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After having such a good time reading Nora Goes Off Script, it sent me off on a quest for other books that will just leave you with a happy smile on your face and the urge to force all your friends to read it. And it took me a while to bring you this week’s Recommendsday – because although I did some targeted reading for new options for this some of them were so good that they ended up as BotW posts too – more on that later!

Anyway, my starting place for this sort of post is often Goodreads’s the “other readers also liked” section for the book in question, to see what avenues that takes me down. But frustratingly, as is often the case for relatively new releases (Nora… came out in summer 2022) it seems to be dominated by other recent releases and I don’t think that Lessons in Chemistry (on page sexual assault), Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (death), Something Wilder(death again) and Killers of a Certain Age (even more death) for all that they are excellent (and obviously right in my reading wheel house because I’ve recommended all of them!) are not quite the same low stakes and low stress experience that Annabel Monaghan is giving you with Nora.

Of the linked recommendations, Thank You for Listening was probably the closet to this of the list – and I couldn’t put that down when I read it last year – but it’s only a six months since it was a BotW, see also Better than Fiction which was mentioned even more recently so I had to come up with something fresh…

And now we get to stuff I read with this post in mind and which ended up as Books of the Week themselves – there’s The Soulmate Equation and Funny You Should Ask and you could probably also include The Roughest Draft. I think Romantic Comedy was always destined to be a BotW, but it does also make you feel good so lets throw that in there too.

So now we look at stuff I read longer ago that is also feel good. So there’s Kate Spencer’s In A New York Minute, which I mentioned in the autumn. But going back even further there’s The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling which is a second-chance romance with witches, and which is less dramatic/high stakes than the blurb would lead you to believe. Then there’s Kate Claybourn’s Love Lettering, which was a BotW three years ago (!) which is a slow burn romance with people who become unexpetedly friends and then… more. Also Sally Thorne’s Second First Impressions, which was a slightly more recent (two years ago) BotW which is a charming and frothy romance which does have some stakes, but it’s not peril. I liked it so much that I’ve actually bought myself a kindle copy now (I borrowed it from the library when I read it initially).

Finally as I mentioned in the Nora post, the Goodreads blubs compares it to Evvie Drake Starts Over so if you haven’t read that, you should totally should. It’s definitely reminded me that I have Linda Holmes’s second novel Flying Solo on the ebook tbr. And it wouldn’t be a feel good book post without me mentioning my beloved Gone With the Windsors which is not a romance (and the rest of these are) but also Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible, which is itself a retelling of Pride and Prejudice – so is romance to round it all off.

Happy Reading!

To be honest I don’t have a lot to talk to you about this month and that’s mainly because of the massive Donna Andrews binge that has taken up so much of my reading time. Which is kinda hilarious in itself. And so I offer you just two this month.

Trixie and Katya’s Guide to Modern Womanhood by Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova

This is exactly what you would expect or hope it to be Drag Race favourites Trixie and Katya giving very tongue in cheek advice. I listened to this on audiobook because I love listening to Trixie and Katya and it was a fun way to spend a few hours – just don’t listen to it on speaker in a public place – or even on your headphones if you’re a person who blushes easily!

Rivers of London: Deadly Ever After by Ben Aaronovitch et al

Slightly rule breaking here as this is the tenth of the Rivers of London graphic novels, but it is actually one that can be picked up standalone I think as the main characters are Beverly’s sisters Olympia and Chelsea who accidentally break an enchantment and fairy tale havoc ensues. I love the art for this series and I love the world. It’s always a long wait for the next instalment, and then they’re over too soon but I really enjoyed it.

And that’s it for December. Most of my content for December was sort of Christmassy which feels a little out of date now we’re into January, but if you want it you can still find it all under the Christmas tag!

Happy Friday everyone. The last few Fridays we’ve been doing Series I Love, today we have a new type of post – Series to Binge. What is the distinction? Well principally it needs to be a series where you can read the books back to back without spotting the formula and getting annoyed. Now a series having a formula doesn’t make it a bad thing – and in the usual pattern of reading when you get each book as it comes out – you don’t necessarily notice it. But when you’re a reader like me who finds something you like and then rattles through as many of them as you can get your hands on as fast as possible, you do sometimes start to notice things. There are some series that I really like but that, I wouldn’t recommend you to read back to back to back – like some of the cozy crimes. Him Indoors likes to read Steph Plum when we’re on holiday – but he can only do about three before it gets a bit repetitive for him.

The Sookie Stackhouse series however, you absolutely can read one after the other. Or at least I can – I read three back to back the other week and started a fourth, put the fourth down for a few days to read other things last week, came back to it this week, finished it and went straight on to the fifth. In fact, in terms of how angry some of the fandom got with the way that it ended, it’s probably best to read them back to back (as you can now) rather than reading them as they came out – because it leaves less time to get involved in the speculation about who Sookie is going to end up with (which is why some of the fans were so disappointed). Coming back and reading them again, I’m spotting even more things that point at the way it turned out, but that’s another story.

Anyway, for those of you who haven’t come across the series before – it’s also known as the Southern Vampire Mysteries or the True Blood books – they’re about a telepathic waitress from a small town in Louisiana. A couple of years prior to the start of the books, the world’s vampire population went public and in the first book Sookie meets the new vampire that’s moved into her town and gets sucked into the problems of the local vampire population. Across the course of the series, Sookie discovers more and more about the supernatural world – and that’s what makes them so bingeable – each book adds something new or takes her somewhere different, so they don’t get samey. For example book two is in Dallas, book three is in Mississippi and introduces some extra complexity to how the vampire world is organised and how some of the other supernaturals get on with the vampires. Book four adds in more supernaturals and more complications and so on and so on. You get the idea and as you can tell you need to read them in order!

I do also need to add a proviso – these books are violent. There’s death and killing – and sexual violence too. I’ve read all the books – and I’m reading them again – but I’ve never watched the TV series because I’m fairly sure it’s going to be too violent for me. I can cope with it on the page but not on screen, much to Him Indoor’s confusion. I do normally tell you when I’m recommending something violent – and it’s sort of why I don’t say that I *love* this series – because the violence can get a bit much and I feel a bit weird about saying that I love something that has such a high body count. But then I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer (for all it’s problems) so maybe I’m just being contrary. Anyway, if you need something to binge to take your mind off the outside world – and you fancy some urban fantasy then this may be your thing.

They should be fairly easy to get hold of – there are omnibus editions on kindle (as you can see from the image as well as the individual books. I have the omnibus of the first three (which I read on holiday in Greece nearly a decade ago) and then picked the rest up from various charity shops – and then got rid of them in the house move – so this time I’m borrowing the ones I don’t have from the library. All in all they should be an easy to get hold of binge.

Happy weekend everyone!

Two shelves today… but there’s a reason, I promise! This is what started as the Chalet School shelf, but then grew into the Chalet school shelf and a half and Other Girls Gone by shelf. And no it’s not very tidy. And no, I’m not stacking any books on top of the Chalet School ones. They are my preciouses. No it’s not logical. But you shouldn’t expect logic from me by now.

I should also probably fill you in on who Girls Gone By are – they’re a small publisher who are republishing Girls Own Titles, most of which were written between 1920 and 1960. They came to my attention in the early 2000s because of their reprints of the hardback versions of the Chalet School – at a point when I was on a student budget and buying a hardback copy of any of them was going to cost you at least £50. And so I started collecting them in their editions. At this point there are only a few they haven’t published so I have as complete a set as I can get.

Anyway, along with the actual Chalet School books, there is the encyclopaedia of the series and a selection of fill-in titles. On the bottom shelf there is also stack of Mabel Esther Allens – both writing as herself and writing as Jean Estoril – some Gwendolyn Courtney, Antonia Forest, Phylis Matthewman and Patricia Caldwell. The non Girls Gone By books are a stack of really quite battered paperbacks – mostly puffins – by authors like Lucy M Boston, Enid Blyton and Anne Digby. Right on the end there are a couple of annuals.

I am running out of space on these two shelves (and on this bookshelf as a whole) but that’s mostly because I have stuff here that I don’t really want to keep forever, but that I’ve been holding onto to take to the non-dealer sale at the Bristol Conference – which should have happened in 2020 but has been postponed (twice) by the pandemic. So if it all goes ahead as planned this year, hopefully by the autumn these shelves will have been weeded and look a bit neater. Or at least that’s the plan. But last time I went to Bristol I came home with a lot of books…

Happy Friday everyone. Today’s series I love is an excuse to talk about my favourite book that I read last week which also happened to be the third book in a trilogy – which is a series right? – but which I think you really need to have read the other two books to get the most out of.

At the start of Miss Buncle’s Book, Barbara Buncle has a problem: she is running out of money. She is already living in Reduced Circumstances, with just her faithful former nanny to help her out, but when her dividends come in at a much reduced rate she needs to find another source of income. So she writes a book. The trouble is that she thinks she doesn’t have any imagination so she writes about the people she knows: the inhabitants of her village. She sprinkles in some excitement for them and that, as well as her very perceptive eye means that the book is accepted by a publisher. When the book is published, it is a great success but doesn’t take long for the village to find out about it and start to try to work out who is responsible.

Barbara is a charming character and watching her try to hide the fact that she wrote the book, whilst the resident search frantically and start to act like their fictional counterparts. She’s kind and often taken advantage of, but also wickedly observant and able to take her revenge (if she wants to) in her writing.

As you might guess from the title of the second book, Miss Buncle Married, there is also some excitement in Barbara’s personal life and the second book sees her moving to a new village to start her married life. By the third book, The Two Mrs Abbotts, it is the war and she has two children, and the focus of the book is less fully on her, but she continues throughout to be a delightful person to spend time watching.

There is no peril in these books and no body count. They are very gentle but very, very funny. If you like Diary of a Provincial Housewife, you should definitely read this. Another of DE Stevenson’s books, Mrs Tim of the Regiment, was a BotW here last year and that also is a delightful selection of characters not doing a lot or facing much peril but being very funny while they do it. And if you want Miss Buncle but *with* a body count, Death by the Book, the first book in Beth Byers’ Poison Ink series is so close to Miss Buncle that my good reads description says that it is “uncomfortably similar” until the murder!

All three of the Buncle books are available from Persephone books, both in Paperback and ebook. The actual books are gorgeous – if you’ve never seen a Persephone book in the flesh, the simple grey cover means the all match on the outside but on the inside each has a different pattern from an appropriate fabric to the period where it was published. They are delightful. And I’m told their new shop in Bath is also wonderful – Little Sister visited before Christmas.

Have a good weekend!