Favourite book: Tough to choose between Season of Love and Second Chance Romance
Books bought: lets not talk about it
Most read author: Really hard to say because there weren’t any repeats ths month except Georgette Heyer rereads. So lets say that
Books read in 2025: 381
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 829 at the end of the year, but has now gone down after the cull I mentioned in yesterday’s resolutions post.
I finished the year pretty strongly once I had finished off my last states I actually managed to read some Christmas books and get some more NetGalley books off the list too. I’ve already said a lot about 2025, so there’s not a lot more to say here for once. But as we are now well into January, it’s time to look forward!
Bonus picture: one last Christmas photo – from Liberty’s main hall, it’s the good ship Liberty!
*often includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – 6 this month!
I know we are a full week into the new year and this is a bit late, but I can only disrupt the publishing schedule so much. Normal service will be resumed next week I promise. Anyway, here we are now with my Reading Resolutions for this year, such as they are.
The first you already know about and it’s no more 50 States challenge. The number of states that aren’t fun is nearly into double figures – and that’s just too many for me to put up with, especially as they all end up being in the last couple of months of the year. And I’m not starting any new challenges, to replace it because the same thing will happen – I’ll end up reading things I don’t enjoy and also buying more books to complete them and that sort of defeats the object.
The second one I’ve actually already done (although you’ll see it in its old state in the stats post tomorrow) and that is clear out the Goodreads to read shelf. It’s been over 800 for months, and it went up again in December as I added all the new releases for 2026 while I was writing anticipated books. And so I spent some time (probably a couple of hours all together) going through all 28 pages of books on to read shelf and removing a whole load of them and it’s now under 600, and hopefully I’ll get it down further.
And then this is the one that is on the list ever year: Reduce the physical to read pile. As I said earlier, one of of the issues with reading challenges is that I never seem to be able to complete them without buying more books and that means that the pre-orders and the other stuff I buy just end up sitting waiting to be read. And we’re now at a point where there are three overflow piles in front of the to-read bookshelf and that’s ridiculous. So I need to really work on that this year. I will have another sort through it to weed stuff out as well and do a round of 50 pages and out on things (which might also get the good reads to shelf down further) but that will have to wait a week or two because I’ve only just done a charity shop run and cleared space to move in the office and I can’t start filling it up with stuff again already!
The theme of this month’s quick reviews could be described as “reporting back” given that we have two books that I’d mentioned on release day that I’ve now read and I’m starting with a sequel to a Book of the Week from the start of last year.
Lies and Dolls by Nev Fountain
Lies and Dolls is a return to the world of Kit Pelham after The Fan Who Knew Too Much and sees Kit and Binfire on their way to Lincolnshire for the opening of a rare toy museum which will be housing some rare figurines from the Vixens of the Void series. Soon the figures go missing and start turning up in pieces. And then there are actual murders. I said in my review of the first book that it could have used being a bit shorter and that the plot was insane – this is even more outlandish on the plot front, but felt like it had had a tighter edit. The world is more absurd than ever, and Kit keeps making the wrong choices in her personal life, but it’s got plenty of black humour as well as another uttlerly bonkers mystery plot. Looking at the “Readers also enjoyed” choices on Goodreads, this is more unrealistic in many ways than the Peter Grant books – and they have magic – but it’s definitely less realistic than both the Andrew Cartmel series too but they are similar in some other ways.
Second Chance Romance by Olivia Dade
Karl and Molly had crushes on each other when they were in high school, but nothing really happened. When they were at college they had an argument and never spoke again.Since then, Molly has become a successful audiobook narrator and Karl (although she doesn’t know it) is her most faithful listener, usually while he’s working in his bakery. When Molly sees an obituary for Karl she flies from California back to Harlot’s Bay for his funeral. Except that he’s not dead – and the two of them get a second chance to work out if that old connection was the real thing. I’m reporting back in on this one because I mentioned it on release day but although this is the second book in this series, you could read this as a standalone . That would would spoil the outcome of that first book as well as you missing out on the running humour that is Karl’s audiobook habits in that first book – so really, you should read At First Spite first. I really liked the relationship building here as Karl tries to show cynical and jaded Molly that he’s worth taking a chance on. And the Harlot’s Bay community continues to be a lot of fun providing plenty in the subplots as well as the romance.
