Month: May 2024

Book of the Week, historical, new releases

Book of the Week: You Should Be So Lucky

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This was the other book that came out the week before last – and so they’ve both now been BotW picks. So that’s two new books in a row, two romances in a row – although this one is set in the past – and two books I’ve been looking forward to that haven’t let me down!

It’s 1960 and baseball player Eddie O’Leary is having the worst time of his life: after being trading to the New York Robin, his swing has vanished and he doesn’t know how to get it back. On top of that all his teammates hate him after comments he made on TV after finding out he was being trading live on air. Mark Bailey is an arts writer, except that recently he hasn’t been writing much at all. So when he’s assigned to ghost write a weekly column for the city’s most notorious baseballer, he is distinctly unenthusiastic. But when he meets Eddie he finds someone who might be as lonely as he is and there’s a definite pull between them. But it’s 1960 and Eddie is a professional sportsman, and Mark doesn’t want to be anyone’s secret (again) so nothing can happen right?

This is in the same world as Sebastian’s earlier book We Could Be So Good which was also a BotW pick here. That was set at the same newspaper that Mark works at – and you’ll see some familiar faces here if you’ve read that book too. This is a grumpy-sunshine type story and is very, very slow burn for some very valid reasons for the characters, but it’s very satisfying watching these two figure out their stuff and get their acts together. I read it across two evenings – and would have read it faster if I didn’t have to do actual work.

My copy was on Kindle, but it’s also on Kobo and in paperback.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: May 13 – May 19

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So I got back yesterday morning from a work trip to Nigeria! I spent a week in Lagos and it was amazing – but so very, very hot! Obviously one of the books on this list was last week’s BotW, and I had to leave The Reunion at home (because I was already a third through it) so that didn’t get finished this week – but I did finish the Shardlake, so swings and roundabouts! This week coming is a much more normal week so we’ll see what happens next.

Read:

Happy Medium by Sarah Adler

Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham

You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian

Impact of Evidence by Carol Carnac

Slain in Scotland by Patti Benning

Sovereign by C J Sansom

Nixed in Nantucket by Patti Benning

Started:

Lips Like Sugar by Jess K Hardy

Still reading:

The Reunion by Kayla Olsen

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd

One book bought, one pre-order arrived.

Bonus picture: Lagos!

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

streaming

Not a Book: Deadloch

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Back to a streaming show this week – but not a new one. In fact Deadloch came out on Amazon Prime last summer and I don’t quite know how I missed it until recently. But these things happen, and I have rectified that mistake now!

Deadloch is a black comedy crime series, centred on the fictional town of Deadloch on Tasmania. As the series starts, the body of a local man is found in the beach, shaking the idyllic town just as the town’s Winter Festival is due to begin. Local police officer Dulcie wants to lead the investigation, but she’s forced to work with Eddie, a detective from Darwin who is not happy that she’s been sent to Deadloch. Dulcie used to be a detective on the mainland before demoting herself and moving to Deadloch at her wife’s request and it is safe to say that her style and Eddie’s are radically different. They are helped in their work by Abby, who is enthusiastic but lacks confidence, and Sven who usually gets given the least important stuff to do. As the bodies start to mount up, can they work out who is killing the men of Deachloch?

The working title for this was apparently Funny Broadchurch if that helps you figure out what the vibe of this is. And there are plenty of jokes – although perhaps unexpectedly it gets really quite dark (and less funny) towards the end of the series. I don’t watch shows like Broadchurch because they’re too grim for me and the last part of this was in fact too grim for me! But I did really enjoy watching the rest of it, and I know my tolerance level is low for grim so others may be fine with it. I have no idea how you would do a second series of this, but I would definitely watch it.

Have a great Sunday!

books, bookshelfies

Bookshelfie: The Attic

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One last bookshelf to share with you, and you may remember it because it used to be the to-read shelf at the old house in the very early days of the blog! Now it lives in the attic. And while the landing bookshelf is meant to be tempting books for people sleeping in the room to read, this is very much odds and ends. So there’s travel books from various trips, the last remains of my university French book collection – a few Agatha Christies, some history books, grammars and dictionaries. Then there are some odds and ends of novels that don’t really fit anywhere else, but that I still want to keep. I keep thinking about getting some proper shelves built in along this wall, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to win Him Indoors over to that plan because he slay thinks I have too many books. As if there is such a thing!

books

Series Redux: Bridgerton

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The first part of series three of Bridgerton has hit Netflix, so today seems like the ideal time to remind you about my series post about the books that inspired the Shondaland series. We’ve reached Colin and Penelope’s story, which means we’re getting closer to my favourite book in the series When He Was Wicked, and I’m optimistic that we might get some of the set up for that in series three as well, as we’ve hardly seen anything of Francesca so far, and they need to get her married off ready for that now. I am sort of fascinated by how they’re going to deal with the parallel timelines of these three books.

Anyway, as I said in my other post, the books are very much the basis for the series – they’re 20 years old now and the romance world has moved on a little bit. The Netflix version has fixed some things on that front, so don’t go in to the books expecting them to be just like the show. But they’re still a nice read – especially if you want to see what the series might do next!

Have a great weekend everyone – especially if you’re watching Bridgerton – and as a little bonus, here’s a set tour from Architectural Digest!

books

Out this week: New Christina Lauren

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It’s new Christina Lauren time! This summer’s novel is The Paradise Problem – whose Amazon strapline tells me is an opposite attracts, fake dating romance. Going further and the blurb tells me it’s about a pair of exes who married in college so she could get access to subsidised housing and he could fulfil a clause in his grandfather’s will to get access to his (massive) inheritance. She thinks they’re divorced, he thinks he’s home and clear until his family start asking to meet his mysterious wife. Doesn’t that sound fun? I find modern marriage of convenience type novels to be a bit hit and miss, but Christina Lauren did a really good one in Roomies, and I’m loving fake relationship novels at the moment so I’m really looking forward to reading this, and I’m hoping that it’ll be in a bookshop where I am soon!

books

Recommendsday: Books with ghosts!

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After picking Happy Medium for book of the week yesterday, today we have some more books with ghosts in them for recommendsday.

In that post yesterday I mentioned The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston, so that’s almost cheating at this point, but here we are, I’m doing it anyway. Obviously, it’s hard for a romance to have a happy ending when one half of the pairing is a ghost, so the romance end of this is slightly tangential. Also, I haven’t read this one yet because it’s not out til next month, but Kirsty Greenwood’s new book Love of my Afterlife has a heroine who meets the man of her dreams in the waiting room for the afterlife, and then has ten days to find him on earth and have a fresh start. So that totally counts right? It has a dead person back on earth…

In a screeching about turn in terms of tone, is Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders which has Abraham Lincoln’s son stuck in a purgatory-like space with a bunch of other ghosts in a graveyard in Washington, while the civil war rages. It is more than a little strange, but it is one of the few award winning books that I’ve read over the last just-less-than-a-decade, and the audiobook has a properly starry cast.

It’s a long time since i recommended Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts in one of these Wednesday posts, but that still holds as a recommendation, as does Grave Expectations which was a BotW last year – and now has a sequel out!

There are also quite a lot of cozy crime series that feature ghosts somehow. Many of them were extremely not my cup of tea, but what I’ve read is Susan M Boyer’s Liz Talbot series (all the titles have Lowcountry in them) have been quite readable. And you could probably add Charmaine Harris’s Harper Connelly series, although she can find dead people, which isn’t quite the same as ghosts!

And finally, let’s not forget the Parasolverse, where people with excessive soul can become ghosts when they die – although they tend to be more side characters than main ones.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, books, new releases

Book of the Week: Happy Medium

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Oh I’m cheating. You know it, I know it and I don’t really care. I finished this on Monday but I read more than half of it last week and it was one of those preorders that dropped onto the kindle so a review is timeline and yah boo sucks I’m doing this!

