#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.