You Had to Be There by Jodie Harsh*
This one took me so long to read – and I previewed it here when it came out – that I had to come back around with a review now I have finished it. I’m quite conflicted writing this review because I found the writing style quite hard going for large parts of the book – breathless isn’t quite the right word, but it is stream of consciousness and breakneck for the majority of the book, just like Jodie’s/J’s life was. And so that might be a stylistic choice, but that is one of the reasons why it took me quite a while to read. The other is that J/Jodie is also making some very bad choices at times and has a lot of traumatic events in his childhood and that is also quite hard to read. But this is a very honest book that is a glimpse into what it was like to be caught up in the Soho nighttime scene in the last years before Crossrail came and closed things down and knocked them down. The buildings that replaced them are shinier and more corporate and the things that were lost can never be replaced. But that’s the way of London – always changing and shifting and moving on to the next thing for more than a millennia. I’m lucky enough to remember seeing it before it changed – and after reading this I’ll be thinking about the communities and clubs that were lost every time I go down the escalators at Tottenham Court Road.
It’s that time again: the first Book of the Week of a New Year. And you can tell that we’re in the depths of winter purely from the photo of the book, because it’s getting harder and harder to get enough daylight to get a not-dark picture of anything. Hey ho. We’re past the shortest day now…
In Totally and Completely Fine, Lauren is still in the same small town in Montana where she grew up. She’s the widowed mother of a teenage daughter, but her reputation as a teenage tearaway still looms large in the mind of some of the town’s residents. She doesn’t really care about how others see her, but she’s still drifting through life after the loss of her husband. Then when she visits her brother Nate on the set of a movie he’s working on she meets his co star Ben. Ben is a decade younger than her and about to be an even bigger deal than he already is, but their attraction is mutual. But when Ben comes to town to help Nate relaunch the local theatre, there’s a chance that it could be something more than a one time thing – if Lauren can find a way to reconcile the different parts of her life.
Now if some of the names here sound familiar, that’s because Nate is the hero of one of Sussman’s previous books, Funny You Should Ask in which Lauren and her daughter Lena also make an appearance. I loved that previous book, and it’s fun in this to see Nate and Chani again and get some more of their story. But this really is about Lauren as the narrative switches between parts of her past – her teenage years, her marriage to Spencer – and her present. Lauren and her husband were happy, she is heartbroken by his death and this is about a new way of living with grief as well as about finding a new love.
It’s a bit of a tearjerker at times, and if I really just wanted Lauren to use her words to her therapist to help herself more, I get why she didn’t and it made for a great payoff at the end. None of the characters here are neat and easy, they’re all messy and complicated and have baggage – which is what makes it so satisfying when they work things out in the end. I enjoyed reading it, and it reminded me why romances with Proper Grown Up Characters are so good, after what feels like a bit of a string of romances with leads who were exasperating in their inability to adult properly!
My copy was a paperback, but it’s also available in Kindle and Kobo and should be fairly easy to find in a big enough bookshop – I’ve definitely seen it in a few.
I finished the Christmas and New Year Period with some more time off work, so I got some more reading done, even if I didn’t managed to finish the two incredibly long runners. Yet. I have made progress though, I really have. Anyway, enjoying the freedom from challenges I read two books that I had been saving since last year because I already had those states ticked off (Illinois and Montana) and two more books that I’d been wanted to read but had had to wait because of the need to finish the 50 States (the Nev Fountain and Mimi Pond) Happy New Year to me!
Happy Sunday everyone, it’s the last day of the Christmas and New Year holidays and so I thought I’d treat you to a recap of some of the Christmas viewing in my household.
I should start by saying that much sport has been watched, thanks to the Africa Cup of Nations, the Premier League and the NFL. Three months until the motorsport seasons starts again. Which, given the seasons only ended in December this year is altogether too short a break for all the teams and people involved. But that’s a story for another day.
We have also watched an awful lot of Taskmaster. This is because there was a Champion of Champions on this Christmas and I realised that we had only watched two of the seaons that the champions were from. So we’ve now watched all of series 18 and 17 and havr started series 16 which I have definitely seen some of but not all of. Fun fact: This time last year I hadn’t watched any Taskmaster at all, I watched my first ever episodes a year ago next week as it was on in the background when I was visiting my sister and her new baby. And now I have watched rather a lot of episodes just with not a lot of logic or order to them.
