Author: veritywilde

Journalist, armchair sports fan, book worm and show fiend. There's a sentence you don't hear too often.
book adjacent, streaming, tv

Not a Book: Capote vs The Swans

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It’s only taken two years, but I’ve finally managed to watch Feud season 2 – Capote and the Swans. After having checked Disney+ for it for ages with no joy, suddenly when I was on there the other weekend there it was. When that happend for the UK, who knows, but the fact remains it has and now I have watched it.

This is an eight episode series based on Laurence Leamer’s book Capote’s Women, which I read back in early 2024 when this originally dropped in the US in preparation for watching this series – expecting to arrive way sooner than it has! Capote is played by British actor Tom Hollander, following in the footsteps of Philip Seymour Hoffman who won an Oscar for playing him in 2005’s Capote and Toby Jones in 2006’s Infamous. And the rest of the cast is incredibly starry – the main Swans are Naomi Watts (Babe), Diane Lane is (Slim), Chloe Sevigny (C Z) and Calista Flockheart (Lee) with Demi Moore and Jessica Lange also in the cast.

For me it’s always interesting to see how a work of non-fiction is turned into a drama – particularly an episodic drama, where you need to have cliff hangers and peaks and troughs to keep the audience watching. I had a couple of issues with the book – the omission of a couple of the swans and the non linear nature of the book, which deals with the Swans mainly one at a time so it is fairly easy to lose track of where in time you are. And if anything this is even less linear than the book was – jumping backwards and forwards between before and after Capote publised the article that exploded his relationship with the women. And that’s the problem with it. You don’t really get to know – or understand – the women’s relationship with Truman or even why they found him so alluring before he blows it all up (so to speak).

The outfits are fabulous and it looks beautiful but somehow – despite some great performances – it struggles to hold your interest. I watched it across a couple of days but that was because I wasn’t feeling very well and wanted some mindless TV to watch rather than because I was obsessed with it and desperate to see what happened next if that makes sense. There is so much drama in the story that it’s telling – but I wanted more of the women and less of maudlin drunken Truman and his terrible abusive boyfriend – even if Russell Tovey is doing a great job of playing the boyfriend.

So if you’ve got your Disney+ subscription turned back on for the new series of Rivals, then this isn’t a bad option for wiling away the time before the next episode drops, but it’s not one to take a subscription out for. And perhaps that’s the real reason it took so long to turn up to watch in the UK!

Have a great Sunday.

The pile

Books Incoming: Mid-May 2026 edition

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I’m not going to lie, this was looking a lot less substantial until the last week – and there’s still a book missing from this because my copy of Star Shipped is still at my mum and dad’s waiting for me to pick it up. Anyway, two of these are already off the pile as you know – because the Richard Osman and the Tom Bower were my airport purchases and I read them on the holiday. So what of the rest. Well the Rainbow Rowell was a pre-order so almost doesn’t count as it was ordered back when Waterstones had that big pre-order offer on back in October – and I still have two books from that order to come. One of which is the final Thursday Next book* which is now expected in mid-October but it does have a cover so it’s edging closer – and of course you can also see here the first Thursday book. Now you may be thinking “doesn’t Verity already own a copy of The Eyre Affair” and yes, yes I do. In paperback and on audio. But this is the 25th anniversary edition – with annotations from the author. According to Jasper Fforde’s instagram, it’s about 8,000 words of annotations. And given that I’m going to re-read the whole series before the final book doesn’t it make sense to read the version of the first ones with the annotations? Certainly all the people I messaged in my indecision over this (full price hardback) purchase agreed with me.

Also bought at the same time is Crime Rangoon, which is the latest Noodle Shop mystery. These are so hard to get copies of in the UK in physical copies or on Kindle at any sort of sensible price that I just couldn’t help myself. More on *where* I bought them next week. The S G MacLean was my purchase at Word on the Water – which actually turned out to be a four book afternoon as I wandered my way back from there via four other bookshops – it would have been five, but I arrived at one just as they flipped the sign over to closed because it was six o’clock. Sad times for me, but potentially a good thing for my walley and my shoulder as by that point I had the Dorothy Dunnett and the Donna Leon in my (not very big) shoulder bag along with the S G MacLean – and soon added the Jill Paton Walsh too.

