Have an amazing day everyone! I shall mostly be eating Easter eggs and reading books…
Happy Easter!
Month: April 2025
Books in the Wild: Supermarket update
I finally made it into a supermarket with more than a single carcase of books, and so here I am with a quick update on what’s in the supermarket (and how much the selection has shrunk). This is my nearest Big Tesco. They used to have one side of a whole aisle in books, but things have changed. I used to be able to go in there and pick up however many books were in their deal no problem. Less so these days and the deals have got less good too – no blanket 2 for £x any more. Hey ho.
So what we have here I would say are the usual suspects – dominated by thrillers and murder mysteries from the big names, with a few bits of women’s fiction, romance, and non-fiction thrown in. There’s the new Ali Hazelwood and the Vera Wong sequel – which would have been my purchases if you’d held me down and said I have to buy something – but I still haven’t read the first Vera Wong (note to self, do sort that out) and the Deep End has a heroine who is a college athlete and I’m not sure I can cope with such young protagonists at the moment!
I was starting to worry that this was going to be the first book selection I’ve seen in ages with no Richard Osman, but there they are on the top left – just The Thursday Murder Club books though, no We Solve Murders. This was about the point where I started thinking what a strange mix of books this was – with new releases all mixed in with the older books and no “best sellers” list visible to explain why. I guess this is probably down to the fact that it’s a smaller selection, but if there’s logic to the display, it escapes me!
And finally we have a small selection of hardbacks and it’s the same sort of genres but the mix is a bit difference – this leans more into the women’s fiction end of things, as do the paperbacks at the bottom half of the shelf. I was hoping they might have the Anthony Horowitz on a good deal, but no. There’s a lot of sagas here of various types and other historical fiction. I feel like this Tesco has always had a lot of sagas, so maybe that’s what the locals like around here, although if you’re a saga reader my experience is that you also tend to be a fast reader and so whether this would keep you happy for many weeks I’m not sure!
And as a bonus contrast: These are from my local little-Asda:
I think this might actually be a better selection – it’s got the new Rebecca Yarros and the previous two, along with some Cassandra Clare and other hardback Romantasy. It’s also got a few more recent of the paperback releases.
Like Tesco, this has sagas but it’s also got a lot of Sarah J Maas to continue the romantasy trend that Tesco was almost totally missing. And it’s got a better selection of romance too – especially considering the size of display. And going back to my earlier point about the reduction in size of the book selection at the Big Tesco – this is one less carcase of books at the Asda than at the Tesco and one is a 24 hour mega market and the other is not.
Have a great Saturday everyone.
Series I Love Redux: Dandy Gilver
After reading Catriona McPherson’s new book last week, I went back and checked where I was at with the Dandy Gilver series – and lo and behold there was a sixteenth book in the series out in paperback for me to read to complete the set. It’s been three years since I last wrote about Dandy – at which point I was one down on the then fifteen books in the series. We’ve now followed Dandy’s adventures from 1923 all the way through until 1939 and seen her go from a bored wife at home with her boys away at school through to a grandmother worrying about the likelihood of her sons being killed up to fight in another war. And given that there are a bunch of throwbacks her first case in this one, it does feel like this could be the last book in the series, but who knows. I would definitely read about Dandy taking on the Home Front, but I don’t want her boys to be killed – so maybe it’s best to stop? Anyway, you can go back and read my previous posts about the series – consistently darker than you expect them to be, and with far too many different cover designs!
Have a great weekend.
Out This Week: New Vinyl Detective
Happy new Vinyl Detective week. Underscore, which is the eight in the series came out on Tuesday and I have my pre-order in my grubby little hand! This time we’re in the world of Italian Movie Soundtracks, which is a great excuse for me to drop a video of one of an ice dance routines into this, because there have been some really good programmes to Italian film music. Anyway, I continue to be impressed with Cartmel’s ability to find new genres to use for this series, although I didn’t love last year’s instalment Noise Floor as much as I have liked previous books in the series. Fingers crossed this is a return to full form… If you want to dip back into my archive, check out my Series I Love post from 2022 here.
