After breaking my own rules yesterday, I’m back with the pattern today, and as it’s the second Wednesday of September,it’s time for this month’s Kindle Offers.
In stuff I own but haven’t read yet, there’s The Whalebone Theatre and Kevin Kwan’sLies and Weddings. And finally in stuff I don’t own (yet), there’s the second in Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brody series, One Good Turn, the fifth in C J Sansom’s Shardlake series, Heartstone (although I did buy this one while writing this!), the novelisation of the recent TV seriesBookish, Ali Hazelwood’s Bride and Uzma Jalaluddin’s Detective Aunty. And finally, if you’re of a certain age, you’ll almost certainly have read some of Terry Deary’s Horrible History books, and his adult history book A History of Britain in Ten Enemies is 99p.
So I said yesterday I don’t know what I was going to do for BotW today, and I kept thinking about it and I still didn’t and I couldn’t come up with any enthusiasm for any of the new things I read last week so I decided to do something different because…
The Autumn new book deluge has really started now because today we had the arrival of the new Dan Brown book, the sixth in the Robert Langdon series. It’s been eight years since the last installment in the series, Origin, and I’m sure there were other people who, like me, thought that that might be it for the series. But no, he’s back and I think this may be the biggest print run of the books out this autumn – the announcement doesn’t say how big it is, but it’s a simultaneous release in 17 territories and the man has 250 million books in print. That is a lot of books.
I’ve read the first two Langtons, back at the original height of Da Vinci Code Mania 20 years ago and I also read his standalone Digital Fortress at around the same time. When the third book came out I had a go at it and then gave up on it and haven’t gone back. When I was reading the first two back I was in France and was borrowing any English books I could get my hands on and I don’t think I had the same motivation for them once I was back in the UK with free reign on anything I wanted to read. But there’s no doubt that he’s one of the authors who will shift big units – they’re the sort of books that people who don’t read many books per year will pick up at the airport. And I don’t say that as a derogatory thing – I do exactly the same with Richard Osman. And his new book is out in a few weeks too…
I’m not actually sure what happened this week. To the reading list I mean. I know what I was doing, and I don’t think I had substantively less reading time than any other week, and I definitely wasn’t out in the evenings in the way that I sometimes am. But here we are. A shorter than usual list, and one where I have no idea what I’m doing for BotW tomorrow…
As I mentioned in June, we have just had a new TV series about the Mitford Sisters, and today I am back to report in on it! Firstly a reminder of the trailer though:
Outrageous is the story of the Mitford sisters in the 1930s. There were six sisters – who are often characterised as Nancy the author, Diana the Fascist, Unity the Nazi, Jessica the communist, Deborah the duchess and Pamela. Poor Pamela – and just for the sake of accuracy she was the second oldest with the lone brother Tom being born third ahead of Diana. This covers the 1930s and ends before the war starts, so is only part of the story and focuses mainly on Nancy, Diana, Unity and Decca.
We watched a bunch of these back to back because they’re just so watchable. Bessie Carter is great as Nancy, who has definitely been made less mean and more likable to the viewer in the adaptation, but Joanna Vanderham is brilliant as Diana because she manages to be loathsome because of her political views, but you also see why the non-fascists among her sisters might still want to be friends with her. And that’s tough to pull off. But really there is so much fascinating material in this. I watched it with Him Indoors who was constantly asking whether things really happened or what happened to them next.
And there is plenty of next because this finishes before the outbreak of the Second World War and there were plenty of things after that that were major and could form part of series two should U decide to make one. And I hope they do, although Unity shooting herself when war is declared isn’t exactly cheerful, but you would then also get to see Deborah and the Devonshires and the Kennedy-adjacency of it all. Fingers crossed it happens.
Now we have finished watching this it has finally got me reading the Mary S Lovell group biography that it’s based on so I can see how they’ve done it and where they have left things out. And I’m also filling in some of the gaps in my reading of Nancy’s books – I’ve read the obvious ones, but I realised while watching that I hadn’t read Wigs on the Green aka the book that Diana and Unity fall out with Nancy over, so I have already remedied that too. And as you know I love reading about the Bright Young Things and Bright-Young-Thing adjacent people so there may yet be more reading off the back of this one.
