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Non-Fiction Round up

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If you’re a regular reader of the blog (*waves*) you’ll have noticed that I don’t read a lot of non-fiction.  But as a proud history graduate (I’m not so proud of my French grammar) and a bit of a history geek, a lot of the non fiction that I do read is history based.  After reading lots of Heavy Duty history books for the degree (in English and in French) I tend to steer clear of weighty, serious tomes in favour of the more readable popular end of the market. This is mostly because with so many things on the to-read pile I know the serious stuff will get ignored*.  And I think they’re the sort of books that will appeal to people who don’t have the interest in history that I do.  I also like biographies and autobiographies that tell me something more about the world and things that I don’t know much about.  So with that in mind, here are a few of my recent reads:

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys by Viv Albertine

I cannot speak highly enough of this book.  Honestly. This jumped out at me because of the insight into a period I know very little about (the 1970s and punk) – Viv Albertine really lived in and through that scene – she was in a band with Sid Vicious before she was a member of The Slits – a revolutionary girl punk band.  This is possibly the most raw and honest autobiography I’ve ever read.  You never get the sense that Albertine is holding anything back, or leaving stuff out to make other people happy or make herself look better.  The first part of the book – Side A – covers her early life and her career in music inside the small punk scene in late 1970s London where everyone knew everyone as they tried to change the world, and the second – Side B – addresses her post-punk life, her fight against cancer and her struggle to find herself and her place in life.  I could not put it down – especially during Side B, which I had expected to be the less interesting part of the book.  Albertine blazed a trail in her music career – doing things that girls didn’t do, and refusing to let men tell them what to do.  I’m fairly sure that she’d hate me for not having strong enough opinions, but I’m equally sure that it’s women like her who have made it possible for me to live the life that I do.  It’s had fabulous reviews – the pull quotes about it are raves and I totally agree. I really seriously recommend this.

Flappers by Judith Mackerell

I’ve got a bit of a fascination going on with the inter-war period – I’ve read a lot of fiction set in that era (both stuff actually written then like Nancy Mitford and stuff written now and set then) and the Bright Young Things fascinate me (if you haven’t seen the BBC’s three-part documentary on the era called Glamour’s Golden Age, watch out for it being repeated), so this was right up my street.  Flappers tells the stories of five notable women of the 1920s – focusing on their lives during that period.  It’s a big old book – it lasted me three days of commuting – but it’s worth a read.  Each of the women have interesting stories – and even if they aren’t that likeable always, you don’t spend long enough in their company to start to get irritated with them.  I think if the book had been solely focused on anyone of them I’d have given up on it – because I would have wanted to punch some sense into them, but as a six-some it really works.  I passed it on to my mum – who’s currently reading it too!

The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry

Now this had been sitting on the shelf for an age – and I finally got around to reading it after I was lucky enough to win tickets to go and see the fabulous Mr Fry talk about the third part of his autobiography and thought I ought to get up to speed with where we’ve got to.  And what a decade he had – this covers university through early successes (and failures) on stage and screen and writing behind the scenes.  I really liked his writing style (it’s just like having him in the room with you) and the stuff he gets up to is so interesting that I raced through the 400 plus pages of what could be a very irritating book about a man being very self-deprecating about his success.  We leave the QI star and polymath after he’s just tried cocaine for the first time.  I’ll let you know what I make of volume three…

And if you read this blog regularly, you’ll notice I’ve read these books spread over a fair period of time.  This has been sitting in draft for ages, but having finished Viv Albertine’s book today, I had to write about it – and this seemed the perfect place, as Albertine’s book is not the usual sort of book I post about – it’s real, it happened – it’s not romance or remotely cosy.  But I had to tell you about it.  I could not put it down this morning – I even took the Kindle into the bath with me so that I could finish my copy (which came via NetGalley) so desperate was I to find out what happened to her next.  Honestly, even if punk isn’t your thing, go and find it in the book shop and read a few pages or borrow it from the library.  Don’t just dismiss it.  It’s an important story, but it’s also tremendously engaging and her writing style – like her musical one – is completely different.

