Category: week in books

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: August 17 – August 23

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So some progress on the still reading list, but maybe not as much as I wanted. I had a bit of decision making fatigue at the end of the week and over the weekend and found it hard to pick a book and stick to it. Hey ho, it seems to be my new normal during the quarantimes to be honest.

Read:

We Germans by Alexander Starritt*

Bones in the Wilderness by George Bellairs

The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper

V for Victory by Lissa Evans*

To Helvetica and Back by Paige Shelton

A Question of Holmes by Brittany Cavallaro

Blue Rosette by Pamela MacGregor-Morris

Started:

Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi*

Fall into Death by Emily Toll

Real Men Knit by Kwana Johnson

Toll the Bell for Murder by George Bellairs

Still reading:

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward*

Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

The Miseducation of Evie Epworth by Matson Taylor*

Still not counting. Still don’t care.

Bonus photo: My lovely sunflowers. So bright,so friendly, such a mood lifter.

A large bunch of sunflowers in a jug

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley

Book of the Week, crime, new releases

Book of the Week: The Moonflower Murders

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A productive week in reading last week as you can see from the list. I finished the new Vinyl Detective, which was great – but I think you need to be reading those in order. Check out my review of Written in Dead Wax – which is the first in the series – and as the series has gone on, the women have become more well-rounded and developed which I think maybe means I was being insightful?! Anyway today’s BotW is also new fiction and this is actually out on Thursday this week, so for once I’m ahead of time!

Cover of The Moonflower Murders

Retired publisher Susan Ryeland has a new life in Greece, where she is running a small hotel with her boyfriend. But when a couple at the hotel tell her about a murder that happened at their hotel on the day of their daughter’s wedding, she is intrigued. And then when she finds out that the daughter is now missing after saying that the wrong man was convicted and that she’s worked it out because of one of the books that Susan published, she returns to the UK to try and find out what has happened. Her investigation takes her from London to Suffolk and to the pages of 1950s Devon.

This is the sequel to Magpie Murders, and although I think this will work better if you’ve read the first book, I actually liked this more. Like the first book, it features a book-within-a-book and it’s really clever and super meta. It’s also super hard to explain in a review. In Magpie Murders, Susan found herself investigating the death of one of her authors who was famous for writing a series of novels about a 1950s detective called Atticus Pünd. The books were homages to Golden Age crime, but the author – Alan Conway – hated writing them (but no one wanted to publish his other stuff) so he wove in references to people that he knew and events in real life to entertain himself. In Magpie Murders the book within the book is Conway’s final Atticus Pünd novel, in Moonflower Murders, it is an earlier book in the series, which turns out to be similarly peppered with clues. It’s a really interesting reading experience. It’s easy to get lost in the Pünd story and forget that you’re meant to be reading it because Susan is reading it looking for clues to the “real” case. The Pünd novel is a satisfying mystery – and so is the “real” mystery that Susan is looking into. It’s such a fun and also mind bending reading experience.

My copy of the Moonflower Murders came from NetGalley, but it’s out on Thursday in hardback, Kindle and Kobo. Horowitz is a big name, so I’d expect you to be able to find physical copies of this fairly easily in bookstores and maybe the supermarkets.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: August 10 – August 16

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Another week, another post where the still reading list is quite long. I am working on it, but as with several other points in the Quarantimes I’m finding it hard to concentrate at times, and move towards lighter books with guaranteed resolutions.

Read:

The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

Death March for Penelope Blow by George Bellairs*

The Vinyl Detective: Low Action by Andrew Cartmel

The Next Always by Nora Roberts

Welcome to Moonlight Harbor by Sheila Roberts

Sweet Home Montana by Shann McPherson*

Ice Cream Lover by Jackie Lau

Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things by Robin Muir

The Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz*

Started:

We Germans by Alexander Starritt*

To Helvetica and Back by Paige Shelton

The Miseducation of Evie Epworth by Matson Taylor*

Still reading:

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward*

Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

A Question of Holmes by Brittany Cavallaro

Still not counting.

