#12Days of Christmas book game: day 12
On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me
Twelve Drummers Drumming
Day 12 of the 12 Days of Christmas game and giveaway.
We made it! Today is the 12th and final day of our 12 Days of Christmas book game. Well done to everyone who has stuck with it thus far – just one more push and we’re done. Today we’re still in the world of music and have to find book titles or authors names etc which relate to drummers and the playing of drums.
Booker Talk Titles for Day
I happened to be out doing some Christmas shopping today and quite by accident found myself in a book shop ( MrBooker Talk will no doubt perform his ritual raising of the eyebrows at that comment). They had a table featuring Christmas related books and guess what one of them was called – Twelve Drummers Drumming! I kid you not…… This is apparently the first in a series of Father Christmas mysteries by C.C Benison (not an author known to me at all). It features an Anglican priest called Tom Christmas who leaves the city and finds a new home in one of those English rural communities where everything seems perfect except that there is a murder. Sounds a bit too much like the Midsomer Murders tv series to me.
My second link is rather more cerebral. It’s The Tin Drum by Gunter Grasse, a book I read when I was about 16 and in my phase of looking for obscure books from other countries with which to impress my mates. Can I remember anything about it – no, not a thing beyond the fact it was tough going.
For my third and final choice, I am scratching the barrel here having run out of ideas for drummers. But drummers are often in a band so with a slight deviation I give you one of my favourite Conan Doyle stories: The Speckled Band./ I know its a different kind of band but thats just hard luck – at this late stage in the game beggars can’t be choosers.
Now over to you. Here’s how to play……
Come up with book titles or book images or anything book related (could be the name of a location mentioned in the book or a character) that matches with drums, drummers and drumming. I hope you fare much better than I did…… I’m looking ideally for 3 titles/images etc . You can mix and match your nominations.
Put your titles into the comments field of that day’s post. Don’t just give me the name since you could easily get that from a Google search – tell us something about the book itself. Why did you choose these titles – are they from your TBR or ones you’ve seen mentioned on a blog. Please try not to just use lists from Goodreads etc.
Feel free to blog about this on your own site or via Twitter using the #12days hashtag
The Giveaway
There’s an incentive to play along with this which is a giveaway of a book up to the value of $20 USD from the Book Depository
To participate, your list of books must be in the comments field by 10pm GMT/5pm Eastern Standard Time on Saturday Dec 17.
Day by Day Prompts
Day 1: Partridge in a Pear Tree
Day 2: Turtle Doves
Day 3: French Hens
Day 4: Calling Birds
Day 5: Gold Rings
Day 6: Geese a-Laying
Day 7: Swans a-Swimming
Day 8: Maids a-Milking
Day 9: Ladies Dancing
Day 10: Lords a-Leaping
Day 11: Pipers Piping
Day 12: Drummers Drumming
Rules of the Game
1.Each day a post will go live on booker talk.com matched to the task for that day. All you to do is post a comment with your list of books on the page
2. Each day try to come up with 3 titles. No need to think of 11 books featuring pipers or eight with maids in them. This is meant to be fun not mission impossible…..
3. Participants are encouraged to be creative with the names of titles matching each day. But the books do need to be in existence – no scope here for making up your own titles.
4. The number of contributions per person will be totalled and the one with the highest number will win the prize. So if you post three titles for day 6 and 5 on day 11, that gives a total of 8 points.
5. Contributions should be entered on the page within the time limit stated each day – typically I will give 48 hours between the time I post the day’s challenge and when comments will be closed.
6. You don’t need to play every day in order to be entered for the prize. Some days will be easier than others – and anyway you have all that shopping and packing still to do
7. There is only one prize – available internationally. The Prize winner will be announced on the blog around about the 15th of December.
6. The prize is that you get to choose a book up to the value of $20 USD from the Book Depository that I will arrange to ship to you. This will probably not arrive until next year given the last postage dates for international mail.
I don’t know any book with “drum” so I tried to find titles with twelve.
1) On my TBR I have The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius.
