Category: Book of the Week

Book of the Week, memoirs, new releases, non-fiction

Book of the Week: I Shop, Therefore I Am

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Lets just take a moment for the fact that my pick this week is a book that came out last week so I am actually topical and sort of on time for once. Lets mark it, because it happens less often than it ought to, considering the number of advance copies I have of things!

Cover of I Shop, Therefore I A,m

I Shop, Therefore I Am is Mary Portas’s second memoir – I haven’t read the first, but I think this picks up where the first one ends – with Mary starting a new job in charge of window displays at Harvey Nichols. During her time there (which starts in the late 1980s), it transformed from a department store somewhere mostly patronised by older ladies from the Home Counties and in the shadow of their neighbour down the road Harrods, to a headline making store at the cutting edge of the fashion industry.

I grew up watching Absolutely Fabulous (not quite when if first came out, but not *that* long after that) and part of the joy of reading this is getting to see the impact that that show had on the store. But it’s also fascinating to see the mechanics of how the shop worked at a time which (in hindsight) was basically the heyday of the high street. I worked in retail for my first Saturday job was in a clothing store, but the behind the scenes of that was nothing like this – I was at a much lower level but also the clientele was very, very different. I also really liked Mary Portas’s writing style and her voice. She balances the day to day of what she was doing with fun gossipy insights into high fashion and celebrity. And she also seems incredibly normal and down to earth with it that it’s easy to forget that she was moving in really high powered circles until she suddenly mentions how upset they were when Princess Diana died because they all saw her in the store all the time, or when she gets Naomi Campbell to do her instore fashion show.

This is a really good read that would work whether you remember the time that Mary is talking about or not, but I think you’ll get different things out of it depending on whether you remember the time before internet shopping or not! It would also be a great Christmas book for someone who is interested in fashion.

My copy came from NetGalley, but it came out last week and I’m expecting to see it in all the bookshops ahead of the festive rush, especially because it made a bunch of the anticipated book lists earlier in the year. And of course it’s also in Kindle and Kobo.

Book of the Week, new releases, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Entitled

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I mean, I’d be shocked if any of you are surprised by today’s pick if you saw yesterday’s reading list, because I am somewhat predictable BUT this really lived up to the hype and is worth reading.

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York is a joint biography of Prince Andrew, Duke of York and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson. It’s written by Andrew Lownie, whose previous book was The Traitor King (which I also read on a holiday!) but has also written about The Mountbattens and Guy Burges. Lownie says in the introduction that he asked the Duke and Duchess to participate in the book – who then tried to prevent the book from happening. He says he approached more than three thousand people as part of the process of writing this book, of whom only around a tenth responded. All of which is to say that he wants you to know that he’s really tried to get the whole picture about the couple. It’s a joint biography but it’s also a look at the way that the couple remain incredibly intertwined nearly 20 years after their divorce. Andrew of course was forced to retire from public life after his disastrous Newsnight interview in 2019, where he tried (and failed) to answer questions about his relationship with the paedophile former financier Jeffry Epstein.

Now you may have seen the headlines generated first by the serialisation ahead of publication, and then the think pieces afterwards about what it means for the future of the couple. Or of course the headlines this week when Sarah Ferguson was dropped by a series of charities after an email from her to Epstein emerged from after the time when she said she had cut all contact with him. And you may think that given all that, what is the point of reading the book, surely all the best bits are already out there.

Well. Yes, the biggest revelations are already out there, but I think reading the book really brings home the scale and volume of it all. And although a lot of the focus of scandal in recent years has been on him (and indeed the serialisation headlines), her behaviour is worth reading about too – according to this she’s a charming people person and great sales person, locked in a cycle of spending, debt and then grift and deals to try and bring it round to a point where she then repeats the pattern.

In The Traitor King, Lownie made a persuasive case that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were active and willing participants in the Nazi intrigues that surrounded them as part of a concerted effort to benefit themselves and improve their positions and I think it changed significantly the way that the couple are viewed. This isn’t changing the way that the Duke of York is perceived – it’s putting all the pieces together and adding in the background information to really cement the idea that he’s up to his neck in scandals around sex and money. And between the two of them – in Lownie’s telling – they present a big challenge for the British monarchy to deal with at a time when there are less and less “working” Royals and also perhaps less public fondness for the institution as a whole.

I bought my copy of Entitled at the airport but you should be able to get this basically everywhere – as long as they haven’t run out of copies. And at Birmingham last week, they only had copies in one of the bookshops (and as I said on Saturday I didn’t manage to get it in any of my pictures!) and not many of them. But I’ve seen it in any bookshop of any size that I’ve been into since early August, and it’s obviously in Kindle and Kobo and audiobook too – although those e-versions have already had a edit, which is a good reminder to us all that ebook files are changeable, and your hard copies are not – once you’ve bought the original version I mean.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever

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At this point I can’t tell if this is going to be a shock for you if you saw the list yesterday? I mean I feel it probably shouldn’t be because it was only Sunday that I wrote about how much I love books about behind the scenes in hollywood and this is a book about how a somewhat legendary movie got made.

If you don’t know what Spinal Tap is, I’m not sure where you’ve been, but they’re a fake rock band created by Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, and This is Spinal Tap was the first mockumentary. It’s the thing that all the others are based on and the source of various pop culture reference to the point where if you see it now it’s hard to imagine how different it was.

Most of this book is the history of how the film got made and what happened next – when a fictional band started become real – from appearing at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert to putting out albums. Rob Reiner has done most of the work on this part of the book and it is to tie in with the fortieth birthday of the movie (last year), the fact that the quartet have got the rights back to the movie and property again and that there’s a sequel which is in movie theatres now. We can gloss over whether the sequel was good idea or not (the reviews suggest maybe not) but it’s a really fun read to see how the movie got made – but also what a collaborative effort it was and what a pivotal role in all of the stars lives.

Now flip the book over and the other end is a mock oral history of the band written by the quartet in their characters. This has some funny moments, but it’s not as good as the other end is. But it’s also less than half the length of the other bit so it doesn’t outstay its welcome!

My copy came from Big Green Books who look like they may have a few signed ones left, but I think it’s going to be pretty easy to find normal copies in the shops if you want it. It’s on Kindle and Kobo too, but priced accordingly considering it’s a hardback release. There’s also an audiobook read/performed by the four of them. And if you haven’t watched This is Spinal Tap, you really should!

Book of the Week, cozy crime, detective, first in series, mystery, reviews

Book of the Week: The Last Supper

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It’s been more than a month since I picked a murder mystery for book of the week. Can you believe it? I can’t – and even when I went back and checked I still sort of didn’t believe it. But it’s true, so who says there’s no variety in my reading. And there’s more murder mysteries coming tomorrow in the Quick Reviews, but first let’s talk about The Last Supper.

Prudence Bulstrode is a retired TV chef. But when one of her former rivals is found dead in the garden of a house where she was catering a shooting weekend, Prudence is called in to replace her. Farleigh Manor is notorious for an unsolved murder from a century ago, but when Prudence arrives she is soon convinced that Deirdre’s death wasn’t a tragic accident but murder. And while her granddaughter, who she brought along to keep her out of getting into (even more) trouble starts investigating the old murder, Prudence sets out to solve the new one.

Rosemary Shrager is a chef who has been a semi regular on British TV for about 20 years now and before that she ran her own catering company, so the setting for this falls very much into her area of expertise and it shows. I personally have never been on a shooting weekend, but it very much felt like she had and all is those details really worked. I also found this quite humorous – with the tension and generation gap between Prudence and Suki, but couldn’t work whether that was deliberate or not. But does it matter if it was or wasn’t? The only disappointment to me was the eventual solution to the murder, which without giving spoilers about what precisely happened, I didn’t quite feel like the reader had all of the pieces for it to work as well as I wanted it to.

But it was a fun read that I finished in an afternoon and evening and I will definitely keep an eye out for the sequel (there are two now) to see if the humour was deliberate!

I bought my copy of The Last Supper secondhand and I’ve seen it in the shops fairly regularly. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, Children's books

Book of the Week: The Wombles at Work

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Happy Tuesday everyone and I hope that those of you who had a bank holiday yesterday had an excellent day. This week’s pick is a nostalgic trip down memory lane for me, because I read several of the Wombles books when I was at primary school, so when I saw this in the same edition as the school library had at a book sale a few months ago, I snapped it up.

This is the third book in the series of children’s books about the Wombles, furry animals who live in burrows and clean up the mess that humans leave behind them. In The Wombles at Work, they are living in Hyde Park after being forced to move from Wimbledon Common. The overarching framing device for the book is that the Wombles are competing to come up with the best ways to fight pollution. Within that, the different strands of the plot sees the different Wombles trying to solve the various problems that they come across. So for example Tomsk saves a swan from choking to death on a net, a music festival takes place in the park and leaves lots of rubbish behind it, Madame Cholet is struggling with restrictions on how long she can have her stove on every day because the cooking can be smelt above ground and there are mysterious notes being left for the burrow.