Outrageous was on U in the UK and is on BritBox in the US. And in the UK you can stream it for free if you go to U directly. And that is a great deal because it’s loads of fun. And the more people who watch it, the better chance we have of a series two…
Happy Saturday everyone and did you know that there is a pop-up in the basement of Waterstones Piccadilly celebrating 90 years of Penguin books?
There very much is, as well as books it’s got this little mini exhibit in the middle – literally one display case – but it’s got this really cool pasteboard for the cover design among a few other bits.
It’s also got a section for the special archive shorts that they’ve released for the anniversary. If my maths is right there is space for 80 on this display, but I didn’t check to see exactly how many different ones there are on it. And they’ve also got another display of them on one of the other floors so if anywhere has a chance of having all 90, Piccadilly does!
And there is a huge selection of the clothbound special editions – again, the biggest variety of them that I remember seeing anywhere because often it’s the usual suspects that you see: Pride and Prejudice and David Copperfield and similar, but this has got some books I didn’t even know had versions in this format – like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Around the World in Eighty Days and Phantom of the Opera.
But there’s still loads more – the Puffin special editions, some vintage books, a load of non-fiction including memoirs, history and science writing.
And there’s loads more – lots of fiction in the various different special lines, but also normal (so to speak) Penguin new releases and similar. I really enjoyed my wander, and yes I bought a book – but you’ll have to wait until Books Incoming (next weekend) so see what it was!
Favourite book: probably The Mitford Girls, even though I haven’t written about it yet!
Books bought: possibly slightly better than last month, but still way too many
Most read author: T P Fielden of the new stuff, but Agatha Christie and Nancy Mitford if you’re including the re-reads
Books read in 2025: 251
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 808
Another fairly solid month in reading – especially considering that the Mary Lowell Mitford book is 700 pages long and that takes time, and there aren’t a lot of short stories on this month’s list.
Bonus picture: yarn bombing in Northampton for the rugby, courtesy of my mum!
*includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – including 1 this month!
We’re about to hit the big autumn new book wave, but before we get there, I wanted to mention that the paperback edition of Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker is out in shops from today. This was my Book of the Week at the start of October last year and was my favourite non-fiction read of 2024. It’s a fascinating re-examining of the life of Pamela Churchill Harriman, making a case for her as a behind the scenes political operator and power player rather than the husband stealing courtesan that she has previously been seen – and portrayed – as. I only read it because I’ve read a fair bit about Truman Capote’s Swans, where she appears fairly often, but it was so much more than I was expecting – and really really worth a look.
It’s a bit of a NetGalley special this month, with all three reviews coming from there albeit some more recently than others because oh boy I’m so behind. And every month I say I’ll do better, but every month I’m choosing between making the physical pile smaller or reducing the NetGalley list, and the actual pile is in my eyeline from the sofa and so… well. Maybe this month is the month. Anyway, to the reviews.
A Schooling in Murder by Andrew Taylor*
Let’s start here, because this one came out in the US yesterday (it came out here in the UK back in June). This is a murder mystery set at and around a girls boarding school during the tail end of World War Two. One of the teachers left school for the holidays and never came back – the school thinks she’s done a flit, but actually she’s dead and her ghost is lingering around the grounds trying to find out who murdered her and how to expose her killer. I’ve read and enjoyed books in Taylor’s Marwood and Lovett series, and enjoy both murder mysteries and school stories so I was hopeful that this would be in my reading wheelhouse. However I found it quite hard to get into, with very slow pacing and a large cast of pretty unlikable characters to try and get to grips with. I kept going because I did want to find out who the murderer was, but by the end I was more frustrated than satisfied – for reasons which are pretty hard to describe without giving spoilers. So I’m chalking this up as a not for me, more than anything else, although I find myself thinking back on it with more fondness than I had when I was actually reading it!
