I said last week that this week was busy, and it really was. But every week is busy at the moment, so what can you do. This one had a three event weekend and a theatre trip earlier in the week so I’m surprised that the list is as long as it is. I haven’t added anything new to the long-running list, but I haven’t got anything off it either, so mixed work there. I shall endeavour to focus my efforts this week!
Bonus picture: At the athletics on Saturday, watching the British 4 x 400m men’s relay team from the Athens World Championships in 1997 get their gold medals 28 years on after their result was upgraded.
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
I’m back in the country and back in the theatre this weekend, and this time it’s the new Matthew Bourne show, which was in my town this week. This is great to start with, because my local theatre didn’t use to be on the touring list for him, but now it is which is a good sign. The theatre was very full on Tuesday night and stayed pretty full for the q&a with Matthew Bourne himself afterwards.
So The Midnight Bell is a series of interconnected stories, all playing out at basically the same time in and around a pub in Soho in the 1930s. It’s inspired by the novels of Patrick Hamilton, which I will admit I haven’t read but during the Q&A (and in the programme) Matthew Bourne explained that he has mixed characters from different novels together, added his own and made it all a bit less bleak than the novels are. And it’s definitely darker than some of Bourne’s other works that I’ve seen (currently standing at six of his New Adventures shows plus the latest production of Oliver! which he choreographed) and perhaps less hopeful. But it is brilliantly atmospheric – dark and seedy with beautiful dancing and acting.
I think this is the best cast of dancers that I have seen for a New Adventures show – it’s got lots of their longtime company members all doing brilliant work. There are two people for each role, so there are lots of variations on who you could see, but almost all the names were familiar to me and I was excited to see Dominic North again, as well as Liam Mower. As I said at the top, the theatre was very full on Tuesday night, although I was disappointed to hear some people grousing at the interval about the fact that there was a gay storyline and a couple of couples left. But they missed out because the second half – set a month after the first act – has even more beautiful dancing and clever and interesting resolutions to the various storylines. I liked the device of having characters miming to old songs as well – it added to what you understand of the characters and their motivations and is something different that I haven’t seen Bourne do before – in the Q&A he said he liked it because it is “on the edge of not working, which makes it exciting” and I would agree with that.
This is on tour through until the autumn – check out the New Adventures website for dates and locations, and most of them also have a Q&A night too.
Back at the airport again this week – this time Terminal five at Heathrow when I was on my way out the other weekend. I don’t fly from Heathrow that often, and the last two times have both been T5 – and I’ve been disappointed in the books (especially compared to Birmingham) both times.
This is the new airport fiction section – I’ve already got the Emily Henry on a Kindle deal or I would have bought that, and that was about it for me – as I’ve decided the Anthony Horowitz is far too big to read in a physical copy so I’m waiting for a deal on the e-book.
Thankfully they did have the new Richard Cole’s which I had been hoping for, and the I struggled with what to get for the second part of the offer. I have two of the Follet Valley’s waiting to be read so I couldn’t justify another without having read some of the previous.
So that left the non fiction which majored heavily on the self help, biography and war history. I went for the Otto English in the end because it was the most appealing but I can’t lie, I was hoping for more, particularly on the fiction side.
Happy Friday everyone. As I mentioned last week, Sarah MacLean’s first contemporary fiction book is out in the world, so this week I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk about one of her historical romance series while I wait to see if I can find a copy of These Summer Storms in the shops!
There are three books in this series, for three brothers and each has one foot in high society and one in the more dangerous streets around Covent Garden. In fact two of these were books of the week when they came out – that’s Brazen and the Beast and Daring and the Duke which are the second and the third respectively.
These started coming about about seven years ago, which was right when historical romance really started to pivot to include more stories that weren’t just happening in ballrooms but got out into the streets a little bit more. I have always really liked MacLean’s writing style – she has a wit and sarcasm that really appeals to me. And although these have sex in them, and are sexy, they’re not as 0-100 as a lot of books can be at the moment – there is relationship development before they jump into bed!
These were relatively easy to get hold of when they came out: they had UK paperback editions, although I bought two of mine from Word in the US and we won’t talk about what that cost me in postage because they are signed and they came with goodies! And I own at least one as an ebook too because they’re on Kindle and Kobo as well.