BBC Four is often the home of unexpected treats. This year one of them was the John Le Carre night, with a couple of documentaries and the first two episodes of the Alec Guinness adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The whole series is on the iPlayer. In fact there was a bit of a spying theme to some of my watching, because as part of the tribute night to Prunella Scales, BBC Four also showed the TV adaption of Alan Bennett’s play A Question of Attribution about the Soviet spy Sir Anthony Blunt which has a rather scene stealing turn from Scales as Elizabeth II.
Then there was Secrets of the Conclave about the behind the scenes of the real selection of the new Pope – which had a really good selection of talking heads, including the two British Cardinals who were there, one of the American cardinals and Cardinal Tagle who was named as one of the Papabile ahead of the conclave. I definitely got the feeling that one of the reasons the people were so willing to take part in this was because they had thoughts on the movie Conclave and wanted to set the record straight on how it really works – as opposed to how the Robert Harris book and movie say it goes. But that just made it an even more interesting watch.
It was also a particularly good Christmas for movies – especially old favourites. Both Murder on the Orient Expresses (Finney and Branagh) as well the Ustinov Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun for the Agatha Christie fans. There were a string of classic movies including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest and Carol Reed’s The Third Man. If you wanted something a bit newer there were some Austen adaptations as we’ve just come past the 200th anniversary – with the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility and Clueless. I also watched When Harry Met Sally again, because how could I not, especially after the death of Rob Reiner and his wife just a few weeks ago.
And finally, it will not surprise you that I watched Kiss Me Kate again when it was on TV on New Year’s Eve. And I’ve kept it on the box so I can watch it again at a time of need. If you haven’t watched it yet despite this being the third time I’ve written about it, you can find it on the iPlayer for then next year.
Have a great Sunday and I hope you don’t have the return to work horrors ahead of the back to normal tomorrow.
Ho ho ho, we’re already into the new year, but I’m flashing back to Christmas because Santa Claus brought me some books again this year and it’s delightful. Inevitably I will have acquired a stack more before it’s time for the January Books Incoming because of the sales and also my birthday. I am realistic about my will power. So here we have it:
So here we have it: there’s a new cook book, a crochet book because I sucuessfully made my first crochet project a few months back, three books from my Buy Me a Book for Christmas post – the Tim Curry memoir, the first Nora Breen book and The Author’s Guide to Murder and then my Christmas book to myself – Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals. Becuase of course I bought myself a Christmas book, what else would you expect from me?!
It should be noted as the first thing in this post that I am not doing this again this year. There are a few states that have got harder and harder each year to find something that I want to read for them and every year there are books I end up carrying on with that I’m not enjoying so that I can tick the state off. And this feeds into the next issue: the last two months of the year always turn into a mad rush to get things finished – rather than reading what I fancy. And this is when I end up reading those books that I’m not enjoying so that I can get to the end.
But more importantly I find myself thinking about whether I should read x book now or save it to be a state for next year because I’ve already ticked that state off this year. Sometimes that’s the next book in a series, sometimes it’s a new arrival altogether. I’d even already started a chart for 2026 with the things I had in stock and which states they match to. Add to that the fact that with Beverly Jenkins’ Blessings series seemingly complete and I’m nearly at end of the Cupcake Bakery Series and I’m out Kansas and Arizona and it just makes me feel tired thinking about it.
It’s also one too many things to do – I can try and reduce the to-read pile and I can try and reduce the NetGalley backlog, but I can’t do those two *and* read 50 states and the 50 states is the thing I enjoy least. So it’s going and that’s my New Year’s Reading Resolution. That said, here is the final 2025 list, which I completed at 1.30 in the morning of the 28th – a few days earlier than usual but some of these read with much suffering on my part when I would rather have given up on them.
And as this is the last time, here’s a link back to all the lists from previous years: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020, that last one reminding me that this was a pandemic era development and like so many things from the annus horribilis that was 2020 we can quietly let it go. This isn’t quite the last thing you’ll hear about the 50 states – there’s definitely a Recommendsday coming for some of these, but also there’s a bunch of books in series on here that I’m sure you’ll hear more about at some point too.
