The February 2023 Reading List

 

At the beginning of this year, it looked as if 2023 might be the year of mystery/detective novels for me. The eight books in my January, 2023 reading list fall into that category. February looked to be going in the same direction.

The first book on my list for February was A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George. This was George's first published novel and introduces Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley. The novel won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel in 1988 and the 1989 Anthony Award in the same category.

Staying with the mystery/detective genre, the second novel for February was The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey - a modern police officer's investigation into the alleged crimes of King Richard III of England. In 1990 the book was voted number one in The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list compiled by the British Crime Writers' Association. If one enjoys reading books covering history in general and English history in particular then this book is for you. I did enjoy the book, but I thought putting it as #1 on the list of the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time a bit much.

Books 3 and 4 for February were books 2 and 3 in Stieg Larsson's Millennium series - The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest .

In January, I read Hideo Yokoyama's mystery Six Four. Hideo Yokoyama has two other books translated into English - Seventeen and Prefecture D. I had wrongly assumed that the 2nd and 3rd novels would be mystery novels as well. I haven't gotten around to Prefecture D. yet but - Seventeen is most definitely not a detective story. The novel centers on a newspaper's coverage of the 1985 Japan Airlines flight that crashed into a mountainside in Gunma Prefecture, Japan killing 520 people and leaving only four survivors. An excellent novel, but again, not a detective story.

Since I had strayed away from the mystery genre, I thought I'd end the month with a book that doesn't fit the category, but one I'd been thinking of reading. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. This is the first book I've read by Dawkins and I had expected him to be a nasty, cynical S.O.B.. You may or may not agree with Dawkins views on God, but Dawkins is a talented writer and not nearly as obnoxious as I had believed he would be.

The list

A Great Deliverance         by Elizabeth George
The Daughter of Time       by Josephine Tey
The Girl Who Played with Fire     by Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest    by Stieg Larsson
Seventeen           by Hideo Yokoyama
The God Delusion    by Richard Dawkins

The Cubiertos Volkswagen

 

I first posted photos of the VW Beetle that is located outside the Cubiertos Restaurant and Grill in Sibulan onto my sorryalltheclevernamesaretaken blog in October of 2018. At that time, the VW was painted a bronze color and was basically used as a large flower pot. (see photos at the above link).

In February of last year, I met with 3 American friends to have lunch at Cubiertos and discovered that the flowers had been removed from the trunk of the VW and the car had been repainted a canary yellow.

Cubiertos is located on the National Hwy. in Sibulan in an area where I do not normally ride my bicycle, so I only recently learned of the changes involving the Cubiertos VW when I happened to drive by in the car.

As can be seen in these new photos taken this morning, the VW is still the same canary yellow, but now sets atop the roof of the restaurant. I logged onto Google Maps in order to add these photo to the restaurant location on the map and I discovered that Cubiertos was not on Google Maps. I was sure I had seen it there previously. At any rate, I edited Google Maps and added the restaurant. It should show up in a few days.

Below are the photos I took this morning.