#blog12daysxmas Day 7 Reflections on #2011PAD

For the last twelve months I have been participating in the Flickr group #2011PAD. We all posted a photograph every day (or some times in batches when we forgot or didn't have time). I really enjoyed myself doing it and felt I was just really getting into the swing of it. A little while ago I posted my last photo for 2011 and feel quite sad about it. However, the future is going to bring a new group Friday Photos 2012 and I am already starting to be quite excited about that.

I decided today for my reading blog to review what impact my reading had on my #2011PAD. I must confess that I was pretty amazed to discover that there were not more photos of books!



I always think that books are so integral to my life that I expected them to be an overwhelming theme. But if I leave out photos that have to do with libraries (with books on shelves in them) or things like Sisters in Crime events, how many actual photos did I take of books I was reading?




I only had ELEVEN photos out of 365 of books I was reading! I really must lead a more balanced life than I often feel I do. And what were the eleven books? Do I feel that they actually reflect my reading habits?




Non-fiction and fiction are both represented. One photo showed both: a book on Itouch and an Agatha Christie, perhaps summing up two main threads of my interest. Maybe I should have included photos of my iTouch (none in the 365 2011PAD) or my iPad representing ebooks as they should be represented.

Apart from the Agatha Christie, other fiction was all crime - Elizabeth Peters, Kerry Greenwood, Tess Gerritson, Jeffrey Siger and Elizabeth Peters again with a lone but fabulous Kate Grenville. Yes, this is probably a fair representation of my fiction reading I must say: crime with a bit of historical and Greece and Egypt thrown in for fair measure.

And the three non-fiction titles apart from the book on the iTouch? Two focus on local and family history and the other is a biography of one of my all time favourite writers who wrote primarily historical and crime fiction. Yes - I can live with that as a microcosm of my non-fiction reading.

#blog12daysxmas Day 6 Goodreads

Well, here we are at day 6 of #blog12daysxmas so I am halfway through and not behind at this point - unlike last year when I was rushing in the rear until the last minute. One of the jobs I will be doing in the early new year so as part of this challenge will be to review how many books I have read in 2011 and what they were.

A couple of years ago at this time of the year I set up this blog to try to encourage myself to read more - or maybe to document what I read as it turned out. I soon got sick of writing reviews on here of every book I read, though I do it occasionally. So I then looked at a range of online tools for documenting what I was reading. After trying out a few I finally decided on Goodreads and find it great and easy to use. It has a very comprehensive database where I have rarely been unable to find a book I wanted to add to My Books. And when this happened once I easily added the title. I can keep my books on a range of shelves and so I can easily see how many books I read in 2011 - or have read to date in 2011 as I have a few I need to finish off.

As it is a social network as well as a database I can read other people's reviews and ratings and get regular bulletins about what my friends are reading or want to read. When I was doing Frontline late this year, I found the reviews on Goodreads great for the task that used online reviews so bear that in mind if you are about to do or are doing Frontline.

There are book discussions and groups that I don't participate in much and recommendations as well, based either on genre or on books on your shelves. I could do a lot more with Goodreads but at present I am happy that it is a good way for me to document my reading, read ratings and reviews and get updates on what my friends are reading. You can set it up to automatically document your reading progress on Twitter and Facebook and embed widgets in your blogs and websites as I have done on this blog.

Do you Goodread? If you do, you can find Polyxena there.

#blog12daysxmas Day 4 Murder in Mesopotamia

I have spent many years reading and rereading Agatha Christies in the Christmas break. This year was no different as I yesterday reread one of my favorites, Murder in Mesopotamia. This Poirot story was published in 1936 and is set in an archaeological dig in Iraq and like many of Agatha's books draws heavily on her experiences on archaeological expeditions with her husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan. Some say that the character of the murdered woman was indeed based on Agatha's experiences on the excavation where she first met Mallowan.

The book is told in the first person by a nurse who is introduced into the expedition to care for the expedition leader's wife. This technique allows Christie great scope to describe the site, the characters, the archaeological practices and local customs and people with an outsider's view which is often incredibly funny. I love Christie's own account of life on a dig, Come tell me how we live, itself a very amusing account, but more from the inside.

#blog12daysxmas Day 2 Seven dials mystery

Agatha Christie is always a good Christmas topic. Her name almost says it (even if it was an assumed name) and she has been part of my Christmas for decades. How many Christmases can I remember when one of the books I eagerly unwrapped was a "Christie for Christmas"? She might have been writing them to combat her issues with British tax but I didn't care. Reading Agatha Christie was part of MY Christmas and my holiday reading.

