Another busy week, with last minute changes to my plans and all sorts going on. Also several nice meals – some of which I cooked myself! But March marches on and the still reading list has got even longer. But some of them are a lot closer to being finished – that’s why the finished list this week is a little shorter. But I will get there in the end.
The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton*
One arrived that I bought the other week, a couple of preorders paid for, and two ebooks!
Bonus photo: I started the week with a night out at the Palladium listening to some of the cast of Neighbourstalkingabout working on the show. You weren’t meant to talkspictures inside so youget this I’m afraid!
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
It’s the middle Sunday of Lent today – which is Mothering Sunday aka Mother’s Day here in the UK. We had my parents around yesterday and are off to Him Indoors’ parents today. I hope that you all have a good day – wherever you are or whatever you are doing.
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I usually lead with the photo but honestly this year I’m not doing very well with the self restraint and I’m almost scaring myself. It is a little more than a calendar month’s worth but February is quite a short month so it probably evens out, so no excuse there!
It’s bad isn’t it? Really bad. I mean the books are good. But the amount of them is bad. I mean the good news is that some of them are already off the pile because I read them even before this post! Death in the Stars is a Kate Shackleton and I read that the other week and The Cereal Murders is one of the Diane Mott Davidson’s that is not available on kindle so I read that too. White Mischief is one of the books about the Happy Valley set that I haven’t read yet and I picked it up in Bookends, which is also where The Ladies Auxiliary, the Edmund Crispin and the Jennifer Crusie came from.
The Crichel Boys and Young Bloomsbury are from two different wanders through Foyles – one before Noises Off and the other the same one I bought Death in the Stars as well. Bookman Dead Style is from that delightful cozy crime selection in Waterstones Gower Street. To The One I Love Best is from my walk over to see John Finnemore (I’ll explain next week!) and the Vanderbeekers, How to Fake it in Hollywood and the Tracey Thorn were impulse purchases off the internet after several different bad days. Because books make me better, right up until I’m confronted with the evidence of how many I’ve bought!
I’ve done a couple of Sherlock Holmes related posts over the last few years, so as the new Lady Sherlock mystery came out this week, it’s time for me to talk about another one of my auto-buy series
So Sherry Thomas’s take on Sherlock Holmes is that Sherlock is the creation of Charlotte Holmes, a brilliantly clever woman who is restricted by the conventions of late Victorian society. In the first book, she becomes a social pariah and sets up her own household and begins to investigate crimes after her family is implicated in a series of deaths. Over the course of the series so far, Thomas has introduced many of the elements of the original Sherlock books – including a Watson and a Moriarty and other things that are too spoilery to mention.
The latest book is the seventh and really does follow on from the sixth book in the series – and I cannot stress enough how much you want to read these in order – the latest book sees Charlotte taking a sea voyage, but even reading the blurb gives you spoilers for the previous book. I made A Study in Scarlet Women my Book of the Week when I read it – so I can point you back at that as well.
These are historical mysteries but they have a fair amount of suspense to them – is historical mystery suspense a genre? At any rate, they’re not thrillers and as Sherry Thomas was a romance writer before she turned to mysteries, there is a (very) slow burn romantic thread running through these too. Basically they are quite hard to confine to one genre, which is probably why I like them so much. In terms of comparisons, I would say that if you like any of Deanna Raybourn’s historical mystery series – Veronica Speedwell or Lady Julia Grey – or Phryne Fisher (even though this is Victorian not inter-war) then you should think about trying these.
Oh, I'm wondering if it's because my pub date was moved from December to March. There was a printing shortage in the US and they needed longer lead time.
They are all available on Kindle in the UK – I even picked up the first one on a deal back in the day – but at time of writing they’re fairly pricy, but you never know, we might get some special offers for the new book. I own most of the rest in paperback (and I think we all know I’ll probably fill the collection in at some point) but my pre-order for the latest one was cancelled a few months back. As you can see, I tweeted Sherry Thomas about it and she thought it could be because of the release date getting bumped back – so hopefully/maybe it will appear in the UK soon so that I can get my hands on an actual copy. Fingers crossed
I mentioned it in my anticipated books post, but Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers from Jesse Sutanto who wrote Dial A for Aunties is out today in the UK.
It was the Oscars at the weekend, so what better opportunity to mention some books with movie stars or the movie industry in them
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Everyone is talking about Daisy Jones and the Six at the moment because the adaptation is out* but Jenkins Reid’s first book in what she’s called the Mick Riva universe is about an elderly movie star who wants an up and coming journalism to write her life story. I have vivid memories of starting to read this on my phone in the immigration queue at Dulles airport, but I actually didn’t finish it until months later. Daisy is the book that really broke through – probably because Reese Witherspoon optioned it – but I think Evelyn is just as good – it was a Book of the Week when I did finish it. And if you know your old Hollywood, there is a lot of fun to be had in figuring out what inspired which bits of Evelyn’s story.
The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty
It’s sort of a stretch to include this because it is before Louise became famous, but I’ve gone with it because I enjoyed it when I read it a decade ago and it’s a bit different. If Evelyn Hugo is a reimagining of Hollywood history creating a new legendary star, The Chaperone falls into the real people-adjacent category. I’ve written whole posts about novelised real people, and this is sort of that, except that our real person isn’t the main character. It’s 1922 and Cora Carlisle is in charge of taking the teenaged Louise Brooks from Kansas to New York to study dance. Louise isn’t at all happy about having a woman old enough to be her mother chaperoning her on the trip and Cora has her own reasons for making the journey too. Set over about five weeks, this has prohibition New York, Louise Brooks before she was a film star and the rapid changes that were happening in society in the 1920s. I didn’t realise until I was writing this that it had been turned into a film – but it did come out in 2020 and we all know that there was a lot going on then and you couldn’t go to the cinemas so maybe that’s not a surprise, but I’ll have to look it up on the streaming services!
