Happy Saturday! Independent bookstore week starts today *and* it’s Pride Month, so I thought Books Incoming could wait another week so that I could write about Gay’s The Word instead.
Gay’s The Word opened in 1979 and says it’s the UK’s oldest LGTB+ bookshop. It’s on Marchmont Street – just down the road from Judd Books as you head towards the Brunswick Centre, which is home to Skoob and also Brunswick Bookshop, which makes for a very easy four bookshop afternoon should that sort of thing be your jam – we know that it is mine. It’s not a big store, but it’s got a deceptively large amount of books in there, many of which I haven’t ever spotted in an actual shop before which is always a delight.
I should say that I’m annoyed with myself because I didn’t take as many photos as I should have on my two visits in the last few weeks, but hey ho, I can’t be perfect all the time. I’m particularly that I didn’t take a photo of this shelf this week – because there were definitely more biographies on there this week and this one doesn’t actually have the book that I bought on it.
I’m not a big Young Adult reader, but I have friends who are who I will be dragging down here to have a look because this is big, varied and again had loads of stuff I hadn’t seen before, even though I feel llike the algorithm serves me a lot of YA.
This is also a few weeks old – this week it had Father Material on it as well as Star Shipped, and K J Charles‘s How To Fake It In Society (which is a hard back or I would have been tempted). I’ve got the Rose Dommu on the (virtual) shelf as well as Murder at the Hotel Orient. On the top shelf, International Relations – a m/m fake dating romance with a diplomat who needs a husband to get an ambasadorial post – looks right up my street and in the middle Show Stopper – about teens at a musical theatre competition is the one I’m going to be telling my YA reading friends about. On the non-fiction side, I’m waiting for A Queer Inheritance – which is about queer lives at properties that are now run by the national trust – to come out in paperback, and I also really want to read Queen James but it’s just as chunky in paperback as it was in Hardback.
And that’s your lot for today. Go visit an indie for bookshop week, and for double points buy a book by an LGTBQ+ author. And if you’re in or around Sheffield this pride month, don’t forget Juno Books too.
No series post today! The World Cup got underway last night and I think you should spend your Friday preparing yourself for the many four match days and the time zone issues that the West Coast of the US presents with the two overnight kickoff times which are 0200 and 0500 here in the UK! I’m marking it with a (vintage but not that vintage) picture of me in my euro 2012 staff shirt which has a bookish link: I got my first kindle so I would have enough reading material for a month in Warsaw without taking a second suitcase full of books…
After a glut of books that I had already read that came out last week, this week is one of those were there are a lot less new releases that I’m interested in. But never fear, there is (almost) always something that I would read, if only the pile wasn’t so huge. And this week my choice would be the new Eva Gates book Whose Body in the Lighthouse, which is the thirteenth in her Library Lovers and is doing something different which I find really quite interesting. For the first twelve books in the series, the lead character has been Lucy, a librarian in the Outer Banks. When I read book ten in the series three years ago, that book was covering Lucy’s wedding. Now two books on she’s had twins. I’ve written before about the difficulties of keeping a cozy series going and not progressing the characters personal lives but also the challenges presented by a heroine with young baby (or at least I think I have!) and Gates is dealing with this by… introducing a new librarian to get caught up in a murder. Or at least that’s what I think she’s doing – the start of the blurb is:
A new librarian’s first day goes terribly wrong when she finds a dead body on the front steps of the library.
In the thirteenth instalment of the beloved Lighthouse Library mysteries, a new character takes the reins.
And I’m not going to lie – I’m sort of fascinated by that. I can’t think of any cozy series I’ve read where the main character has been switched, much less successfully. If you can, please do drop them in the comments because I would love to read some. Agatha Christie moved the narrator around in her series, but the detective character was always the same – it was a Poirot mystery whether the narration was coming from Captain Hastings or Roger Ackroyd or whoever. So this has gone onto my list of things to watch out for because it’s an interesting and unusual way to tackle the problem.
I’m sorry, you’re going to have to wait another week for the May Quick Reviews, because this month’s Kindle Offers are that good. This was a really quite expensive post to write and so hold on to your wallets, here we go.
It’s Tuesday again and I’m back with another BotW post – but this time it’s a new release that came out last week. It’s also the first non-fiction pick of the year – just a few weeks off the mid-way point but we can gloss over that bit.