I would say that that was when I stopped because four books plus a purse, plus a kindle was plenty enough, but I did go to two more bookshops (including Waterstones Gower Street) after that so I’d be lying. And it was only the fullness of bag and the realisation that I was going to have to fess up to all of this when I wrote this post that stopped a couple more purchases! I did have a lovely time though – even if it has undone all the work that I had been doing on reducing the size of the actual pile. I had nearly got rid of the front overspill pile, but that’s now back up to the size of the two behind it. Oops.

Happy Saturday

not a book, streaming

Out Today: Rivals Series 2!

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Happy Friday everyone – a bit of a break in the normal order of things today because the first part of the second season of Rivals has arrived on Disney+ (or Hulu if you’re in the US) today. You will remember how much I loved the first series when that came out in 2024 (I think I’ve watched the whole thing nearly three times now) and I’ve been so excited for the new series. I fully intend to spend my weekend watching as much of this as Eurovision and other life commitments permits because I can’t wait to how they carry everything on. I mean I’ve read Rivals so I know how that turns out but there isn’t enough of the plot of that left to do another whole season let alone a season which is four episodes longer than the first. There’s a lot of polo-playing in the trailer and the next book in the series is Polo so they may be including some of that in this I guess – although there’s not a lot of Rupert and co in that – or I guess they could be doing their own thing and expanding the world out in their own direction. Either way, I can’t wait.

Book previews

Out Today: New Emma Straub

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UK cover of American Fantasy

This one has been out in the US for about a month now, but the new novel from Emma Straub is out in the UK today. American Fantasy is set on a cruise for fans of a 90s boyband, where thousands their now grown up fans are on a ship with all five band members. One of the cruisers is Annie who’s really only there to keep her sister happy, but reconnects with a part of herself that she’s forgotten and (per the blurb) “By the time she meets one of the band members—not just a celebrity but someone in need of a friend—she has accessed a new sense of possibility.” If this is going where I think it might be going, it’s joining a number of books along the same lines in the last few years – but this being Emma Straub I could be completely off base with where this ends up. So I’m looking forward to reading it, and expecting to see it in the shops quite a lot.

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommensday: May 2026 Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of May and so we’re back to Kindle offers and the post that is traditionally the most expensive for me to write in any given month!

OK, lets start with a recent BotW Katherine Center’s The Love Haters, which is 99p, as is the first Tuga book Welcome to Glorious Tuga and given that book two is out in paperback next month I wouldn’t be surpised to see a price drop on that in June. There’s also the third Emmy Lake book, Mrs Porter Calling, the middle Kiss Quotient book The Bride Test and for £2.89 you can pick up Love and Other Brain Experiments which was a BotW back in March.

Also in romances that I’ve read, there’s Sarah Adam’s When in Rome which has a very Taylor Swift-figure goes to small town and falls in love vibe about it, but which was a little too New Adult for my tastes and then there is Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail from Ashley Herring Blake‘s Bright Falls series which I liked a lot more.

Among the recent releases there’s the new Kate Claybourn Paris Match, and the new Cat Sebastian Star Shipped which I would totally be buying if I didn’t already own a copy (even if the copy is at my parents. In other books waiting on the TBR shelf there’s Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, the sequel to The Maid, The Mystery Guest; S J Paris’s Traitor’s Legacy and last year’s Ashley Poston Sounds Like Love,

In mystery there is recent release A Murder in Eight Cocktails; the first Ruth Galloway book The Crossing Places; the third Canon Clement Murder at the Monastery; the Rivers of London novella, What Abigail did that Summer; the third Three Dahlias book, Seven Lively Suspects; the first in Simon Brett’s latest series Major Bricket and the Circus Corpse ahead of the release of the sequel later this month; the third Cesare Aldo Ritual of Fire; the third Grave Expectations book, The Grapples of Wrath; the first Flavia De Luce book The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie – presumably to coincide with the new TV adaptation and there’s also the latest Hamish MacBeth, Death of a Groom and a much earlier one The Death of a Glutton as well as the second Agatha Raisin The Vicious Vet.

In other fiction, there is Curtis Sittenfeld‘s Prep; the third Cazalet Chronicle, Confusion and The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House which was a featured review a looooong time ago (in a time before BotWs I think). In non-fiction there’s Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls; the Spinal Tap ‘memoir’ A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever; Dan Jones‘s The Hollow Crown and Ronan Farrow‘s Catch and Kill.

In things I bought while writing the post there is the first in Rhys Bowen‘s Molly Murphy series, Murphy’s Law; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold which I have been eyeing up in bookshops since the stage version was on in the West End at the start of the year; The Chinese Gold Murders which likewise I have been eyeing up in bookshops for a while; Nancy Goldstone’s The Rebel Empresses (likewise) and Mark Galeotti’s A Short History of Russia. And surely that is enough for this month…

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The Wyndham Case

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It’s Tuesday again and I’m continuing my pattern of picking a mystery for Book of the Week fifty percent of the time this year! I was going to say every other week, but it’s not strictly every other week, it does go in patches – a couple of mysteries, a couple of romances, one mystery, one romance – you get the pictures. Anyway: The Wyndham Case.

St Agatha’s College, Cambridge has a collection of books donated to them in the seventeenth century. Unfortunately the books are now completely uninteresting to scholars and come with a lot of strings attached. And on this particular morning they also have a dead body lying in front of them. Imogen Quy is one of the first on the scene in her role as college nurse and isn’t convinced with the idea that it was suicide – or that the dead student was stealing books. And then another student is found dead in the college fountain.

I have been wanting to read the Imogen Quy series for a while, after enjoying Jill Paton Walsh’s Wimsey continuations and during my wanderings post-Word on the Water last week (more on this on Saturday) I bought this. And I’m so glad I did because I really enjoyed it and it was a proper one sitting read for me. In the introduction to that first Wimsey continuation, Paton Walsh mentions that Gaudy Night was one of the reasons why she wanted to go to Oxford and she’s done a really good job in this of creating her on fictional college, this time in Cambridge (which is where she lived). The mystery is pretty good and the collection of students that you encounter feels pretty realistic for the time that it was written (early 1990s). My mum was a solicitor at one point in her life – and she’s done a lot of fundraising over the years, so the complicated bequest of the Wyndham collection was particularly appealing to me as well.

There are four books in this series – and the bad news for the to-read pile is that I know that the bookshop I bought this from has the next two in the series, and it’s pretty easy for me to get back there in the not to distant future! I’m not telling you which bookshop it is in case you get there before me, because I don’t think they’re strictly in print anymore but they seem to be fairly easy to get second hand. And they’re also in Kindle, Kobo and on audio too.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: May 4 – May 10

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Not my greatest week in reading – but that’s because I did two theatre trips, a weekend in Essex and local elections coverage. It was fun, but it was a lot. And the long runners are still lingering. I will have to try and do better this week. But this week is Eurovision week so…

Read:

Sconed to Death by Betty Hechtman*

Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie

Hattie Breaks a Leg by Patrick Gleason

Scales of Justice by Ngaio Marsh

Edward the Confessor by David A Woodman

The Wyndham Case by Jill Paton Walsh

The Golden One by Elizabeth Peters

Started:

Call for the Dead by John le Carré

Still reading:

Death and Other Occupational Hazards by Veronica Dapunt

Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell

Game Changer by Rachael Reid

A bad week for book buying – five ebooks as I was writing the Offers post, plus another six actual books from four different bookshops…

Bonus picture: back in my old stomping ground of Colchester at the weekend in glorious sunshine.

*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: False Prophet

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After a podcast last week, I’m back with a Netflix documentary this week to make it two whole weeks in a row that I haven’t talked about theatre. Even though I did go to the theatre (twice) this week. I actually watched this the weekend that it came out last month – but this got caught behind the theatre posts in the queue because they were more time sensitive.