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
Neely, Anne and Jennifer become best friends as young women in New York and across the course of the book climb to the top of the entertainment industry. But their lives are intertwined with the pills they take – the dolls of the title – and they cause more problems than they solve. This is a twentieth century classic – if you haven’t read it, you really should. My copy is a very pretty Virago Hardback, but as you can see the latest edition marks the book’s fiftieth anniversary, although we’re now closer to the sixtieth!
Of course there are loads of other books I could have included – I included Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents in a Quick Reviews post a few months back, so it’s a bit soon to write another review of it, but that is set in the world of the studio system during and after the Second World War. Fear in the Sunlight in Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey series is set around the production of a very real Hitchcock film in Portmeirion in 1936. Carrie Fisher used her own experiences in Hollywood to write Postcards from the Edge about a Hollywood star with a drug problem, and Angela Carter’s Wise Children also includes the twins’ experiences in the movie business
And as is traditional with these things, I have a bunch of stuff that would fit this still sitting on the to-read pile, like Blonde by Joyce Carole Oates (which Ana de Armas was nominated for in this years Oscars losing out to Michelle Yeoh), Their Finest Hour and a Half is about the only Lissa Evans novel (for adults) that I haven’t read – although I have seen the movie that it was turned into, which is just called Their Finest, and Laura Kalpakian’s The Great Pretenders, about the granddaughter of a movie mogul who strikes out on her own in the business, which I impulse bought in Foyles last summer.
Happy Wednesday everyone!
*and don’t this won’t be the last time I mention Daisy I’m sure!
A familiar name on the cover of this week’s pick, but this time it’s a short story collection from Rainbow Rowell and not a novel
Scattered Showers is a collection of short stories and novellas, some of which have been published before and some of which have some familiar faces from other Rowell novels. My edition is also very, very pretty. You can’t see it in the photo, but the long edge is sprayed in rainbow colours and the type itself is a sort of dark pinky purple colour that is really nice.
I think my favourite might be the last in the book – about two characters waiting to be used by a writer. It’s a bit meta but it really is charming. But it was also nice to spend time with Simon and Baz again and I loved the text conversation short story with the women from Attachments, and also the college dorm story set in the same world as Fangirl. And that’s already at half the book without mentioning the two that I had already read which are also good. Some old friends and some new friends and really it’s a lovely way to spend a few hours.
My copy was a preorder because it’s a nice signed one, but it should be fairly easy to get hold of this in hardback – I saw it in a shop just the other week – but it’s also on Kindle and Kobo. And a couple are available on theirown too on Kindle Unlimited if you just want to sample a bit of the range.
Well. I smell a binge, which isn’t at all what I should be doing. But it is very typical of me of late. Anyhow, I’m enjoying myself so that’s fine, although the length of the still reading list is definitely not. And I have at least one evening entertainment this week coming which is always a risk.
One pre-order and a couple of ebooks but I nobly avoided bookshops for reasons that you will understand when you see the next Books Incoming post!
Bonus photo: winter refusesto goaway and treated usto snow this week. Snow.Just want none of us needed. Then it turned to rain and everything was just soggy and squelchy and miserable. And cold. Really quite cold. Even buying a bunch of daffodilsdidn’t make it feel any more spring like.
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
So, just a quick post today to flag that James Graham’s play Best of Enemies, starring Zachary Quinto and David Harewood, which I saw at the theatre late last year is getting a cinema release in May. You can see what I wrote about it at the time here
You can find out where your nearest venue is here.
I genuinely had a wonderful week last week – with three bookshops visited and lots to say about all of them. I have puzzled over which order to do them in – but I’m going for Bookends because it’s not in London and it’s a bit different too. And yes, I realise that I have to get better at taking pictures of the exteriors of the bookshops I visit, but really, I’m more interested in the contents than the packaging and I always forget.
So, Bookends and Bookcase is a giant bookshop in the centre of Carlisle. Book ends is the new book section, which I didn’t take that many pictures of, and Bookcase is the most amazing second had section that spreads over the majority of the five storey building. Honestly, I spent actual hours in there. The picture above is the entry level second hand selection – with popular paperback fiction and some crime in the section that you can see here, but really it’s just a tiny fraction of what they’ve got.
And what they’ve got includes a lot of Children’s books – and I had such a happy time searching for stuff in my Girl’s Own collections. As you can see there were some Elsie Oxenhams – which I own a few of but really need proper guidance from an expert on what to buy as the series is so very, very, very weird – and plenty of Arthur Ransomes, which I managed to resist this time at least.
Then there’s a huge downstairs section of children’s books with more classic stuff (not pictured) but also a ton of newer authors too.
Also downstairs is a massive music section – featuring sheet music and basically any classical music record ever produced. Genuinely this photo doesn’t do it justice because this is just part of the record section – there are nooks and crannies filled with records that you can’t seen here and if you look very carefully at the back you can see the doorway through to the start of the rooms with the sheet music in them. It’s wild.
Also wild is the safe door at the far end of the record section which I had to include just because it was such a surprise to spot it down there.
I’m not a poetry person, but I’ve included this to show just how wide – and sometimes random – the selection is. I think if it is a poetry or a playscript you could probably find pretty much anything in there. While I was browsing a man came in asking about antique Ordnance Survey maps – and twenty minutes later I saw him at the till paying for an old OS map of Liverpool for his collection. It was amazing.
You’ll see my book haul in Books Incoming next week, so I won’t ruin the surprise – but I’ll end by saying, if you’re anywhere near Carlisle, it’s definitely worth a detour!