Receipts from the Bookshop is a year in the life of Katie Clapham’s real life actual bookshop in St Annes on Sea, which is in Lancashire and near Lytham and also the (probably) better known Blackpool. It’s based on her Substack of the same name which I used to read faithfully until substack changed the way they send their emails (or I changed something in my settings on substack who can tell) and then got a bit behind. But that’s ok because now there is a book! And the fact that I didn’t remember reading much of it before suggests that that substack change happened longer ago than I thought – or that I was less faithful than I thought!
If you’re a book person – and I assume from the fact that you’re reading this that you are – then this is a wonderful insight into what it’s like to own your own bookshop and as a bonus it will also give you plenty of ideas for books to read. I concluded (and told Him Indoors this) that I could not own a bookshop because I would buy myself too many books and/or crack the spines in the stock and turn them into secondhand books before they’d even been first hand. It’s a delightful soothing read with plenty of regular characters popping in and out of the shop through the year. Personally I would like to emulate the person who has a list of their required books (new hardbacks) on a personalised piece of stationery. That’s the sort of vibes that I would like to have. I mean I don’t – because although I love hardbacks I am bad at reading them because they’re not as portable as my other options.
Anyway, this is delightful. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it on the commute and it would make a lovely gift for the bookish person in your life. And you can even buy it straight from Katie’s shop Booksellers Inc via Bookshop.org or by emailing the shop direct if you want a signed one. I have definitely ordered from her in the past – but I can’t for the life of me remember what the book was except that it may have been a Curtis Sittenfeld because I’ve pre-ordered several of those from indie at least two of which (Rodham and Romantic Comedy) were to get Indie bookseller bonus swag (a tote bag and a key ring) iirc and I think one of the swag ones was from here (the other was likely to from Fox Lane Books in Yorkshire). My copy came from NetGalley – even if I didn’t manage to post about it before release day I had actually finished it before release day for once) and it’s also available in Kindle and Kobo. And I’ll throw in another link to the Receipts from the Bookshop Substack here just in case you want to go and have a read of that before committing yourself.
A fairly solid week in reading all things considered, helped by commuting for the four days that I was working and some miserable weather as well. Having (finally) finished the first Heated Rivalry book last week, I then proceeded to binge through the next four, but managed to distract myself away to read some other things too so that I have some things to write about this week. Less good on the NetGalley front, but given the orgy of early June releases, the rest of the month is a little quieter for me on that front so hopefully I’ll catch up a bit this week. Still need to work on that long runners list.
I’m not going to lie, I had a different post in mind for today, but when news broke on Friday that Anthony Stuart Head had died, I went to delay Friday’s post to do a repost of my post about Buffy the Vampire Slayer only to realise that I have never written a post about Buffy. And so I thought that now was (sadly) the time to change this.
In case you have been living under a rock for the last nearly thirty years, I’m going to quote Anthony Stuart Head’s character Rupert Giles to explain the premise:
In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer
Buffy Summers might look like an ordinary teenage girl but she is the Slayer. At the start of the first season she’s just moved to Sunnydale, California after getting expelled from her school in LA*. She wants to make a fresh start only to discover that Sunnydale is also the Hellmouth – a mystical portal between earth and other dimension and basically the place that all demons are drawn to. Thus begins seven seasons of vampire hunting, demon slaying and teenage angst for Buffy and her group of friends – known as The Scooby Gang.
I’m going to date myself here, but I was basically the perfect age when this arrived on screens in the UK. Buffy was ever so slightly older than me and I wanted her outfits, her boyfriend (Angel! Oh Angel!) and her wisecracks. I hated school a lot of the time so a high school could literally be hell was also appealing. Coincidentally, I had been watching the first series (again) earlier this week and put it on again while I was writing this and within minutes there was one (“bad hair on top of that outfit?”). I recorded every episode on video (in order) so that my sister and I could watch them again (and again). I used IMDB’s quotes feature (already in existence even back then), Microsoft word and coloured paper to create a wall of quotes on the side of my desk. The reason I got into spoilers is because I went on the internet as soon as series two finished to find out (spoiler) if Angel was really dead.
Obviously vcrs became obsolete a long time ago, and my budget never stretched to the DVD boxsets, so it was only when Sy Fy did a complete repeat from the start sometime after I moved to Northampton that I realised how much of my sister and my shared language is pulled from Buffy because it was a staple of our Saturday nights in together**. I have a strong preference for the first three series which I will happily rewatch over and over and there are probably some from the final series that I’ve still only watched once or twice max, but I can recite you whole chunks of other episodes and if I close my eyes and think hard enough I can still conjure up the scene in the Yoko Factor (season four) where Angel completely mentally outwits (stupid) Riley after beating him up physically.