Trust Me: The False Prophet is a four episode mini-series following Christine Marie and her husband Tolga Katas who move to the Short Creek community in the hopes that they can help members of the FLDS community in the aftermath of the arrest and conviction of their leader, Warren Jeffs. Christine is a cult expert who has a fascinatingly varied prior life, Tolga is a videographer. Both are very much city people and get the sort of suspicious reception from the locals you might expect. But Christine is incredibly persistent and helps the women to start a shop to sell their products and make some money. But during the course of this they discover a new “prophet” is emerging from the chaos and vacuum that has been left by the absence of Warren Jeffs.

I’ve written previously about Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, which covers Rulon and Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Mormon Church (and was made by the same director and executive producer) but after Warren Jeffs was imprisoned the community was left isolated and leaderless. Then Samuel Bateman appears in town with a group of wives – some of whom look to be underage and the community starts talking. Christine and Tolga decide that they’re going to try and find out what is going on and bring him to justice – and they’re going to film it as they do it. It’s astonishing. And what makes it even more astonishing is that Bateman approached them to make a documentary about him to help him spread his word – as in he thinks this is a good idea.

The big difference from Keep Sweet is that this has all of Tolga’s footage of the documentary that they were filming and so has all of the people that they are talking about in the documentary in their own words on camera at the time that it was happening. Including Samuel. I said in the post about Keep Sweet that the first parts of that were grimmer than I expected (and I was expecting that to be pretty grim) but I think having seen that gave me a really good background coming into this – and although this is pretty horrifying, ultimately it has a satisfying ending (or as satisfying as things can be in these circumstances) to their quest to help the young women that Bateman was marrying*.

I watched all of these episodes back to back in one sitting. I thought it was really well made and realy clever. I admired Christine and Tolga for what they were trying to do – and the nerves of steel that they showed while they were doing it. I have a few questions about the local police response, but that’s not about the documentary! And if you do watch this, this Guardian article from last week and this Hollywood Reporter profile of Christine Maire are interesting reading too.

Have a good Sunday.

*Spoiler: Samuel Bateman was sentenced to 50 years in prison in late 2024

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Word on the Water

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Happy Saturday everyone and I’ve been wandering London’s bookshops again. I don’t think I’ve been to Word on the Water since before the pandemic so it was lovely to go back there.

Word on the Water is a barge on Regent’s Canal, just behind Kings Cross and you can really feel it moving with the water. It’s just lovely.

It has a stove. And lots of comfy spots to sit and peruse the books, or just think about the gentle rocking as the ducks float by outside the window.

I would describe the selection as carefully curated and eclectic. I go to a lot of bookshops and found a lot things in there that I hadn’t seen before to look and and chose from.

There’s a lovely children’s and YA section too and don’t panic there is a section at the front with some of the new release hardbacks as well and some boxes of books on the roof outside too.

It’s a little bit of a trek out of my usual stomping grounds but it was definitely worth the trip.

Have a lovely weekend.

Fantasy, series

Fantasy Series: Legends and Lattes

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Happy Friday everyone. If you’re in the UK you may well be watching election results today – as people who’ve been around here for a while will know, I really love election results days so I will be spending my day watching the results come in. But for those of you who aren’t elections nerds, here’s a series post for you.

The Legends and Lattes series are low stakes cozy fantasy novels. Each novel does (sort of) standalone but has a connected set of characters. The first book that was published was Legends and Lattes which was a Book of the Week when I read it a little over a year ago, and that was followed by a prequel Bookshops and Bonedust and then a third book Brigands and Breadknives which was published in the autumn last year.

I think the peril levels are highest in the third book, but there’s still pretty low stakes – and if you’ve read anything about the series you’re pretty sure that it’s going to work out ok in the end because that’ what the promise is. There’s some chaos, there are some weird and wonderful creatures – including but not limited to a creature who lives in a bag and a talking sword – and there are lots of laughs and more than a few feels. They are very easy books to sit down and gobble up in a sitting. And for all that they are cozy and you might think you should read them in autumn, they’re also delightful when read on a sun lounger as I did with book three!

Now if you want to read these, it’s perfectly find to read them in publication order (that’s what I did after all) and the good news is that Legends and Lattes is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment if you’re a member there. And they’re pretty easy to get hold of – I’ve seen them in all sorts of bookstores.

Have a good weekend everyone