We are nearly at the halfway point in the year, so I thought today I would take the opportunity to mention my favourite reads of 2025 so far. Now it should be noted that these are not all new books and I think principally that’s because I’ve had a few absolutely chronic binge reads that means that I’ve just read less other stuff all together so the mix of new to old is very much skewed in favour of the old at the halfway mark of the year.
I’m going to start with the not new stuff, because there is more of it. Lets start with the a murder mystery and A Case of Mice and Murder. This is an edwardian era mystery set in essentially a closed community – the barristers of the Temple. I loved it and have recommended it a few times now. The sequel is out next month and is just as good. Next up is Legends and Lattes, which is sort of Terry Pratchett-esque but with very low takes and a very cozy vibe. I still need to read the second book in the series, which is a prequel and there is a third book coming in the autumn. And then there is On Turpentine Lane a fun romantic comedy with a mystery subplot that had me smiling and laughing the whole way through. And obviously the main binge was that six week period where I read the entire Dr Ruth Galloway series, so I should really mention those as well.
On the new book front, my favourite is probably The Favourites, which is one of the better portrayals of figure skating in fiction. I’ve seen a lot of other skating fans who have enjoyed it too, but really is a melodrama about intertwined relationships that uses the sport as a driving factor – you definitely don’t need to know the difference between an axel and a salchow to enjoy this (particularly as it’s set in ice dance and they don’t do jumps!). I also really enjoyed Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest short story collection, Show Don’t Tell. I remain someone who prefers novels to short stories, but I like Sittenfeld’s writing and ideas so much and this is really good, especially if you’ve read Prep because you get to revisit the characters years down the line. There are a couple more new releases that I’ve enjoyed but that are later books in series which usually means I don’t review them because: spoilers. But the latest Vinyl Detective was a return to form and was a BotW pick and Murder Below Deck, the second Paul Delamere book was also a really fun read.
As ever, as well as reading a lot of new fiction, I’ve read a whole bunch of not new fiction that is still very good, and given that the non-fiction best of was a mix of new releases and old, it would be remiss of me not to complete the set with the old (so to speak) fiction. And I’m working from published longest ago to most recent for reasons that will become obvious very shortly…
Rivals by Jilly Cooper
Ok, I’m starting with the one on this list that I should absolutely have read before now, and which you’re going to have the least trouble getting hold of because the adaptation is (rightly) everywhere at the moment. As I said in my BotW review at the start of December the very 80s attitudes in the adaptation are there (and even more so) in the book. So if you didn’t get on with that aspect of the TV version (or don’t like books like that in general) than your mileage may vary. But I absolutely raced through it – Goodreads tells me it’s the longest book I’ve read this year (over 700 pages) and yet I read it in under three days. And only one of those days was a weekend (and that was the one where i only had about 100 pages to go and finished it on a plane) – so that’s fast even for me. Season Two has now been announced for the adaptation, and we can only hope that the scripts are already written (or at least part written) and so they can get on with filming it asap…
The Golden Hour by Beatriz Williams
Beatriz Williams’s 2019 novel fits neatly into a couple of my reading interests – fiction set in the first half of the twentieth century, Edward and Mrs Simpson-related fiction and spy and espionage stuff that’s not too, too terrifying. This has a split narrative between Nassau in 1941, where Lulu has been sent to write an article about the former King and now governor of the Bahamas and his wife; and a sanatorium in Switzerland atthe start of the twentieth century. The blurb majors on the Windsor connection, but they’re not really the centre – that’s Lulu. I continue to be about three books behind on Williams’ solo releases because they just seem to be harder to get hold of here, but whenever I read them I really do enjoy them.