When I bough this I wasn’t sure if this was one of the ones that I had already read or not, but in reading it, I realised that I hadn’t and that was also a delightful treat. I went off and had a look at the book summaries and I have definitely read the previous book where the Wombles had to move form Hyde Park, and fifth book the Wombles around the World where some of the burrow are sent around the world to find out more about other countries and other Wombles. I think I’ve read the book where they move back to Wimbledon common, but I’m not 100% sure. And I have the audiobook of the first one too because it’s read by Bernard Cribbins, which I listened to years ago and now want to listen to again! It’s easy to think that the problem of pollution and people wanting to care for the environment is a new thing, but when you go back and read the Wombles books – written in about eight years from the late 1960s through the 1970s, you realise that things really haven’t changed a lot. All of which means I think it would still be a great story to read as a middle grader today, even if the references to the Old Queen are more likely to be read as references to Elizabeth II rather than Victoria!

These were out of print for years and years which may explain that – my school library was the only place I ever remember seeing these and I’ve never come across them anywhere else before, and I suspect they may still be hard to find in the shops but they are at least on Kindle now.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: A Star is Bored

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Following on from The Celebrants two Tuesdays ago, today I’m writing about A Star is Born, which I discovered is written by Steven Rowley’s husband when I read the thanks for The Celebrants. And as I had on the pile already of course I went on to read that. And so here we are.

Charlie needs a new job and a gig as personal assistant to Kathi Kannon, an iconic Hollywood actress who played a character he had a figurine of as a child. He’s searching for meaning in his life and a way of moving on past his difficult childhood, she needs someone to organise her chaotic life. She’s impulsive and carefree, and everything that Charlie is not. She’s also Hollywood royalty with mental health and addiction issues and an octogenarian mother who was also an actress who lives next door.

Now if this sounds like Carrie Fisher (and her mum Debbie Reynolds) that might be because Bryon Lane worked as Fisher’s assistant for three years and says that that job inspired the novel. Now you can draw your own conclusions about how much of Kathi is Carrie and I can see from the reviews on Goodreads that it’s a polarising one. And if you’ve read any of Fisher’s memoirs that may also colour your opinions.

For me, Kathi’s hedonistic devil may care manic presence was there as a foil to Charlie’s own issues. He’s totally lost and allows the job to consume him and become his identity. It’s all amped up to eleven and Kathi’s antics seem purposefully extreme and exaggerated so that the reader is often thinking “come on Charlie, surely this is the thing that will make you wake up”. The blurb calls it hilarious, but a lot of the humour is too much towards the cringe for me, and I definitely wanted Charlie to pick himself up and grow some self worth well before he did. But by the end I was pleased with the journey that he had gone on and the person that had come out the other side.

Like The Celebrants, this one isn’t on Kindle and is going to be a special order, to the point where it’s not even listed on the Waterstones website. I’m not sure it’s a spend loads of money to get it type buy, but if it should come your way at a reasonable price it’s an interesting read. And I’d happy read another book by Byron Lane if that came my way.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: The Art of Catching Feelings

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Happy Tuesday everyone, I finally made a start on the Alicia Thompson backlog last week and here I am reporting back!

When Daphne goes to a baseball game days after she’s signed her divorce papers, she’s doing it because her ex wanted the ticket. So she gets drunk and then she heckles a player and seems to make him cry. The moment goes viral and she reaches out to him on social to apologise… except in all the drafting and redrafting she edits out the bit where she says she was the heckler. And so when Chris unexpectedly replies to her message it all gets complicated really fast. Chris is struggling with his own issues and finds himself strangely drawn to his new online friend. But how long can Daphne keep her secret and what happens when he finds out?

Let’s get the big problem over with right away: yes she’s basically catfishing him. And we’re meant to be fine with it – or at least get over it by the time it’s all resolved because: romance reasons. And so your mileage on this one may vary depending on your tolerance for that. I was mostly OK with it, but it took far too long for Daphne to come clean with Chris and I think there were ways that the book could have worked better if the dual identity situation had been resolved sooner.

And I realise that that sounds like I didn’t enjoy this, but I actually did – I read it in about 24 hours – and I liked the banter and the baseball setting and the development of Daphne’s character. I just wanted it to be better in a couple of areas. I wanted to see Daphne’s ex getting his comeuppance for his awful behaviour – which would have helped the reader understand her a bit better (and thus help with the deception thing) – which could just have been as simple as him being really annoyed at the success she sees as part of the plot.

I’ve seen this in Big Foyles and the Waterstones with the romance sections, so it should be fairly easy to get hold of this one (compared to some of my choices I mean) but it’s also on Kobo and Kindle.

Happy Reading!

Authors I love, Book of the Week, fiction

Book of the Week: The Celebrants

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A diversion away from mystery and romance into “proper” fiction today. And this has been on my shelf since the paperback came out in February last year, but given that I had a Very Bad Year last year when it comes to people dying it has taken a while for me to be in the right place to read it, much as I love Stephen Rowley.