The first book featuring Sally Smith’s barrister and (very) reluctant detective Gabriel Ward was a BotW back in April and as the sequel is out today and I read it as soon as I could after finishing that first one, today I have a bonus review of it for you.
We rejoin Gabriel in the run up to Christmas 1901 where he is about to tackle a difficult libel case, representing an actress who says that a tabloid has impugned her reputation. But then a mummified hand is delivered to the Temple’s treasurer and Gabriel is once again pressed into service to try and find out what is happening without inviting the police into the Inner Temple. And as more body parts arrive – including one with a fatal consequence – it becomes clear that someone has got a grudge against the Inner Temple itself.
Sally Smith has come up with another twisty and intriguing mystery and has also continued to build out the world that she created in the first book. Gabriel’s world and circle continues to expand, and his cloistered and sheltered life is a great device to enable her to explain the background to things and the rules of the world without it feeling like an info dump. And Gabriel’s growing friendship with Constable Wright makes for a great unlikely duo who actually compliment each other really well.
I would have read another one of these straight away had that been an option, so the sooner Sally Smith can write a third one the better – and hopefully enough people will buy this to get in on our shelves this time next year. My copy came from NetGalley, but my paperback copy of the first book came from a bookshop so I’m hoping this one will be findable in stores too. I’ll certainly be looking out for it. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too.
Happy Wednesday everyone! After a week in a hotel, with a sense of serendipity between life and reading, I’m back with a post about books set in hotels.
The Listeners by Maggie Steifvater*
So this is the book that first got me thinking about this post. As I mentioned on my preview post, this is set in a West Virginia hotel that’s been commandeered to hold Axis diplomats in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. It covers the staff as they try to deal with providing luxurious accommodation to people who are part of the enemy, but in particular the hotel’s manager June and FBI agent Tucker. For me this was a case of the blurb being better than the book itself. The pacing of this was too slow for me, and the magical realism elements didn’t ever seem to come to fruition the way that I was expecting them too. But it inspired the rest of this post so that it something!
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
I read this a lot longer ago, but there’s a reason that this has been adapted for TV, made into a film and was nominated for the Booker Prize when it came out. Mrs Palfrey moves into the Claremont after the death of her husband. The characters are really well drawn and the picture of life presented is so vivid that you really can imagine the inmates of the Claremont going about their lives. The ending is somewhat melancholy – but not entirely unexpected. THis was my first Elizabeth Taylor when I read it and I have gone on to read more – including At Mrs Lippencote’s, which I wrote about not that long ago.
Bellweather Rhapsody by Katie Racculia
Hundreds of students have gathered at the Bellweather hotel for a statewide festival. Among the attendees is Minnie Graves, who 15 years ago was at the hotel when a notorious murder-suicide took place. She’s back to face her demons, but when a music prodigy disappears from the same room that the tragedy took place in, the hotel is once again the scene of an investigation. I didn’t like this as much as I did Racculia’s Tuesday Mooney, but it’s a bit like a Wes Anderson film but in a book. The cast is quirky, the plot is twisty and it’s funny as well as mysterious. Also it’s six years now since Racculia’s last novel, so I do hope there’s another one soon.
I’m currently revisiting Agatha Christie’s At Bertram’s Hotel for the first time in probably 20 years and for the first time as an audiobook, which is also a lot of fun especially as I’ve watched the TV adaptation a bunch of times and it’s fun remembering what the differences are. And of course The Body at the Library, which also features a hotel as a major part of the plot and there’s also Nita Prose’s The Maid and its sequels (which I still need to read).
If you’ve got any more books with hotels as a major plot point (and I’ve read A Gentleman in Moscow already) do put them in the comments!
A slightly strange week of reading last week due to the trip, so it’s been a strange one to pick something today, but in the end I did come up with something!
Next Stop, Murder is set in a town in the Adirondack Mountains. Celia has moved to Blue Lake with her daughter Katie after a tragedy in New York. Celia’s taken over an ice cream shop, which is a big change from her previous life as a NYPD forensics expert. But when a body is found on a tour bus, Celia finds herself drawn into the investigation.