The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp by Leonie Swann*
Agnes and her friends live in Sunset Hall, as a sort of commune of old people pooling resources so they can stay independent. At the start of the book one of the residents is dead in the garden and just as they’re figuring out what to do about it, a policeman turns up because one of their neighbours has been shot. So they decide the solution to their dead body is to work out who killed their neighbour and pin the murder on them. Except it’s really a lot harder to do than they expect. I finally got around to reading it after seeing the sequel in a bookshop last week and nearly buying it before I remembered I’m not meant to be buying sequels when I haven’t read the first one yet and pulling my finger out. And… I liked the blurb for it more than I enjoyed reading it. I found the writing style really hard to get into and I don’t know if that was the translation (it was originally in German) or just the author’s style, but that combined with the shifting point of view and uncertainty about what was real and what wasn’t just made it a not for me. Which is sad because a group of feisty senior citizens and a murder has often been a thing that I have enjoyed. Hey ho.
Any Trope But You by Victoria Levine*
Romance author Margot’s career has just exploded with the leak of her secret alternative unhappy endings that she has written for all of her novels. She decides she’s going to reinvent herself as a crime writer, and her sister books her into a wilderness retreat to try and get her started. But when Margot arrives in Alaska she finds the ranch is run by a handsome doctor who has given up his cancer research to return home and care for his injured father – it’s like she’s walked straight into a romance novel… This is leaning into romance tropes by amping them up to 11. And I respect that. For me my issues with it fell into two categories: the exaggeration of the trends made the heroine really really annoying to me (she is willfully and wildly unprepared for her trip to Alaska and really refuses to take instructions or listen almost to a too-stupid-to-live level), and I wanted there to be more fun in the fact that this is happening. I wanted it to be more of a fun romp but actually it’s taking itself quite seriously. And given how many of the current crop of romance novels seem to be writing exaggerated tropes with a completely straight face, that meant it didn’t really seem that different to everything else to me. But it did tick Alaska off my 50 states challenge for the year!
It’s been more than a month since I picked a murder mystery for book of the week. Can you believe it? I can’t – and even when I went back and checked I still sort of didn’t believe it. But it’s true, so who says there’s no variety in my reading. And there’s more murder mysteries coming tomorrow in the Quick Reviews, but first let’s talk about The Last Supper.
Prudence Bulstrode is a retired TV chef. But when one of her former rivals is found dead in the garden of a house where she was catering a shooting weekend, Prudence is called in to replace her. Farleigh Manor is notorious for an unsolved murder from a century ago, but when Prudence arrives she is soon convinced that Deirdre’s death wasn’t a tragic accident but murder. And while her granddaughter, who she brought along to keep her out of getting into (even more) trouble starts investigating the old murder, Prudence sets out to solve the new one.
Rosemary Shrager is a chef who has been a semi regular on British TV for about 20 years now and before that she ran her own catering company, so the setting for this falls very much into her area of expertise and it shows. I personally have never been on a shooting weekend, but it very much felt like she had and all is those details really worked. I also found this quite humorous – with the tension and generation gap between Prudence and Suki, but couldn’t work whether that was deliberate or not. But does it matter if it was or wasn’t? The only disappointment to me was the eventual solution to the murder, which without giving spoilers about what precisely happened, I didn’t quite feel like the reader had all of the pieces for it to work as well as I wanted it to.
But it was a fun read that I finished in an afternoon and evening and I will definitely keep an eye out for the sequel (there are two now) to see if the humour was deliberate!
I bought my copy of The Last Supper secondhand and I’ve seen it in the shops fairly regularly. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.
I can’t believe it’s September already. I mean the weather last week was pretty autumnal so maybe I can believe it, but anyway, the end of the school holidays is basically here and I will try and find a silver lining in the fact that hopefully it means that Central London will be a little bit quieter soon. Any way a pretty solid week in reading given that there was a bank holiday, I went to a concert and had a night out with a friend.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 