2013 Mystery/Crime Reading Challenge

Amy over at The Crafty Book Nerd is hosting this mystery/crime reading challenge (I promise I'll put up the picture as soon as I get to a real computer!).  It's exactly what I need to keep track of my mystery reading habit.  Normally I would have gone for the Sherlock Holmes level,which is 30 or more mysteries in a year, but since I'm starting more than half way through the year I'll pace myself and aim for Lieutenant (15 books).

Classics Club Reading List

I am joining the Classics Club! This is the kind of reading I love to think about doing, and having the club should keep me going. (When I'm not reading my Vintage Mysteries of course!). Here's the list:

1. The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu
2. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3. The Love Department - William Trevor
4. The Transformations of Lucius - Apuleius
5. Sentimental Education - Gustave Flaubert
6. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
7. Barnaby Rudge - Charles Dickens
8. The Stranger - Albert Camus
9. The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
10. The Wonderful Years - Reiner Kunze
11. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
12. Candide - Voltaire
13. I'm Not Stiller - Max Frisch
14. Therese Raquin - Emile Zola
15. Eugenie Grandet - Honore de Balzac
16. The Tartar Steppe - Dino Buzzati
17. The Late Mattia Pascal - Luigi Pirandello
18. Journey to the West - Wu Cheng-en
19. I nostri antenati - Italo Calvino
20. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
21. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
22. Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann
23. The Makioka Sisters - Tanizaki Junichiro
24. The Crime of Father Amaro - Eca de Queiros
25. The Man with Seven Names - Alves Redol
26. Gargantua and Pantagruel - Francois Rabelais
27. Simplicius Simplicissimus - J. J. C. Von Grimmelshausen
28. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
29. Outlaws of the Marsh - Shi Nai'an
30. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
31. The Glass-Bead Game - Hermann Hesse
32. The Spanish Bawd - Fernando de Rojas
33. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
34. The Odyssey - Homer
35. Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence
36. The Iliad - Homer
37. The Vicar of Wakefield - Oliver Goldsmith
38. The Blind Owl - Sadeq Hedayat
39. Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre
40. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
41. Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing - Joseph, Freiherr von Eichendorff
42. We - Evgeni Zamiatin
43. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
44. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
45. Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov
46. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
47. Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
48. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
49. Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
50. The Story of the Stone - Cao Xueqin

Leo Bruce, Our Jubilee Is Death (1959)

Our Jubilee Is Death just barely squeaks into the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge as it was published in 1959.  Smooth schoolmaster Carolus Deene investigates the death of the odious Mrs. Lillianne Bomberger, a bestselling mystery writer.  She is found buried up to the neck, with only her head sticking out of the sand, on a beach in eastern England, by Carolus's cousin Fay.  The title is a quote from Sir Thomas Browne and seems to refer to the great pleasure that everyone takes in Mrs. Bomberger's death.

This book was a great deal of fun and I recommend it to lovers of the witty British mystery.  I have read other Leo Bruce mysteries and this was the most enjoyable so far.

For purposes of the VMRC, this title is category 18, Murder on the High Seas.

Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge

I love mysteries and I have ever since I discovered Nancy Drew as a kid.  When I was about 10 I started reading Agatha Christie.  Since then I have read widely but I have a special love for the vintage mystery, especially the British Golden Age classics.  So I love the great detectives (hence the name of this blog) but I'm a bit of a detective myself in hunting these wonderful old stories out.

Learning about the reading challenge in general was a revelation to me.  I can commune online with others who love to read too! And I can read vintage mysteries for a challenge: fabulous!!

So here goes, my first reading challenge.  Up, up, and away!