This did feel very much like a first book in series because there’s a lot of set up work being done alongside the murder plot. It’s got an interesting narrative style though, with the narration moving around as well as diary entries from Katie, and articles from the local press. The mystery isn’t that complicated, but it worked well and I enjoyed the book enough that I’ll be checking out the second in the series to see if those first-book symptoms have cleared up.
This one is in Kindle Unlimited, so it’s not on Kobo (at the moment at least) and I suspect the paperback that’s listed on Amazon is a print on demand one, so I wouldn’t expect it to be in the shops. But if you’re in KU at the moment it’s an easy way to pass a couple of hours.
Hello from my sofa back in the UK, where I am safely back after a week in Ghana. It was incredibly busy week and so the list sort of reflects that – especially as the flight home on Saturday was an overnight one. I put an old Bond film on to go to sleep to and it worked a treat – it was Goldfinger and I don’t even remember the card game by the pool! Anyway, I’ve got a couple of days off at the start of this week, but the job list is huge – and we’ve got a super busy weekend as well, so the list maybe similarly small next week…
Another Sunday, another documentary from me. And it’s probably not unexpected that a musicals geek like me would watch a documentary about Liza Minelli, but I’m here to make a case forwhy you’d be interested in it even if you’re not a fan of musicals or divas.
This is a documentary about Liza Minelli, which focuses principally on Liza’s life after the death of her mother Judy Garland, and her work establishing herself as separate to her mother and building her own legacy and legend. As you can see from the trailer, Liza is in it (a lot) as are numerous of her friends – both famous and not.
Liza’s life is pretty incredible. She’s the daughter of one of Hollywood’s most beloved (but troubled) stars and a legendary director of musical films, She was in the public eye from the day that she was born, but she went on to be an iconic performer herself. She’s one of only six people to be a non-competitive EGOT – her Grammy is an honorary one, but she won her Oscar, Emmy and three Tonys in competition (and has a fourth honorary Tony too). And that career is covered extensively in this documentary.
But the reason that I think that this is of interest to people beyond the Liza fans, is because of that life time of fame. Liza has never really had a private life, and she’s had a public persona from the moment her parents first put her in front of a camera. in a way, she’s one of the last vestiges of the studio system: a child brought up in the business who watched how her mother was portrayed in the press and who has deliberately and constantly guarded what facets of herself she shows to her fans and her public when she’s not performing. So don’t go expecting any big revelations or confessions here – but that’s what I found so fascinating – what Minelli is like in normal life is essentially unknowable unless you’re in her inner circle. And you get glimpses of that from the friends and family – but just that, glimpses because her one overriding motivation in her public persona is to prove to everyone that she’s not Judy Garland and that she didn’t inherit all the problems that her mother had.
So it’s incredibly watchable, but there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. There’s loads of great archive and lots of evidence that she’s a kind person but she’s not going to tell you how she feels, or what she really thinks. I know that Peter Allen was the husband that she liked the most – according to her friends but there’s nothing really good or bad from her about any of them, although various of her friends are not shy to tell you that they really didn’t like David Gest. She’s still sticking to it that she never really saw any drugs at Studio 54, despite all other evidence to the contrary. You come away feeling doused in showbiz pizzaz, and slowly realise that you’re none the wiser about the reality. Just fascinating.
This one is available on different streaming services depending on where you are – in the UK it’s on the iPlayer at the moment.
Ok, so it’s not quite the middle of the month yet, but it’s close enough – especially as I know there are some pre-orders due to arrive in the next few weeks so I want to get this batch out of the way!
As you can see it’s a modest (for me) haul this month – with two of them (Fear of Frying and The Chow Maniac) already off the to read pile and looking for a new home on the other bookshelves. The Vita Sackville West is also off the shelves for now – as I lent it straight out to mum, who is always interested in Gardens and the Bloomsbury Group. So that just leaves the second Jane Jeffries, The Wombles at Work (which came from the same book fair where I found the Vita book), my pre-order of the new Ben Aaronovitch and 1984 which was an impulse purchase from the Pride Month display at Foyles. And I realise typing this that the new Sarah Adler should be in this photo and isn’t, but as I’m several thousand miles away from home at the moment there is nothing I can do about it so consider Finders Keepers on the list too!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 