Imagine my surprise last week when I was browsing the Hawthorn Library new books shelves as is my daily custom and I saw this cover! It is a reprint of the original 1929 cover so that made it stand out but when I picked it up I had no memory of the plot! Was this an Agatha Christie that had managed to escape my notice? I know I don't own all her books by any means but I thought I had read them all, even the Mary Westmacott ones. Needless to say I grabbed the book and borrowed it.

The Seven dials mystery was published in 1929 as one of a series of 7/6 novels by Collins. Others included detective and wild west stories by authors I have never heard of, or ones which have disappeared from popularity but that I can remember from my early days in public libraries mainly because they were being weeded. The book I borrowed is a facsimile edition that HarperCollins put out in 2010 and I enjoyed reading it for that reason alone. The cover artwork and the internal font and layout of the book were quite of their age.

The book is partly set in Chimneys, the scene of some of her other books, but it isn't a Miss Marple or a Poirot. Instead it features a couple of young people who come upon a mysterious death which is rendered curious by the seven clocks on the mantlepiece of the dead man's bedroom. The book is a definite cozy with a romantic interest, some of Christie's humorous characterization and a quirk to the plot at the end. I enjoyed reading it.

If I had read it before, I certainly didn't remember it though the investigator Lady Eileen "Bunty" Brent seemed to ring some bells with me. Maybe she appeared in another of Christie's books? Or maybe I need to do some Christie rereading? At any rate, I am very glad I found a "Christie for Christmas".

#blog12daysxmas Day 1 Christmas books

Am I mad or what? I have taken up the #blog12daysxmas blogging challenge and decided that not only would I do it for myself I would also do it for the City of Boroondara Library Service local history blog, Telling Tales! Amidst much todo on Twitter this morning I realized that I am already TWO posts behind! So fortunately it is a dreary, rainy day in Melbourne and I am hunkering down to get this on the road.

Last year I decided that I would focus on reading for my twelve days personal blogging, and I am going to start here again but you never know! I might move to food as there is certainly a lot of relevance to Christmas there or to technology as it plays a key role in Christmas for me and my connections both locally and around the world.

But to books and reading! One of the joys of Christmas to me for as long as I can remember has been the great pleasure I have got in getting new books for presents. As I said last year, these authors and titles have changed over the years and have reflected my current favorites. I have so many books (Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie immediately come to mind) which are inscribed with 25 December 19xx inside the cover. Some date back over 40 years and I often think as I read them and reread them what good value these presents have been to me.



But I have found increasingly that I get fewer books for presents though I certainly give them and book vouchers. What of this year? I gave Readings vouchers to all the Boroondara staff who were part of our Being The Best We Can continuous improvement project. I gave the Lonely Planet England to a friend planning a trip to the UK in 2012 and the Movida cookbook to a friend who loves Spain and cooking - what a great combination! My nephew got the latest Janet Evanovich, Kerry Greenwood's Cooking the books, and Cassandra Clare's Clockwork Prince and my niece the latest Elsbeth Edgar, On orchard road. My sister got a book on knitting cats and kittens - the purrfect present!



And me? Well although there was discussion on Christmas Day (not instigated by me) about Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie being my favourite Christmas authors, I didn't get a single book on Christmas Day! I hasten to add that this is not to say that I didn't like my presents! I did and they all reflected other things that I like. But no books on Christmas Day :(

However, I did get one fabulous book for Christmas - in fact it was the only book I actually got for Christmas this year. Thank you so much KC for the effort you took to get me Jennifer Kloester's Georgette Heyer: biography of a bestseller! I had noted it as an advance publication and hadn't even realized it was out. I have started reading it and will relish it over the 12 days of Christmas. How appropriate is it as a Christmas book, given that I used to love getting my new Heyers every Christmas!

#blogjune 27 Franklin and Eleanor

Youtube is a great historical resource! I have been reading Hazel Rowley's Franklin and Eleanor: an extraordinary marriage (Melbourne University Press, 2011) and just idly flicked in a search to Youtube as one does. Yes, there is Eleanor at the Human Rights Declaration at United Nations and also masses of other stuff from the FDR collection including family movies as well as more notable speeches and occasions.


Eleanor was an amazing woman and I have read other stuff on her and seen at least one documentary. This book by Hazel Rowley is a really enjoyable read. It's well-researched and well-written and has some great photographs. As she focuses on the relationship between Eleanor and Franklin the part of Eleanor's life that is mainly featured is that between her marriage in 1905 and Franklin's death in 1945, though the context of before and after is well set. I got a bit confused with all the relatives in the beginning and think that perhaps a family tree would have made a good addition to the book! But that's a minor quibble!

