Here‘s my November TBR along with my goals for the month. My TBR will not be as ambitious as it was last month. Last month, I had 67 books on my TBR. I only read 9 of them and mood read for the rest of the month after my dog passed away on Oct 25. 67 books was too much. Oct was rough for me. I know I have a lot of ARCs to read right now but I really need to mood read for a while. I‘m hoping Nov will be better for me.
#novembertbr
pickSimenon's psychological portrait of a serial killer is compelling and creepy, with the things unsaid somehow worse than the things he shows - less is definitely more!
The Strangler is garotting older women, the hapless police have no clue, an anxious tailor suspects his neighbour but with no substantial evidence cannot claim the reward for information, and a young reporter's theorising incites the killer to write that he is not insane, that his ⬇️
"He would buy books in the salerooms...choosing them at random. They were invariably books with yellowed pages, about which there clung a special smell, and he would find in them sometimes a pressed flower, at others a squashed fly. Occasionally, he would come across a letter in faded ink which had served as a marker, and it was seldom that there was not some name inscribed on the front page, or the purple stamp of a public library." ?
My first #BookHaul of the day was from Crook Hall Gardens, a National Trust property a few minutes walk from Durham town centre. It's a beautiful, tranquil oasis, with a reasonable selection of secondhand books in the Jacobian Room. I assume the statue is of Pomona, as she's holding a fruit & facing a small orchard.
Books are: a probably somewhat dated text book on working with post-traumatic stress experience, a 1942 Faber collection of Eliot, ⬇️
pickMaigret is called to Delfzijl, a Dutch port town, to assist a French citizen entangled in a murder, his investigation hampered by his inability to speak Dutch, while only some of the suspects speak French.
The townsfolk are stuffily provincial & would rather the crime go unsolved than an embarrassing scandal be exposed, so Maigret's relentless prodding at the truth is most unwelcome.
Most of the characters are unsympathetic in a claustrophobic ⬇️
"When Detective Chief Inspector Maigret arrived in Delfzijl, one afternoon in May, he had only the sketchiest notions about the case taking him to this small town located in the northernmost corner of Holland."
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
pickMaigret investigates the stabbing in an alley of an unassuming man leading a double life, despised by his wife and family, held in affection by past co-workers and acquaintances. The mystery of how he funded this life forms a principle strand of Maigret's enquiries.
Cold, torrential, late-autumnal rain and humid, overheated rooms infuse the atmosphere, with the inspector brooding ruefully on the "quiet desperation" of the lives he encounters.
I'm starting to run out of the libraries' inventories of Maigret novels, which is a shame as I've not read half of them yet. It does mean that I'm reading this LARGE PRINT edition due to availability, and somewhat previous to necessity because of my aging vision 🤓
The opening of the plot is a mystery staple: if the dead man's employer went bust years ago, what has he been doing all the time he told his wife he was going into work? 🤔
pickCharacter is everything in this episode. Maigret divines personalities and motivations to gradually unfold the psychological currents which have led to the murder of the mistress of a brilliant but amoral brain surgeon. Maigret himself is very much under Simenon's microscope in this one, and it's been said that Maigret and the surgeon are starkly reflected aspects of Georges himself, which is somewhat disturbing, come to think of it. 4.5 ⭐
Stop the bus! A new-to-me Maigret at the library 😁 Everything else on hold until I've read this. At number 43 in the series, it's about halfway through the run, written in 1953, so Maigret is already a well established institution in the police service.
In this one, the blurb says he makes an uncharacteristic error of judgement, which is a good hook. Looking forward to this one.