A Murder Inside by Frances Brody
It’s the late 1960s and Nell Lewis has just been made governor of a new women’s open prison in Yorkshire. The job was going to be challenging enough before a body was found on the grounds and so Nell sets out to solve the crime and protect the women inmates from the suspicion of the local community. I really liked the set up and the 1960s setting – I haven’t read a lot of mystery series set in this time period, or at least not stuff that wasn’t contemporary to it when it was written. I’m not sure how many books it’s going to be possible to set around this one prison, but there are currently two of them we’ll see how the second ends when I get around to reading it. Frances Brody has published another in her Kate Shackleton series since this came out, so it may be that she’s going to try and run the two series in parallel to start with and see how it goes. I hope so, because I do like Kate, and I think there’s plenty more that she can investigate too.
Flying Solo by Linda Holmes
Laurie has just returned to her home town in Maine to sort out the estate of her 90-year-old aunt. She’s also recently cancelled her wedding and ended that relationship and is about to turn 40. Among her aunt’s possessions and mementos of travels around the world she finds a wooden duck and a love letter that references “if you’re desperate, there’s always the ducks”. And so Laurie sets out to discover the history of the duck – and in doing so gets caught up in antiques dealers and con artists and late night dates at the library with her high school boyfriend. This was Holmes’s follow-up to Evvie Drake Starts Over, and although both of them have A Novel written on the front, I would say this is further towards the Women’s Fiction end of the spectrum than the other one was. It has a satisfying ending, but it’s a grown up one – not a throw everything you know about yourself away and give yourself over to The New one. I really enjoyed it – and the only reason it wasn’t a BotW is because I read it the same week as The Rom-Commers (which is on the best new fiction list). Was my late November-early December holiday a real high point in my reading this year or is it recency bias – who can tell, but I did read a whole bunch of books I’d been saving on that holiday as a treat.
The Reunion by Kayla Olsen
Liv was the star of a hit teen TV show and grew up on screen. Twenty years on, a reboot is in the offing and she finds herself back on set with all her old castmates – including her former boyfriend. She’s built herself a new life since the show – but this is her chance to try and get closure on what happened with her on and off screen love interest when the show ended. Once they’re back on set together, they fall into old habits – but will this time have a different ending? This was released in January 2023 and is part of what is now a growing collection of novels set around nostalgia for TV shows or movies – whether it’s characters transported into them, or former stars of them involved in romances some how. I’ve read a few of them, with mixed success, but this is a really good one*. Like Flying Solo it has “A Novel” written on the front of it – and in this case it means that the novel is more about Liv finding herself than completely centred on the romance between her and Ransom. This one is harder to get hold of I think – I bought it in Foyles and it’s definitely an American paperback size, but if you do spot it, I think it’s worth it.
Have a great day everyone!
*so is yesterday’s BotW pick, but it is much more Christmas-themed and also a new release so doesn’t fit in to this post.
After the best new fiction on Friday, here I am with my favourite non-fiction books of the year, which is very much a mix of new releases and not new releases, but also features a suspicious number of books that fall into one of my favourite periods of history – aka the first half of the 20th Century.
Kingmaker by Sonia Purnell*
I think this is my favourite of the new non-fiction that I’ve read this year. I love a look at how women exerted power in male-dominated environments, and this re-examination of Pamela Harriman – who has previously just been dismissed as a femme fatale/grande horizontale who worked her way through all the men she knew – is a really interesting one. Purnell makes a strong case – and appears to have the evidence to back it up due to the amount of personal papers that she had access to. I was so pleased to see this prominently displayed in the bookshops this autumn.
Capote’s Women by Lawrence Leamer
Harriman is one of the women in the title of Lawrence Leamer’s book – and the other women were definitely among those who dismissed Harriman as a modern day courtesan – after all she had slept with several of their husbands (one of whom she later married). If you don’t want to commit to an entire book about Pamela (and Kingmaker is 500 pages long) then you can catch a glimpse of her war years and immediate aftermath in this book about Capote and the women who featured in his notorious Esquire article La Cote Basque, which blew up his friendships with them forever.
