Elizabeth MacKintosh
2020 in Facts and Figures
I already posted my main 2020 in Review and Looking Ahead to 2021 posts a while ago — only on my new blog (separate post to come) –, but I held back on my 2020 reading statistics until the year was well and truly over. And for all my good intentions when posting my mid-year […]
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Favorite Rainy Day Reads
24 Festive Tasks: Door 5 – Bon Om Touk, Bonus Task: List / tell us about your favorite rainy day reads. I suppose it only takes one look at my list of read books this year to determine my favorite rainy day books, as 2020 was essentially one extended rainy day: Golden Age mysteries and […]
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Josephine Tey: Brat Farrar (Reread)
24 Festive Tasks: Door 16 – Melbourne Cup Day, Book: Read a book by an Australian author, set in Australia, or a book that involves horses. As my book for this holiday, today I revisited Josephine Tey’s “Brat Farrar” (thanks to Lillelara for the nudge) — and still liked it every bit as much […]
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Josephine Tey: Inspector Grant Series
Having already read two books from Tey’s Alan Grant series (The Daughter of Time and The Franchise Affair) as well as her nonseries novel Brat Farrar in past years, and Miss Pym Disposes at the beginning of this year, I took the combined (re)read of The Daughter of Time and the play Dickon during the pandemic buddy […]
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2020 Mid-Year Reading Review and Statistics
What with the pandemic still very much ongoing, BL acting up again, MR’s and Char’s resulting posts re: BookLikes, the BL experience, and moving back to Goodreads, this feels like a somewhat odd moment to post my half-yearly reading stats. I hope it won’t be the last time on this site, but I fear that […]
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Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time & Dickon
This weekend’s “let’s-forget-the-pandemic” buddy read wasn’t the first time I read Josephine Tey’s setting-the-record-straight-about-Richard III novel, The Daughter of Time, but it was the first time that I did so by reading it together with her play on the same subject (written under the name Gordon Daviot), Dickon, and that combined reading changed my perspective […]
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Six Favorite Scottish Writers
24 Festive Tasks: Door 12 – St. Andrew’s Day, Task 1: Tell us: Who is your favorite Scottish (or Scots-born / -descendant) writer? Six favorite Scottish writers: Arthur Conan Doyle: Elementary. Robert Louis Stevenson: For Kidnapped alone — though his Edinburgh Picturesque Notes, even 150 years after their first publication, remain one of the […]
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My Rainy Day Reads
24 Festive Tasks: Door 5 – Bon Om Touk, Task 1: List / tell us about your favorite rainy day reads. Any- and everything that — with or without a mug of hot tea and some chocolate or other snacks — makes me feel all warm and comfortable (while still engaging my brain cells, […]
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Golden Age Mysteries: Further Reading
With my Detection Club Bingo card now blacked out, I’m going to track my reading here. (Note: for purposes of completeness, this includes books by the below authors already read prior to the creation of this list.) My priorities are going to be: Arthur Conan Doyle’s / Sherlock Holmes’s adventures, biographies, contemporaries and rivals, as […]
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Detection Club Bingo: My Progress So Far
Whee — only two squres to go for blackout! The Squares / Chapters: 1. A New Era Dawns: Ernest Bramah – The Tales of Max Carrados; Emmuska Orczy – The Old Man in the Corner 2. The Birth of the Golden Age: A.A. Milne – The Red House Mystery 3. The Great Detectives: Margery […]
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My Personal Literary Canon, Part 2: “Veteran” Readership
24 Festive Tasks, Door 5, Task 3: Tell us: What author’s books would you consider yourself a veteran of (i.e., by author have you read particularly many books – or maybe even all of them)? The authors by whom I’ve read the most books don’t coincide exactly, but substantially with those that I’d also consider […]
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Josephine Tey: Brat Farrar & The Franchise Affair
A Josephine Tey Double Dip Both Brat Farrar and The Franchise Affair were on my 2017 Halloween Bingo long list, but so were many other books … oh well. Both of these are stand-out books, in that (1) they’re not, or not substantively, part of Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant series (in Franchise Affair Grant appears, […]
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