 

*I have a copy of Adam Zamoyski’s Rites of Peace sitting on my shelf that has been there for about five years – and I’m really interested in the Congress of Vienna.  As in A-Level special project essays interested.

books, new releases, reviews, Uncategorized

Review: The Rosie Effect

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I’ll start by saying that Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project is possibly my favourite book that I’ve read so far this year.  I’ve leant it to my sister, my mum and my dad – and they’ve all loved it.  Don Tillman is one of my new favourite fictional characters – and I loved his “journey” in The Rosie Project.  Thus it was with excitement mingled with trepidation that approached its sequel – The Rosie Effect.  I’ve had mixed results with sequels – so my overriding thought going into this was “please don’t have messed this up Mr Simsion”.

The Book picks up around 10 months after the end of The Rosie Project, with Don and Rosie married and living in New York.  One day as they’re sitting down to dinner, Rosie tells Don they have “something to celebrate” and suddenly he has a whole new host of challenges to negotiate on the road to fatherhood – and yes I know that’s a slight spoiler – but hey – this is one of the posters that Penguin are using:

Twitter poster for The Rosie Effect

So as you might imagine, the prospect of fatherhood poses a whole lot of questions for Don – who takes life very literally and isn’t great with social conventions.  I don’t want to say too much more than that, because I think anything else I add is going to be a bit of a spoiler!

The problem with a lot of sequels is that to create a plot, the author needs to create some drama in a relationship, and on this front the idea of a baby is a good one – it’s a logical next step for Don and Rosie and doesn’t feel forced.  And with the addition of adjusting to life in a new country where there are new rules to learn there is plenty of potential for drama.  However some of the things that happen to Don as a result of the pregnancy do seem a little far fetched and some of Rosie’s behaviour didn’t seem to sit quite right with the Rosie of the first book.

But I still enjoyed it – and I wonder if my reservations are because my hopes were so high.  Looking at it the other way though, would I have liked the book so much if I hadn’t read the first one?  I think probably not – because I needed the investment in the characters that I’d already built up.

So, is it as good as the Rosie Project?  No.  Is it a satisfying sequel for those of us who loved the original?  Well yes – I think so.  After a few rocky moments in the middle – and towards the end – I finished up happy with the outcome.  If you haven’t met Don and Rosie before – go and read the Rosie Project first – but, overall, he didn’t mess it up.

My copy of The Rosie Effect came from NetGalley in return for an honest review – but I suspect it’s going to be widely available from all the usual outlets – like Foyles or on Kindle or you can find it on my shelf at My Independent Bookshop.

Chick lit, fiction, new releases, Uncategorized

Review: The Honeymoon Hotel

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Today’s review is Hester Browne’s latest book The Honeymoon Hotel – which was out last week in the UK and I’m reviewing today because NetGalley was showing the US release date and I didn’t realise…

I’ll start by saying that Hester Browne creates the sort of characters and lives that I love.  I adored Melissa/Honey from the Little Lady Agency* and Evie from Vintage Girl (or Swept Off Her Feet depending on when you bought it) is a hoot.  Browne also creates worlds that I wish I could be a part of – a bit posh, filled with glamour and balls and parties but in a subtle, achievable way – you can believe that you too could be part of a world like that with a bit of luck and hard work (and better networking skills).

The Honeymoon Hotel is the story of Rosie, who at the start of the novel is unceremoniously left at the altar**, and her life as an events coordinator (mostly weddings) at a posh, glamorous, retro-in-a-Golden-Age-of-Hollywood way hotel in London.  She’s angling for a promotion, but her plans are thrown off track by the arrival of the owner’s son Joe to learn the business…

I *really* enjoyed The Honeymoon Hotel – once again, Browne has created a world that you believe in and characters that you buy into – I was rooting for Rosie all the way through and wanted it to turn out “right” for her.  I’m quite a shy person in real life and not good with crowds of strange people, but I found myself thinking “Oooh.  Hotel events planning, that sounds like so much fun” as I read about Rosie’s job at the hotel.  I loved the supporting characters as well, and although he gave me the pip at first, as I got to know him I really liked Joe.  I would liked to have find out more about his dad Lawrence (and what he was up to when he kept disappearing) and I wanted a little bit more comeuppance for one character who shall remain nameless in the interests of avoiding spoilers.