Series I love post was 2022, last year got a out today.
Recommendsday: Unhappy Marriages
It’s Wednesday again and it’s Easter Week. So for this week’s Recommendsday I did try and come up with something appropriate to the season. But I think I’ve already written about all the books with vicars and churches that I can think of pretty recently (although more are bound to come to me as soon as this post publishes, so you never know), so instead I’m back with a post about unhappy marriages in fiction – of various kinds. This post is entirely inspired by reading At Mrs Lippencote’s last week.
Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippencote’s is set during the Second World War, when Julia joins her husband Roddy in a rented house near his RAF base. Their son Oliver is also with them as is Roddy’s cousin Eleanor. It is not a happy household. Julia and Roddy are not really well suited – he thought that she would grow and mature into her role as an officer’s wife under his guidance, while she thinks very little of the things that she is meant to do because of her “position”. They don’t spend a lot of time together, but what time they do spend together is mostly low-level unhappy as neither can ever do anything that will please the other. That makes it sound miserable – but it’s a social comedy, which I always enjoy. It was Taylor’s first novel – and although I like some of her others more, it’s definitely worth a look.
Julia has a husband problem – or does Roddy have a wife problem? – whichever way you call it, it’s an unhappy marriage and there are plenty of those around, particularly in novels set in the 1930s and 1940s. Whether it’s hurried marriages because people didn’t know each other well enough and there was a war coming (or happening) or marriages changed by war, there are plenty of options in books from the era.
In Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust Tony and Brenda Last have been married for a little under a decade, have an eight year old son and live in a country pile. He thinks they’re happy, but Brenda is bored and starts an affair – which sets Tony on the road that eventually leads to utter disaster. This gets pretty bleak (in ways I can’t explain because: spoilers) but it’s clever and from the tail end of Waugh’s satirical era, before he turned into his more realistic and also more religious novels.
There are plenty of unhappy marriages in Daphne Du Maurier too, you can basically take your pick because there’s almost always one miserable marriage in her novels somewhere. And if you pick Rebecca you can try and decide which Mrs De Winter has the worst marriage – the first or the second! But Frenchman’s Creek would also work and possibly doesn’t get as much notice and it has pirates (it’s set in the Restoration).
Jumping a couple of centuries forward in time not to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. It’s the early 1980s, Rachel is very pregnant and has just discovered that her husband is in love with another woman. Across the course of the (very short) book, she cooks food (she’s a cookery writer), tries to win him back and rages against the world. If you’ve watched any of Ephron’s films you’ll recognise a few lines here and there from that. And it was inspired by the breakdown of Ephron’s own second marriage to the Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate exposé fame).
There are of course plenty of unhappy marriages in mystery fiction – but given that often one of them ends up dead or doing murders it would be a bit of a spoiler to include them here. There are plenty of them in Agatha Christie’s books though, and Christie’s own disappearance and the breakdown in her first marriage has been extensively writen about. The Christie Affair by Nina Grammont was a BotW back in 2022 and is a reimagining of what happened when Christie went missing, written from the perspective of her husband’s mistress. It’s a hard one to write about without giving too much away – but I did try and give it ago in my review, so do check that out.
Book of the Week: The Edinburgh Murders
I’m breaking a couple of rules this week because somewhere along the line I had managed to miss that Catriona McPherson had started a new series – and that we were on to the second book in it. But as The Edinburgh Murders came out last week I am at least timely!
It’s 1948 and Helen Crowther is a welfare almoner for the newly formed NHS in Edinburgh. It’s not an easy or a popular job, and her home life isn’t simple either but she keeps on going. While she’s at the bath house with one of her clients, the body of a man is found boiled to death in one of the cubicles. And then another couple of bodies turn up and Helen finds herself investigating because she’s noticed a few things that are worryingly close to home.