#blogjune 25 Lord Peter: the end

Weeks ago when I was sick I started reading or rather re-reading Dorothy L. Sayers' crime fiction. I quickly romped through the books (mostly in ebook form - Stanza and Amazon) and then with some misplaced reluctance turned to the Jill Paton Walsh novels about Lord Peter Wimsey.

Novels past, I was left only with short stories and today I finally finished the last volume of her short stories: Lord Peter: the complete Lord Peter Wimsey stories. I have really struggled to complete this volume as short stories are simply not my favourite type of writing. I know they can be beautiful gems of construction but I really prefer the development of plot and character to be found in a longer work.

This volume is a compendium of all DLS's Peter Wimsey stories and some of them I reread recently in other collections such as Striding folly and In the teeth of the evidence. Don't get me wrong, some of these stories are very clever pieces of detection and there are passages that I love. One such is the scene in "The learned adventure of the Dragon's Head" where nephew Lord St George is visiting and purchases a secondhand book that turns out to provide an interesting mystery. How about this for writing?

"Yes, Uncle Peter," said the viscount dutifully. He was extended on his stomach on the library hearthrug, laboriously picking his way through the more exciting-looking bits of the Cosmographia, with the aid of Messrs. Lewis and Short, whose monumental compilation he had hitherto looked upon as a barbarous invention for the annoyance of upper forms.

These short stories contain lots of little gems that are reminiscent of her full-blown novels. I am very glad I have read them again but so wish there were more novels. Short stories are not the same.

#blogjune 23 The First Merchant Venturers

It's winter here in Melbourne and tulip time. I had some lovely tulips for my birthday and yesterday got some more - red and yellow ones. Tulips always remind me of Egyptology and Bill Culican. Bill was an archaeologist and ancient historian who instilled in me a passion for the subject when I was an undergraduate. But tulips and Egyptology? Well, Bill always used to claim that tulips became popular in Holland and Western Europe as a result of an expanding interest in Egyptology in the 18th century.

I don't really know how true this was but it certainly made a good story. What I do know is that one year when I was teaching in his subject he hauled me into his office before a lecture, handed me a bunch of tulips, told me to go quickly to the lecture theatre and not be seen with him. When he referred to the spread of the tulip trade and its links with Egyptology I was to rise up and present him with the tulips :) All of this was to be a joke for the benefit of another lecturer who was going to be present. I duly presented the tulips on cue and Bill continued lecturing without a blink. Peter collapsed with laughter and we moved on. Maybe you had to be there to understand.



Bill's specialty (or one of them) was the Phoenicians and he supervised my honours thesis that looked at potential Phoenician influence on a Roman cult. His publication, The first merchant venturers: the ancient Levant in history and commerce, was published by Thames and Hudson in 1966 and remains a great read. The Phoenicians were and are fairly elusive figures in the history of antiquity. Bill's comparison of them to their favoured pomegranate is one that always sticks in my head and could be said to describe a number of things and people:

" Luscious but hard of skin, wholesome but fragmentary, vivid but shallow, seedy but ever refreshing, ripe but enduring, and if not the most palatable, at least the most shapely fruit."

Bill Culican died an untimely death in 1984 at the age of 54. He was sorely missed then and still is now. You can read Graeme Clarke's eulogy at his funeral here. But every time I have tulips in the house they bring a smile to my face because of him. And it's been great to remember him today.

#blogjune 22 Five books meme

I'm rather late at getting to this Five Books Meme that others have been doing since last week. But I had other things to say. Now I am on a roll and getting ahead of myself.

1. The book I’m currently reading: Book? I am currently actively reading three books and really always have a couple on the go. The current ones are: Dorothy L Sayers Lord Peter: the complete Lord Peter Wimsey stories, In tearing haste: letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley, and Patrick Leigh Fermor A time to keep silence. The first book is my final book in my self-imposed reading-all-Wimsey-books challenge. The other two arose from the death of Paddy Leigh Fermor last week and my wanting to read his works.

2. The last book I finished: That would be Dorothy L Sayers In the teeth of the evidence, a collection of her short stories.

3. The next book I want to read: Anita Heiss Paris Dreaming as I articulated recently in another #blogjune.

4. The last book I bought: In tearing haste: letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley (a quick 1-Click on Kindle means that I have been reading this in hard copy as well as on my iTouch and iPad).

5. The last book I was given: Niki Segnit The Flavour thesaurus which I was given for my birthday in May.

This meme is probably pretty boring to those of you who have been reading my #blogjune posts as I have already blogged about all of this books separately. I have linked to the other posts to give you my further comments.