It’s the first day of 2026, and instead of doing the stats for last month, I’ve decided I’m doing my lookahead to the books that are being published this year that I’m looking forward to reading, many of which are already pre-ordered! There is no real order to this and I’m going to start with the standalone stuff, because as always there are loads of series books coming out but you know what I read in series, so I’m starting with the less predictable bits!
First up, is the one and only non fiction book in this post: Liza Minelli’s memoir. It’s called Kids, Wait Til You Hear This! and it’s out in March just around the time that she turns 80. You may remember from my review of the documentary about her Liza: A Trully Terrific Absolutely True Story that Liza’s public persona is so ingrained in her that she doesn’t really show you anything behind that in the doc. And so I’m fascinated to see whether this is any different. But even if she’s still got the public face on, her life is still so incredible that I’m looking forward to reading about it in more depth. I pre-ordered this back in September and I can’t wait.
To the fiction: Emma Straub’s new book American Fantasy which is set on a cruise ship with all five members of a 90s boyband on board along with thousands of their fans. I’ve really enjoyed a bunch of books that have featured famous people and normies and this looks like it’s doing something similar but in a more lit-fic way than some of the ones I’ve read. The bar here is Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy though and that is high. This is out in April in the US and May in the UK.
Next up is Star Shipped which is Cat Sebastian’s first contemporary romance. This is an enemies to lovers deal about Simon and Charlie, two costars on a popular sci-fi TV show. As someone who was a massive Star Trek fan back in the day, I look forward to figuring out which shows (or franchises) this is pulling from as well as seeing what Sebastian’s writing looks like in a contemporary setting. This is out in early March in ebook and late April in paperback. Also in March is a new book from Sarah T Dubb. I loved Birding with Benefits which was one of my best books of 2024 and so I’m looking forward to Honey Bee Mine which has a bee keeper and a bad boy restauranteur who end up working together on a honey festival. Sounds sweet right? (sorry, terrible pun)
Another April release is Cherry Baby, the new Rainbow Rowell. This is about Cherry, whose husband has gone off to Hollywood to make a movie based on his comic strip which features a character based on her. However what no-one in her town knows is that he isn’t coming home leaving her to figure out who she is without him. But then on a night out to see a band she runs into someone who knew her way back when and even better – has never heard of the comic strip. I love a second chance romance and I like Rainbow Rowell so I’m really looking forward to this.
And now the series: the first to arrive is The Mysterious Affair Of Judith Potts, which is the fifth Marlow Murder Club Book from Robert Thorogood and is coming in two weeks time in mid January. We have a new Hawthorne and Horowitz coming in April. And A Deadly Episode sounds like it’s taking the series even more meta as the first book in this series (where a fictional version of the author is solving mysteries) is now being turned into a film and a murder takes place on set. I’m very interested to see how this works out! In July we have the next Three Dahlias mystery, Death on a Lively Sea, which sees Posy, Caro and Ros on a super yacht belonging to a billionaire who is convinced he’s going to be murdered! And there’s another Dahlia novel due in December – Murder on the Mistletoe Express.
The tenth Veronica Speedwell, A Ghastly Catastrophe, is out in March, There’s also a 14th Kate Shackleton book which allegedly is coming in April, but has already slid from March and still has no title, so I am fully expecting it to slide again! Away from murder mysteries, there is a sixth Before the Coffee Gets Cold book coming in May called Before I Knew I Loved You. We also have the sixth and final Heartstopper coming in July with Nick heading off to university – can he and Charlie make long distance work? There is also the series finale to Jen DeLuca’s Ren Faire series, Well Versed, which is out in September and Caitlin is the same age Emily was when she rushed home to help Caitlin and her mum in Well Met. This time it’s Caitlin who is back in her home town, back in her childhood bedroom and back at the Ren Faire where her teenage heart was broken – only to find that the guy who did the breaking is back too. I don’t want the series to be over, but one more visit to Willow Creek is better than no more.
And finally there is one book out in 2026 that I have been waiting a long, long time for. And that is Jasper Fforde’s Dark Reading Matter. The final Thursday Next book has been more than a decade in the waiting for. And I have been very patient and I mentioned this in last year’s anticipated books and the release date slid into 2026, and it’s slid again in the last few weeks to September, but I have it pre-ordered and so eventually it will turn up. I have faith.
