Tag: book lists

Book Serendipity

~ whatmeread ~ 7 Comments

Following the lead of Bookish Beck, I have been keeping track of instances of book serendipity, where the same subject comes up in more than one place around the same time. My lists aren’t nearly as comprehensive as Beck’s, maybe because I don’t have as much attention to detail. But here are a few I’ve noted in the past few months:

References to Pompey the Great in Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare and The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, read on the same day.

A transport with “Gypsy” in its name in Ancestry by Simon Mawer and The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller, read one after another.

Factions among the faculty of a girls’ school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark and the short story “The Greek Play” by H. C. Bailey in the British Library “Lessons in Crime,” read one after another.

A son of an important man disappears from school in adjacent stories in the British Library collection Lessons in Crime, “The Adventure of the Priory School” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and “The Missing Undergraduate” by Henry Wade.

In the category of related serendipity, two different blog reviews of books by Robert van Gulik randomly read on the same day.

#ReadingIrelandMonth26! Irish Writers Read in 2025

~ whatmeread ~ 7 Comments

Cathy of 746 Books is hosting the 12th year of Reading Ireland Month, and although I usually participate just a bit by reviewing a book or two by an Irish author, I thought I’d take her suggestion this time and make a post about books by Irish authors I’ve read or reviewed during the last year. So here goes, I think in order of the reading! These are all books read in 2025, so there’s some overlap with last year’s event.

Classics Club Spin #43

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

It’s time for another Classics Club Spin. To participate, post a numbered list of 20 books from your Classics Club list (here’s mine) before Sunday, February 8th. Classics Club will announce a number on that day, and that determines the book to read before the 29th of March.

I think I’ve participated in every spin since I became a Classic Club member. At this date, I have just eight books on my list, so I’ll be repeating to get 20:

  1. The Tavern Knight by Raphael Sabatini
  2. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  3. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  4. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  5. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  6. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  7. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  8. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  9. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  10. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  11. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  12. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  13. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  14. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  15. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  16. The Tavern Knight by Raphael Sabatini
  17. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Duma
  18. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  19. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  20. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare

WWW Wednesday!

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for WWW Wednesday, an idea I borrowed from David Chazan, The Chocolate Lady, who borrowed it from someone else. For this feature, I report

  • What I am reading now
  • What I just finished reading
  • What I intend to read next

This is something you can participate in, too, if you want, by leaving comments about what you’ve been reading or plan to read.

What I Am Reading Now

I just started reading the biography Oscar Wilde by Sheridan Morley. This book was kindly sent to me for review by Dean Street Press. I find Wilde a fascinating personality, so I’m hoping to gain some insight from this novel.

What I Just Finished Reading

I read A Fortunate Man by Henrik Pontoppidan for the Pontoppidan Review-Along in March. By the last few days, I felt as if I had been reading it forever (it’s more than 800 pages long), and I’ll have a lot to say about it in my review. It is a vast novel that attempts to bring in most of the important philosophies and currents affecting Danish life in the mid-nineteenth century.

What I Will Read Next

If I don’t read If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery next, I’ll have to send it back to the library unread! It’s one of only two books I need to read to finish the Booker Prize shortlist for 2022. I’m reading it for my Booker Prize project; hence, I have no idea what it’s about.

14th Anniversary! Top Ten Books of the Year!

~ whatmeread ~ 19 Comments

It’s hard to believe that yesterday was the 14th anniversary of my blog. As has become my habit, this is the time that I list my favorite books of the ones I reviewed during the year. As usual, I make my list from the Best of Ten books during the year.

This year was a tough one to pick, because I had twelve books that were difficult to choose among, along with all the other Best of Tens. I ended up with three or four fairly recent books and five or six classic novels, one comic novel, three novels about the course of the main character’s childhood and life, four historical novels and one partially historical, one nonfiction memoir, one mystery, and one drama with a twist. Three were by men, and seven by women. Two of these books were re-reads for me.

So, here they are, in the order I reviewed them:

WWW Wednesday!

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for WWW Wednesday, an idea I borrowed from David Chazan, The Chocolate Lady, who borrowed it from someone else. For this feature, I report

  • What I am reading now
  • What I just finished reading
  • What I intend to read next

This is something you can participate in, too, if you want, by leaving comments about what you’ve been reading or plan to read.

What I am reading now

I am reading The Town House by Norah Lofts. It’s the first book in Lofts’ Suffolk Trilogy. It begins in the 14th century with a serf escaping serfdom, much like Cathedral of the Sea. I looked for a book by Lofts after finishing her book Lady Living Alone, which I really enjoyed.

What I just finished reading

I just finished reading Beggar’s Choice by Patricia Wentworth. Although I had difficulty getting started because it was so obvious that someone was trying to frame the oblivious main character, it turned out to be a pretty good read.

What I will read next

I guess I’m on a roll with classic novels, because the book I will probably read next is Death in Ambush by Susan Gilruth. I think I bought this book to read for the Christmas season and apparently forgot to do that!

Wanderlust Bingo: I Guess I Get a C

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

I didn’t actually participate in the Wanderlust Bingo Card challenge. In fact, I haven’t really gotten the point of the bingo card challenges. However, FictionFan put her card up last week showing how she had filled it out pretty well without attempting the challenge. Actually, she got all of them. So, I decided to try it myself. Unfortunately, I found that although I had many choices for some of the entries and several for others, as far as I can remember the settings of all the books I read, this year I had none for several locations.

Here’s how my card came out:

Here are my books:

As you can see, the spaces that are missing are

  • Subcontinent
  • Central America
  • Caribbean

Maybe I’ll do better next year.