Bonus photo: I give you summer in the United Kingdom: at the start of the week in the mid 30s, by the end of the week – this…

rain in a park

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley

Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: Daring and the Duke

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The well-informed may have spotted the final books in two series on my reading list yesterday. The final book in the Wells and Wong series – which sees the girls take a Nile cruise – and the last in Sarah MacLean’s Bareknuckle Bastards series. This week’s BotW is the latter – because it’s an epic grovelling book and that turned out to be exactly what I needed last week.

Paperback copy of Daring and the Duke

The Daring of the name is Grace, queen of Covent Garden and the Duke is Ewan, who betrayed her when they were children and who Grace’s brothers have been hiding her from ever since. Ewan has been searching for Grace for a decade – and was told that she was dead – and has been busy trying to ruin her brothers in revenge ever since. But now he knows she’s alive and he’s determined to win her back and make her his duchess. If you haven’t read the first three books in the series, that already sounds like a lot of grovelling is going to be needed, but if you have read Wicked and the Wallflower and Brazen and the Beast it feels going into this like it will be impossible to redeem Ewan. Which is what makes this book so intriguing.

And it mostly delivers. I think if MacLean didn’t have such strong form for series ending novels I would have been even more enthusiastic but  it’s not quite as brilliant a redemption as MacLean’s previous epic-grovel series ender Day of the Duchess or the big reveal general epicness of Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover – which came off the back of a cliffhanger moment so big that you almost couldn’t believe it had been done. But Grace is a great character (also her business organisation is a lot of fun) and peeling back the layers and finding out what happened to Ewan is very satisfying.  We continue to be in difficult times and a bit of escapist reading in early Victorian London with plenty of grovelling as well as actual boxing makes for a strangely calming experience. Or at least it did for me.

I’ve written before that I’m trying not to save up books by my favourite authors anymore because my tastes change and I end up missing out on books that I would have enjoyed at the time but that now don’t float my boat. And previously this would probably have been a book that I would have saved for a time of need, but to be honest all of coronavirus life is pretty much a Time of Need, so I wasn’t going to risk saving it. I’ve also had a recent run of disappointing reads from new books by authors who I usually love, which means it was also a real relief that this was so good and did what I was hoping it would do.

Coronavirus also means that there was no Sarah MacLean meet up for me to go to this year, so instead I treated myself to a signed copy of Daring and the Duke  from Sarah MacLean’s local bookstore in Brooklyn, Word bookstore – but you should be able to get hold of the UK edition (which looks substantially more ethereal and floaty than these books are) from your usual purveyor of books (I can’t promise it’ll be in stock though, it might be an order) or in Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

Bonus picture: it was a sunny week outside and there was also a bit of a sunshine-y theme in the look of my reading!

Copies of Daring and the Duke, Death Sets Sail and The Vinyl Detective

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: August 3 – August 9

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Such a hot week. Sometimes all I wanted to do was find a cool area and read. But I also had a fairly busy week, so that wasn’t actually always possible…

Read:

The Clutter Corpse by Simon Brett

Daring and the Duke by Sarah MacLean

Paper Girls Vol 5 by Brian K Vaughan et al

Dance Away with Me by Susan Elizabeth Philips

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Death Sets Sail by Robin Stevens

Murder Makes Mistakes by George Bellairs

Started:

The Vinyl Detective: Low Action by Andrew Cartmel

Dead March for Penelope Blow by George Bellairs*

The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

Still reading:

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward*

Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things by Robin Muir

A Question of Holmes by Brittany Cavallaro

Still not counting, still don’t care.

Bonus photo: here’s one of my cousin’s cocker spaniel puppies. It’s the most adorable photo I have this week, maybe this year.

A cocker spaniel puppy

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley

Book of the Week, new releases, Young Adult

Book of the Week: The Great Godden

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The mini-reviews are coming up tomorrow, in the meantime, this week’s Book of the Week is a beach/holiday read suggestion for those of you are taking some time off work in August – whether you’re hanging out in a hammock in your garden like me or actually going somewhere away from home.

Cover of The Great Godden

So Meg Rosoff’s The Great Godden is about one family, one summer at their family’s house by the beach and what happens when they meet the Godden brothers. Children of a famous actress, Kit is handsome and charismatic and Hugo is quieter and almost surly when you first meet him. The narrator isn’t named or described by gender, which means that you can either decide what you want them to be (if you manage to think about it that conciously) or just read and draw your own conclusions as you go.

