Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Autumny Covers

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's theme is Books with Springy Covers (Pastel colors, flowers, baby animals, sunshine, etc.)Books with Springy Covers (Pastel colors, flowers, baby animals, sunshine, etc.) Given that we are now in autumn in Australia I am doing books with Autumny Covers instead. 

Red Leaves by Paullina Simons - This was the first book I thought of when I saw the theme. When went to search for it on my blog, I realised that I read it in my pre-blogging days. It wasn't even on my spreadsheet where I keep my list of reads going back to mid 2004! I read this book a very long time ago!


Red Leaves by Thomas H Cook - When I was filtering on my spreadsheet for the title Red Leaves, I came across this book, which I don't remember a thing about. I read this back in 2007. 


Pumpkin Spice Cafe by Laurie Gilmore - When I think of American Fall, then one word that comes up a lot is pumpkin. I just read this book while I was away so it is a very, very recent read. 

Full Moon Coffee shop by Mai Mochizuki - This book doesn't have anything to do with autumn really, but the colours feel autumny to me.

In Italy for Love by Leonie Mack - By contrast, this book is all about living in Northern Italy during autumn!

The Yellow Wood by Minnie Darke - When you go for a drive to check out the autumn colours in nature then yellow and reds dominate, so a yellow wood fits the theme for me!


The Family Tree by Susan Wiggs - Look at that tree! Doesn't it scream autumn in the colour of it.

Song of the Sun God by Shankari Chandran - The next three books don't have anything in the subject to do with autumn, but the colours on the covers feel like they fit in this post. This book is set in Sri Lanka which is very tropical and doesn't really have autumn as a season as far as I know.


Fire Study by Maria V Snyder - The colours of fire and the colours of autumn feel very similar to me!


The Place on Dalhousie by Melina Marchetta - It might be time for me to relisten to some Melina Marchetta books! It's been a while.

This Week..

I'm reading

We are back from holidays! We thoroughly enjoyed our time in Japan and South Korea. We are already talking about when we will go to Japan again! One thing that was surprising was how much reading time I had! I think it is because there was no TV to watch on the ship, and I wasn't playing any games  or doom scrolling on my phone due to limited internet. I also had pre- written all the blog posts for the time I was away so no blogging required either! I normally wouldn't read too much while on holidays but this time I finished 10 books! I am not going to list them all here as I am planning to share them in next week's Top Ten Tuesday post. I also now have a ton of reviews to write as I used this time to get a little bit ahead on review books, but also read a few books just for fun!

What I will talk about is what I have been reading since I got home.

A book that I started on the plane but finished yesterday is Secrets Beneath a Riviera Sky by Jennifer Bohnet. This is a book that I will be reviewing in a couple of weeks time.

Another book with a review due in a couple of weeks time is The Best Days of Our Lives by Helen Rolfe. I loved her Skylarks books set in an air ambulance unit, and was hoping for more, but this is not connected to that series at all!

This morning I started reading Pictures of You by Australian author Emma Grey. I could say I started this on a whim, but the reality is that the library wants its book back, and I don't really want to return it unread, so binge read here I come!

March was a really good month for me. I finished 17 books which is probably the highest I have had in quite some time. I know that I am not going to maintain that pace going forward though. Of the books I read in March, I gave two of them 5 stars (The Jam Maker and The Winter Sea), and another five books rating 4.5/5! Here they are:

I just wanted to mention the passing of Kerry Greenwood. She was the author of the Phryne Fisher and Corinna Chapman series, and lived a very colourful life. It has been a number of years since I read any of her books, but I think I will pick one up when I go to the library!

I'm watching


I didn't watch anything on the plane on the way to Japan, but on the way home I watched Wicked. I saw it in the cinemas when it came out, but I had forgotten how long the movie is! It was a delight to watch it again though.

The French Film Festival finished yesterday and because I was away for most of it, I didn't get to see all the films that I wanted to see. I was therefore delighted to see that a couple of them were available on the plane. I chose to watch The Marching Band! It was such a good film, although I do seem to have the knack of picking films to watch on a plane that will make me cry! 

Here's the trailer

Speaking of films set in France, kind of, Erin from Still Life, with Cracker Crumb and Lisa from Boondock Ramblings are hosting a Springtime in Paris movie event. The idea is that each week we watch a film and then share our thoughts. The schedule is below.

I did come home from holidays with a bit of a head cold, so sitting down and watching Mrs Harris Goes to Paris was the perfect way to spend Sunday afternoon. It is a movie that I have watched numerous times, and I have listened to the audiobook! I shared my thoughts about the book and the movie a couple of years ago during Paris in July which you can find here.

We also started watching Amanda and Alan's Spanish Job. We loved the two series set in Italy so we were always going to watch, and it is interesting to see the Spanish culture and food.


Life

I am hoping to have big news next week! Let's just say I had to do some job interviews via Teams whilst I was on the cruise, which is a bit odd! I am crossing everything for one of the roles in particular. 

In big news, I bought a new fragrance while we were away. I am one of those people who tends to wear the same fragrance for years until they stop making it, and then it takes me an age to find another one that I like. And then I wear that until they stop making it! Over and over. I also got a sample bottle of another one so now I have three choices every morning!



Max

As seems to be normal with Max he needed to go to the vet while we were away as he had some sores suddenly appear on his belly. He's good in himself, so nothing to worry about but we do need to get his medical conditions under control which I suspect means a change of medication. 

I think he is glad we are home though. He has barely left our sides in the last couple of days. This is a live action shot from a minute ago.

Posts from the last week

Historical Fiction Reading Challenge - April links

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Degrees of Separation

Sunbirds by Mirandi Riwoe

Weekend Cooking: In My Kitchen - March

Six Degrees of Separation: Knife to Here Be Dragons


I've linked this post to It's Monday, what are you reading? as hosted by Book Date and Sunday Salon hosted at Readerbuzz

SIx Degrees: Knife to Here Be Dragons

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best. The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links. I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

This month's starting point is is Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder

Using the word knife as my link I am choosing YA book The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.

A somewhat similar title, but a very different book is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, who is a very well known Japanese/British author.

If you want to talk about big name Japanese authors then Haruki Murakami would have to be right up there! I am choosing to use his book Norwegian Wood, for no other reason than we just got back from a cruise that went to Japan and Korea and we were on a Norwegian Cruise Line ship.

There were two main reasons for choosing the cruise that we chose. It visited Okinawa with it's interesting WWII and post WWII history, and it was cherry blossom season. A book that has both WWII history (albeit about Japanese POWs in Australia) and cherry blossoms on the cover is Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms by Anita Heiss.

Another book about POWs being incarcerated in a different county is The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies. This time though the POWs are German and are imprisoned in North Wales.

Now, if I am going to talk about books set in Wales, I can't go past the amazing Sharon Kay Penman for my final link. Her book Here Be Dragons is a book that has lived long in my memory! It is about Llewelyn, Prince of North Wales.

My chain is a bit all over the place this month which might be a product of my still on holiday brain, but part of the fun of Six Degrees is seeing the way that the links work in each participants mind. One thing that these books have in common is that they are all older books. I think the newest one is Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms which came out in 2016.

By the way, I mixed up my memes this month, and did a Six Degrees style post for my Top Ten Tuesday post last week. Interestingly that had quite a few WWII books as well. You can check it out here!

Next month, the starting point is an historical novel longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize, Rapture by Emily Maguire.

Will you be joining us?

Weekend Cooking: In My Kitchen - March

Welcome to the first Saturday of the month where I usually share everything I have made over the previous month. March was a pretty busy month for us. We were in Brisbane for 26 hours for a family birthday, and then we were on holidays for the last part of the month.

I therefore only really made one thing, but to be fair I did make it twice. I had a lot of homemade lemon curd in the fridge, so I found a recipe to make Lemon Cheesecake Mousse. I shared that recipe here.

Our trip to Brisbane was for my stepson's 21st celebrations. A group of us went out to teppanyaki which was a lot of fun!

My friend was going to Singapore for a couple of weeks so I said that she could park her car at our place and I would drop them off and pick them up from the airport. She didn't need to, but she gave me a thank you gift, which consists of local products from the Yarrawonga area which is where she lives.

She also bought back some Merlion branded chocolate from Singapore which is fruit and nut flavoured!

I am super keen to try the jam, but I will have to do so before Christmas because if I put it in the pantry thinking that I will get to it at Christmas I will totally forget that it is there!

At the time I am writing this last part of this post, I have been home from our trip to Japan and South Korea for around 5 hours. I will have a couple of holiday related posts coming up over the next few weeks, but I did want to share the teapot and cup set that we bought. If I remember correctly we bought it from a market at the cruise terminal in Kobe. We weren't really looking for anything in particular but I did like the colour and designs as soon as I saw it, so it came home with us!

