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Case Histories

After finishing the last book in the Flavia De Luce series, I went to my book shelves to find a real book to read.  Lately I've been stuck on ebooks, and I have so many hard copies that I've not read yet.  It was time to turn some real pages.

Among the many books I have on my shelves, I have the first three books in a series by Kate Atkinson.  I've never read anything by Atkinson, so I pulled out the first in the series, Case Histories, and started it.

You can see that Stephan King called it "the best mystery of the decade." High praise and I think the book is delivering on a pleasurable and interesting reading adventure.

 Atkinson takes a good 100 pages telling 4 seemingly unconnected stories.  One is about a missing 3 year old, a story of a woman who loses it and murders her husband, the story of a man whose daughter is murdered by a man who has never been caught, and the story about the private detective who seems to be bringing all the stories together.

Atkinson has a great voice and I like the flow of her writing.  For a mystery writer, she is skilled in crafting prose that does more than tell the story with the appropriate clues and foreshadowing and is pleasurable to read.  It evokes the feelings that go with the story, so we are not only on the journey to solve the mystery but we get to know the characters in an emotional way.

If this book is good measure of Kate Atkinson's other books, I will continue to read her other books.  Next up:

A Broken, Dated Light Fixture Gets a Makeover

Makeovers--I want one, but I'll have to settle for this quick one I gave an old light fixture. 

I had one of these except think brass and 70's with plastic candles that were crumbling to nothing.  Three or four years ago we took this fixture out of our entryway and put up a new pendant that matched all the light fixtures in our dining room and hallways.  

Being the pack rat I am, I stuck this fixture into a box, thinking I might have a garage sale and get a couple of dollars for it. Yeah, right! I never had that garage sale.  

I've been looking at all these amazing cloches and wishing I had one, or two, or three, or . . .  Anyway one day when I going through my junk, I  came across this light fixture and LIGHTBULB!  I had an idea.  So I dragged it out of the box dissembled it,  painted the brass cap, used some 6000 glue to attach the metal part to the glass one and Viola!  A cloche that is uniquely mine.  And best of all, it was free!  

Excuse the lousy photo.  I took it at night and, well, it stinks, but you get the idea.  

 It is pretty and I think with the antique brass painted white, it works.

I love it.  I just have to learn how to use it more effectively.  I also love that this broken, out of date fixture has new life and totally different purpose.  And it was free! 

Back to Blogging

It's Wednesday and I've decided to come back to blogging.  I've wanted to for a while and really my lack of blogging was a sort of self enforced ban, so here I am!  No big earth shattering announcement and I doubt anyone will notice, but still, I am back.

I've decided that on Wednesdays I will share something from the world of books.  Books have always been something I love.  I read to live and I live to read.  Who said that?

For a while I've been enjoying Flavia de Luce, an eleven year old sleuth who happens to be a chemistry prodigy and lives in a moldering British estate with her father and two sisters.  I know this may sound as though this series is for the juvenile, or young adult readers, but that is not so.  Alan Bradley has written her as a delightful, energetic detective and narrator, who is still a child and naive in the most enduring ways, and manages to pull the adult reader in with good story lines.

The father is absorbed in his stamp collecting and grieving the loss of his wife and Flavia's mother, who   was an adventurous soul with a real zest for living.  Her death has left some huge holes in her family's lives.  This is especially true for Flavia who has no real memories of her mother.  The whole family is a study in disfunction and Flavia and her sister live to torture each other.

There are 5 books so far beginning with  The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Next is The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag

A Red Herring without Mustard

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

and finally my present read: Speaking from among the Bones

If you decide to read this series, I hope you'll find them as enjoyable as I do.