June Books

Hi everyone.  I hope everyone in the US had a nice July 4th. I also hope everyone else had a nice day even if it wasn’t a holiday.

My Fourth of July weekend was more rain than sun, and the 4th itself was a wash out   The only good thing was at least on the 4th I was able to work my shift at the lake (under thick clouds) since Monday I didn’t work due to an all morning rain. And the predicted rain kept the number of boats down too so I managed to read quite a bit 😀. (And the rain arrived just as it was time for me to go home.)

It's time for my June book post. Last month I didn't get through  many books. Being gone for the first 1/3 of the month didn't help. (Even though I read more on this trip than I usually end up reading while traveling.) Most of this month's reading was done while working at my lake job, where a usual Monday and Tuesday morning is maybe only 6 or 7 boats in 5 hours.  (And we're told to bring a book or something else to entertain ourselves with when there's down time.) You would think with such a wet  month that I might have read more, but as it became a very busy month, I didn't.😞

Last month I read 2 mysteries and 2 biographical books.  I really need to get back into a reading mood. What I did complete I enjoyed as they were all good reads. 

My first book for June was Appointment with Death  by Agatha Christie. I pulled this book off my shelf and took it with me on my trip because I figured it would be a good travel read. Plus the book itself is small and light and was perfect for my carry on.

My copy is from the 1980's and fairly worn, but I'm not sure I actually read this mystery before. It didn't ring any bells as I was making my way through it.  Of course you used to be able to find a lot of Christies at used bookstores, so I might have bought my copy decades ago while browsing at one of my favorite types of stores with the plans to read it. Now I don't even know where there are any used bookstores near me. (Maybe that should be on my exploring list though.)

Mrs. Boynton is a controlling American woman who dictates her children's lives, both the young ones and the adults. Her older children even talk of killing her to escape her grasp. She gives them no money, won't let them work or carry on as normal people would,  and she refuses to let them visit with anyone. However, she does take them all to the Middle East to visit Petra and some other sights. This gives one of them a great opportunity to murder her.

Christie does a great job creating a fabulous love-to-hate character. Mrs. Boynton made me think of some of the women you occasionally hear about that really abuse their children by locking them in rooms and doing other horrific things. And of course, because this is a Christie novel, her detective, M. Poirot, is also visiting the Middle East in this 1937 mystery.  Leave it to him to figure out who killed this woman. Was it actually one of her oppressed children?  The murderer was a total surprise to me.

My next book was another Japanese mystery by the author of The Decagon House Murders, a book that I read last year. This time instead of students in a university mystery club trying to solve the murders in an interesting house on an island, there are a small group of people meeting at another interesting home in an isolated wooded area. Besides the people who live there and their small staff, the visitors are all on an annual pilgrimage to see an artist's collection of works. The home is owned by the artist's son, and after his father died, the son bought up most of the paintings and displays them there.

A year earlier during this annual painting viewing visit, a woman fell to her death from a house balcony,  another  visitor was murdered and one even went missing, so this year everyone is a little bit on edge. Then there's the story of the missing painting, and also the last piece the artist ever created which has never been on display. This scene sets up a very suspenseful  gothic feeling and scenario.

This book alternates between the days surrounding the murder and the same days 1 year later. Luckily there is a list of characters in the front of the book because sometimes people are referred to by the family names and sometimes by their first names which can get a bit confusing. But otherwise, this is a very good story. I didn’t figure out the exact ending, but I did suspect bits of it.  And there was a great twist right at the end. I actually liked this book better than the The Decagon House. And there is an interesting tie between the two. 

My only listen in June was Appetite for Life, a biography of Julia Child  published in 1997. If you don't know who Julia Child is, she introduced the majority of Americans to French cooking by writing a 2 volume set of landmark cookbooks on the subject back in the 1950's and 60's. You could even say she was what started a new food culture in the US. Julia Child also had a variety of public television cooking shows for many  years. At over a 23 hour listen,  this book took a bit to get through, but I must say I loved it so most of the 23+  hours didn't really seem like 23+ hours. 

One thing I enjoyed about this book is that the author wrote this biography back in the 1990's, so she had a chance to speak with people who were a part of Julia's life.  What a life Julia Child had too, especially for someone who started off as a class clown rather than an ambitious  academic. Not that she wasn't smart, because she was. The details about when she joined the OSS as  a spy during the Second World War also

interested me because my Dad, like Julia, was in India,  Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and China during the war. Not only was her part interesting but I could somewhat, in some ways, apply that to my Dad's life too.

I also enjoyed reading about her partnership with her husband Paul's, her vast travels, her attitudes towards various foods and people, life at  her winter home in France, and the making of her television show on Public TV.  She was definitely a trailblazer. I also found it interesting how she never considered herself a chef even though she took lessons in Paris at Le Cordon Bleu and that food was her life. She even loved to eat. Besides all of that, she was really a perfectionist.

This biography, although detailed ladened,  was enjoyable and well done. I will admit that by the end  of this book I was  ready for something different.  Some of the information isn't anything new (if you've read about Julia Child before), but this book still has plenty to keep you reading.   It's a very  intimate view of Julia Child's life.After reading it, I feel like I've gotten to know this interesting woman even better.

My next and last book had an Iceland connection. Nancy Marie Brown is an American writer with a background in Icelandic language as well as a literary background in the Icelandic Sagas. In the past I had read two of her other books (The Ivory Vikings about ancient northern European chess/game pieces including the Lewis Chessmen and also The Far Traveller about Gudrid, a Viking woman from the Sagas who traveled a lot of the world for her time). Both of these books I really enjoyed. This book, A Good Horse Has No Color,  has been sitting on my bookshelf, and I figured this was a great time to read it while my travels were still fresh in my mind.

In this book Nancy Brown is looking to buy 2 Icelandic horses to take back to her farm in Northern Vermont. Being a knowledge person about Iceland, she not only includes horse information but also  her travel  stories  and some Icelandic history with it. This is a horse book, but because of the depth of this story, you don't have to be a horse person to enjoy it. That's because this story is more of a travel personal biography (one of my favorite types of books to read) that is related to horses. And in the process you learn more about Iceland horses also.

 For example, most horses have 3 gaits, but Icelandic horses have 5. Most horses have the walk, trot and gallop/canter. Icelandic horses also have the tolt and the flying pace. And although Icelandic horses tend to be smaller than what most people think of  when they think of sizes in horses, they are horses, not ponies. From what this book explained, riding them is also a different style from riding other horses.  There is also a specific pattern in how these horses are raised, which include not even training nor riding them until they reach 4-5 years of age.

I've only ridden a horse once in my life. It was a great experience, and horses are amazing animals.  I wouldn't call myself  a horse person though,  but I did very much enjoy this book. It was as interesting as the author's other books I've read. 

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I'm still waiting for a nice stretch of hammock weather so I can spend some long afternoons lounging and reading on my screen porch. Hopefully things will dry out (and warm up) soon because I have a couple of very long books I  want to read. 

I also did a 6 month count up, and I'm at 46 books. I had been hoping to hit 50 because it's a good  goal number, but it is what it is. That's definitely not as many as some of you out there in the blogosphere have read so far this year, but luckily reading is not a competitive sport.

And as I write every month, if you have any good recommendations, I'd love to hear about them. Have a great day, and thanks for stopping by my blog.