I usually try and write here about things that you can go and see. This is a bit of an exception, because it was a one night only thing. But I had a great time, so I’m writing about it anyway.
Bernadette Peters only made her West End Debut I. Sondheim’s Old Friends, but she is an absolute Broadway Legend. If you go on a streaming service and look for Stephen Sondheim songs or cast albums you’ll find her there. And now in her mid-seventies she’s still touring and sounding pretty darn good.
The set list for this included a lot of Sondheim – and pretty much all the stuff that I hoped she would do: Losing Mind from Follies (and Buddy’s Eyes), Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music, Children Will Listen from Into the Woods, You Gotta Get a Gimmick from Gypsy (with special guests Joanna Riding and Bonnie Langford) and Move On from Sunday in the Park with George. But on top of that she also threw in a couple of songs from Hello Dolly – given that she’s played Dolly and Imelda Staunton is currently headlining that show elsewhere in the West End and things like Nothing Like a Dame, Johanna and Being Alive. It was a wonderful straight through hour and fortyish minutes and from my perch up in the balcony it was amazing. And I think the rest of the audience was as spellbound as I was.
I did Book Con last week, but here’s the other stuff that’s arrive in the last month, not including those ones. So we have two books from Persephone Books – on which more next week. The there is Film Stars at Riverlea which came from a friend, two books from the charity shops – The Fixer Upper and Lilian Boxfish Takes a Walk. I said in my post when the new Lady Sherlock came out we would see how long it took for my preorder to turn up – and here is the answer: it arrived on August 8! Then we have Laurence Leamer’s book Hitchcock’s Blondes, which came down in price in hardback and a cozy crime that I got cheap second hand. All very nice.
As Jen DeLuca had her new book out yesterday, I’m taking the opportunity to point you at my point about her Renaissance Faire series – variously known as the Well Met, Renn Faire and Willow Creek series, following a group of linked romances all set at or adjacent to a renaissance faire in the town of Willow Creek. I think they’re great fun, and make a great summer read. Here’s my original series post here, and my BotW review of Well Met and preview for Well Travelled as well.
You may recognise Jen DeLuca’s name from the Willow Creek Renaissance fair, but you can see from this cover that this is a new series and a bit of a new direction. The blurb seems to be promising ghosts (as is the cover if you look close enough) as our heroine, Cassie, moves to Boneyard Key and starts to investigate whether her new house is haunted with the help of local cafe owner Nick… I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this at some point when the pile isn’t quite as out of control as at the current moment!
It’s only right that the week after Book Conference, my book of the Week pick is a bonkers Girls Own boarding school story. So buckle up, this has got a lot of plot to get though…
I was going to say that I don’t know where to start on the plot, but I do: the start, because this opens on a twin arriving at Riverlea having run away from the boarding school she was attending after the parents decided they would be better apart from each other. And it only gets wilder from there. It’s got (not in order and not exhaustive) film stars, vindictive PE teachers, hidden talents, missing treasure, salvation through cricket, missing heirs, near drowning and a shipwreck. And those last are not at the same time. And it’s only just over 200 pages long.
Now I normally like my school stories a little saner – if by saner we mean the realistic (in comparison) boarding school in the Alps where you might get lost up a mountain that Elinor M Brent Dyer offers. But sometimes you just need something crazy. This was a great way to spend an evening and I thank my friend for letting me read it first.
I can’t even tell you where to get this – it’s long out of print and I’ve never seen it before – but I’m also not expecting many of you to want to read it because it’s niche. So niche. But also hilarious.
As I mentioned yesterday, last weekend I was at Book Conference, and now you’ve seen the new arrivals, you get the write up of what I got up to at my third trip to The Bristol Conference for Twentieth Century Schoolgirls and their Books.
Once again we were at Wills Hall, which is part of the University of Bristol and has a pleasingly boarding school air to the old parts of the site. And this year’s theme was Mothers, Mistresses and Other Role Models – a reminder that in this context mistresses means teachers – but there were other topics on the menu as well, including my friend’s talk “Cantering Towards Christ – evangelical pony books” which we came up with at the 2022 conference and she’s had to do all the reading for. It was amazing – and came with commemorative magnets too.
As this is my third time at conference there were a fair few familiar faces now – but actually quite a lot of new ones too. And as I’ve said in my posts about the previous conferences, there is such joy in spending time with other people who are into the same stuff that you are – especially when its something so niche. Everyone gets it when you make a joke about good girls getting a doctor to marry, or singing someone out of a coma. And you get such good book recommendations too. Aside from my friend’s talk, my other favourite was the one about timeslip novels. Time travel or timeslip books are one of the areas where I can never figure out what I’m going to like and what I’m not very easily, so it was really great to hear someone talk with so much knowledge about them and with such love.