Murder by Kate Morgan*
If you read as much mystery fiction set in the past as I do, this might be right up your street. It’s an examination of the evolution of the crime of murder in legal terms in England. If you’ve ever wondered about how the differences between murder and manslaughter came about, or when various forms of insanity defences evolved, this is the book for you. It also covers some of the more recent developments in murder trials that have come out of tragedies like Aberfan – and whether or not they have worked as intended. And if you’re writing historical crime fiction this is probably a must read to make sure you’re getting the legal side of things right!
Going Infinite by Michael Lewis
Another of my areas of special interest in non-fiction (aside from interwar history) are spectacular flops/business disasters/con men. And the rise and fall of Sam Bankman Fried and his crypto exchange are among the most spectacular of recent years. Of course the challenge of such a recent scandal as this is being up to date and this was originally published in 2023 just as the trial was starting and the paperback edition that I bought (on the way to Malaysia and then mostly read on the plane) came out not long after the sentencing. But the big reason for reading this rather than listening to one of the podcasts about the story (which have the ability to add new episodes as things evolve) is that Michael Lewis was already working on a book about SBF when the implosion happened – and thus was on the scene in a way no one else was. And have a bonus podcast recommendation – Spellcaster from Wondery is my pick of the SBF specials, although The Naked Emperor series of CBC’s Understood is also good (and I have their series about Celine Dion waiting to be listened to as well).
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jenette McCurdy
It would be remiss of me not to include a memoir in this list – and this also fits into a special interest area: Hollywood. But Jenette McCurdy‘s memoir comes with some important caveats: this covers abuse of many different kinds as well as addiction and eating disorders. It is a tough read. A very tough read. But at the end it is hopeful that McCurdy – a former Nickelodeon child star – has come out of the other side, and not just because her mother is dead and can no longer emotionally manipulate and exploit her. I really hope that she is in a better place – this book really illustrates why so few child stars emerge from that early fame unscathed.
And I realise that’s a bit of a downer to end on. Sorry about that. But hey these things happen.
We’re nearly there. It’s nearly the end of 2024 – and with that, it’s time for me to take a look at some of my favourite reads of the last year. This year I’ve split it up across a couple of posts, and first up we have the best New Fiction that I’ve read this year.
The Other Side of Disappearing
Kate Claybourn’s new novel came out in March, and was a Book of the Week when I got around to reading it in April. And you can click the link to read the full review, but it’s a road trip novel, as a reluctant participant in a podcast goes with her sister to try and find their mother, with the production crew in train. I liked it because of the way it portrayed the heroine’s relationship with her sister as well as the romance, but also because it was more uplifting than I was expecting considering it had a heroine who had been parentified because of the behaviour of her mother even before she abandoned them both. There’s still no news on when Claybourn’s next book is due, but I hope that it’s going in a similar sort of direction to this one because it was a really delightful read.
Summer Fridays by Suzanne Rindell
This was a rare case of me reading a Kindle sample and then abandoning all my usual rules about purchase prices to buy the book because I was so desperate to read it. And I’ve since seen it in two for ones in Foyles and at a big discount on Kindle, so if I had waited I would have saved a whole heap of cash. But this made me so nostalgic for the rom-coms of my teenage years. I loved You’ve Got Mail when it came out (still do now to be honest) and the description of this as You’ve Got Mail for a new generation is pretty much spot on. As I said in my review at the time, some people are going to have an issue with the way that the couple get together (their respective partners are cheating on them with each other, but they’re not split up) which is why I count it as “A Novel” not a romance, but I really, really liked it. Suzanne Rindell seems to be on an every other year sort of publication schedule, and I hope that her next one is as good as this.
The Comfort of Ghosts by Jacqueline Winspear
This is slightly cheating, and I’ve swapped it in since mid-year point where I picked Mona of the Manor instead. The Comfort of Ghosts is the last in a long series, and I try not to recommend books where you need to have read all the others to get the maximum impact from it. But it’s also rare for a series to finish so satisfyingly as the Maisie Dobbs one does. At the end of eighteen books, Maisie is sent off to a bright new future, all the loose ends are tidied up – including some that you had forgotten, but unlike some final books in mystery series, the mystery plot in this isn’t an add on to the rest, it’s properly thought out and integrated. It’s satisfying enough that although I’m sad that Maisie’s story is done, I’m happy to leave her at this point. Hopefully I’ll like Winspear’s next book as much, and if the White Lady is any indication I think I will
The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center
This is the first of two books in this list that I read on my late November/early December holiday and is that recency bias showing? I don’t know. But when I looked at all my top rate books these were the ones I wanted to include. And this is the second book in this list that gave me all the nostalgia for the movies of my teenage years. Charlie is a great hero – with the gruff and abrasive exterior hiding a soft and sentimental interior that he is trying his best to hide from everyone. The banter is great, the critique of the movie industry is also fabulous if you’re someone like me who wants to know where the (less problematic) successors to Notting Hill, Never Been Kissed and Two Weeks Notice are.
Birding with Benefits by Sarah T Dubb
And this is the only book on this list which wasn’t a Book of the Week – and that’s because I read it the same week as the Rom-Commers and there can only be one BotW each week. The heroine of Birding With Benefits is Celeste. She’s newly single and about to be an empty nester, so she’s trying to put herself out there and find some adventures of her own. So of course she says yes to a friend who asks her to help one of his friends out at an event. The friend is John, and it turns out the event is Tuscon’s annual birdwatching contest – which John wants to win to help him launch his own guiding business and to a lesser extent to show his ex-girlfriend that he’s just fine. And so the unlikely duo begin a fake relationship for the duration of the contest and it soon turns into something more than either of them expected. It’s charming and fun – and made me care about birdwatching, which is something I never thought possible. It deserves its spot on this list.
Here’s to as many good books in 2025 – and have a great weekend everyone!
Yes, it’s nearly the end of July, so we’re well over six months in to the year, but I’m here and I’m using this week’s Recommendsday to shout out my favourite books of the year so far, in no particular order.
But I’m going to start with At First Spite, Olivia Dade’s latest novel, which came out in February and which I read basically as soon as the paperback hit my doormat. It’s the first in a new series, and features a heroine who finds her self living in a tiny house between her ex-fiancé on one side and his brother on the other. If you go and read my Book of the Week review for this, you’ll see that it’s not all sunshine and roses for Athena, but it all works out beautifully. And I can’t wait for the next book in the series, which is currently called Dearly Departed, whenever it arrives.
Next up is a March release – Kate Claybourn’s The Other Side of Disappearing, which is a romance, a mystery and a road trip as two sisters travel across the US with a podcast production crew to try and find out what happened to the con-man their mum used to date. This also has a retired college football (the American kind) player – so if you’re after sporty-themed books this is another one – but I couldn’t include it in last week’s Recommendsday, because: statute of limitations, and also twice in a week would be boring!
And now an April release – Emily Henry’s Funny Story. And I ummed and ahhed about whether to include this because I feel like I’ve written so much about her over the years, but then I went back and checked my review and I read it in less than 18 hours, which is probably the quickest of any of the books on the list, so how could I leave it off? It’s another newly single heroine, who is stuck in close proximity to her ex, but more different to At First Spite than that makes it sound. It’s so good, and I would read it again today, if only I didn’t have so many other books on the go at once…
On to May, and a book that I bought in paperback after reading the kindle sample and then read immediately. I explain in my review of Summer Fridays why this is going to divide romance readers, but I loved it and I think it is closer to “a Novel” than “a romance”. Travel back to 1999 New York with Sawyer and spend the summer with her and Nick as she figures out what she’s doing with her life. If you’re about to go on holiday, this might be the perfect sun lounger read.
This was very nearly an all romance post – and indeed I’ve grouped them all together, but I wanted to include one other new release – Mona of the Manor. Yes, it’s the tenth in the Tales of the City series but I think it stands alone more easily than the other contender for this final place which was the final Maisie Dobbs novel, The Comfort of Ghosts. Mona of the Manor is a fill in of a portion of the Tales Story we haven’t seen – and as it’s in the British countryside in the 1990s it’s pretty self-contained. And it’s so much fun as Mona tries to make ends meet by turning the country house she’s inherited into a not-quite-a-hotel with the help of her adopted son.
And there you have it. My five favourite new books of the year so far. I think. But as ever, I’m a fickle thing, and who knows what will be the top five by the end of the year!
I mean this may be the quickest one of these that I have recently written – because actually the easiest thing may be to point you at the reviews I’ve already written for this year’s picks at the midway point! I don’t think it’s going to surprise you that two of the five are romances, then there’s one rich people problems and a non-fiction book. And so in no particular order my favourite new releases of the year so far are:
Let’s see what has been added to the list by the end of the year!
Still to come for the halfway point: how many states have I ticked off my read the USA challenge? How am I getting on with colouring the bookcase drawing in my journal? And of course my favourite not new books of the year so far.
Back when I first tried Kindle Unlimited, I promised to keep you posted on how long I kept it for and the sort of value for money I was getting out of it. I’ve not always been great at remembering to do that, but as I did last year, now we’ve finished another year, here is the lowdown on 2022.
If my Goodread shelves are correct, I read 39 books via KU last year – which doesn’t included another few that I started and then abandoned. It averages to just over a month, although some months I did more than that, and others less. The months where it got a bit patchy include when I had Covid as well as my bout of shingles and then obviously that massive Meg Langlsow binge that I’m still on! I’ve almost always got the maximum number of books on loan – as I have a bad habit of borrowing things when I see them with the intentions of reading it later and then… getting distracted!
I’ve used it to try out – and then reject in some cases – new cozy crime and historical crime series, which would have come under my rules about too hard to tell if they’re worth paying for from the sample rules, but I would have been annoyed if I’d paid for them when I got to the end! And yes I know I did pay for them if I got them in KU, but you know what I mean. On a practical financial angle, 18 of the 29 were British Library Crime Classics – which tend to retail at about £3 a book in ebook so that’s half the cost of the year of KU covered right there! And a lot of them were very good with some of them ending up as Books of the week – like Til Death Do Us Part, The Incredible Crime, Death of a Bookseller and Green for Danger – others have ended up in various Recommendsdays – including the specific BLCC one.
Aside from the BLCC masses, there are a few short stories, but almost everything else has been cozy crime or historical mystery books, which is exactly why I wanted KU to start with – mostly they don’t take me long to read, but the actual kindle price is over my maximum, or at least over the maximum that I’m prepared to pay for something I can read in an afternoon. They also help me tick of states in the 50 States challenge – although (spoiler alert) as we saw yesterday, I didn’t manage to complete it last year. But 2023 could be different…
So all in all, I reckon I’ve done ok on the KU value this year – but I need to monitor it slightly more carefully, particularly when it comes to how much the stuff I’m reading would be to buy to make sure it stays worth it.
This time last year I wrote a post about revisiting Gaudy Night. And in 2022 I included rereads in my total (for the first time?). And it’s been a year of revisiting old favourites. So it’s time to take a bit of a look back over one of the big themes of my reading year.
Firstly it should be said that I’m still listening to Gaudy Night fairly regularly. I could probably recite along with some of it by this point, but I’ve definitely done all the Peter and Harriet books a couple of times this year and I think I’ve listened to the whole series – just not as much. I’ve also worked my way back through many of the Alleyn mysteries but this time in audio. I haven’t read those anywhere near as much so it’s been interesting hearing them and noticing new things. I’d done some in abridged versions before but I’ve switched to the unabridged in the main now. Having watched all the BBC Miss Marples again this year, I’ve reread a few of them to remind myself of the changes in the adaptations. The same actually for some of the Alleyns and a Poirot or two after I read the book about the series.