#blogjune 18 Manhattan dreaming

Interested in life in the world of art galleries, life in Canberra, sexist footballers, life in the Big Apple, the sights and sounds and wonders of arriving in New York? Anita Heiss' chicklit novel, Manhattan dreaming, published by Random House, has all of this and more. It's a quick fun and funny read set in the life of Lauren, an indigenous art curator, who hails from Goulburn but has a ball when she hits New York City.

Anita is a great ambassador for indigenous Australia and I have long admired her speaking skills and the writing and storytelling work she has done with teenagers. This is the first book of hers that I have read, but after I finished I went straight out and reserved the sequel, Paris dreaming! It's next on my pile of books to start!

#blogjune 14 In tearing haste

When Patrick Leigh Fermor died last week, I went to the library catalogue to hunt out my Fermor favourites. Much to my delight I discovered a book I didn't know. Edited by Charlotte Mosley, In tearing haste is a collection of letters between Patrick Leigh Fermor and Deborah Devonshire. The correspondence which is two-sided (i.e. I mean there are letters from both of them) spans the period from 1954 to 2008. It is illustrated by a great series of photos of them and lots of other familiar bods and ends in a poignant one taken in 2008 at Edensor with both of them, backs to the camera, heading away from the viewer.

I have just been dipping into it since I brought it home but think it deserves a solid cover-to-cover read now!

#blogjune 11 Last gift of time: life beyond sixty

I first started reading Carolyn Heilbrun's writing decades ago under her pseudonym of Amanda Cross. Her crime novels about a feisty academic feminist, Kate Fansler, really stood out for me among other early feminist crime fiction which was very issues based and not necessarily good writing or attractive publishing. Cross' novels, on the other hand, were well-written reflective pieces with a good story line and, at that, usually a storyline set in academic circumstances which I understood.

In 1970 an investigative journalist discovered who was the real person behind Amanda Cross and I came to know the writing of Carolyn Heilbrun herself, such as the classic Writing a woman's life. Heilbrun, atheist, feminist and a woman with strong views, had decided that she did not want to live beyond the term of a natural life i.e. 70, the Biblical three score years and ten though as an atheist the Bible was not a construct that ruled her life. The Last gift of time: life beyond sixty was written when she was approaching 70 and looking back on the last ten years of her life. She decided then that the time was not right but when she was 77 ended her life at her own time and in her own place and space, in a room of her own indeed.

I read and savoured these essays when they were published in 1997 and I was in my 40s. Since then as 60 has relentlessly approached family and friends, not to mention me, I have dipped into them again and again and bought copies as gifts. Recently I thought of these essays when a friend was dealing with her brother's impending death. They were probably inappropriate for that occasion but I pulled the volume down to revisit it and enjoy her reflective prose. And they are very apt for me in my current environment of dealing with the situation of two parents in their late 80s who are moving to nursing homes.

A couple of days ago Paddy Leigh Fermor died at 96. He was still living part of the year in the Mani and part in England. He is reputed to have still been writing and revising. Carolyn Heilbrun decided at age 77 in full possession of her faculties to choose her own time of ending her life. My friend's father, John, who is 90 and has dementia was a member of the Euthanasia Society but now he is in a high care dementia ward and doesn't know what euthanasia means. There are many pathways. But I really recommend that people read Carolyn Heilbrun and savour her prose.

#blogjune10 In the teeth of the evidence

This morning I just finished my latest Dorothy L. Sayers though it was a reread, of course. As I have previously blogged, I am now up to her short stories and the book I finished this morning was a 1939 compilation called In the teeth of the evidence after the first (and Wimsey) short story in the book. The book contains two Lord Peter stories (the above mentioned and "Absolutely elsewhere"), five stories with wine and spirits salesman Montague Egg as detective, and ten other stories of mystery and suspense with no detective.

I enjoyed them all as little jewels of cleverness and wonder as I frequently do how someone has the ingenuity to come up with plot after plot. However, on a whole short stories are not my preferred style of reading. I have one more collection of DLS's short stories and then I am back to a full-blown book where there is more plot and character development.

#blogjune 9 Vale Patrick Leigh Fermor aged 96

What an end of an era! Paddy Leigh Fermor was well-known for his famous walk across Europe with Horace in his bag and his travel classics A time of gifts and Between the woods and the water. I wonder where my copies are and feel that I should pull them out.

Apart from that for me he was synonymous with the Mani and his eponymous book on the Mani and his Roumeli are both classic books on Greece. I didn't ever meet him but while I was in Athens in the 1970s he was certainly around at various times.