52 Recipes Challenge

Here are the new recipes we tried this month.

Sticky meatballs

Chicken and Mushroom Bake

Weekend Cooking posts from the last month

What I Baked In My Kitchen - February

The Jam Maker by Mary-Lou Stephens

Chicken and Mushroom Bake (Jamie Oliver)

Lemon Cheesecake Mousse

Colours of Creaming Soda

I am sharing this post with In My Kitchen hosted at Sherry's Pickings.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book reviews (novel, nonfiction), cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs, restaurant reviews, travel information, or fun food facts. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page

Sunbirds by Mirandi Riwoe

 

I picked up this book from the library a few weeks ago on a whim, which was probably a bit silly given that I knew that I was going to struggle to read it before we went away on holidays. However, I started reading the prologue, which is about the bombing of seaplanes in Roebuck Bay near Broome during WWII, and was really moved by it. I even gave it to my husband and said read this. When I went to school I don't recall really being taught that places like Broome and Darwin were bombed during the war. I think most people would know about Darwin now, but I don't think the other bombings would be as well known. We visited Broome a couple of years ago so are familiar with the history and it is one that intrigues me. At low tide you can still walk out to the wrecks of the seaplanes, although they are disintegrating with time.

This was a fascinating story set against the backdrop of agitation for Indonesian independence from the Dutch, with a novelette woven through which is the story of a murdered girl, and all the while the Japanese get closer and closer and so the tension builds and builds. Of course, much like the British in Singapore and Hong Kong, they believe that there is no way that the Japanese will possibly take their country. Some of the Asian characters initially believed that the Japanese will assist with their desire for self rule, although looking back we know that this didn't really happen anywhere.

Our main character is Anna van Hoorn. She is the daughter of a Dutch plantation owner and a desperately unhappy Indo woman named Hermine. Anna's family is wealthy, and maintains many Dutch traditions but Anna is fascinated by many of the local customs. She  grew up with many of the villagers and often slips away to learn out to do the traditional dances and eat the traditional foods. In many ways she doesn't necessarily fit into either culture. She is respected in the Dutch community only because of her father's money and must always be seen to be morally upright, and yet she is not really accepted into the village because of her father's money.

One of her family's guests is Mattijs, a Dutch pilot who is hoping to make a new life in the Dutch East Indies. Anna's father believes that this will be a good match and so the machinations begin. But Anna is also fascinated with Sigit, brother of the van Hoorn's housekeeper Diah. Sigit is a separatist, agitating for self rule. Diah has dreams of her own. Her brother looks down on her because she works looking after the family, but she knows that in doing so she can work towards the future that she wants.

I always appreciate the opportunity to read a WWII story that is just that bit different. There are WWII books out there set in the Asian theatre of war but nowhere near as many as there are set in Europe. I can't think of many set in what is now Indonesia. This is, however, much more than just a WWII story. It is a story about identity and belonging, about the path to self rule and more. 

Riwoe also did a great job portraying the various different lives from food and languages to culture. You could feel the tropical heat rising off the page, smell the spices in the food and hear the birds. It's very evocative. I have only previously read her novella, The Fish Girl, which I reviewed here. I enjoyed this book immensely, so will definitely be tracking down her previous book and looking forward to whatever comes next.

I am sharing this review with Historical Fiction Reading Challenge which I host . 

Rating 4.5/5

Top Ten Tuesday: 10 Degrees of Separation

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's theme is Books You’d be a Fool Not to Read (Happy April Fool’s Day! In honor of this silly holiday, share the books you think people must read for whatever reason. They could be your favorites, books you deem classics, books that you learned something important from, books you wish you’d read sooner, etc. You could even narrow it down to a specific genre and share the must-reads for that genre. Get creative!)

I am not really feeling this as a topic so I have decided to be a fool in a different way. Every month, I participate in a meme called Six Degrees of Separation. It is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best. The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links.

You can choose to make the links between books in any way that you like. It could be from a word in the title, part of the authors name, a cover that reminds you of another book, the subject of the book. It really is just a big game of association. In order to start things off, I am going to choose to use the last book I mentioned in last week's Top Ten Tuesday post and see where that takes me using 10 books instead of the normal 7!

So how does this make me foolish? Because I am doing the wrong meme!

My starting point is White Mulberry by Rosa Kwon Easton as it was the last book that I mentioned in last week's Top Ten Tuesday post. 

