After the very solid end to September, October started very slowly on the reading front – much like September did and this week’s list is mostly being held up by novellas. But that’s OK sometimes right? Especially as last month had none. I’ll just keep telling myself that. In my defense, the Brian Inglis is long and I am making good progress on it and I went to the theatre as well. Anyway, moving on. Onwards to next week…
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.
So as you saw on Saturday I’ve been on holiday, and so the list is appropriately holiday-y. My goal for the holiday was to read the same number of books from NetGalley as other books and across the week and a bit I basically did that (once you exclude the audiobooks) so I’m pretty pleased with that. Go me. For once a target I achieved!
Well. That list is looking a bit more healthy. I was going to say it was looking better, but then I realised that not all the books on the list were better and revised my words. Because although there is some excellent stuff on there, there were also a few that were really not. But that happens every now and again, it just seems to have happened more than usual in the last couple of weeks. But on the bright side, another off the long runners list, so I can’t really complain can I?
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!
A slightly more normal week in reading, despite a theatre trip and a day out at a car show and various other bits and bobs. It’s definitely starting to get a bit autumnal though, so perhaps the day trips and evenings out will start to turn into quiet cozy nights in in the next few weeks?!
I’m not actually sure what happened this week. To the reading list I mean. I know what I was doing, and I don’t think I had substantively less reading time than any other week, and I definitely wasn’t out in the evenings in the way that I sometimes am. But here we are. A shorter than usual list, and one where I have no idea what I’m doing for BotW tomorrow…
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.
I can’t believe it’s September already. I mean the weather last week was pretty autumnal so maybe I can believe it, but anyway, the end of the school holidays is basically here and I will try and find a silver lining in the fact that hopefully it means that Central London will be a little bit quieter soon. Any way a pretty solid week in reading given that there was a bank holiday, I went to a concert and had a night out with a friend.
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.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 