Month: October 2025

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: What You Are Looking for is in the Library

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Hello everyone. Apologies for the slightly blurry photo – I was finishing this one late night on Sunday, and haven’t been home in daylight to improve this. These things happen. Anway…

What You Are Looking for is in the Library is the stories of a series of people who visit a library in Tokyo and receive book recommendations from Sayuri Komachi, the enigmatic librarian who works there. Each of them is struggling with something in their lives, and although they don’t really tell her that, she senses what the recommendation is that they need. Each chapter follows the person receiving the advice, so you don’t actually see that much of Sayuri – just when they visit her in the library.

This is quite quiet and low stakes, but it’s immensely satisfying and soothing, and I loved seeing little glimpses of the people we had already met in the subsequent chapters. I read this in about 24 hours – starting fairly late on Saturday evening and finishing later than I should have been awake the night before the early train on Sunday and it still almost felt like it was over too quickly. I would happily read a sequel, but so far I can’t see that there is one, although this has been so successful that another one of Michiko Aoyama’s books, The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park, has been published in English already, with another, Hot Chocolate on Thursday, coming early next year although interestingly they both have different translators from this one.

What You Are Looking for is in the Library should be really easy to get hold of – it’s sold a tonne of copies and I’ve seen it all over the bookshops. And of course it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: October 13 – October 19

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Well, I think the thing that should be noted here is that Abdication is more than 500 pages long and quite dense as well as full of lots of people to keep track of. And I finished my craft project (hurrah!) and went out one evening, and went to the cinema as well and so, well yes, the still reading pile has got bigger. But I will work on that this week, even if I am on the move from one end of the country to the other, and going to the theatre again tonight…

Read:

A Quiche Before Dying by Jill Churchill

The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett

Abdication by Brian Inglis

Jandy Mac Comes Back by Elsie J Oxenham

Bone Cold by Patti Benning

What you are looking for is in the library by Michiko Aoyama

Started:

A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Solving a Murder by F H Petford*

Still reading:

Nightfall in New York by Katherine Woodfine

From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming

You Had to Be There by Jodie Harsh*

Ritual of Fire by D V Bishop

Pet Shop Boys, Literally by Chris Heath

On the bright side, I didn’t buy any books that arrived this week, but I did take full advantage of the Waterstones 25% off pre-sale books offer… I got my basket down from over £200 to a much more sensible £60 or so!

Bonus picture: a sign that made me smile at the book stall at the market (and Diwali fair) on Saturday.

*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: Rocky Horror documentary

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Happy Sunday everyone, and I’ve got a new release film for you this week that I went to see yesterday and am posting about straight away beause screenings may be limited and (spoiler) I really liked it and want it to do well.

Strange Journey is a documentary telling the story of Rocky Horror documentary as it went from Upstairs at the Royal Court in London, to the Kings Road in Chelsea, to LA to the big screen and then its transformation into probably the ultimate cult movie. It’s directed by Linus O’Brien who is the son of Rocky creator and original Riff Raff Richard O’Brien and as well as being a history of Rocky, it’s also the story of Richard O’Brien’s own journey with his gender identity. It’s got all the talking heads you could want, as well as Richard O’Brien – singing some of the songs while playing them on guitar at 83! – it has Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Jim Sharman and most importantly Tim Curry. And there’s loads of behind the scenes footage too – it turns out someone had a cine camera behind the scenes of the Rocky movie shoot as well as at some of the early London theatre performances, so you get to see them all in their original incarnations as well as things like watching Curry performing Sweet Transvestite to the movie camera with all the trappings of the set. I’ve put the trailer in here because it gives you a good idea of what you’re in for:

It’s very much a history and appreciation – it’s got Trixie Mattel and Jack Black for talking heads as well as various film academics and shadow cast members talking about the historical significance of the film and the positive effect that it has had on their lives. I really enjoyed it – it brought a tear to my eye more than once and I once again remember that Tim Curry’s Frank N Furter is incredible.

I’m not sure how old I was when I first saw the movie, but I first went to the touring musical when I was in my final year at uni – and came straight out of the early evening show and bought a ticket to see the late show and watched it again from the front row, having spent more of my monthly budget than I intended and then went out to the stage door afterwards (not a very Verity thing to do) and got a picture with David Bedella (an even less Verity thing) which I still have, still think I look goofy in, but still sort of love all the same. So I think I’m the ideal audience member for this, and can’t really work out how it will land if you’re not a Rocky fan. But then it’s a cult of its own really, so hopefully some of the people who go to midnight screenings every week will turn out to see it.