Gretchen Acorn is a fake medium, except she’d like to think she’s an ethical fake medium – because she tries to leave her clients in a better state than she found them, even if she is being paid for her services. When one of her wealthiest clients asks her to go and help her bridge partner by stopping the hauntings that are stopping him from selling his goat farm, she expects to be working with an OAP. But what she gets is Charlie – handsome, young and absolutely convinced that she’s a fraud. Which of course she is, except that as she’s leaving the farm she meets her very first real ghost, who it turns out has been causing havoc at the open houses to protect Charlie from a curse. Now all Gretchen has to do is convince Charlie not to sell – but how can she win over someone who had her pegged as a fake at first sight?

As regular readers will know, I have a somewhat chequered relationship with books that feature the paranormal or supernatural – in that I can never really work out which ones I’m going to like and what it is that I do like in them. But Mrs Nash’s Ashes was one of my favourite books of last year and I reminded myself how much I had enjoyed The Dead Romantics and put on my preorder despite my issues above. And I’m so glad that I did. This is funny and charming and, yes, quirky but not so quirky it made my teeth itch and its also funny and has enough darkness in it to counter act a possible overload of sweetness (goat farmer! Medium! Con artist! Ghost!).

It’s got some dementia in it, so if you’re dealing with that in your life at the moment approach with care, and Gretchen spends a lot of the book keeping everyone at arms length for reasons that absolutely make sense – and at times it was so touching it brought some tears to my eyes. But I came out the end with a big smile on my face – and convinced that Gretchen and Charlie were perfect for each other, which is quite a feat based on their first meeting!

My copy was a Kindle edition, but it’s also on Kobo and in paperback. Mrs Nash’s Ashes was in all the shops last year, so I’m expecting this to be too.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: May 6 – May 12

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Not going to lie, there was a slightly fatal flaw in my reading plans this week – I bought two books in Foyles and started reading one of them – forgetting that I was going away at the weekend and that I was going to be too far through it for it to be worth carting it away with me for more than a week (I would have finished it before the end of the first day). And so there we are – a shorter list, with one book that was in contention for BotW unfinished, and no idea what I’m going to do tomorrow. Why am I so bad at organising my reading? Actually it’s not bad at organising. I know what I should be doing, it’s just that I am so easily tempted by shiny new books and then it derails all my plans!

Read:

Look to the Lady by Margery Allingham

Excellent Intentions by Richard Hull

Harbored in Hawaii by Patti Benning

Axed in Alaska by Patti Benning

Cut and Thirst by Margaret Atwood

Started:

The Reunion by Kayla Olsen

Happy Medium by Sarah Adler

Still reading:

Sovereign by C J Sansom

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd

Four books bought – two in Foyles and two at the weekend – and two preorders dropped onto my kindle!

Bonus picture: I do love a mews. And I was wandering near work one evening last week and took this one. I could fancy living in one of these. Sadly I do not have the requisite millions!

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

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Opening Night

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A somewhat perplexing theatre trip this week. Opening Night got 1* and 4* reviews when it opened, and it seems like the audiences have paid more attention to the ones than the fours, as its closing early at the end of this coming week, instead of running though til the end of July.

This is a musical adaptation of a John Casavetes film, with music by Rufus Wainwright, starring Sheridan Smith and directed by Ivo Van Hove. Now I love to go and see a flop – I saw the X factor musical twice, and the spice girls musical to name a few – and I do actually really like Rufus Wainwright’s music, so of course I rocked up to see this before it finished to see what I thought.

And the answer, five days on, is that I still don’t know! It’s not so bad it’s funny. It’s not a misunderstood masterpiece. But it is incredibly confused, and (sadly) the music is ultimately pretty forgettable. I’m not even sure what I can say about the performances – everyone is giving it their all, but I’m still not sure what they were meant to be working towards! But I got a good discount on my seat, and I’m glad that I can say I saw it. And sometimes that’s all you’re after!

Have a great Sunday!