It’s really quite hard to explain what genre this book actually is. It’s published by a YA imprint, but I can think of people who don’t read YA who would like this. It’s not quite Rich People Problems, but it is sort of adjacent to it – I mean the family have a summer house by the sea! It’s also very subtle and feels quite low stakes in a way –  I was reading it waiting for something awful to happen, but it’s not that sort of book. It’s much more every day, it’s about everyday events and normal summer holiday type things. One of the narrator’s sisters is pony mad. The other has suddenly grown into her looks and is getting a lot more attention than she used to. The narrator works in a shop for a holiday job. There’s a wedding being planned. The climax of every thing is basically a tennis match and it’s so good. There aren’t a lot of really good sport-in-book scenes in novels – but this is one of them and would be fairly near the top of my list (the top being the cricket scene in Murder Must Advertise). It would be a great book to read by the sea or by the “sea” aka your pond, paddling pool, local body of water. It is very, very summery and perfect for the warm weather.

I am all about the low-stakes at the moment – so if you’ve got any recommendations for me for similarly enjoyable but un-anxiety-inducing books, drop them in the comments for me please. I’ve mentioned before that I am all about resolutions at the moment – hence the mystery and romance heavy reading lists, but this was a nice change that didn’t make me super stressed. It’s not the first Meg Rosoff I’ve read, but it is the first one I’ve really liked, so I might have another little wander through her other books, but I’m not sure there’s any guarantee I’ll find something similar there!

My copy came from NetGalley, but it’s out now in hardback and in Kindle and Kobo. I haven’t ventured into a bookshop yet, so I can’t tell you what the likelihood is of it being in there on a table, but Meg Rosoff is a fairly well known name so I reckon there’s a good chance it’ll be in stock in larger book stores, but probably not the supermarkets.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: July 27 – August 2

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I’m going to go on the record and say that I was really glad to see the back of July. Here’s hoping that August is better. I worked over the weekend, which I usually do for the British Grand Prix weekend – but that’s usually because I’m trying to avoid the floods of fans coming in to my home town and the surrounding villages. Obviously that wasn’t a problem this year – and the race is in August (not July) and there’s another one at Silverstone next weekend, but it did at least make life feel a little bit more normal. Anyway the usual end of month/start of month posts are underway – if you missed it on Saturday here are the stats. Tomorrow is BotW as usual and then Wednesday will be the mini reviews.

Read:

One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London*

The Garden of Forgotten Wishes by Trisha Ashley*

The Night They Killed Joss Varan by George Bellairs

Evidence of the Affair by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P Djèlí Clark

The Great Godden by Meg Rosoff*

Started:

Daring and the Duke by Sarah MacLean

Still reading:

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward*

Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things by Robin Muir

A Question of Holmes by Brittany Cavallaro

Still not counting what I’m buying and determinedly so, but on top of the impulse buying a couple of preorders dropped onto my kindle this week as nice gifts from PastVerity so that was cheering too.

Bonus photo: there were a couple of beautiful days last week – I was in the office over the weekend so didn’t get to take advantage of all of them, but this was from Thursday when I went for a walk near home and headed down to the stream.

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley

Book of the Week, memoirs, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Here for It

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As I mentioned yesterday, last week I mostly binged on George Bellairs and I’ve talked about him relatively recently. But luckily I also read R Eric Thomas’s book of essays, so I get to tell you about that today!

Cover of Here for It

I think I first came across him as a podcast guest, but in case you haven’t come across him before, R Eric Thomas writes the “Eric Reads the News” column for Elle.com and is Very Funny. This an essay collection but as a whole it also forms a memoir about growing up different and how he found his way and place in life. He was one of the few black pupils at his high school and his Ivy League college. He was brought up attending a conservative black church but he is gay. And it took him a while to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, a period which included going viral on the early internet and not in a good way.

