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My favourite books, libraries and bookshops! Cronulla Beach, Sydney, Australia. 🧳🗝️☕️🐦‍⬛
📖59/65: The Magician by Colm Tóibín

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🏝️Although part of NSW, Australia, spectacular World Heritage listed Lord Howe Island lies 600kms offshore.
The population is capped at 400 residents plus 400 visitors. Internet is only available at certain locations. Our guest lodge has a landline only and messaging system for contact with the outside world. Like an Agatha Christie novel, guests are served their meals together sharply at 7.30am, 12pm and 7pm with afternoon tea in between.

What better place to read Barry Maitland’s excellent crime novel, Bright Air, about the seemingly accidental death of a climber on the monstrous cliffs of Mount Gower at the Island’s southern end.
This is my favourite kind of mystery novel, where regular people, thrust into terrible circumstances, must become the detectives. 🛘

#barrymaitlandauthor #barrymaitlandbrightair #lordhoweisland #australiancrimefiction by @cronullabookshelf

🏛️I set a goal to read five creepy books for Halloween taken from my longstanding tbr piles.

This is the last: The Woman in Black by Susan Hill - the ultimate gothic ghost story and essential Halloween read. It’s surprising that it was written in 1983 because it feels like a classic masterpiece from the 1800s. It is beautifully easy to read and has everything you want in a ghost story - oppressive, atmospheric English fog and mist; lonely, marshy landscape; an enormous, abandoned mansion and a young man sent there on business who ignores all the warning signs.
Sinister and frightening. 🪦

#halloweenreadinglist #creepyfiction #susanhill #thewomaninblack #ghoststories by @cronullabookshelf

☠️🏯🇯🇵The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji is the definitive Japanese locked room murder mystery.
It is inspired by the Golden Age mystery classics, particularly Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.
A group a mystery club students travel to the remote island of Tsunojima to stay for a week at the location of a mass murder. They sleep in the Decagon House and are picked off one by one. The remaining members fight each other and their growing paranoia to work to solve the mystery of which of them is the killer.
This is a must read for lovers of the genre. It was a gripping, entertaining experience but it doesn’t reach the genius of Christie’s And Then There Were None, in my humble opinion. 🗝️

#halloweenreadinglist #murdermystery #japanesemurdermystery #lockedroommystery by @cronullabookshelf

🎃Hallowe’en Party: I thought this book would be just like the movie version, A Haunting in Venice, but actually it’s completely different. Set in Cornwall for one thing, not Venice.
As master detective, Hercule Poirot investigates the case of a murder at a Halloween party, I’m reminded why Agatha Christie is so brilliant and such a cosy pleasure to read. 🍎

(Photo from a previous trip to New York).

#halloweenreadinglist #creepyfiction #agathachristie #murdermystery #agathachristiehalloweenparty by @cronullabookshelf

📕A Study in Scarlet: Where it all began - Dr Watson first meets the bewildering and impressive Sherlock Holmes and together they explore the case of two American men killed in London.
There is a surprising subplot which takes us to the Wild West of the USA and a sinister Morman cult.
Published in 1887, still a brilliant read from the master storyteller, Arthur Conan Doyle. 🧳

#astudyinscarlet #arthurconandoyle #halloweenreadinglist #crimeclassics by @cronullabookshelf

Dark tales 🐈‍⬛ - bite sized masterpieces of the gothic and macabre. Creepy, disturbing, ghostly and sometimes baffling.
Shirley Jackson is a fiend.🏚️

#shirleyjackson #darktales #creepyfiction #halloweenreadinglist by @cronullabookshelf

