Here we are with the pre-Christmas book haul. The Judi Dench was a whole saga, because the first copy went missing in the post and I didn’t think Simon at Big Green Books would have another one, but I got really lucky and he had a return. Which I got delivered to my parents’ house just to be safe! Then there’s a little batch of career novels which I treated myself to, another of the Edward Marston ship mysteries and two books from Foyles last week because I can’t help myself! Now depending on the amount of books I get for Christmas you may get a Christmas special books incoming, but I’m not sure yet, so I’m reserving the right to change my mind and bundle it all into January!
I’m reading this year’s Sarah Morgan Christmas book at the moment, so I’m using it to take the opportunity to remind you about her O’Neil Brothers/Snow Crystal books – which are pretty Christmassy all in – and a pretty decent price at the moment. In a slightly bonkers twist, the Kindle omnibus is more expensive than buying them individually, but if you just want the Christmas ones, you can do both of those for about £6.50 all in.
This is out this week and is a Pride and Prejudice retelling set on the set of a musical version of Pride and Prejudice. It’s also got different titles if you’re in the UK or US. Here it’s Enemies to Lovers, elsewhere it’s The Stage Kiss. I’m not going to lie, this didn’t entirely work for me, on account of both the hero and heroine being very mean at times, and being inside Darcy’s head in the early stages not making me like him more! But I know that I’m picky when it comes to P&P retellings, so I mention it anyway because I know the are a lot of people on the look out for Lizzy and Darcy in as many forms as possible. Eligible is still the best one though!
It’s starting to feel proper Christmassy now, so it’s time for the festive reading recommendations. And I’ve broken it down into two again this year – the new releases for Christmas 2023 and books from previous years that I’ve read this year.
So lets start with Jeevanki Charika’s Picture Perfect, which has a heroine who needs to find her inspiration as a photographer again after a bad break up and a hero who needs someone to take on a group holiday to make his ex jealous and try to win her back. This is a fun and festive (New Year not Christmas!) fake relationship romance that sees the two characters become better versions of themselves as they pretend to be in a relationship. I found Vimal’s perspective to be quite stressful to read because of his issues with reading social cues (I was going to say social anxiety but I’m not quite sure that is quite what it is) but I really liked Niro as a character and I loved her passion for photography and the way that pretending to be Vimal’s girlfriend gave her the confidence to stand up for him and to come out of her shell. You might remember that Charika’s previous book Playing for Love was a BotW in 2022 and this has characters in common with that.
I did a series post about Susan Mallery’s Happily Inc series a couple of weeks back, and Home Sweet Christmas this is a twin storyline Christmas romance set in another one of Mallery’s quirky small towns – this time Wishing Tree, the Christmas themed-town which is frankly bonkers, but still seems to work some how. One storyline has Camryn, who has moved back to the town that she grew up after the death of her mum and is newly responsible for her younger half sisters and the family’s gift wrapping business (just go with it). She’s trying to work out what her life and future looks like now and whether she wants to risk a relationship again. She starts a definitely temporary relationship with Jake, whose family own the local resort. The other has River, new to town and trying to find her place and put down some roots. Her friends persuade her to put her name in the hat for the town’s Snow Queen – and soon she’s doing events with Dylan, a hot local carpenter. Some of this really worked for me, but Jake’s mom crossed the boundary from strangely well informed and well placed and into manipulative and meddling and it really messed with my enjoyment of the rest of the book. I think there was probably too much plot on each story for them to both go into one book, but it was still a fun, easy Christmas read.
And finally let’s go for some classic crime, with another British Library Crime Classic holiday collection – this time A Surprise for Christmas. It’s got G K Chesterton, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham along with several other names you might recognise from other BLCC books. I’m not usually a big short story reader, but at Christmas I do quite like them, and it’s a nice way to find new authors to watch out for in the BLCC collection – I think that’s how I found Christiana Brand, but I wouldn’t swear to that.
So this week is a weird mix of audiobooks, cozy crime and checking which states I’m missing on Read across the USA 2023… And of course we continue to gear up for Christmas and all that that entails. Can I get everything done in time? Will I prioritise reading over present buying? Who can tell…
Christmas is coming and you know what that means – I go back over my wish list of books from the year and pick the ones I haven’t been able to justify buying but really want to read and ask for them for Christmas gifts. My family have already had the key books from the list sent to them, so I’m hoping some of them might already be wrapped up with a tag with my name on somewhere!
As usual, most of this list is hardback non-fiction. Because when you have as big a to-read pile as I do, you can’t justify £20 and up on a book. But these do also tend to be the sort of books that never go on kindle deal and will still be relatively expensive in paper back. So actually maybe it’s sensible to buy them in hardback. So let’s start withAstor by Anderson Cooper – his book on the Vanderbilts was a gift request a few years ago in one of those hazy Covid years when I didn’t do a Christmas request post and just sent the list directly to my family (thanks mum and dad for buying it) and now the CNN anchor and his collaborator have switched focus away from Cooper’s own family to another of the Gilded Age big names.
Also firmly in the Rich People Problems area of my wheel house, Jonathan Miles’s Once Upon a Time World looks at the growth and development of the French Riviera. I’ve already read Anne De Courcy’s book about Chanel and the Riviera (again thanks mum) and Mary S Lovell’s book The Riviera Set, but I had a nosy at this in Daunt this week and it looks very readable and like it might have some new and different stuff to those other two. Or at least not huge amounts of crossover.
Moving on to another of my areas of special interest – Hollywood. Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars came out at the start of the year and I’m always interested in machinations – and this promises behind the scenes details from Oscar history and new dramas we haven’t heard about before. While we were on holiday in September, I readNick de Semlyen’s Wild and Crazy Guys which is about the comedians who came out of sketch shows in the early 80s, so to even it out i would also like to read Shawn Levy’s In On the Joke about female stand ups in the 50s and 60s. I liked Levy’s The Castle on Sunset, and he seemed in that to have all the right connections to get some interesting stuff for this.
Laurence Leamer’s Hitchcock’s Blondes as the title suggests is about the blonde actresses who starred in Hitchcock movies. I’ve already read a bit about a few of them and Hitchcock has popped up in a bunch of my other reading and I’ve come to the conclusion that he was pretty toxic but I’d like to read the details! I’d also like to read Deliberate Cruelty by Roseanne Montillo which is about one of Truman Capote’s Swans who he accused of murder in the thinly disguised short story that brought about his social downfall.
And then the fiction. I loved Stephen Rowley’s The Guncleback when I read it, and the editor was also great. For some reason his books are really hard to get over here so his latest,The Celebrantsis on this list because I can’t justify the imported paperback (and it took years for imported copies The Guncle to hit Foyles Charing Cross Road’s shelves) and it doesn’t come in kindle in the UK.
And as if I hadn’t already put enough Rich People books on this list already, I’m going there in the fiction too with Social Engagement by Avery Carpenter Forrey. The blurb for this has a heroine whose wedding had imploded just hours after the vows and promises to show you how she got there. The reviews veer between “this is brilliant and funny” and “I hate the heroine, she causes her own problems” so I’m optimistic it could be right up my street. In a similar vein, I’d love to find Becky Chalsen’s Kismetunder the tree – this has a pair of twins and their childhood friend turned husband to one twin on holiday on Fire Ireland and trouble brewing around the other twin’s wedding and their thirtieth birthdays…
I mentioned Beatriz Williams’ latest back when it came out, but I still don’t own The Beach at Summerly and given all the spy stories in the news at the moment, the appeal of a novel about Cold War era-espionage has not decreased at all! I also still haven’t read the latest Veronica Speedwell, although as the next one comes out in the new year there’s a chance it will go on offer on kindle in the run up to that. And I don’t own any of them in actual physical copies yet, so getting one poses a risk that I will want them all!
I think thats probably enough, isn’t it? I should say i had to revise this a few times as I realised that some of the books that I was putting on the list were books that were on last year’s list – which you can find here if you want it. And mum, if you’re reading I know there is more here than I sent to you guys but I picked the ones I thought you would mostly likely like to borrow to suggest to you all!