There are many obituaries and I have a couple of links here:

http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.politikh&id=283540 (in Greek)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/patrick-leigh-fermor-british-adventurer-writer-and-war-hero-dies-at-96/2011/06/10/AG5bfpQH_story.html (in English)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/special-forces-obituaries/8568395/Sir-Patrick-Leigh-Fermor.html

#blogjune 8 Striding folly

Striding folly is a collection of three Dorothy L Sayers short stories featuring Peter Wimsey in his detective role. "Striding folly" and "The Haunted policeman" were originally published in 1939 and "Talboys" was written in 1942. All the stories date to a time after Peter and Harriet's marriage in Busman's Honeymoon. "The Haunted policeman" depicts him as a new father after the birth of Bredon whilst "Talboys" depicts him as the father of three boys and the mystery of the stolen peaches. Whilst they are all good stories and offer some insight into Lord Peter's later life, #shortstoriesarenotthesame :( The volume Striding folly also has an informative introductory essay by Janet Hitchman entitled "Lord Peter Wimsey and his creator" and that essay is well worth a read.

#blogjune 5 Beyond the Ladies Lounge

One of the projects I have been working on with the Collingwood Historical Society for some time is an online directory of hotels of Collingwood. This has involved a number of us in research into obscure references to and photographs of over 100 hotels which at various times operated in Abbotsford, Clifton Hill and Collingwood. The online presence for this is being finalized currently and it will be a fabulous resource once it is up and available.

During our research into this, we were very pleased to come across Clare Wright's Beyond the Ladies Lounge, published by Melbourne University Press in 2003. Based on her thesis, Wright explores the history and role of female publicans. I remember being very surprised at the outcomes of her research. I had come across a couple of notable female publicans in my research (both in Hawthorn and Collingwood) and had thought them very unusual women. But Wright's research really challenges that view. In fact, being a publican appears to have been quite a common practice for women and one of the ways women could succeed in eras when it was very difficult for women, particularly married women, to have good employment prospects. However, single women also found and find this a pathway to becoming successful business women.

Wright's books draws on oral history, archival sources, interviews, folk songs and literary sources to create a great resource for those interested in the history of Australian hotels and the role women played in these.

#blogjune 4 More Peter Wimsey

I got on a real roll reading Dorothy Sayers crime fiction and, of course, once I had finished all her novels I wanted to read more about Peter Wimsey. That left me with two options: to read the ones written by Jill Paton Walsh and to search out the various short stories written by Dorothy L Sayers about him. So I have been doing both.

Jill Paton Walsh in 1998 published a completed form of Dorothy Sayers last but unfinished Wimsey novel, Thrones, Dominations. After its success, she followed up with two other Wimsey titles A Presumption of Death in 2002 and The Attenbury Emeralds in 2010. Both of the latter titles were based on ideas or hints of cases from DLS who refers to the Attenbury Emeralds as Wimsey's first case after the war and who wrote a series of letters to and from various members of the Wimsey family on which A Presumption of Death is based. In fact A Presumption of Death is identified as co-authored by the two writers as is Thrones, Dominations.



I had read Thrones, Dominations previously and read it again at the end of my recent Sayers burst. Coming as it did at the end of weeks of reading DLS's prose and allusions I really didn't find it as good (though certainly not bad). I had decided I wasn't going to read Jill Paton Walsh's other Wimsey titles but they came up in conversation with some friends, one of whom said the next two were very good. So I did read them and I have enjoyed both of them particularly The Attenbury Emeralds. But, they just are not Sayers. One can read her books on so many levels and the prose is just filled with literary and other allusions including, I am sure, many I don't get. But if you like the Wimsey stories do read the Jill Paton Walsh ones bearing in mind that this is another writer who writes well but differently.

#blogjune 3 Dorothy L. Sayers

During the last month or so I have had a very yucky run of being poorly with sore throats, cold, sinusitis, hay fever and gastro! That was the down side but the up side of this was that I took to my bed a few times and was only in the mood for very recreational reading. And well let's face it for me that really means crime fiction. But I didn't want some new titles. I needed some comfortable old rereads that would delight me by their prose and give me the thrill of the chase when sometimes I really knew the outcome.

So I decided to read a Dorothy L Sayers or two. In fact, it ended up being not stopping at two but encompassing her whole corpus of crime novels as well as the one she left partly written, Thrones, Dominations, which was completed by Jill Paton Walsh. I decided I wanted to read them in order so I searched out a chronology first off and found one here (along with a lot of other information). This was a list in internal chronology rather than by year of publication.