This is basically a funny and joyful journey to self-acceptance. Some of the essays really, really work. Thomas is also a playwright and coupled with his storyteller ability means that he has a knack for picking out themes that run through his life and finding just the right experience to use to tell you about it. And it means the stories build and develop and go somewhere (which is somehow rarer than you expect it to be in essay collections) and make you think.

It made me laugh and it made me think and it was a really great book to read in these strange quarantimes we are living in. I think it’s a special order in the UK – Amazon only has the hardback and no kindle edition right now – so I don’t think you’ll be able to pick it up off a shelf in the bookstore. If you want a taste of R Eric before you buy, here is one of my favourite of his recent columns but he also has a newsletter that you could sign up for and see if you’re interested.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: July 20 – July 26

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A slightly better week, but to be honest we’re grading on a curve. You may be able to tell that I mostly cheered myself up by bingeing on Inspector Littlejohn books. It worked. Didn’t help me make any progress on the still reading list though…

Read:

The Crime at Halfpenny Bridge by George Bellairs

Here for It by R Eric Thomas

The Case of the Headless Jesuit by George Bellairs

The Cursing Stones Murder by George Bellairs

My Beijing by Nie Jun

A Scarf for Keiko by Ann Malaspina

Death in Dark Glasses by George Bellairs

Say Yes to the Duke by Eloisa James

Started:

A Question of Holmes by Brittany Cavallaro

Still reading:

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward*

Last Tang Standing by Lauren Ho

The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things by Robin Muir

One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London*

Still not counting and determinedly so.

Bonus photo: I didn’t go anywhere interesting last week. So my glass of rose is the most interesting photo of the week. Says. It. All.

Glass of Rose

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley

Book of the Week, memoirs

Book of the Week: The Chiffon Trenches

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So as I said yesterday, it was an awful week. But at least I have a good book to tell you about today. Sometimes it’s the small things isn’t it.

Cover of The Chiffon Trenches

So The Chiffon Trenches is André Leon Talley’s new memoir about his life in the fashion industry. If you’re my age, you may have first seen him  as a judge on America’s Next Top Model around the time they started trying to update the series to make it more high fashion – the era of the Vogue Italia photospread prize, before they started getting people to vote on social media – but he left after the madness that was the All Stars season. Ahem. Anyway, serious fashion fans will actually know him as a long-standing and long-serving member of the Vogue editorial team, where among his roles he was Creative Director, Fashion News Editor and an Editor-at-Large.

This is not his first memoir (although I haven’t read the previous one) but this one deals with his early life, his rise to prominence, his relationship with Anna Wintour and his role in fighting for more diversity and representation in fashion. He is a striking figure – and it’s not just because he’s a 6’7 man who wears couture kaftans – this book will take you on a hell of a journey. He was born in North Carolina in the time of Jim Crow laws. He won a scholarship to Brown University where he did a Masters in French Literature and was intending to be a French teacher. His first mentor was Diana Vreeland. He worked for Andy Warhol at the Factory and at his magazine Interview. He was Anna Wintour’s righthand person through her rise to the top job at Vogue and beyond. And this is his attempt to make sure that his achievements are seen in their own right and his work and not as part of Anna Wintour’s.

It’s fascinating. He’s got all the stories about all the people. If you’ve read about fashion – or about the Studio 54 crowd – it’s all here. Dancing with Diana Ross. Weekend’s at Karl Lagerfelds. European princesses. There’s a best dressed list (male and female) at the back. I didn’t always love his writing style – but I did love the content. It’s a mind-blowing peek at the excesses of the world of high fashion and at the world of Vogue at a time when money was rolling in and anything went. And he’s very keen to set you straight about what the Devil Wears Prada got wrong. If you’ve read Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries (which I did a couple of years back) there is some neat crossover here. If you’re a serious fashion fan, I don’t know how much it will tell you that you don’t know – except what Talley’s view on everything is and how he wants to position himself. But it’s a lot of fun finding out.

You should be able to get hold of this fairly easily at your book store of choice. It’s a hardback at the moment and it only came out a couple of months back so I would expect it to be on one of the tables or in one of the displays fairly near the front rather than in hidden away in a specialist section. And it is also an audiobook (that he reads himself!) and on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading