4-Play

I am generally a bad blogger in that I don’t respond to memes and/or challenges. Mostly it’s because I keep this blog on topic (a personal challenge requiring enormous restraint some days) and partly it’s because some of them remind me ever so vaguely of the chain letters that ruined a perfectly good teenage friendship.

However I’ve been tagged by Kerrie, one of the people who inspired me to start my own blog (though she may not know that) and , with a bit of tweaking, I can keep it on topic.

4 places I’ve lived:

Adelaide, Australia (setting for Kirsty Brooks’ The Vodka Dialogue featuring a sassy PI and a must read for chic lit fans)

Jerusalem, Israel (setting for one of Jonathan Kellerman’s standalone novels and a great read: The Butcher’s Theatre)

Katoomba, Australia (setting for one of my all time favourite traditional house-party mysteries called Grim Pickings by Jennifer Rowe)

Sydney, Australia (setting for a top-notch PI novel called Dry Dock by Cathy Cole)

4 places I’ve visited

The Nile, Egypt which I sailed down on a felucca and drank cocktails at the hotel that was featured in the movie of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile

Chicago, America where I made my own walking tour of sites from Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawski novels

London (and other bits), England, where I bored my then boyfriend to tears by dragging him on a tour of Sherlock Holmes related sites (for the record he returned the favour by making me trudge across the country to see what he says was Hadrian’s wall and I say was a pile of rubble)

California, America where a friend and fellow Sue Grafton fan and I did a driving tour of the area of all the places that surround the fictional Santa Teresa in which the alphabet novels are set

4 places I want to go to

Alaska (home of Dana Stabenow’s spiffy Kate Shugak series)

Botswana (home of Alexander McCall Smith’s No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series)

Russia (I rather fell in love with Tom Rob Smith’s Leo Demidov this year and have always loved Doctor Zhivago)

…Egypt (again) (for an Elizabeth Peters inspired tour of course)(plus it is my favourite place on the planet)

4 Australian authors I recommend

Leah Giarratano(picture me doing a happy dance due to her new novel’s imminent publication) (reviewed here and here)

Kerry Greenwood (reviewed here and here)

Adrian Hyland (reviewed here)

Felicity Young (reviewed here and here)

The top 4 books I’ve read this year

I’ve got 5 books rated 5 so far this year, but here are the 4 crime fiction ones

Leah Giarratano, Voodoo Doll

Adrian Hyland, Diamond Dove (a.k.a Moonlight Downs)

Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire

Johan Theorin, Echoes from the Dead

4 blogs I watch daily

I’ve deliberately chosen non book-related blogs here – I can’t think of any of those that haven’t already been mentioned by other responders and I do have other interests (shock horror),

Roz Savage, Ocean Rower(a 40+ year old English woman is rowing solo across the Pacific to bring attention to what’s ailing our poor planet and she’s blogging and podcasting the entire adventure, she’s funny and inspirational too)

The Scott Adams Blog (he writes what I already think but more succinctly and funnier and he makes me view the world differently)

Unleashed (ABC Australia’s opinion & essay blog – exposing myself to a load of different ideas keeps me, hopefully, from becoming too set in my thinking)

Graph Jam (blame Maxine, it makes me laugh every day)

And because everyone else seems to have added and subtracted their own categories I’m going to add my own, inspired by a tiresome week

4 things I would remove from my world if I had a magic wand

Alzheimer’s (no reading tie in but an old family friend is suffering from this hideous disease and it’s just awful for all concerned)

Celebrities (I am sick of reading about them and their mindless doings every time I pick up a newspaper)

Politicians (Ditto)

WHO (their daft definition of pandemic has made my working days a drudgery)

I’m not tagging anyone for this but if you should want to participate in the comments below or on your own blog, have at it.