Have a great Sunday everyone.

bookshops

Books in the Wild: The Works October 2025 edition

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Happy Saturday everyone, and I’ve been back into my local branch of The Works again to see what you can pick up in there for a bargain…

These are the new release titles (as opposed to the multi-buy deals) and you can see that they’ve got the new Richard Osman, R F Kuang, Stephanie Garber and Bob Mortimer here, along with The Favourites (just in time for the start of the Grand Prix figure skating season this weekend) and a stack of Cecelia Aherns, a tonne of romantasy and sports romance (mostly hockey) and a stack of the latest wave of paranormal romances should you be in the market for some Halloween reading.

On the next one we have more Romantasy, more romance, more Richard Osman, but also the majority of the crime selection that they’ve got at the moment – which again shows the shift in publishing trends as a couple of years ago, in fact maybe only a year ago, there would have been at least one of these carcases full of crime and mystery novels – all my early Tasha Alexander, Royal Spynesses, Carola Dunns, Dandy Gilvers, Max Tudors and Kate Shackletons came from The Works back in the day so I’m a big miffed about that although obviously my wallet (and Him Indoors) thanks me.

And here we have the deals shelves – there are plenty of Christmas reads if you want them too. I haven’t read these particular Sarah Morgans, but her Christmas novels that I have read have been good. I have read Jingle Bell Mingle which is part of the Christmas Notch series by Sierra Simone and Julie Murphy. But apart from that I’ve read embarrassingly little of this shelf – I’ve read a lot of the authors, just not these books in particular.

I’m a little better on this shelf. There’s The Christmas Jigsaw Murders which I read back in 2023, The Rom-Commers and Any Trope But You that I’ve read, and then Match Point and Murder at Holly House that I have on the to-read pile. But that’s it. And actually the thing that has surprised me everytime I’ve been into The Works recently is how few of the romance novels I recognise. Yes there are the Elsie Silvers and Elle Kennedys and the like, but there’s also loads of other illustrated pastel covers that I haven’t come across. ANd I don’t know if that’s just because they’re aimed at the BookTok viewer tastes – which are younger heroines and lots of sports and that’s not what I’m after – or if there are just a different set of books that are making it to The Works now, because I swear I haven’t seen them in Foyles or Gower Street’s Romance selections. But maybe I just haven’t been paying attention…

Christmas books, Series I love

Series I Love: Meg Langslow at Christmas

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Happy Friday everyone, and also happy New Meg Langslow week. Book 38 (!), Five Golden Wings, is out this week and so I’m taking the opportunity to write about why the Meg Christmas books are among my favourite festive themed novels – and in fact are some of the few festive related titles that I actively look forward to.

If you’ve missed my previous appreciations of the series, Meg Langslow is a blacksmith and town organiser in a small town in Virginia called Caerphilly. She has a retired-actor-turned-professor husband and a set of twins and an enormous and eccentric extended family. The series exists in what I call the Floating Now, where time does pass, but not at the same rate as it has passed in real life, but modern developments are incorporated as if there were there all along. See also Charles Paris who has been in his early 50s since the 1970s and is still in them now except that his bedsit is now a studio apartment and he has a smartphone tear her than an answer machine.

Donna Andrews is continuing to write two a year, and after 25 years they’re still great. And don’t get me wrong, I love the non-Christmas ones, but in a world where every year there are more Christmas themed books, be it murder mystery or romance, hers are a cut above. Whether it’s her family descending on her for the season, a storm, or another Caerphilly festive event, Andrews keeps managing to thing of festive scenarios to put the characters in for Meg to stumble across a corpse.

I try my hardest to save them and savour them, but it is hard. The good news is that compared to when I first started to buy them, they’re much easier to get hold of now because they’re on Kindle in the UK, which they weren’t back in 2013 when I first read Murder with Peacocks.

Anyway, my first festive read is still a few weeks away because I do try and get past Halloween before I start on them, but if you’re in the market for some tinsel already, then you could do a lot worse!

Have a great weekend!

Book previews

Out This Week: 1929

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A rare mention for a non-fiction book today, because this one sounds like a good one. 1929 is Andrew Ross Sorkin’s examination of the Wall Street Crash. I read more than my share of fiction set in and around this period and the Crash is often hovering around in the background of them – whether it’s a character whose family lost all their money in the crash in a 1930s set novel, or a knowing nod ahead in a 1920s set one to what is to become. But I’ve never really read about it in any depth and the only time it really came up in my history studies was in my GCSE module on America between 1929 and 1970 (ish) and that was very much an overview. It was much more indepth about the New Deal than it was about the reasons behind it. So this is going on to my list – although I may wait until the paperback appears…

Uncategorized

Recommendsday: Novelised Real People II

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We’ve made it to the middle of the week, and today I’ve got a follow up to my post from 2021 about novelised versions of real people’s lives (not to be confused with the one about real people solving crimes from a couple of months back. This has taken quite a while to pull together because I’ve read a few that I really didn’t like and didn’t want to write about to get to this point, but this is still a two I liked and one I didn’t situation, but the one I’ve written is a not for me situation as opposed to being a terrible book!

Jackie by Dawn Tripp*

I’ve read a fair few books, fiction and non-fiction, about Jackie Kennedy, so I was interested to read Dawn Tripp’s novel. Unsurprisingly most of this deals with Jackie’s life with Jack and immediately after, but it does a pretty good job of creating a real woman behind the myth and capturing the different aspects of her personality to make you understand why she made the decisions that she did and how she dealt with being at the centre of one of the most notorious moments in American twentieth century history. I have definitely read a lot worse versions of this story. I’m looking at you Jackie and Maria Callas novel.

Peggy by Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison*

This is a novel about Peggy Guggenheim, covering moments of her life almost in snapshots in a first person stream of consciousness style that feels like it’s trying to be as avant-garde as the art that she is famous for collecting. Now I really struggled with this – despite having read Judith Mackerell’s The Unfinished Palazzo (about her and some other owners of the building that became the home of her art collection) and so having some knowledge of her life I found it hard to follow not just because of the stream of conscious writing style but because of the way it handles dialogue as well as the jumps through time. I know Peggy to have had an interesting life, but being inside her head the whole time with her thoughts makes it hard to see her actions in any context and is exhausting. This was clearly a mammoth labour of love and writing for Rebecca Godfrey who died before it was completed, and an epic task for Leslie Jamison to take over and finish it, but it’s clearly not one for me.

The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin

This is the story of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the shy daughter of an ambassador who married the world’s most famous man of his day – Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly across the Atlantic. Anne also becomes a pilot and flies alongside her husband as his navigator as they explore the world. But the pressure of being the world’s most famous couple is hard to withstand – and tragedy hits their family as well (for those of you who have read Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie took elements of what happened to the Lindberghs when creating the Armstrongs) and Anne will have to figure out who she is in her own right. I found Anne a bit of a challenge at times in the early part of the story, but it’s fascinating to watch her grow into herself and obviously she had an incredibly eventful life that put her at the heart of some really key moments in history.

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Red Land, Black Land

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Considering how busy last week was, I actually had choices for this week’s BotW, which was a bit of surprise to me, but these things happen and it required some serious thinking to work out what to pick. And hard thinking is tiring. So in the end I went with my first instinct. Whether that will work out in the end, who knows. Anyway…

Red Land, Black Land is Barbara Mertz’s social history of Egypt. It takes you through the daily life of an Ancient Egyptian, although perhaps unsurprisingly considering that most of what we know about them is from their tombs it tends towards the end of their lives and death!

Those of you who have been around here for a while will know that although I love history, it is rare that I venture before the Middle Ages and if push comes to shove, I would say that I’m most interested in the period after 1750*. So why did I venture more than a thousand years before my usual area of interest? Well Barbara Mertz is the real name of Elizabeth Peters, author of the Amelia Peabody and Vicky Bliss series, who did a PhD in Egyptology in the early 1950s and published this and a second book, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphics in the 1960s. They have remained in print ever since (having both been revised a couple of times – including in the case of Red Land, Black Land in 2008, which is when the audio book version that I listened to is from.

This is very much an introductory prime, written in an accessible, chatty style. I can imagine it being on the preliminary reading lists for all manner of courses on Egyptology, to get people into the swing of it before they go on to read the drier, more academic texts. In fact in many ways it’s got the same vibes as Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guide series (which I also listened to on audio). And if you’ve read the Amelia Peabody series you can see where some of the inspiration for the various plots came from as well as spotting the various real life figures that popped up in that series (Theodore Davis, Arthur Weigel et al) as their discoveries and tombs are referenced.

Your mileage on this may vary depending on how much you like your history books with asides. I really like that (well when it’s an author whose voice I like!) and I found the audio book experience for this a real delight. I listened to the whole thing across about four days, and liked it so much I’ve bought Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphics in audio too!

Red Land, Black Land is available as an audio book and as a paperback in its current revision, but not on Kindle or Kobo. If you’re tempted to buy secondhand, pay attention to the age and edition that you’re looking at – as from looking at the reviews on Goodreads it would seem that it did change and update a lot over time – especially given that there’s 30 years between the last two updates and scholarship can move a lot in that time!

Happy reading!

*and if you look at the history modules that I did for my degree you will see this born out!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: October 6 – October 12

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I’ve got to stop starting these posts by saying how busy I have been, but really I have. I’ve had house guests, and evenings out and a craft project to finish. And this week I’ve got nights out and that craft project still isn’t finished. Anyway, that’s one way of saying that this list could have been much worse. I’m making progress on Abdication, but it’s more than 500 pages and dense, so that’s taking time. And I really need to get on with the Pet Shop Boys book when I have an evening at home, because it’s hardback and I’m not carting it around with me to work and back!

Read:

Red Land, Black Land by Barbara Mertz

A Deadly Night at the Theatre by Katy Watson

Summers End by Juneau Black

Kris Kringle by Patti Benning

The Dogs of Venice by Steven Rowley

Hattie Steals the Show by Patrick Gleeson

Started:

Nightfall in New York by Katherine Woodfine

From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming

Still reading:

Abdication by Brian Inglis

You Had to Be There by Jodie Harsh*

Ritual of Fire by D V Bishop

Pet Shop Boys, Literally by Chris Heath

One on a trip to Market Harborough, about five more mostly second hand over the internet, and another two ebooks. Whoops

Bonus picture: exotic (and not so exotic) brassicas. I loved the colours.

*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, streaming

Not a Book: Matchroom

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Happy Sunday everyone, I’m back with a streaming recommendation this week for something that may have gone under your radar, especially if you’re not in the UK.

Matchroom are a sporting event and sports promotion company that was founded by Barry Hearn in the early 1980s. Barry started out in snooker, managing Steve Davis and then moved into snooker promotion founding Matchroom and then taking the company into boxing and darts. Barry’s son Eddie is now in the business with him, and the premise of the series is that you’re getting a look behind the scenes at the company.

Of course it’s not that simple. The subtitle of the show is The Greatest Showmen and Barry and Eddie are very, very aware of the cameras and the storylines, as you might expect for men who work in the world of boxing and also who live in Brentwood, the home of that original British manufactured reality series The Only Way is Essex – and yes, we do get some cutaway shots of the exterior of Sugar Hut just to remind you of that. And don’t forget the Only Fools and Horses call backs just to remind you that they (well Barry) have come from nothing and made it big. Barry is talking about retirement, Eddie is desperate to take over, but there are other options inside the company for Barry than his son, who may be hungrier and scrappier than Eddie.

And it’s full of egos, rivalries and shouting matches. Get Eddie in front of a microphone – at a press conference or in a radio studio and he’ll start an argument with someone. At times he seems like a man who could argue with his own shadow without realising that he is doing it. People say that women are bitchy, but the levels of petty and grudge holding in this are off the scale. I like snooker, I can take or leave darts but boxing is one of the few sports that I don’t watch, so I watched the actual fighting sections through my fingers (or even looking away at some points). But even if you don’t like any of the sports involved, I think it’s pretty worth watching – for the pettiness, but also to spot the bits where something real pokes out from under the puff piece, and to watch Eddie and Barry trying to control their edits – and whether it works!

We watched all six episodes across two and a bit nights – and I would happily watch another series, although given how the fights featured in the series went for the Matchroom stable, Eddie may not be up for series two!

Have a great Sunday.