So in due course, I read: Whose body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Strong Poison, The Documents in the Case, The Nine Tailors, The Five Red Herrings, Have his Carcase, Murder must Advertise, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, and the afore-mentioned Thrones, Dominations. I was amused to see as I clocked these up on Goodreads which then broadcast my reading to Twitter and Facebook how I seemed to be starting a trend amongst my followers! I hope they had as much please as I did :)

What a pleasure were they all! I love her prose and her literary allusions and, of course, her plots. They are all really fabulous but Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night are still my definite favourites! Some things don't change in decades. I didn't really like Thrones, Dominations as much as the real DLS but I was encouraged last weekend to start reading the other couple of Wimsey books that Jill Paton Walsh wrote as the person recommending them said they were good. I am currently reading A Presumption of Death which is also based partly on some extant DLS stuff. So I will be reporting back further on these titles.

#blogjune 2 MacRobertsonland by Jill Robertson

I have some fairly vivid but also unclear memories of being taken as a primary school child on a tour of the MacRobertsons factory in Fitzroy. The nuns and various parents (mothers really) took us from Armadale to Fitzroy. I have no memory of how we got there but remember that school trips in my childhood often involved a special tram we had hired. So maybe that is how we got there! I do still remember the vats of sweet stuff and the sample bags we got to take home. But I had forgotten until I read Jill Robertson's book this week that McRobertsons had created Freddo Frogs, Cherry Ripes and Columbines!

Jill Roberston's book is the story of MacPherson Robertson the man as well as the story of his confectionery enterprise in Fitzroy and it is a fascinating story of rags to riches success, philanthropy that covered the Mawson Antarctic expedition, MacRobertson High and MacRobertson Bridge, and a personal life that was unusual. I loved the memories this book evoked for me, both in the text and the illustrations, and I loved the local connections for me. Fitzroy, Clifton Hill and Kew are all areas which I have connections with and with which MacPherson Robertson had connections.

#blog12daysxmas Day 12 12 drummers drumming

On the 12th day of Christmas I checked out the words to the song and realized it was 12 drummers drumming. I am not totally sure about what that signifies in any meaningful way for me today but I would like to attempt 12 reflections on what this blogging challenge has meant for me.

1. I found it incredibly challenging to blog every day for 12 days and in fact didn't! I have finished 12 blogposts on time today but there were a couple of days when I did two.
2. On the first day of Christmas I chose to blog on my Hecuba Reads blog because I wanted to talk about getting books for Christmas. Somehow this one-off decision morphed into blogging 12 days on the one blog - ie a blog about reading that I created last year to improve the documentation of my reading.
3. I have three active blogs on quite specific subjects, ie this one on reading, my food blog and my technology blog. Wouldn't it have been easier to spread the blogging amongst the three blogs? YES is the answer as I have several posts waiting for me on the others.
4. I think the reason I stayed put on this blog is that like last January I felt that it would be a good thing to document and explore my reading or lack of reading.
5. My technology blog is called Hecuba's Story and her story ended in November. My half-thought out Animoto tribute to her life is the blogpost I have been meaning to do since then. I planned to do it as part of this blogging challenge but.... The time is not right. So reading stayed as the theme (even though Heccie's name is part of this blog too).
   
6. I really admire the bloggers who stuck to the theme and talked about livestock and maids et al. I tried to do this occasionally but kept on being waylaid by the theme of my reading!
7. @jobeaz was great in outlining every day's action at the beginning of each blog.
8. Documenting books I got for Christmas and my birthday was a great exercise. I love getting books as presents and it is nice to acknowledge such gifts.
9. I love Agatha Christie and it was great to blog about my trip to her house in Devon - finally. Thanks for providing the trigger for this.
   
10. Local history is a particular passion of mine and the books whose publication I have been involved with in this area are very special to me. It was great to share them with you all.
11. My reading and rereading of Elizabeth Peters' works has been a significant reading task I set myself in 2010 so it was good to spend some time assessing where I had got to. I was so pleased that at least one person decided to read her books (or give them a go) as a result of this post.
12. We set up our #librarymysteryamonth challenge! That will be such fun and I am really looking forward to seeing what books Tara Moss comes up with and with sharing the books amongst us. Blogging once a month will be bliss after this daily effort :) Thanks to the 6-8 people who have put up their hands.

Thanks to all of you who participated in this #blog12daysxmas. It has been great sharing the days with you all! I have found myself looking forward to reading your posts even if doing it myself did become a bit of a chore.

In parallel to the #blog12daysxmas was the #twitterlibrarysecretsanta and this featured in some of the blogs. I have illustrated this post with a photo of my #twitterlibrarysecretsanta Christmas tree posing before a painting by Australian science fiction writer Sean McMullen of a fictional account of a Roman landing in Western Australia. This photo brings together lots of things for me and I used it today for my #2011PAD, a challenge I joined during the 12 Days of Christmas.