This has a great setting and a cleverly put together mystery to solve. I found Helen a really interesting character, and her job gives her an excellent excuse to be sticking her nose into other people’s lives. There aren’t as many historical mystery series set in the immediate post war period as there are set in the 1930s so that make a really nice change as well as the Edinburgh setting. I’m pretty sure this will work best for you if you’ve already read the first book, but I haven’t and I still enjoyed it! Like with McPherson’s Dandy Gilver series, the mystery is darker than you often find in historical mysteries, but it’s not too graphic although there are a couple of gruesome moments its more implied than right there on the page.
My copy came via NetGalley, but it’s out now in the UK on Kindle and Kobo as well as in paperback. I couldn’t find the first one of these in the shops last week when I was looking, so I don’t know how easy the hardcover version of this is going to be to find though.
Happy Reading!
The Week in Books: April 7 – April 13
So a couple of things are notable from last week’s list. Lets take them in order. Firstly: I finished the Ruth Galloway series. So that binge is over, and the book hangover has commenced. Secondly a large amount of Kerry Greenwood was read after the news that she had died – I’m more than halfway through Corinna Chapman book three – and would have finished it (and probably the next one too) if I hadn’t suddenly realised that I was going to have to write about other things than Kerry’s books on here in the near future. Thirdly: I’m having a good go at the NetGalley list this month. The Simon Brett is out in a couple of weeks (he’s clearly writing at a rate of knots at the moment!) and the Catriona McPherson came out last week. And I’ve started another one that came out last week. Now should I have read them in a different order: yes. But the fact that I’ve read them is progress in itself!
Read:
The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths
Earthly Delights by Kerry Greenwood
They Do It With Mirrors by Agatha Christie
Heavenly Pleasures by Kerry Greenwood
Camping and a Steak Out by Patti Benning
Major Bricket and the Circus Corpse by Simon Brett*
At Mrs Lippencote’s by Elizabeth Taylor
The Edinburgh Murders by Catriona McPherson*
Started:
Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Detective by Kelly Gardiner and Sharmini Kumar*
Devil’s Food by Kerry Greenwood
Still reading:
The Oscar Wars by Michael Schulman
Abdication by Juliet Nicolson
Cher: The Memoir Part One by Cher
Four books bought – I just couldn’t help myself… but on the bright side none of them were hardback new releases, so I did at least resist that temptation!
Bonus picture: I have deployed the hammock! Sadly it was so lovely I fell asleep while reading the Cher memoir and ended up with a headache from too much sun and still without having finished the book. But I shan’t let that deter me. I shall put my head in the shade next time and wear a hat.
*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: Elizabeth Taylor documentaries
There have been a couple of documentaries recently about Elizabeth Taylor – and I’ve watched them and I have thoughts! Golden Age and Old Hollywood is one of the areas that I’m always interested in reading about (fiction and non fiction) and watching documentaries about and it was interesting that two big productions about the same person popped up so close to each other at a time when there was no obvious anniversary to explain it.
The two documentaries in question are Elizabeth Taylor: the Lost Tapes and Elizabeth Taylor – Rebel Superstar. The former is an HBO documentary, the latter a three part series executive produced by Kim Kardashian. And given that they’re both about the same person, who only had one life (duh) they both cover fairly similar ground.
Rebel Superstar has more about her later business career and it also has the better talking heads – among them Taylor’s son Chris and granddaughter Naomi, Sharon Stone, Margaret O’Brien, Kim K herself and Paris Jackson (Michael’s daughter) and Joan Collins. And oh my it needs Joan Collins – she’s the only sharp voice in a documentary that is working hard to gloss over a few things and is basically a hagiography, such is the lack of critical voices and mention of less than flattering aspects of Taylor’s personal life.
The Lost Tapes has the advantage of recordings of Liz herself, made in the mid 1960s, which means that this focuses on that era and the time leading up to it and not later. You only get a very short section at the end on everything else – addiction and later marriages are skipped over, although her work in Aids activism at a time when there was a huge amount of stigma is given more of its due. You also get cine footage filmed on set with her by Roddie McDowell where you see her with James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson. But the interviewer doesn’t give her a lot of pushback or press her on what she’s saying in the tapes, and again we’re in haigography territory.
