books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: October 5 – October 11

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So here’s the thing… I’ve been on holiday. And I was on holiday this time last week is true. So today’s list is huge. In fact the holiday list in general is massive and I’m pretty pleased with myself because my goal was to read some non fiction (done) and to try and make progress on the NetGalley list (done). And I know what I’m picking for tomorrow too, so I will break the streak of writing about books I finished on Monday! This week I’m back down to earth with a bump so we’ll see what happens to the list now, but I think we already know it’s going to be *much* shorter.

Read:

Julia at the Drive-In by Rainbow Rowell

The Final Problem by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Murder at Canterbury Cathedral by Jim Eldridge

Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

Winter Breakage by David Levithan

The Price of Admission by Dustin Thao

The Spy and the Snake by M J Rowbotham*

Lord Peter Views the Body by Dorothy L Sayers

The Shadows of Kensington Gore by Ross Montgomery*

Death in the Dressing Room by Simon Brett

The Bloodshed in the Bookshop by Simon Brett

Miss Hortense and the Last Rites by Mel Pennant*

Pride, Prejudice and Peril by Jessica Bull*

Started:

Take a Chance, Sasha Sinclair by Ashley Herring Blake

Still reading:

Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell

Eight ebooks bought (offers post writing does tend to do that to me), one pre-order put in and another pre-order turned up. I’m expecting another pre-order this week so we already know there’ll be at least one book on next week’s list.

Bonus picture: a picture from (nearly) the top of Teide, the third highest volcano in the world. There was sand from the Sahara in the air so we couldn’t see as far as you usually can, but we still got all the effects of being 3,500m above sea level…

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

concerts, not a book

Not a Book: Martha Wainwright

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Yes this happened a couple of weeks ago now, but it was a one off concert that Martha slotted between her gigs supporting Snow Patrol at the Royal Albert Hall so it’s not like I’ve missed out on alerting you to an ongoing tour by not posting it sooner.

At this point my love for Martha Wainright (and her brother Rufus) should be well known, and this was a lovely, intimate gig in a new to me venue – the Tabernacle in Notting Hill. She put out a warning on her instagram the day before that there was no opening act and that she’d be on straight away at 7.30, so of course being perpetually early I was there for the doors opening at 6.30 and got a spot in the front row. Of course then I had to hang around in it for an hour before the show started, but the floor was clean and I had a book (and a pint of cider) so it wasn’t exactly a hardship!

There were a bunch of the old favourites here but the main purpose was for her to preview some of the songs from her upcoming album. I’ve seen Martha a few times, but not doing a solo set like this (ie just her and her guitar) since the very first time I saw her at The Stables near Milton Keynes when she was touring the Come Home to Mama album more than a decade ago. Her songs sound good with a band – but they’re also great when it’s just her on her own. We did have a few songs with her and a sax, but they were the minority. Her chat between songs was hilarious – as she lamented her younger self’s propensity for alternate guitar tunings and her difficulties in remembering them now. All in all, a lovely night and a real treat – and I’m looking forward to the new album when it comes out next year.

Have a good Sunday!

bookshops

Happy Bookshop Day!

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It’s Bookshop Day 2026 in the UK – so today please take yourself down to a bookstore – preferably an Indie if you have one near you – and buy some books! Lots of shops are holding events and I would be going to one of my local ones if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve got a day out in London planned! There’s usually a special Books are My Bag bag too – which are often available for a few days after too.

Happy Book-shopping!

series

Series Redux: Charles Paris

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There was a new Fetherings book out yesterday (number 22 in the series) which makes today an ideal time to remind you about my favourite Simon Brett series – Charles Paris. Charles is a middle aged, probably alcoholic actor who just about manages to stay the right side of solvent by picking up odd acting jobs. You can find my original post about the series here – I first binged my way through them seven years ago and have re-read or re-listened to most of them since. There are 20 books in the series and if you do them all back to back you will notice that they started in the 1970s and that we’re still going and they’re now in the current day and Charles is still basically the same age, but don’t let that bother you. The floating now nature of the series means that Charles is always coming across new facets of the acting profession to get jobs in.

I sort of think that the series may be complete at this point because there hasn’t been a new book since 2018 – but given that there was a 15 year gap between books 17 and 18 that’s not a given. These are all in Kindle Unlimited – individually (all with fresh covers since I first read them!) and a six book omnibus edition of the start of the series – and there are also audiobooks read by the author, and radio dramas (lightly adapted to bring them all into the present-ish) day starting Bill Nighy as Charles.

Have a great weekend

previews

Out This Week: New Lauren Willis

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I know everyone is going supernatural at the moment, but I wasn’t expecting Lauren Willig to join the club. I don’t know why I wasn’t but hey, it was a surprise to me when I saw this pop up in the October releases with the catchy subhead/amazon tagline of “A Supernatural Cemetery Romance of Gilded Age Curses and Second Chances”. The blurb says it’s “a delightfully Gothic romantic adventure, complete with a little bit of demon-hunting.” It promises two people – Jess and Adam digging into the history of a Brooklyn cemetery only to discover a Gilded Age curse, a ghostly socialite and a demonic pact. Now as you are all well aware my record with supernatural stuff in books is patchy, but as I generally like Lauren Willig I will give this a go if it crosses my path at a reasonable price – and that may take some time if previous history holds true. But spooky season has definitely started now, which means I should start reading some of the Halloween books I have waiting on the various piles…

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: September Quick Reviews

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It’s the first Wednesday of the month and so here I am with some quick reviews of some books I read last month that I haven’t already told you about. I had a lot of books that I didn’t like last month, but I’ve tried to moderate myself and give you some stuff I actually did like!

Laura Clark is Away from Her Desk by Helen Russell*

Laura Clark is a 40-something HR manager, married to a golf-obsessd husband with a 19 year-old daughter who is drifting towards the end of a gap year with no idea what comes next and a mother who constantly calls on her to ask for things or complain. But one day Laura doesn’t turn up for work, disappears from her home and stops answering her phone. Gradually the people in Laura’s life find their lives descending into chaos without her there to perform the invisible labour they had all taken for granted. This is told from the point of view of one of Laura’s work colleagues, her husband, her daughter and her best friend and as you read you build a picture of a deeply unappreciated woman moving through her life without anyone doing anything for her. The collapse of everyone else’s lives is humourous to read, but actually I found this suprisingly bleak – the idea that Laura had been slogging on through all of their grunt work without anyone noticing is chilling. Luckily I thought the ending pulled it around or I might have been really quite depressed by the end!

In Dog We Trust by Beth Kendrick

Jocelyn is a town person and her mother has always told her to stay away from summer people – except for providing them with their clean laundry as part of the family business. But when she is named legal guardian for a pack of pedigree dogs she finds herself thrust into the rich side of town. But along with the dogs comes their owner’s estranged son who is determined to overturn the will…This is the fifth book in this series and I’ve read the first two and really enjoyed them and skipped a few to get to this one and it’s fine – but it’s not as good as the first two. I appreciated the subtle commentary on class but I did want to give some of the characters a bit of a shake at times. I think if I hadn’t enjoyed the previous two so much I would have enjoyed this more – I was just holding it to a higher standard!

When Gavin Met Stacey and Everything in Between by Ruth Jones and James Corden

This is a retrospective on the beloved TV series written by its creators. If you like the show, you’ll enjoy the insider information in this – I really liked learning how the show evolved from its original form into the show that we all loved. James Corden has a bad rap (rep?) as a person these days but Gavin and Stacey is a masterpiece and his rapport with Ruth is charming. If you like the show you’ll like this, but if you like the behind the scenes of how things get made, this is also interesting.

Book of the Week, mystery

Book of the Week: The Final Problem

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Yes, yes, yes, I know. I’m doing a book I finished on Monday again. But I have reasons: I’m carrying on two themes – it’s Sherlock Holmes related following on from the new Lady Sherlock coming out last week and it’s also translated – this time from Spanish. So there’s method to my madness.

It’s 1960 and in Greece bad weather has stranded tourists on the island of Utakos where they are staying in the only hotel. Then one of them is found dead in a beach cabana. It looks like suicide but one of the guests Basil Ormond – an out of work actor who is best known for playing Sherlock Holmes in a series of movies – thinks that it may be murder. The police can’t get to the island because of the weather and the other guests depute him to investigate because of his experience playing the detective on the big screen. Can he find the killer before the police arrive – or before the killer strikes again?

This is billed as inspired by Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes and I think that’s pretty accurate. It’s got a clever mystery, an interesting group of characters and it’s got a really nice style about it – I don’t know how much of that is the translator Frances Riddle vs Arturo Pérez-Reverte himself but it makes for a good reading experience. I didn’t have the killer worked out – which is also good – and once it was revealed I thought it was really neatly done.

Pérez-Reverte is a long established author in Spanish – I’ve seen him on the book shelves when I’ve been browsing on holidays in Spain – and upon looking on amazon it looks like an other series of his about a Spanish D’Artagnan type may also be available in English but I’ve certainly never seen them in shops the way I have this one over the last few months. If you like a classic crime novel this is worth a look, and I enjoyed it enough that I’ll be keeping my eyes open for more of his books – and if this does well may be we will get some more of them in English.

It’s on offer for 99p on Kindle and Kobo at the moment, and as I said it should be fairly easy to find in the shops too.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: September 28 – October 4

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Considering how big the finished list is, I really shouldn’t have added a book to the still reading pile, and yet I did. I got distracted and forgot about it until Sunday. And I’m in a bit of a situation for tomorrow too because I did that thing again last week. When will I learn? (Ed: never!) Anyway, let’s see if I can fix that this week coming…

Read:

A Game of Cat and Killer by Jiro Akagawa*

Unnatural Death by Dorothy L Sayers

Murder on the Cornish Train by J M Hall*

Alan Opts Out by Courtney Maum*

The Voices of the Dead by Nicola Upson*

Puzzles of the Parish edited by Martin Edwards

The Gentleman’s Book of Vice by Jess Everlee*

Take Six Girls by Laura Thompson

A Murder at Midnight by Ellie Alexander

Started:

Julia at the Drive-In by Rainbow Rowell

Pride, Prejudice and Peril by Jessica Bull*

Still reading:

The Final Problem by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell

Two books and one ebook

Bonus picture: as I started the week by picking a book I finished on Monday as my BotW I’m carrying on the cat theme with a picture of this kitty, spotted in my neighbourhood.

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

books, stats

Reading Stats: September 2026

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Books read this month: 30*

New books: 25

Re-reads: 5 (all audiobooks)

Books from the to-read pile: 9

NetGalley books read: 10

Kindle Unlimited read: 1

Ebooks: 4

Audiobooks: 5

Non-fiction books: 3

Favourite book: Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

Books bought: five books and ten ebooks

Most read author: Probably Dorothy L Sayers because I’ve started the Wimsey audiobooks with a different narrator…

Books read in 2026: 294

Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 591

A fairly solid month in books in the end. I’m sort of surprised it turned out so well because there were a lot of theatre trips in there – five musicals and a concert. And we’re deep into the autumn new release season so it’s a surprise to me that I didn’t buy more in the end. Roll on October.

Bonus picture: the final curtain of the special 20th anniversary performance of Avenue Q – with many of the original cast and the current revival one. A lovely night in the theatre.

*often includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – this month!

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Daunt Notting Hill

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Happy Saturday everyone and I’ve got another bookshop for you, and another with not a lot of photos because it was busy and it is small! And yes I’ve cropped my photo of the exterior – because there was a lady sitting on the bench outside and I try not to do that.

This is one of their displays – as you can see it’s got a real range of books, but tending towards the more literary than genre end of book selection. And because of the size here, there’s no space to break down by genre of fiction – so it’s one fiction section upstairs and you’re going to have to have a bit of a browse to see what they have. But if you have an author or a book you’re looking for that does make life easier because you don’t have to play guess the section for your author.

Downstairs they’ve got a large section for children’s and young adult books – where I spotted the new Lissa Evans as you can see – as well as more specialist non-fiction than the general non fiction section upstairs. I really liked the large section of picture books for toddlers – but that may be because I’m most frequently buying for a toddler when it comes to children’s books at the moment!

Because it was so busy upstairs when I was there (and also close to closing time!) I found it quite hard to figure out what sort of book purchaser this one is best for – but busy is good when it comes to keeping bookshops open. And Daunt Notting Hill is literally 50 meters or so away from Notting Hill Books, so you’ve got an option for a really book heavy afternoon if you want to go out that side of London – you can do Saucy Books, Notting Hill Books and across the road from that one there’s also Books for Cooks – which I did have a quick wander around and has more cookbooks than you can imagine – and also a kitchen demonstration area at the back which suggests they host some really tasty events!

Have a great Saturday – go buy some books!