#blog12daysxmas Day 11 #librarytwittermysteryamonth

On the 11th Day of Christmas I didn't blog but expressed concern that I had got behind. So on the 12th day of Christmas I am doing that blog.

What I want to confirm here is that some of us Twitter library types and non-library types for that matter are going to start a mystery a month book club. The commitment will be to read the recommended 12 mysteries a year and to blog about them. Please tweet the blog post and identify your blog post when you tweet it with hash tag: #librarytwittermysteryamonth.



We are going to follow the recommendations of crime writer @tara_moss who is posting them monthly here. She has information about the author and the book on the site but we all might like to post further information about the author and book on our blogs or on Twitter. So for example here is a link to the Wikipedia article on Murder on the Orient Express.

I look forward to rereading this classic Christie title and sharing how I feel about it with you. Now just remember we are READING the book: that includes print or ebook but not watching films :)) A number of people have indicated interest but if any other want to identify themselves please comment below or tweet to me @polyxena.

#blog12daysxmas Day 10 Elizabeth Peters

In 2010 one of the reading tasks I set myself was to read or reread all the titles written by Elizabeth Peters (under that pseudonym). As we both share a primary fascination in antiquity and archaeology how can crime fiction linked to that not be a pleasure for me? Both being ailurophiles makes it even better.


The award-winning writer was born in 1927 and has more than 50 novels to her names. Elizabeth Peters is one of two pseudonyms of Barbara Mertz who has published her archaeological titles under her real name. Her other pseudonym is Barbara Michaels under which she writes more gothic crime/adventure books but still often with an archaeological background.


Under the name of Elizabeth Peters, she was published three series (Amelia Peabody, Vicki Bliss and Jacqueline Kirby) as well as nine stand-alone titles. The stand-alone titles commenced with the Jackal's Head in 1968 and end (to date) with the C0penhagen connection in 1982. The non-series titles are as follows:

• The Jackal's Head
• The Camelot Caper
• The Dead Sea Cipher
• The Night of 400 Rabbits (Shadows in Moonlight UK & Oz)
• Legend in Green Velvet
• Devil-May-Care
• The Love Talker
• Summer of the Dragon
• Copenhagen Connection
  

The first series that I became acquainted with was the Jacqueline Kirby series. With my British School at Athens background I loved the Seventh sinner published in 1972 and read it not long after publication when I had actually visited Rome and the San Clemente site. Of course, I loved the librarianness of the books and the tracking of Jacqueline's life from small town librarian through to well-known romance writer. The titles in this series finish with Naked once more from 1989. Aside from the first one archaeology didn't provide the scene for this series but the library character sure makes up for that. They are as follows:

• The Seventh Sinner
• Murders of Richard III
• Die for Love
• Naked Once More
  

Peters' other small series is the Vicki Bliss series with six titles. The eponymous hero of the series, Vicki Bliss, is an American art historian but the titles are set in Europe and Egypt. Trojan gold, Night train to Memphis and the Laughter of the dead kings draw on archaeology. The Night train to Memphis is a fabulous take-off of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Nile but also has some great tongue in cheek connections to the Peabody/Emerson excavations. The final title, while not her best, pulls it all together. The titles are:

• Borrower of the Night
• Street of Five Moons
• Silhouette in Scarlet
• Trojan Gold
• Night train to Memphis
• The Laughter of Dead Kings
  

And then there are the nineteen Amelia Peabody books which are set in the late 19th and early 20th century against a backdrop of the developments of scientific archaeology and the struggle of women to be able to study and practice in their own right as professionals. What can I say? Crime fiction set in an archaeological environment? This is one of the joys of classic Agatha Christie for me, and of Peters too. There is Agatha Christie here and Rider Haggard and totally over the top plots and characters. But it is all set in a thoroughly researched background both for the contemporary history and settings as well as the archaeological sources. The Peabody series are as follows:

• Crocodile on the Sandbank
• Curse of the Pharaohs
• The Mummy Case
• Deeds of the Disturber
• The Last Camel Died at Noon
• The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog
• The Hippopotamus Pool
• Seeing a Large Cat
• The Ape Who Guards the Balance
• The Falcon at the Portal
• He Shall Thunder in the Sky (also: Thunder in the Sky)
• Lord of the Silent
• The Golden One
• Children of the Storm
• Guardian of the Horizon
• Serpent of the Crown
• Tomb of the Golden Bird
• A River in the Sky
  

And how did I go with the challenge? Well, I am still working on it. I read all the Jacqueline Kirby books; I am currently reading the final Vicki Bliss and I have one or two Amelia Peabody titles on reserve. Of the non-series books, I only reread the Dead Sea Cipher so I had better get on and reserve some of those. This looks like it is becoming a two year effort :)

#blog12daysxmas Day 9 Sisters in Crime

Yay! Today is Day 9 so I hope that this means that I am going to catch up and stay "catched" up :) I have several active blogs and for some reason started doing the #blog12daysxmas challenge on my reading blog. I can still swop around and do posts on different blogs but for the moment I am happy to take the opportunity to do a bit of reflection on me and reading and so this blog is the place to be.