This year I have also reread the entire Phryne Fisher series and binged two thirds of the Meg Langslow series in December alone. I’ve also done most of the Amelia Peabody series again in audio and all the Vicky Blisses (not in audio!). I’ve also revisited a bunch of Georgette Heyers as new audio versions have been published of ones that had narrators I hated before (like Devil’s Cub) or just plain weren’t available (Masqueraders).
A lot of the audiobook revisits have been because I’ve spent many more nights away from home in 2022 than I did in 2021 and so they’ve been my regular listens to get to sleep. I am very bad with silence at the best of times and I mostly stay in hostel dorms and I like to have something to listen to to block out what ever is happening in them. And that something needs to be something that I don’t have to concentrate too hard on and that I’m not so interested in that it will keep me awake. This means more often than not it’s something I’ve read before at least once.
And for that reason I expect the rereading to continue in 2023 – I’m in a hostel for most of this week because of train strikes so I expect I’ll be back to an old favourite to drown out the sound of the traffic on the Euston road!
Well here we are. We’ve made it to the start of a year. What am I hoping for in 2023? Well this time last year I said we didn’t know that 2021 could be even more exhausting that 2020, and for me personally I think 2022 has been even worse again. I had covid in the first third of the year, shingles in the last third and an awful virus that lasted basically the whole of December. Sprinkled in between all of that, at work we had the War in Ukraine, the death of Elizabeth II and another structural reorganisation. So it’s been insanely busy and insanely hard. If 2023 could be a little bit less of all of that I would really appreciate it. I think you’ll see the stresses and strains in the stats, and the reflection posts that I’ve been writing for the next few days.
I’ve carried on with the rereading – including the massive Meg Langslow binge of the last month. I think I’ve reduced the NetGalley backlog a little – or at least I haven’t added to it. I was doing well at not requesting more books, but then a whole load of really interesting looking stuff for the first half of next year got added and I got trigger happy on the request button. I’ve definitely read less non-fiction this year, apart from Actor Memoirs, but I’ve enjoyed what I read. I have done better on the physical books front than this time last year, but not as well as I wanted to.
So this is the point where I look back on the series I’ve read this year and pick out some highlights for you.
Let’s start with a new to me discovery – Her Majesty the Queen Investigates. These were fun cozy Murder mysteries with a royal twist. As I said in my series post about them, I think they work best in slightly closed settings – or at least not London – but I liked the characters and the tone a lot. It’s a shame there’s a year until the next one.
Moving on to Richard Osman. This year we got the third Thursday Murder Club book and they continue to be both clever and witty and fun but occasionally heartbreaking. This is the series that spawned the copycats that are popping up all over the place at the moment – I’m reading my way through some of them so you don’t have to!
I really enjoyed the Nanette Hayes mysteries, but I wish there were more of them. I am still looking for more 90s crime series that I missed out on (too young at the time!) and can catch up on now because they do seem to work for me – see some of the Fahrenheit series I’ve enjoyed. And I have another of the Liz Evans books waiting that I picked up from the charity book stall at the shopping centre. If you have any suggestions please do whack them in the comments please.
I’ve also carried on working my way though some of the other series I’ve been reading for years. I’m up basically up to date on the Kate Shackleton series now, as well as Dandy Gilver. It continues to be tricky to find new historical-set mystery series that I don’t wish to throw across the room, but I’m still trying. I hope Carola Dunn is having a happy retirement but I do miss her and the prospect of a new Daisy Dalrymple. But I’ve basically binged the Mary Russell series over the last two years, which has been good, but that age gap still annoys me. Royal Spyness continues and Kerry Greenwood has written a new Phryne that I’m saving for a special occasion. All hail Kerry.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 