If you haven’t read any of Hester Browne’s books before, this might be an ideal place to start – a quirky and interesting set up, an engaging central character and a cast of characters that all seem perfectly real and plausible.  I could have read about them for twice as long – and could happily have coped with another chapter or an epilogue of what happened next.

My copy of The Honeymoon Hotel came from Netgalley in return for an honest review – although I’ll probably buy myself a copy of the paperback so that I can put it on an actual shelf next to her other books! You can buy Honeymoon Hotel from all the usual suspects like Foyles, Waterstones, on Kindle, if you’re in the US on Amazon.com or in a new twist, you can buy it through my page on My Independent Book Shop so a portion of the sale goes to an independent book shop near me – and where you can also buy other books that I’ve reviewed recently.  I’m hoping that Honeymoon Hotel will be widely available in the supermarkets as well and that it will do really well.

 

* It’s a measure of how much I love Hester Browne’s characters, voice and world that I’m still coming back despite my disappointment with the third Little Lady book.  Although I will say that the first book appeared at a time when I wanted a boyfriend who didn’t make me sleep in a tent for holidays or sneer at my theatre habits and in consequence I possibly over-identified and over-invested in the central relationship, and so the third book pushed me into a rant on the scale of certain elements of the True Blood fans at the end of that series.

**The regulars amongst you will notice that this is my second book in a week featuring a hotel with a worker who was jilted. You wait ages for a book about a hotel and then… etc

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Follow-on books

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Two things conspired to make me write this post this week – firstly the publication of Sophie Hannah’s Poirot continuation The Monogram Murders and secondly the arrival in the post of The Chalet Girls Grow up – a follow on to my favourite school story series that I’ve long hesitated over reading that a friend has lent me.

Why have I been worried about reading it?  Well the reviews on Amazon are pretty polarised shall we say, and I have a bad track record for dealing with outcomes that I don’t like in books.  As I’ve mentioned before, there’s one of my previous favourite books I can hardly bring myself to read any more after the author (in my opinion) messed up the ending to the final book in the series.  I’ve since “forgiven” the author – I still read and look forward to her new books, but I can’t get past the ending to the third book when reading the first.  So, I thought, why run the risk of ruining the Chalet School?

So what’s changed?  Well there have been hints recently that my attitudes are changing – dare I say maturing.  I read the Sebastian Faulks Jeeves and Wooster novel at the start of this year – and although I thought the writing style was pretty spot on, I wasn’t keen on the plot or on the outcome (if you know what I mean).  But it hasn’t stopped me returning to my “proper” Wodehouse books.   But I don’t love Bertie and his butler the way that I do the Chalet School.

I do love the Peter Wimsey books though – it’s not as long standing a passion, but if you set me going, I think I could recite large chunks of Busman’s Honeymoon and in the last week I’ve listened to the audio book of Strong Poison and the radio plays of Have His Carcase, Murder Must Advertise and Gaudy Night.  And a few years ago I read two the Jill Paton Walsh Wimsey continuations – Thrones, Dominations and The Attenbury Emeralds. The first I thought was ok, if more sordid than Wimsey novels usually are and more packed with returning characters, the second I was disappointed in – I haven’t read the third or the fourth.  But it (clearly) hasn’t stopped me loving the originals.  There was nothing in there that ruined my enjoyment of Peter’s other cases.

I’ve also recently read my first Chalet School “fill-in” title (lent to me by the same friend who’s sent me Grow Up), that’s a book by a different author that fills in a gap in the series. I quite liked the plot, I didn’t think it was entirely “right” but it didn’t bother me enough to stop me from finishing it – and I’d read some more if I get a chance to.  I’ve also read really quite a lot of Pride and Prejudice follow-ons/retellings – some that I’ve hated (Emma Tennant’s Pemberley) and some which I’ve enjoyed (P D James’ Death Comes To Pemberley) and I’ve another (Jo Baker’s Longbourn) waiting on the pile – and they haven’t dimmed my liking for the original.  In fact some of them, have given me a good laugh – although that probably wasn’t what the author intended.