The Celebrants follows a group of friends, who made a pact in college to throw each other “living funerals”, after one of their group dies. Nearly 30 years later, the five of them are still in touch, but rather than the funerals making them think of all the reasons life is worth living, all they seem to do is make them remember what could have been. But one of the group has just had a diagnosis that there’s no coming back for, and the whole group will need to face their past head on.

As I said, I had a bad year last year on the losing people front, and wasn’t really in a place to want to be reading about impending death in a friendship group, given that I was living through precisely that. But I’m in a better place at the moment (or at least a more resilient one!) and so I went in. And it’s really good – it will remind you about the friends you’ve made over the years, how the friendships you made with people you met when you were young can sometimes survive all the changes that come with the years and still understand you better than almost anyone else and also that you never do really feel any older than you were just after you graduated college.

This was a lovely read – and although it made me tear up at the end, it was worth it (if that makes sense). I really like Rowley’s writing style and his characters are always so real – no one is perfect, they’re all three dimensional, flawed people. The narrative moves around through the years between their various funerals as different things happen in their lives and that really worked for me too and broke up the potential sadness nicely.

Annoyingly, this one isn’t available on Kindle (and nor is the Guncle sequel which is a right pain) so you’re going to have to get this in a physical edition. I’ve seen the Guncle in the Big Foyles, but not this one, so it may also be a special order. But it is worth it.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, new releases, reviews, romance

Book of the Week: Finders Keepers

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It’s Tuesday and I’m using this week’s BotW to report back in on the new Sarah Adler, which came out back at the end of June, but which I bought in paperback which hampered my reading of it what with having started it right before I went to Ghana.

Quentin and Nina were best friends when they were at school, right up until they weren’t. But now they’re both back in their home town for the summer and living next door to each other again. Nina was expecting to be moving in with her boyfriend and getting ready for the new term as a professor. Instead she’s single, homeless and jobless. Quentin is back from Europe and also newly single and suggests resurrecting the treasure hunt that that they were trying to solve that last summer when they fell out. Surely after nearly two decades they can figure out what went wrong that summer – in the hunt and between the two of them?

Is it a second chance romance if they weren’t ever really together the first time and they just had massive crushes on each other? Because that is what we have here. It should also be noted that I absolutely loved Mrs Nash’s Ashes, and really liked Happy Medium despite the presence of ghosts and fake mediums. This is making the hat trick of BotWs for Adler’s first three novels but I liked this the least. But that’s because it turns out two of the main things it’s doing are not really my favourite tropes: this has got an incredibly oblivious heroine with anxiety problems that make me stressed and the two of them need to use their words more. If they had done that then they wouldn’t be in the mess they are and I wouldn’t find it so stressful to read and could probably deal with the cringey bits of their treasure hunt better.

But I’m still recommending it because I know that this is very much a me thing and I know other people are going to really love this. Yes I’m hoping adler’s next one goes back towards the vibes of Mrs Nash’s Ashes and gives more sunshine-but-quirky but given where we are in romance at the moment with a lot of college age pairings and early 20s heroines who are learning to adult I will still take it. Because that’s not where I am in my reading life at the moment and you just need to look at my post from The Works on Saturday to start seeing why that’s a problem right now!

I’ve got this in paperback so I’m hoping it will be one of my easier picks to get hold of and of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too for £2.99 at the moment (but who knows how long that will last given that it’s nearly the end of the month.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, detective, first in series

Book of the Week: Next Stop, Murder

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A slightly strange week of reading last week due to the trip, so it’s been a strange one to pick something today, but in the end I did come up with something!

Next Stop, Murder is set in a town in the Adirondack Mountains. Celia has moved to Blue Lake with her daughter Katie after a tragedy in New York. Celia’s taken over an ice cream shop, which is a big change from her previous life as a NYPD forensics expert. But when a body is found on a tour bus, Celia finds herself drawn into the investigation.

This did feel very much like a first book in series because there’s a lot of set up work being done alongside the murder plot. It’s got an interesting narrative style though, with the narration moving around as well as diary entries from Katie, and articles from the local press. The mystery isn’t that complicated, but it worked well and I enjoyed the book enough that I’ll be checking out the second in the series to see if those first-book symptoms have cleared up.

This one is in Kindle Unlimited, so it’s not on Kobo (at the moment at least) and I suspect the paperback that’s listed on Amazon is a print on demand one, so I wouldn’t expect it to be in the shops. But if you’re in KU at the moment it’s an easy way to pass a couple of hours.

Happy Reading!