It’s another one of those things where I have absolutely no perspetive on how it would work for someone who has never seen it – the pretty girl fighting the baddies (not getting killed by them) is not as subversive/revelatory as it was then, but I still think it’s funny and clever and great and the special effects aren’t even too awful because the late 1990s was a work of practical effects, make up and long distance shots of stunt doubles with occasional bits of cgi rather than the cheap computer effects for everything that came a decade later. Oh and the soundtrack was cracking – I owned both “songs from” albums, and the cast recordig for the musical episode*** and my ambition was to be able to play the Buffy-Angel love theme on the piano. I know. It was a simpler time.
To go back to where I started – Anthony Stuart Head’s Giles is at the heart of the show in those first three years. He’s the fish out of water British Librarian but he’s also the father figure that Buffy needs in the absence of her real dad. The show is poorer when he’s not in it, and the world is poorer without him in it. Seventy two is no age. And obviously I’m sad as a fan of his work (he’s also brilliant in the radio sitcom Cabin Pressure and as Adam Klaus in the first episode of Jonathan Creek) but my thoughts are really with his daughters – their mum and his partner died in December and so to lose their dad so soon must be unimaginably devastating.
Here are some of season one’s best bits, featuring loads of Buffy, plenty of Giles and some Nicholas Brendon who also sadly died a couple of months back. The Buffy cast has had a really bad 18 months, as Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Dawn, died in February last year.
Go watch some Buffy -(or if you’re an F1 fan enjoy the Monaco GP and *then* watch some Buffy).
*in events in the original movie (with a completely different cast) that came out in 1992.
**Along with Clueless, She’s All That, Never Been Kissed, Ever After, Pretty Woman and the Richard Curtis oevre
***And I bet I could still sing along to pretty much all of it.
Happy Saturday everyone, it’s book shop post day again!
So Judd Books is another one on my regular rounds of bookshops in Bloomsbury, but it’s a bit different to the rest of the round because you can never predict what you’re going to find in there. It has secondhand and bargain books and sort of specialises in books on the arts and social science but it also has some fiction in there too. It’s the sort of book you wander into to see if you can find a book you’d like to read rather than a bookshop you go into to find a specific book. So you might go in and discover they’ve got a book you’ve been looking for for ages, or find something completely new to you. I took this photo on my four book afternoon (that also saw me go to Word on the Water among others) and I bought the first in a crime series from the early 90s as well as a Dorothy Dunnett mystery to try out. I’ve been in again since but realised that I didn’t have time to browse properly because I had an appointment so some how came out empty handed! Anyway, if you’re wandering down towards central London from Kings Cross, it’s a good place to stop on your way. And it’s not the only bookshop on the route either but more on that anon…
Books bought: 7 ebooks, 8 books and a couple of pre-orders arrived too, plus a holiday book from mum (thanks mum!)
Most read author: Jill Paton Walsh as I binged the entire Imogen Quy series.
Books read in 2025: 92
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 587
I may have bought too many books, but I did at least get more off the to-read pile than I put on it (just) and it was a really good month in non-fiction reading which makes for a change. I also did well on the NetGalley front but not on the Kindle Unlimited one – but I guess I can’t do everything!
Bonus picture: some more Wales – this time Anglesey – from the end of month trip.
*often includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – but not this month!
June is Pride month and so its fitting that the first new release I’m featuring this month is the new book in Alexis Hall’s London Calling series – aka the third in the series that started with Boyfriend Material. It’s called Father Material and I have to say I am trepidatious. I loved Boyfriend Material and I liked Husband Material, just not as much (but still enough for it to be a BotW). I liked that Husband Material didn’t use the break-them-up-to-create-conflict trope that you see so much in sequels to romance novels – but the ending of Husband Material was not quite what a lot of readers wanted and left some people feeling like they’d fallen for a bait and switch. I did not feel like that I should say – I thought it was a perfectly consistent way to wrap up the conflict that was going on in the book. But there is definitely potential for another similar situation in this book, and that’s where my trepidation comes from – because if it does, then there’s been no character growth in anyone, at all, since the first book. And I’m not here for that. And of course it could go in a totally different direction to all of that – and I have a mixed record with some of Alexis Hall’s plots. I really liked Rosaline Palmer Takes The Cake, but I couldn’t finish the next in that series Paris Daillencourt is about to crumble and I had very strong feelings about Val deserving better than he got in Something Fabulous, to the point where I still haven’t read the sequel because I’m worried I will hate it.
All of which is to say – there is a second sequel to a beloved first book that came out this week and you should be able to find it in stores as well as on Kindle and Kobo. Best of luck everyone…
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 