So – I think I’m prepared to risk both the Poirot continuation and the Chalet Girls Grow Up. If you find me in a puddle weeping, you’ll know that I’ve completely miscalculated and have Ruined It All For Ever.

Feel free to share your follow-on novel stories and recommendations in the comments – are there any others that you think I should definitely read?

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Booker Shortlist

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Back in July I posted about the Booker Longlist and the chances of the short list increasing my hit rate for award winning/nominated authors – well the results are in. The short list is:

Joshua Ferris -To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Richard Flanagan – The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Karen Joy Fowler – We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Howard Jacobson – J

Neel Mukherjee – The Lives of Others

Ali Smith – How to be Both

And it’s good news!  I’ve read Karen Joy Fowler’s Jane Austen Book Club, so I’ve read something by one of the authors.  This is an improvement on last year when I hadn’t (and still haven’t) read anything by any of the authors on the list.  This still means that I can’t predict who’ll win, or converse knowledgeably about the nominees (except to know who’s nominated) but, hey, baby steps, baby steps…

books, Uncategorized

Liebster Awards

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Thank you very much to Amanda at ChocolatePages for nominating me for a Liebster Award – and sorry it’s taken me so long to post this.  I’d never heard of them before – so I had to have a google to find out about more.  There appear to be a few variants of the rules, but the rules I was nominated under are:

1. Thank and link back to the blogger who nominated you.

2. Write 11 random facts about yourself.

3. Answer the 11 questions you have been asked from the blogger who nominated you.

4. Nominate 11 bloggers with under 200 followers and set them 11 questions to answer.

So here are your random facts about me:

1. I’m a journalist in my day job

2. I really don’t like violent films or horror movies – The Boy had to stop Pulp Fiction half way through because I was so upset.  This surprises people because as part of the aforementioned day (and sometimes night) job I sometimes have to watch really horrible videos.

3. I have a large collection of Chalet School books – old paperbacks and new reprinted (unedited) ones from Girls Gone By. They were one of my favourite series when I was younger – and I’m still working to complete my set!

4. My first job was a bell-ringer at church weddings – £5 per wedding (back in the late 90s) was much better than the hourly rate in a shop at the time!

5. I’m a massive theatre fan and write about it here – although I don’t post on that as often as I do over here, books being somewhat cheaper than the theatre!

6. I lived in France for a year when I was at university – I was at university in Tours

7. As a child I had an obsession with Queen Victoria.  I used to play pretend games where I was her.  Or her daughter Victoria.  This means I (still) know some really random stuff about her and the royal family.  Like the fact that Edward VIII’s name was actually Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David and that he was always known as David.

8. My Granny loved Mills and Boon books.  When I was about 12 I had a phase of borrowing them and reading them.  I thought they were like Sweet Valley High, but with sex.

9. My favourite movie – ever – is Pillow Talk. Although this trailer does it no justice at all.

10. I’m a massive motorsports fan – Sunday afternoons during the season will find me camped on the sofa watching Formula One or MotoGP.

11. I don’t really have a claim to fame – I’m very jealous of people who do.  The best I have is that my Grandad stood as a candidate to become an MP in the 1960s.  He didn’t win.

And my 11 answers:

1. Sweet or savoury? Savoury – especially anything involving cheese

2. What made you start blogging? A need for more than my twitter account to express myself?! Seriously though, Verity Reads Books came about as part of a concerted effort to reduce the to-read pile – I thought if I was telling the world about it, I’d be less likely to ignore the backlog.  It hasn’t always worked.