As I have said in a number of posts, I think my book knowledge is not very good these days and also that I don't read enough new authors or even new books. I think one exception to that is women crime authors. I still don't read enough of them BUT most months I try to go to the Melbourne Sisters in Crime event where we are introduced to women crime writers. These are friendly casual events at Bells Hotel in South Melbourne on a Friday night. It seems to me sometimes that it is one of the few real efforts I make to keep my book knowledge current. If you want to come along any time, I would love to see you there. There doesn't seem to be a published schedule yet for 2011 but I am sure it will be out soon.

If you want more information on Sisters in Crime you can check them out on Facebook or on the Sisters in Crime Australia website. I just noticed that the website tells us that a series on Phryne Fisher is coming to ABC in 2011. That will be something I want to keep my eye on!!

#blog12daysxmas Day 8 #librarytwittermysteryamonth

On Day 8 we were all faffing around looking for new challenges for the New Year. Would it be a daily image of oneself on Flickr as @sirexkat was touting? Or would it be the #2011PAD on Flickr? I had really enjoyed looking at other people's PADs on Flickr last year so decided on that one rather than the image of me. We did a similar thing for a month at @restructuregirl's behest in 2010 and it made me really think every day about what photo I wanted to post. It also made me realize (grumble, grumble) that the Flickr i-Phone app doesn't do groups. Ah well, I shall survive using a proper PC or other work arounds. I am particularly happy to be doing PAD as there are very few of my friends on it so it means I will be getting to know a whole of new people! Yay! Of course, it will also be great if you all join as well. The more the merrier and many of you post images every day already!


And what might all of this have to do with a reading blog, you may be asking? Well, late in the day @Tara_moss posted a link to an online mystery book club where she would be recommending a mystery a month. She is starting with Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express for January. That seemed right up my alley! By this morning a group of us library people on Twitter had decided to go with it as #librarytwittermysteryamonth! We decided we would start with Tara's suggestion for January but were finding the website it was posted on a bit problematic. There is info there about Agatha and the book but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to post comments. So we will go with the book and perhaps work out some other way to communicate about our reading. We look forward to having lots of you joining in our #librarytwittermysteryamonth! Here's a link to the Wikipedia article as well to get you going! You can let me know either by Twitter @polyxena or by posting a comment below if you want to participate.

#blog12daysxmas Day 7 What have I achieved?

I started this blog Hecuba Reads on 7 January 2010 because of a resolution which may have been a New Year's one. It certainly came to me in January. It related to my concern that I wasn't reading as much I as I had in the past, well not reading books, and really feeling that my book knowledge was not very good any more. I knew I always still had books on the go but they were not documented - unlike those voraciously consumed by @ladymidnight.


So I set myself the aim of reading 52 books in 2010 - and also of documenting them. So how did I go? Well, the first challenge was to decide how and where to document them. I set up this blog and initially I was using it to write a post about each book as I finished it. I also played around with Evernote, and Bookjetty and Goodreads amongst other sites trying to find something that worked for me and wasn't intrusive to my life.


You can read about my explorations in earlier posts. I fairly soon decided that Goodreads worked for me. I could access it on my PC, my VDI and via an Itouch app. I could link it to Facebook and Twitter and I could easier track my progress through each book. I could add titles which were not already on the database and I could write reviews. I did write reviews initially by setting up links to my posts on this blog. But eventually that fell away as my life became too complicated in 2010 and doing blogposts about comfortable old reads lapsed in importance.


So I managed to document my reading. According to Goodreads I read 63 books in 2010 so I met and indeed exceeded my challenge of reading at least 52 books. You can see what the 63 were on Goodreads. What did I read? Well, the answer is much as I thought. I read a lot of fiction, mainly crime, some of it new but lots of it old favourites. I embarked for example on reading the complete works of Elizabeth Peters (under that name only). I had read a lot of them before but not all and I really enjoyed reading both the favourites and a couple of recent publications. I read a bit of non-fiction - travel, biography, cooking and history. So nothing was very unpredictable.


I am glad that I started documenting my reading and I'll continue doing it in 2011. Goodreads is a good tool for that. So Day 7 of this blogging is being done on day 8, but it relates to my achievements by day 7. Hopefully I'll be able to catch up by doing two some time over the weekend.