And that’s your lot. It’s quite a bit isn’t it? And the good news is that the majority of them are either pre-ordered or I have copies already via NetGalley so the chances of me reporting back in on some of them is high!
Happy New Year’s Eve everyone, I’m finishing the year with my last batch of Christmas reading of the the season in a post that was going to be new Christmas reads, but has actually turned out to be new Christmas Mysteries and so I have adjusted the title accordingly!
Miss Winter in the Library with the Knife by Martin Edwards*
And I’m starting with the book that I finished the most recently, because it’s the most different (I think) as it gives puzzle to the reader to solve as they go along. Six people have been invited to the remote and mysterious village of Midwinter for a Christmas Murder Mystery puzzle weekend. Their task is to solve the clues and work out who killed a fictional crime writer. But soon after they arrive as the snow falls and blocks them off from the outside world, a body is discovered. Was it an accident or is one of the group a murderer – and if so why? As well as writing his own detective fiction, Martin Edwards writes the introductions to the British Library Crime Classics series (more on them later) and literally wrote the book on the history of the murder mystery genre, and this is very much in that tradition, with a few nifty twists. I’m not a puzzle person (especially when reading as an ebook) but I’m sure that element will appeal to some, but I enjoyed the murder-within-a-murder nature of the story and the shifting points of view of the narrative which managed to both add to the reader’s knowledge and confuse them further about the solution. A lot of fun.
The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson
Now I appreciate that I mentioned Nicola Upson in last week’s Recommendsday but for Christmas 2025, Nicola Upson has broken away from her Josephine Tey series to write a standalone murder mystery novella based around the genesis of the board game Cluedo (or Clue if you’re American) or at least the imagined version of it. At Christmas 1943, Anthony and Elva take a break from their war work to head to the hotel where they used to work before the war to run a murder mystery weekend. But when they arrive they find themselves caught up in a real crime. Can they work out what has happened before it is too late. I really enjoyed this – it’s under 150 pages but there are plenty of twists and turns and I raced through it. I got it on a 99p deal on Kindle and it was totally worth it.
Death in Ambush by Susan Gilruth
Lee has been invited to spend Christmas with her friends in a country village. But what should be an idyllic trip starts to turn sour when a Christmas party is disrupted by a new resident and then soon after another resident suffers a stroke and then dies. But rumours soon start that it was actually murder, and Lee finds herself working with the Scotland Yard detective who has been called in to investigate. Does it count as new if the book was actually written in 1952? I’ve decided it does because this is this year’s British Library Crime Classic Christmas offering. Lee is an interesting character and she has a prior relationship with DI Gordon from another book (also long out of print) that is slightly flirtatious despite the fact that she is married (which may not please some people) but it didn’t bother me because it made for a really interesting dynamic in a clever murder mystery.
The Christmas Alibi by J G Colgan
It’s 1938 and a Christmas house party is assembling near Hexham. The host is a retired colonel, Monty and among the guests are his niece along with several men she has been entangled with and their wives. Among the men are a newspaper journalist, an MP and a man injured fighting against the Fascists in Spain. At the end of a ghost story, one of the guests is dead and as they are snowed in, the house party set about investigating whether it was suicide or if there is a murderer on the loose. This is a newly written book, but with a cover designed to make you think that it is in fact a classic mystery* and it felt a bit like the author was throwing every 1930s history event that they could think of at it. It’s pretty readable as you’re going along, but I didn’t think it stuck the landing on the ending – probably because of all the plot that was going on. Definitely one where you get to the end and realise you had more problems with it than you thought! There’s promise in there, but it needed more work. Why am I including it? Well if your algorithm is anything like mine, it’s been bringing it up as a recommendation for about a month now, so i thought it was worth reporting back!
And that’s your lot – and probably my lot for Christmas reading this year. I mean until I discover a Christmas book on the to-read shelf that I just have to read right now (probably in June). Thank you for reading the blog this year – and have a great night if you’re celebrating tonight, and no matter how good or bad your 2025 has been, may your 2026 be better.
Happy New Year everyone.
*there are quite a lot of these about – Hugh Morrison is definitely doing something similar with his covers and there are some that are even more BLCC coded out there.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 