3. Cats or dogs? Cats

4. Who is your favourite author? This is really tough for me, because there are so many people that I love reading.  I think either Dorothy L Sayers or Terry Pratchett – because I have one or other of their books as an audiobook on my headphones almost all the time and that’s got to mean something right?! Apart from that, I buy everything that Katie Fforde, Trisha Ashley, Laurie Graham and Christina Jones publish.

5. Tell me one interesting fact about you? I used to be a breakfast sidekick on a local radio station.  I started off as the newsreader, and ended up spending the whole show in the studio chattering away.

6. Who would be your 3 ideal dinner guests, (dead, alive, famous or not)? Doris Day, Freddie Mercury and Cecil Beaton.  Who knows if they’d get on or not…

7. What would you serve them? My speciality (and the one dish I’ve never messed up so far) is Mary Berry’s Chicken Taleggio – originally from her book Cook Up A Feast but now widely available on the web.  Here for example.  So that, then a crumble and a cheese board probably – because I’d hate to do something that didn’t turn out right!

8. What’s your all time favourite tv show? Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Particularly the High School seasons.  Every time I watch an episode I remember how much of my vocabulary comes from there – and how it shaped my teenage years. I used to try and wear my hair like Buffy’s (style not colour) was during Becoming Part II *all the time*.  I can still quote BTVS extensively…

9. What’s your ideal date? A night out at the theatre with a nice meal beforehand – something My Boy has got the hang of now – usually arrange the theatre – he buys the dinner! A Dream date would be going to see some Formula One or MotoGP – The Boy took me to the MotoGP at Silverstone last year and it was amazing.

10. Who is your celebrity crush? Oooh.  Tough. Patrick Dempsey maybe – not only is he hot and in one of my favourite shows, but he’s a racing driver in his spare time. I also like Benedict Cumberbatch – the various series of Cabin Pressure are also on frequent rotation on my mp3) and I still have a massive soft spot for David Boreanz and James Marsters from Buffy.

11. Tell me 2 of your favourite bloggers? The first blog I ever encountered is still one of my favourites – and that’s Dooce.  I’ve been reading her since just after Leta was born (and she’s 10 now) – which is longer than I’ve known some of my best friends!  I also love The mighty mighty Monkseal whose blogs on various reality shows are so funny they’ll make you cry. I nearly put him as one of my 11 – but he’s not a well-kept enough secret to be under 200 followers!

Here are my 11 questions to be answered:

1. What was your first job?

2. What’s your claim to fame?

3. What was your favourite book when you were a child?

4. What’s your favourite film?

5. Who was your teenage crush?

6. What’s your embarrassing childhood secret?

7. What’s your favourite TV show?

8. What was your first pet

9. Have you ever lived abroad (aka not the country you come from) if so – where

10. Favourite Sweet?

11. And is there one book you think everyone should read?

And my bloggers and this is where I had problems – so it’s not the full 11 I’m afraid.  I didn’t want to use anyone who I don’t actually read – and I found a lot of the blogs I read didn’t fit the criteria.  In fact it’s a shameful three – but I’ve had this post sitting in draft form all ready to go bar the bloggers for nearly three weeks.  So as it was starting to look rude, I thought I ought to swallow my pride, admit my failings and post as is so to speak.

1. Nutley One

2. A Small Mind at the Theatre

3. The Lovely Emma Louise from EmmaLouBookBlog (I apologise if you’ve done this before and I couldn’t spot it)

So there you go.  I promise I’ll try and do better in future.

new releases, reviews, Uncategorized

Review: American Blonde

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A busy week here on the blog – because a lot of my advance copies come out this week!  Today I’m doing American Blonde by Jennifer Niven (published this very day) and tomorrow is my favourite book of the month so far (and there isn’t much reading time left in July) – What Would Mary Berry Do?

So I discovered a little way into this book that there have been three previous books featuring the leading character Velva Jean, which I of course haven’t read.  And that did explain the start which seemed to plunge you right into Velva Jean’s life without giving you much detail about what is clearly a fairly complicated back story!  But that said, I don’t think you need to have read the previous stories to enjoy this one – I haven’t (duh) and I still liked it.

