TBR Thursday 266…

Episode 266

A major step towards achieving my 2021 TBR reduction plan this week – no increase! Admittedly, no decrease either, but one step at a time. Sitting pretty on 193…

Here’s a few I should be pulling out soon…

Factual

The Invention of China by Bill Hayton

Courtesy of Yale University Press via Amazon Vine. It’s so rare that Amazon Vine offers me a book these days, much less an interesting-sounding one. I have a feeling the author, who is a journalist rather than a historian, is going to have to work quite hard to convince me of his argument though, unless the blurb over-simplifies it…

The Blurb says: China’s current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but “China” as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals.

In this compelling account, Hayton shows how China’s present-day geopolitical problems—the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea—were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers and revolutionaries adopted foreign ideas to “invent’ a new vision of China. By asserting a particular, politicized version of the past the government bolstered its claim to a vast territory stretching from the Pacific to Central Asia. Ranging across history, nationhood, language, and territory, Hayton shows how the Republic’s reworking of its past not only helped it to justify its right to rule a century ago—but continues to motivate and direct policy today.

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Vintage Crime

The Port of London Murders by Josephine Bell

Courtesy of the British Library. Isn’t it a gorgeous cover again? However, it’s getting pretty mixed reviews so far. I haven’t read anything by Bell before, so this will be my introduction to her…

The Blurb says: Wapping. Tugs and barges on the river. A west-end shop that deals apparently in nothing but lingerie. Women who sell their souls for something in a little screw of paper. A doctor in the slums who has mysterious visitors …

In a mean street of dockland a woman is dead, with every sign of suicide …

A derelict barge casts part of a cargo ashore, boxes which have double ends: some of these box-ends are empty, others conceal pink chiffon nightdresses …

The river police are concerned with the smuggling, Detective-Sergeant Chandler with an apparent suicide which he believes to be murder. River and shore police confer. Sergeant Chandler visits his suspects once more. He is never seen again …

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Crime

Cemetery Road by Greg Iles

Courtesy of HarperCollins. I was really tempted by Iles’ last hugely successful book, Mississippi Blood, but as usual never found time to read it, so I was pleased to be sent a copy of this one. I actually thought he was a newish author but it looks like he has an extensive back catalogue and a large and loyal fan base. Will I join them? It’s nearly 600 pages long, so it’ll have to be good to keep my attention…

The Blurb says: Marshall McEwan is one of the most successful journalists in Washington, DC. But his father is terminally ill, and he must return to his childhood home – a place he vowed he would never go back to.

Bienville, Mississippi, is no longer the city Marshall remembers. His family’s 150-year-old newspaper is failing, and Jet Talal, the love of his youth, has married into the family of Max Matheson, one of a dozen powerful patriarchs who rule the town through the exclusive Bienville Poker Club. The city’s only hope of economic salvation is a new, billion-dollar Chinese paper mill. But on the verge of the deal’s consummation, two deaths rock Bienville to its core.

Joining forces with his former lover, Marshall begins digging for the truth. But he and Jet soon discover that the soil of Mississippi is a minefield where explosive secrets can be far more destructive than injustice.

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Scottish Classic on Audio

Whisky Galore by Sir Compton Mackenzie read by David Rintoul

One from my Classics Club list. I vaguely know the story of this, I think from watching the ancient film version when I was a kid, but I’ve never read it. David Rintoul is a Scottish actor, so I’m expecting him to breeze through the islanders’ accents… 

The Blurb says: It’s 1943, and the war has brought rationing to the Hebridean Islands of Great and Little Todday. When food is in short supply, it is bad enough, but when the whisky runs out, it looks like the end of the world.

Morale is at rock bottom. George Campbell needs a wee dram to give him the courage to stand up to his mother and marry Catriona. The priest, the doctor and, of course, the landlord at the inn are all having a very thin time of it. There’s no conversation, no jollity, no fun – until a shipwreck off the coast brings a piece of extraordinary good fortune….

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NB All blurbs and covers taken from Goodreads, Amazon UK or Audible UK.

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So…what do you think? Are you tempted?