One of the main characters names in Daughters of Tuscany by Siobhan Daiko is Rosa which connects nicely to the author's name for the previous book. (my review)

I am choosing to use the fact that the main setting for Still Life by Sarah Winman is Florence which is  the capital city of Tuscany This book is almost a love letter to the city.

From there I am choosing to use the word Life from the title and choose Life After Life by Kate Atkinson 

Another Kate whose writing I enjoy is Kate Forsyth who writes phenomenal fairy tale retellings wrapped up in historical fiction. Normally I would pick Bitter Greens but this time I am going with The Beast's Garden which is set against the backdrop of WWII.

Next I am choosing Briar Rose by Jane Yolen. This is another fairytale retelling I enjoyed, once again set during WWII. There are even some similar motifs on the cover of both of these books. (my review)

Using the word Rose and the WWII setting as the links I am choosing The Rose Code by Kate Quinn, which is about the codebreakers working at Bletchley during WWII. 

Still focusing on WWII settings, and the work of codebreakers, this time Australian women who were based in Brisbane, I have chosen The Codebreakers by Alli Sinclair

I hadn't really intended to have so many WWII connections, but here is another one. My main link though is that both authors have the same first name. I have therefore chose At the Foot of the Cherry Tree by Alli Parker as my next link.  

And finally, I am using the word tree as my link to Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak . (my review)

So there we have it! 10 books linked by various different means taking us from a Korean woman living in Japan in the lead up to WWII to a book where the Cypriot characters are living in London following years of conflict on their island. I inadvertently ended up with quite a few WWII books, as well as several books with roses on the cover!

I would mention that there are lots of option with every level of this there are multiple different ways you could go. For example, I saw Sarah Winman at Melbourne Writers Festival a few years ago now, so I could have picked any other author who I have seen at MWF as my next choice and the chain would have ended up looking very different, and everyone's chains are always unique. Do you think you would have fun doing this exercise?

Historical Fiction Reading Challenge - April links

 Thank you to everyone who contributed a review in March for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge. I will be back next week with all the statistics for the month!

I am looking forward to reading your reviews throughout the rest of the year! I am sure there is going to be a lot of great historical fiction discovered and shared with fellow HF lovers over the course of this year!

If you haven't already signed up, it's not too late! The sign up post is here.

Just to recap what participants need to know. At the beginning of each month I will put up a post which will have a Mr Linky embedded into it for you to add your link.

Please remember...

• add the link(s) of your review(s) including your name and book title to the Mister Linky we’ll be adding to our monthly post (please, do not add your blog link, but the correct address that will guide us directly to your review). A direct link to your Goodreads review is also acceptable
• any kind of historical fiction is accepted (fantasy, young adult, graphic novels...)
• if you have time, have a look some of the other links that are present. You never know when you will discover new blogs or books!

You can also join the challenge group on Facebook which you can find here and don't forget to use the #histficreadingchallenge hashtag on the socials.

Let the reading begin!!

Weekend Cooking: Colours of Creaming Soda

 One of the things that I find fascinating when travelling is around food. What the differences are, and what the similarities are! Today I am going to talk about creaming soda.That's right....I'm thinking about the big topics!

I am not sure if you have tasted it or not, but I was trying to think how to describe what the flavour of creaming soda is, and I really struggled. The best I could come up with is that it is mostly like a carbonated vanilla flavoured drink. It's not my drink of choice, but every now and again I will see it on the shelf, and think, yes, I could have some of that.

It therefore make sense to me that it would be a brown coloured drink, taking into consideration the colour of vanilla seeds or vanilla essence. And here in Australia, anything being called traditional creaming soda is a brown colour, but it is not actually the same the world over.

If you buy non traditional creaming soda here in Australia, then the more common colour is a vibrant red colour, and I am not just talking about the can. I was very surprised to learn when I visited South Africa for the first time a few years ago that it is a vibrant green colour there. They have also gone the extra mile and your can get all sorts of things that are green creaming soda flavoured. There is flavoured milk, cordial and even chocolate!

Image from Pinterest

I was surprised when we were in Hong Kong last year that creaming soda is more a yellow colour there. I had a pineapple and mango juice (so good!) but I also had to check out the creaming soda while I was there so I made Robert order that!

What colour is creaming soda where you live? And do you even like it?

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book reviews (novel, nonfiction), cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs, restaurant reviews, travel information, or fun food facts. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page