Velva Jean Hart returns to the US after serving in the WASP as a pilot in Europe.  She’s had some adventures there (about which I’m hazy and I wouldn’t want to give away anyway) and is a war heroine.  She’s promptly snapped up by Hollywood giant MGM after the publicity surrounding her return.  At the studio, she joins up with one of her former WASP colleagues –  who is a film star – and navigates the tricky waters of stardom, with a new name, a new image and a studio who wants to control every aspect of her life.  But when she witnesses a suspicious death and starts to investigate, she discovers how far the powers-that-be will go to maintain Hollywood’s perfect image.

I picked this on Net Galley because I have a bit of a fascination with studio-system-era Hollywood – and it really delivered.  I loved the studio intrigue, the cover-ups and the machinations, although with such a huge cast of characters – many of whom had stage names – I did occasionally find it a little hard to keep track of who was who. I did like the leads, although I felt like I was missing out a little bit on the back story to some of them, which would have explained why she preferred one suitor rather than the one that I liked best!

But this is a really good read – and if you’re a fan of Hollywood’s Golden Age there’s plenty for you here, but equally, I think the murder mystery is good enough to hold your interest even if you’re not fascinated by the machinations of the studio system.  Once I’ve got the to-read pile more under control I may well try and go back and read some of Velva Jean’s previous adventures.

American Blonde is available through Foyles and Amazon although I can’t see it as an e-book in the UK.  My copy was provided by Net Galley in return for an honest review.

fiction, new releases, reviews, Thriller, Uncategorized

Book Review: A Delicate Truth by John le Carré

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Disclosure: I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway – not that that influences what I write…

So, as you may have noticed from the previous posts, I’m not a big thriller reader.  Detective or mystery stories, yes, lots of them and preferably set in any period not now (I’m not a CSI girl).  I have read some John le Carré before – because before watching the film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I wanted to have read the book – to see if it was going to be too violent for me to cope with (for my post about the contradictions of my job and my aversion to violence in films see this post on my other blog).  I enjoyed it so much that I not only watched the film and most of the Alec Guiness TV adaptation, but also read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – which is also really good.  I’ve been keeping my eyes out for more of his Smiley series at the library – but hadn’t read any of his newer books* – hence my entry into the Goodreads giveaway (despite the enormous size of the to-read pile) and I was really pleased when I won a copy.

A Delicate Truth
Paperback copy of A Delicate Truth by John le Carré

I’m always very careful not to give away plot spoilers in my synopsis, and it’s quite hard with A Delicate Truth to say much about the plot without saying too much, so I’ve taken my cue for this from the Goodreads synopsis.  The story centres around a top, top secret counter-terror operation in Gibraltar – what happened, how it was set up and whether it was the success that it was meant to have been.

The intertwining plots are carefully and meticulously constructed – I never thought that I knew what was coming next and at the end I still had questions (in a good way) and wanted to know more.  The characters are believable – in some cases horribly so – and you really can imagine that these events could possibly have happened – although you hope fervently that they haven’t.

Le Carré still has the knack for describing the workings of government in a way that feels real, and in addition, in this book he turns his focus on the world of private defence contractors.  I’ve read a lot of news articles about this new aspect of the military world and I can’t claim to know first hand what any of them are really like, but it’s clear that the author isn’t keen, shall we say, on this latest development.  And if anything near of the shenanigans that go on in this book have gone on in real life (and I devoutly hope they haven’t) then he’s got reason.

This is an exciting and page-turning book – which I gobbled up in a day’s commute and an evening’s reading. I would recommend it to anyone who has read his earlier works or people who like a thriller at the cinema and want a book for their summer holiday.  I’m not surprised this has done so well – I’ll certainly be passing it on to the thriller readers in my family (my dad and The Boy).

A Delicate Truth by John le Carré can be found on Kindle or as a proper book all over the place (although my link is Foyles, for reasons previously explained) and you can also see more reviews on Goodreads.

* I nearly put “contemporary books” but then I remembered that the Smiley books were written at the time that they were set in, it’s just me that’s reading them now!