Neither of these would have got me writing about them on their own, because it’s not really a recommendation – both lack a bite in slightly different ways. If you’re only going to watch one, I’d make it the Lost Tapes – because it has those recordings of Elizabeth talking about her life and the lovely home movie footage, but neither of them give you the full picture of Taylor’s life. If you go in not knowing anything about her, you could come out missing some of the details – like the fact that both Burton and Taylor were married to other people when they started their relationship, or the entirity of her marriage to Larry Fortensky. But if you’re interested in Hollywood history then they’re worth a watch, but if you are a newbie who wants a more complete picture, you’re probably better with a book – or even her Wikipedia!
If you’re in the UK, Rebel Superstar is on the BBC iPlayer and The Lost Tapes was shown on Sky Documentaries and is now on Now. If you’re elsewhere you’ll have to have a dig around and see which platform or streamer has bought them up.
Have a great Sunday.
Books Incoming: Mid-April 2025
A truly bumper month of acquisitions. But the good news – if such there can be – is that I have read all the Elly Griffiths at this point, along with the Edmund Crispin so they’re not actually on the to-read pile any more, they’re now in search of a place on the actual shelves. And of course given that I own all of the series except the first one in paperback there is a non zero chance that my mania for sets (preferably matching) will lead me to acquire The Crossing Places in paperback too so I have the set. I will try and resist. The Julia Buckley happened to be in the Picadilly Waterstones when I was in there buying one of the Ruth Galloways and although it’s not the next one in the series I haven’t read, it’s so rare to spot these in a shop I bought it anyway.
The Ann Granger is the first Mitchell and Markby which I have read but don’t own. Its the same edition that I read it in when a very dear friend lent me her whole set to me by post nearly a decade ago. She very sadly died last summer – but it would have been her birthday this week so when I saw this in the National Trust bookshop at the weekend it seemed like a sign to acquire it and reread. And then of course I got distracted by the Corinna Chapman re-read so it hasn’t happened – yet. And the other two were also purchased at the same time – and were total impulse buys. I’ve never come across them before but they’re books two and five in a twenty year old cozy crime series so I thought I’d snaffle them as they were only £1 each. I’ll either like them or I won’t and I was supporting a good cause!
Have a great Saturday.
Mystery Series: Corinna Chapman
With the news of the death of Kerry Greenwood at the start of the week, I felt moved to embark on a reread of her contemporary mystery series set in Melbourne. It’s been a while since I read them, but I was still surprised to see that I hadn’t written about them here – especially given how much I’ve written about the delightful Phryne Fisher. So today I’m remedying that.
Corinna Chapman is a baker in Melbourne. She owns and runs her own bakery which is in the same building she lives in: a delightful creation of an apartment building called Insula. Built in the 1920s by someone with a bit of a fixation on the Romans when it came to design. On top of that, each apartment is named after a different Roman God and it has a delightful roof garden too. I would move in myself except that across the course of the books quite a lot of drama happens in the building and its environs.
The first book in the series is nearly 20 years old now, so there are some bits here that are a little dated, but Corinna is such a wonderful creation. She is a reformed accountant, divorced, a reluctant sleuth and happy in herself despite society telling her that she should be miserable because she weighs too much. This is written in the first person so you’re inside her head the whole time and her personal monologue is idiosyncratic and wry. The other residents of the building and in Corinna’s life are also amusing and fun. And of course there are murders to solve. Often more than one of them too – in the first book for example Corinna finds herself investigating who is terrorising the women of her building but also who is killing off heroin addicts in Melbourne.
There are seven of these, with the final book The Spotted Dog coming some years after the previous installment which had lead me to hope that we might still get another one, but it seems that wasn’t meant to be. So I shall console myself with a reread. I’ve never seen these in paperback in the wild here in the UK as far as I can remember, but the good news for the rest of you is that the first one and the third one are in Kindle Unlimited in the UK at the moment, even if I don’t much like the new covers they’ve been given.
Have a great weekend everyone.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 