James Hamilton Paterson : Rancid Pansies

The third book in the Gerald Samper series finds our hero holing up at his friend’s home in Suffolk after his house in Italy falls over a cliff.

Rosemary Tonks : The Bloater

Rosemary Tonks was an intriguing woman and now seems to be becoming something of a cult figure. Born in 1928 she published stories for children while still in her teens. In the 1960’s she was involved in a collaboration with Delia Derbyshire in the BBC Radiophonic workshop. Derbyshire had studied music and mathematics at Cambridge, and after she was refused a job at Decca, ‘we don’t employ women’ she went to the BBC and did some radical work there. Rosemary Tonks, who by the 1960’s was an avant-garde poet, joined with her in a program called Sono-Montage. This was described as ‘An experiment in combining spoken poetry with electronically produced sounds.’

Joseph O’Neill: This Is The Life

Margery Sharp : Cluny Brown

Mr Porritt is a plumber and Cluny Brown’s uncle and the sole person responsible for her well-being and safety. He worries about her, for she is a girl who does not know her place. She even went to the Ritz for afternoon tea on her own and spent the exorbitant sum of 2/6 just to see what it was like.

Carl Hiaasen : Squeeze Me

When Kiki Pew Fitzsimons disappears from her Diamond Patrons table at the fundraiser for the Gold Coast Chapter of the IBS Wellness Foundation, (a group globally committed to defeating irritable bowel syndrome) her fellow Potussies (loyal Palm Beach women who support the new POTUS) are convinced she has been murdered by an illegal immigrant.

Helen Garner : Everywhere I Look

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We gave each other gifts this New Year, the reading women in my family. And because we all have an embrasse of books, we committed to giving each other a book we had already owned and read. I scored four widely different books; The Travellers by Regina Porter, Australian Short Stories No. 23, What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt and Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner.

Jeeves’ Famous Hangover Cure

The Gerts grew up on P G Wodehouse and loved Jeeves and Bertie Wooster. Even though I read Right Ho Jeeves when I was about seven, I always remembered the dramatic effect of Jeeves’ hangover cure.

Bonnie Garmus: Lessons In Chemistry

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Sheila,” one of the women was saying, “but didn’t she say cast-iron requires zero-point-one-one calories of heat to raise the temperature of a single gram of atomic mass by one degree Celsius?”

“That’s right, Elaine,” the other said. “That’s why I’m buying a new skillet.”

A House-Boat on the Styx : John Kendrick Bangs

John Kendrick Bangs was an American author writing comic fiction between the years of 1895 and 1922. The term ‘Bangsian Fantasy’ is derived from his work and relates to fantasy fiction about famous people in the afterlife. This particular tale has a heterogenous group among the shades, which includes Shakespeare, Confucius, Johnson, Boswell and Baron Munchausen among others. As you would imagine they have lively discussions. There is something of the atmosphere of a gentleman’s club, where the men (for there are no women in this version of Hades) continue to behave as they did in life. Baron Munchausen tells huge lies and is aggrieved when no-one believes him. Bacon and Shakespeare are at odds over the authorship of Hamlet, Johnson rehearses his bon mots and has Boswell with pen poised waiting to capture them.

Eunoia : Christian Bok

In these freezing days in a house full of people coughing and spluttering I do not have my usual time to read. To keep me amused I dip into favourite books and read a paragraph or two before putting on the kettle to make another batch of hot lemon drinks. Those of you who have been readers of this blog for a long time will recall my admiration for this author and his cleverness in writing small stories where he uses only one vowel.