BrokenTune

Door 12:  St. Andrew's Day

Task 1:  Tell us: Who is your favorite Scottish (or Scots-born / -descendant) writer?

That's a tough choice because there are quite a few authors that tie for the spot of favourite and I am not going to choose one over another - so in no particular order:

Ali Smith - because her use of language astounds me every time, her quirkiness inspires me, and her empathy with the world around her gives me hope.

Josephine Tey - because she was a bucker of trends and showed that genre fiction can include intelligent discourse and detailed research and still be riveting. She wrote other books, too, that are not Golden Age mysteries and which I am very much looking forward to as I am sure they will provide me just as much enjoyment as her dramatic works published under her other pseudonym, Gordon Daviot. 

Arthur Conan Doyle - The master. That is all.

David Hume - because I read one of his books very early on when I first became interested in philosophy and it completely opened my eyes to a new world of thought.

Task 2: Ian Rankin likes to say that the Scottish national diet is sugar, fat and alcohol. The traditional Scottish dessert, Raspberry Cranachan, contains all three of these (and of course the alcohol in it is the national drink, whisky), but it's also delicious! So, make Raspberry Cranachan: http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/2852/raspberry-cranachan.aspx (For a non-alcoholic version just omit the whisky; or substitute with orange juice.)

Nope. I am not going to make cranachan. I really don't care for it...or any other dessert that involves lots of cream. 

I have opted to celebrate St. Andrew's Day (today) with a different combination of Rankin's requisite ingredients:

I'll leave it up to our Game Hosts whether this is enough to claim the point.

Task 3: St. Andrew was a fisherman by trade: Which book(s) from your TBR that you read this year turned out to be the year's greatest "catch"?

Without a doubt, the greatest catch has been Gaudy Night, which I read in January, then promptly re-read in June already, and from which I am still "hungover".

Task 4: If you could create your personal tartan, what would it look like? Or if you have a favorite existing tartan, which one is it?

I do like most of them, actually, especially the darker ones featuring blue, black, dark gray offset by something bright. However, I am not keen on the Royal Stewart one. The abundance of red in that one irks me. 

Book: Read a book set in Scotland.

Once I finish Not So Quiet, I hope to get to The Weatherhouse which was written by Nan Shepherd about the impact of WWI on a small rural community. The book was published in the same year as Not So Quiet, 1930, and I look forward to seeing what parallels, if any, there are to Not So Quiet, The Road Back (which was the sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front), and Sunset Song (which is set in that same time and almost the same place as The Weatherhouse).