And then as well as buying books, I did a bit of selling too. There’s a participant book sale on Sunday morning and I went through my shelves to figure out what I thought the other people at conference might want to take off my hands. Two years ago I didn’t quite get it right – mostly because I took my duplicates and if I’ve got a duplicate of something they probably already have it too. So this time I went for the Girls Own stuff that I’m not going to want to read again (some of which I bought at last conference!) and then adjacent stuff that I’ve seen sold at conference (and indeed bought myself) – so adult novels set in boarding schools, crime, mystery and some literary and women’s fiction.
And I did quite well. I took four boxes of books to sell – and I only bought two boxes back. But more to the point, I made back in sales what I had spent on the books I bought! Which is quite the achievement. And now all the stuff I’m happy to get rid of is sorted and in boxes it makes it easier for me to sell it (the Girls Own stuff) or donate it (the other stuff). I just need to pull my finger out and sort that – although I’d rather be reading the books that I bought!
This time last week I was at Book Conference, so it’s only right that this Saturday’s post is the new arrivals that came home with me! To be honest, I think I was pretty restrained. I mean judge for yourself from the photo, but I could have gone completely wild. Instead I resisted and stuck to what I could buy with the cash I took with me. I went with a list of what I wanted and fresh photos of the relevant bookshelves to try and make sure I didn’t buy anything I already have. Most of this came from the dealer sale, but there are a few from the participant sale and a few freebies from the very end.
So lets go from top left, which is a copy of Return to the Wells with a dust jacket to replace the one I have which didn’t have a jacket. I love the Sadlers Wells series, and I bought seven of them in hardback at my very first Book conference in 2018. I’ve now got a whole set, but there are a couple that don’t have dustwrappers, so one of my goals for this conference was to see if I could upgrade for a reasonable price. And so now I just have Jane Leaves the Wells and some of the very late ones without covers – and those last ones are *expensive* so it may stay that way for a while.
I’m still missing a couple of Shirley Flight books – sadly none in the sale – but there were two other Air Hostess themed books which I just couldn’t resist. Going clockwise, there’s the first of two Dimsie books that I picked up. Dimsie is a series that I’ve read very out of order so I got a couple more to fill in some gaps. Then there’s some crime – a cozy that’s the first in a series and then four of Josephine Tey’s Alan Grant series – three of which I’ve read and the fourth is the only one I haven’t.
Then there’s the other Dimsie, an Armada Chalet School because it was free and I just can’t resist upgrading and adding to the Armada collection, even though I have the full set in Girls Gone By paperback now, and this one was on the free table as we were leaving as was Roller Skates. And the Alison Uttley is a classic of the kids timeslip genre that I some how haven’t read.
I’m pretty pleased with what I got – there were a couple of hardback Drina books that I was tempted by, but the prices weren’t quite right and collecting Drina in hardback isn’t one of my priorities (and also you can’t get a matching set of them because Drina, Ballerina was written so many years later) so I bought the priority stuff first – and when I can back they were already sold so it clearly wasn’t meant to be. I also resisted another Sadlers Wells – which I already have in hardback and with a dustcover – it’s just not a *matching* dustcover and it was expensive. So I was good. And not too many of these (relatively) are going on the pile. Return to the Wells will go onto the shelf with the others, the Chalet Book will go with that set and the Alan Grants that I’ve already read will go with the Golden Age Paperbacks. Lovely stuff.
Happy Friday everyone, I’m back with another series post and this is one that may not be a surprise if you’ve been paying attention to the lists the last few weeks.
These are a series of six books set in the 1930s following a clergyman who, in book one, is on a train where someone is murdered and finds himself drawn into the investigation. And then across the course of the next few books he finds himself again drawn into mysteries and murders of various kinds.
I read the first one of these a few years back and in my BotW review I said that it was really trying to make you think it was a British Library Crime Classic. They’ve updated the cover style since then although when you get A Third Class Murder it still has the original one – as you can see from the photo. It was a standalone title at the point that I read it and there are now another five – some of which are more towards the thriller, some are more straight up murder mysteries. If you have read a lot of Golden Age crime you can spot where some of the inspiration is coming from, but they’re basically very easy to read, enjoyable 1930s set mysteries that are perhaps a little derivative but that are also missing some of the problematic attitudes and language you find in the genuine article.
All six are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and I suspect a seventh will appear at some point – there is certainly the set up for it at the end of book six.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 