2) The twelve labours of Heracles
3) Twelfth Night by Shakespeare.
I like the way you went in a different direction to the theme of drums
I have to belatedly add this one because it’s perfect pun: Twelfth Night, of course, by the inimitable Mrs S.
I’m kicking off with ‘Twelve Years a Slave’ by Solomon Northup, which I’ll admit popped into my head because of the multi-talented Steve McQueen’s recent film adaptation of the book.
Secondly, I’ve gone for ‘The Tin Drum’ by Gunter Grass, which was the only percussion based book I could think of.
I resorted to google for my last title as I was all out of twelves and drums, and chose this because it sounds so fabulously kitsch. ‘The Drums of Fu-Manchu’ by Sax Rohmer. Quoted on the back cover is this – “Imagine a person, tall, lean, and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan…” – sounds so good I might just have to get a copy!
Ah, I wish I’d thought to include titles with the right number, e.g. Debbie’s mention of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (an excellent novel) above. I could have used Cheaper by the Dozen, a very funny memoir, and The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti, a literary/suspense novel coming out in March.
I never thought about using books with numbers in the title. could have saved a lot of sighing at my end
Here’s one: Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon. This is one of my favorite books of the Outlander series.
One that is new to me!
I have nothing for drums, so must make a numerical offer:
In 2010, I read Twelve red Herrings, a book of short mystery stories by Jeffrey Archer.
In my TBR stack lives The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients by Theresa Brown, about a day on a busy teaching hospital’s cancer ward. And on my TBR list The Twelve Tribes of Hattie</i by Ayana Mathis, the fictional life of Hattie Shepherd and her twelve children.
Jeffrey Archer’s career as an author doesn’t seem to have been impacted by his time in prison does it?
Ah ha! I have something for this: Drumming on Water, a Verse Novel by Geoff Page, and I’m glad I’m up early today or Sue from Whispering Gums would have beaten me to it, because she’s the one who sent it to me as a gift!
Jungle Drums is another gorgeous picture book by Aussie author-illustrator Graeme Base, who I told you about yesterday. This one is lush with jungly pictures, and there’s a cute little drumming waterhog as the main character.
Salt Story by Sarah Drummond is about the commercial fishermen of western Australia and was more interesting than it sounds. The characters are fascinating, it’s a different world out there. Sarah has a new book out which I have yet to read…
And yes, The Tin Drum… I have lost count of the times someone has commented on my blog that I should read this, and it’s on my TBR…. maybe next year’s German Lit Month!
Lovely to get titles that I would never have heard about but for your passionate support for Australian authors
Haha, you will and truly beat me, Lisa … I’ve been AWOL for a couple of days, darn it!
So I’ll have to dig deeper..
John Le Carre’s The little drummer girl – I haven’t read it but it’s one of those books that just stuck in my mind, because Le Carre’s books were everywhere back in the day!
Gilbreth and Carey’s Cheaper by the dozen…such a hoot of a book that I read a few times in my teens
But now I’m stuck… Tin drum, Drumming on water, which others have said are all I can come up with.
it was a tough one wasnt it?
Oh dear I don’t want to be responsible for you and Sue getting your pistols out at dawn over this!
*chuckle* Don’t worry, Sue and I are the best of friends, not just virtually, we meet up for an occasional coffee when she’s in Melbourne and hopefully soon too in Canberra because there’s a splendid exhibition of treasures from Versailles that I want to see.
Hmm, a search for “drum” doesn’t reveal much of relevance on my lists, but nonetheless…
1. Conundrum by Jan Morris is one of my favourite memoirs, a frank account of her sex change.
2. Slices of Life: A Food Writer Cooks through Many a Conundrum by Leah Eskin is on my TBR. It’s a collection of her Chicago Tribune columns, along with copious recipes.
3. Also on the TBR is Just My Typo: From “Sinning with the Choir” to “the Untied States” by Drummond Moir. It really is a book about typos!
A book about typos – now that surely has a very limited readership??