📚Found this new kid on the block when I was out on a doggy walk this morning. 🏡🐕

#streetlibrary #littlefreelibrary #burraneer #bibliophilie by @cronullabookshelf

🤍A Heart So White by Javier Marías - I made a mistake when I read this book and I’ll save you from making the same mistake.
The narrative begins : a young woman shoots herself in the heart shortly after her honeymoon. Many years later a man discovers that his father was the unfortunate groom and that he was mysteriously widowed three times.
This is such a hook, but then the book doesn’t follow a linear path of discovery. It spends all its time rambling off on digressive tangents. Frustratingly you can never quite get to the promised answers until the last pages. In the meantime you have to wade through seemingly disjointed mini-stories within the story.
But the thing is, you have to slow down and enjoy the side stories, because they are the story.
I wasted energy rushing to get to the end when I should’ve just enjoyed the journey. 🧳

#aheartsowhite #javiermarias #fictionintranslation by @cronullabookshelf

🥂📚Grand Days:
Now, a book with a bookshop named after it, is a book I had to read.
It is Grand Days by Australian author, Frank Moorhouse. It’s the first book in a trilogy which won the Miles Franklin award in 2001.

Years ago I bought it at Grand Days, Kings Cross (which curates stylish second-hand books and retro fashions) and have been inspired by Radio National’s Top 100 Australian books to finally drag it to the top of my tbr. (I’ve seen it on a couple of lists).

Edith Campbell Berry is a young woman from Australia who arrives in Geneva to take up a role, after WWI, at the newly formed League of Nations. She is smart, idealistic and very proper but open to new experiences. She stumbles into a relationship with a gender fluid man which takes her into sexual adventures she never imagined.
This is a fun read, if overly long, and is an authentic window on a neglected part of world history - the rise and fall of The League of Nations. It was the world’s first intergovernmental organisation but catastrophically failed to obtain its goal of world peace. After WWII it was dissolved and replaced with the United Nations.

@grand_days

#granddaysfrankmoorhouse #milesfranklinliteraryaward #frankmoorhouse #australianfiction #weareflour by @cronullabookshelf

🌳The GreenWay path Innerwest - it’s a rainy day for a 10km walk!

But so worth it and I found these two little libraries along the path.🏡📚

#greenwayinnerwest #streetlibrary #littlefreelibrary by @cronullabookshelf

📚Strangers is a fascinating memoir of the sudden and unexpected breakdown of a 20 year marriage.
Set mainly on Martha’s Vineyard, Belle comes from wealth and privilege, (there are many crazy anecdotes about the fame and fortunes of her family).

At times their lives were giving me the ick - she had worked as defense council for a major tobacco company, they “thinned out” the forest on their Martha’s Vineyard property to better see the lake, her husband went on “tennis and hunting trips” on a private plane and most of the beaches on Martha’s Vineyard are private and require a key.

But I liked the voice of Belle Burden. She writes an engaging, compelling story. (I read it in two days).
And she makes the point that women (including her mother and grandmother) have so often been silenced, forced to smooth over the mess made by their unfaithful husbands and not complain too loudly about it.
So I’m cheering her right to tell her story, of how unfairly she was treated, the full impact it had on her and her children’s lives, and how she came out the other side. 🦅

#belleburden #strangers #memoir
#cronulla by @cronullabookshelf

📖The Passion According to G.H.: I suspect I don’t have a fully formed soul.
This is author Clarice Lispector’s stated requirement for a reader of her book.

I’m now thinking maybe stream-of-consciousness books are not for me. Especially while the protagonist descends into madness.
I feel like I’m going mad myself when I read this book. No one with a fragile mind should touch it.

🪳Spoiler alert: a woman kills a cockroach and it breaks her brain. This goes on slowly for the whole book. It’s not a book to be picked up lightly. It’s a book to be studied.

(This may be the last time I select a book based on cover aesthetics.
I’m blaming instagram).

On the positive side Earth Walker & Co General Store and Cafe in Coledale is amazing! It’s worth the joyous, winding, cliff-top coastal drive down from Sydney just to experience the food and ambience.
#earthwalkerco #coledale #thepassionaccordingtogh by @cronullabookshelf