I was hoping to write a few more book reviews but, shamefully, I haven’t finished a book in a while. One of these days there will be an onslaught of recently-read books, but I’m afraid there is a review pile which is rapidly growing and never diminishing. Sorry! Instead, I shall offer a little mind-troubler. My Aunt Jacq. and I are regular correspondents (which reminds me, it’s my turn to write – will get to it soon, Jacq!) and used to often set little literary challenges for each other. One of the ones I liked best was an ABC sort of puzzle. The variety which doesn’t leave one’s mind all day…
It’s authors whose titles begin with the same letter as their surname… like Austen and… erm… no, let’s try Bronte and… wait a moment… Dickens and Dombey and Son, there’s one. Woolf and The Waves. You get the idea… harder than it thinks. Let’s see if we can cobble together an alphabet between us – I’ve got D and W sorted. Only ABCEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVXYZ to cover…
Rudyard Kipling and ‘Kim’?
Jonathan Smith Summer in February
Libby Purves Passing Go
Good game, good game!
You might find some here.
Colette, “Claudine a Paris”
A J Cronin, “The Citadel”
Dark Puss (I’ll leave all the remaining letters for other readers!)
Does Rose Tremain’s The Colour count?
Or, if The doesn’t count, what about John Fowles’s the French Lieutenant’s woman?
And Herman Melville – Moby Dick.
Nathaniel Hawthorne – House of Seven Gables? (I’m leaving off ‘the’ as it gets everwhere…)
Chaucer – the Canterbury Tales
du Maurier – My Cousin Rachel (cheat?)
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame