Month: April 2024

books

Book of the Week: Funny Story

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I mean it may not be a surprise to you that this week’s BotW is the new Emily Henry. I’ve enjoyed her previous books so much that I was hoping this one was going to live up to my expectations and, luckily, it did!

Daphne moved to Waning Bay, Michigan because it was her fiancé’s home town. But when he decides that he’s actually in love with his best friend Petra, she finds herself stranded in a new town, where she may have her dream job as a childrens librarian, but she’s got no friends and will soon have no where to live either. So she does what any one would do – moves in with Petra’s jilted boyfriend Miles. The two would seem to be absolute opposites – Daphne is serious, practical and so quiet her colleagues think she might be in witness protection. Miles is scruffy and somewhat chaotic and likes listening to heartbreak ballads on repeat. But when the two of them get drunk together they think it might be a good idea to post deliberately misleading photos of the two of them together, and then, well things get even more complicated.

I read this in less than 18 hours. I was reading it on the train to work and I was cross when I had to put it down and get off and walk to the office. I was reading it on the train home, and was cross when I had to stop reading and get off the train – even though I was really hungry and wanted to go home for my dinner. And I finished in bed that night when I should have been going to sleep. Luckily I was near enough to the end that it didn’t end up being a 2am finish and the Bad Decisions book club.

I enjoyed Happy Place last year, but I liked this so much more. This is back towards the pure romance end of the spectrum, whereas Happy Place was closer to the Women’s Fiction end. This was back to Book Lovers levels of enjoyment for me and I would happily have read another hundred pages, especially if those pages included more comeuppance for Daphne’s awful ex-Peter. The only thing I didn’t really understand – to start with at least – was why Daphne would have been with Peter in the first place, but Henry did a really good job of making that understandable.

My copy of Funny Story came from NetGalley, but it’s out now and will be where ever you get your books from, because Emily Henry books get massive wide releases. It’s a hardback – so it’ll be at the airports in the large format paperback if you’re going on holiday any time soon – and of course it’s in Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: April 22 – April 28

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We’re hurtling towards the end of April and I’m still not entirely sure how that happened. Anyway all the usual end of month stuff coming up, but for once I have already finished all the new releases this month that I had got from NetGalley. I’m not sure when the last time that happened was, and when you add to that the fact that I’ve also finished the May requests too and it’s really unusual. What I haven’t done is got the list of ongoing books down – because I got a bit distracted by the exciting new releases. Still you win some, you lose some!

Read:

Tied up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh

The Breakup Tour by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka

Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz*

Funny Story by Emily Henry*

The Lifeline by Libby Page*

Fake Flame by Adele Buck*

Vanishing Point by Patricia Wentworth

Miffed in Maine by Patti Benning

Started:

Sovereign by C J Sansom

Still reading:

The Mimosa Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu

Diva by Daisy Goodwin*

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd

No books bought. Another minor miracle.

Bonus picture: it’s wisteria season again! There were loads of them in Italy, but they’re also coming into bloom on the building I walk past on the way to work.

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

book adjacent

Book adjacent: Marlow Murder Club

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The TV adaptation of the first book in Robert Thoroughgood’s mystery series is here, I’ve finished watching it and so this Sunday is time for me to tell you all about it!

It’s a two part adaptation of The Marlow Murder Club, which is the first of the three books we have had so far in the series. It introduces us to Judith, Becks and Suzie who become friends and co-investigators as they try to figure out who killed Judith’s neighbour – whose murder she hears while swimming in the river. The police are initially sceptical that it’s actually a murder but then the lead detective makes the threesome become civilian advisors after realising that they were right. That’s about all I’m going to tell you except that more deaths follow.

This is definitely a cozy mystery series, it does have it’s dramatic moments, but if there’s a scale that goes from Sister Boniface and Father Brown (10) through to Morse (1) on the humorous to serious scale, it’s somewhere around a 6. I found some bits of it too cringe to watch – but they’re all things that are in the book and that didn’t bother me (or at least not as much) in the reading.This has been adapted for the screen by the author – who is also the creator of the Death in Paradise TV series – and I can’t work out if that’s a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, he clearly knows which elements of the characters’ backstories are important to keep for future developments, on the other, he might be a bit too close to the material to get the best out of it.

The acting is a little patchy in places – but I liked Samantha Bond as Judith, even though she’s at least a decade younger than Book Judith, and I find it traumatic that the actress who played Julia in the Joan Hickson Murder is Announced is now old enough to be playing senior citizen roles. But that’s my issue about how fast time has passed and how often I’ve watched those Miss Marples! On the whole, I prefer the books – because of the cringe-embarrassment factor, but I think it’s a fairly solid adaptation, and I definitely liked it more than I’ve liked a lot of the most recent Agatha Raisin adaptations and I think it’s better than them.

In the UK, this was shown on Drama, and also is available on UKTV Play. As you can see from the trailer that I’ve found it’s been on 7 Australia and it looks like it’s going to be on PBS Masterpiece in the US.

Have a great Sunday everyone.

books, bookshops

Bookshop visit: Óbidos Part 2

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Last week I said there was more from Óbidos and so here it is!

This is the Livraria do Mercado, which is a bookshop and an organic market. I have no idea what the proportion of books to produce is when it comes to sales, but in terms of the look of the place, it’s mostly books!

I also have no idea what how the prices for the produce stack up compared to in the other stores, but it seemed to be good quality and I know I’d be happy to buy my veggies in a bookshop – after all I’ve done my fair share of book buying in supermarkets over the years, and this is definitely the better way around!

It’s mostly Portuguese books (obviously) but they have also got a section with foreign language novels – including lots of Portuguese authors in translation and, in English at least, some very random secondhand books!

You’ve already seen this one, but this is the book exchange – and this is all English books (or the vast majority anyway). It’s run by volunteers who have moved to the area and raises money for local charities. As you know, I picked up a few books while I was there!

And that’s it! Have a great weekend and I hope you have a comfy spot and a good book to read in it!

books, mystery, series

Mystery series: Hawthorne and Horowitz

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Happy Friday everyone, I said last Friday that I thought that we were about to go on a bit of a run of crime series posts, and here we are with it

I’ve mentioned this series before, but as the fifth book is out now – and I’ve read it – the time seems right to do a bit of a recap. This is Anthony Horowitz’s mystery series where a fictionalised version of himself is working with Nathanial Hawthorne, an ex-policeman turned private investigator, to write what turns into a series of books about murder investigations Hawthorne has worked on. Book-Horowitz fits in these true crime books alongside his other work – writing novels, working on TV series, promoting his work – and often this leads to more crimes to investigate.

Hawthorn is a mysterious character – we are told the circumstances surrounding his departure from the police force, but not by him and any details about his life he does give up to BookHorowitz are done grudgingly or when his hand is forced. BookHorowitz is a Captain Hastings figure – stumbling through cases, drawing all the wrong conclusions but often thinking he is doing better than Hawthorne.

The first four books in the series have been written in the first person – but the new book is a bit of a departure, with BookHorowitz fulfilling a publishing contract by writing about one of Hawthorne’s prior cases, and giving us sections in the third person from the “book” and then first person sections as BookHorowitz goes through the process of finding out the details about the case – and about some new developments in the backstory.

Once I get going with these (and that usually means I need to actually sit down and get at least 50 pages in), they’re incredibly easy to read, and I really appreciate the meta-ness of it all as Horowitz weaves the fiction into his real biography. And I love how bumbling he makes himself – it’s fun and funny to read. As I said last week, I’m still hoping that he’ll write another Magpie Murder, but I’ll happily accept more in this series!

I would definitely start at the beginning if you’re going to read these – you don’t need to have read the others to follow the new one, but you’ll definitely get more out of it if you do. And they should be fairly easy to get hold of – the new one was in the airport bookshop last week and I fairly frequently see them on the tables in Waterstones and Foyles. And obviously they’re on Kindle and Kobo and audiobook too. Just watch out – because we’ve had a couple of different cover designs now, so you might find a few different styles out there if you’re looking at the paperbacks.

Happy Friday everyone.

Book of the Week, books

Book of the Week: The Darkest Sin

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I said yesterday I didn’t know what I was going to write about today, but it all became clear to me while I was trying to get to sleep last night, even if this is slightly rule breaking.

It’s rule breaking because The Darkest Sin is not the first book in the series – but I didn’t realise that when I bought it and I haven’t read the first in the series. I picked this off the shelf to take on holiday because it is set in Florence and we were going to Tuscany so it seemed fitting – and it was really good.

Cesare Aldo is an investigator at one of the criminal courts in Florence, a city full of factions, alliances and secrets. When he is sent to a convent to investigate reports of night-time intruders, he finds rivalries and secrets – and that’s even before the body of a naked man is found inside the convent. Alongside this, a constable of the same court finds the body of a missing colleague, that was pulled from the river near his childhood home. who would have dared kill a court officers – and if Carlo Strocchi can find out, it could secure him the promotion he yearns for. But Florence is dangerous and treacherous and the answers could prove a bigger problem than the mysteries.

Having not read the prior book in the series, I don’t know how much of the backstory in this had already been revealed in that – and what would have been a twist to a reader already familiar with Aldo. But going in blind, this was a twisty and page turning thriller with clever, well-drawn characters – not just in the main characters but in the supporting roles too. Sixteenth Century Florence is also a character in this – you can hear it and smell it and sense the danger lurking all around.

As I said yesterday, it was a doing and seeing sort of holiday not a lazing around one – so I was still finishing this on the plane home, and I was actually annoyed when the plane landed sooner than I expected and I had to leave it unfinished for a few hours while we made our way home. I’ll definitely be looking for more of these – I want to find out what the first book told you and see what happens next!

You can get The Darkest Sin on Kindle and Kobo and in paperback. There are three books in the series available now – with a fourth coming in the autumn.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: April 15 – April 21

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We’ve been on holiday, but it was a sightseeing and doing things sort of holiday, not a lying on a sun lounger one, so the book list isn’t quite what you might expect from a holiday week. But I had a wonderful time and I don’t care. No idea what I’m writing about tomorrow though. I’m sure something will come to me though. It usually does. Given that Taylor Swift has a new album out I should probably have tried harder to finish The Breakup Tour right?

Read:

When in Rome by Ngaio Marsh

Busted in Boston by Patti Benning

The Lantern’s Dance by Laurie R King

They do it with Mirrors by Agatha Christie

The Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters

The Darkest Sin by D V Bishop

Started:

Diva by Daisy Goodwin*

The Mimosa Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu

Still reading:

Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz*

The Breakup Tour by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd

None. So that’s something right?

Bonus picture: Tuscany. Just wonderful

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

film, not a book

Not a Book: On the Basis of Sex

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A slightly random film review today, because this is not new, and there was no particular reason why we watched it the other week, except that it was there.

This is a biopic about the early career of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the US Supreme Court Justice who died in the latter stages of President Trump’s term. If all you know about her is that she was a judge, this will fill you in on how she got to that position, and how tough things were for women who wanted to be lawyers in the mid-twentieth century. In fact there are portions of this that will probably make you really angry – they definitely did me anyway.

It has its flaws – it’s quite old fashioned in style, I don’t think Armie Hammer is great, and it probably should have done more about her later achievements than a couple of credit cards at the end, but as a primer to go and watch a documentary or read a biography, it’s pretty good.