The list last week was long, but actually today’s pick is the last book I finished at the weekend – and in fact read in less than a day while snuggled up on the sofa trying to will the cold I have to go away (it’s not Covid, I did several tests…) and it’s also not a Christmas book but won’t worry there are plenty of those coming up over the next few weeks!
I mentioned Hello Stranger when it came out a few months back, hard on the heels of the UK release of Katherine Center’s previous book, The Bodyguard. And Hello Stranger is about Sadie, a portrait painter who has got a spot in the final of a prestigious competition. The only problem is that hard on the heels of this news, she discovers some less good news: she needs (minor) brain surgery. And then when she wakes up she can’t see faces any more. That is to say, the faces are there but her brain can’t make any sense of them and she doesn’t recognise anyone anymore. Which as a portrait painter is a bit of a problem but it’s also a pretty big problem for everyday life too. But she doesn’t want anyone to know about it so she heads back out into a new and different world where she meets a handsome vet and spars with the obnoxious neighbour in her building – but could either of them turn into something more?
As I said this was the last book I finished last week and I basically read it across the afternoon and evening – stopping only to cook dinner, eat and pack my suitcase for the week. And it really does hook you in – and is one of those books where it’s so fun that you can ignore the slight bonkers of it all. And there’s a fair bit of bonkers here – most of which could be solved by Sadie just telling people what her issue is and I never quite understood why she didn’t, except for her pathological dislike of admitting that she needed help and the fact that if she did the plot would disappear. And as someone who works in audio, I found it hard to believe that she didn’t recognise people’s voices more than she did – but again, I went with it because it is a lot of fun.
Sadie also has a really difficult relationship with her step sister and I wanted a bit more resolution to that – or at least more comeuppance for her sister but Sadie definitely comes out on top so that’s good. And overall I liked it a lot – and more than I did The Bodyguard, where I had a few issues that boiled down to having read a lot of celebrity and normal person romances this year and others being better and not really understanding what the hero saw in the heroine. And Hello Stranger has a really quirky premise and is first person in Sadie’s eyes and she has a lot to deal with so you don’t have time to worry about what the hero sees in her!
I also went off and did a quiz about face blindness as soon as I finished the book – and I actually did much better at it than I expected to, given that I think of myself as being bad at faces and names! And I suspect a lot of readers will go off and do the same thing. So in conclusion, if you’re not on the Christmas book train yet this would make a nice read – although given that it’s set in sunny Texas it’s not exactly a cozy winter read!
You can get Hello Stranger on Kindle and Kobo. It’s not out in paperback in the UK until May next year, but if you’re in the US it’s available in hardback.
A much better week in reading I have to say – which may have been because I didn’t go to the theatre and I was commuting into work every day which gives me nearly two hours reading time (if I want it) on the train each day. And just a quick note to say that I’m messing with the usual schedule this month because Christmas is coming and I have a fair few things I want to post before it’s too close to the big day!
Bonus photo: because e-scooters aren’t lethal enough, how is this for an invention…
Actually two bonuses this week because after I mentioned the Inn at Boonsboro in recommendsday last week, – link to this popped up in one of my Facebook groups!
So I’ve read another couple of books in the Fetherings series recently, and it’s another series that’s really easy to read at this time of year – small town murder mysteries at the seaside make for perfect autumnal reading somehow. So this is another Simon Brett series – and has the same sort of humour and murder mix that you get in Charles Paris and Mrs Pargeter but this time with a duo at the centre in neighbours Carole and Jude and their contrasting personalities. I’m about a dozen into the series now and the setting are still pretty varied but with enough call backs to previous books and developments to make them fun if you’re binging, but not so many that you can’t just pick them up and carry on.
They’re also very bingeable – so if you can get hold of them it’s very easy to run through them at speed, but they do sometimes have a bit of a price issue – I can read them in a couple of hours and that effects how much I’m willing to pay!
