By the time you read this, my nightshifts will be underway. I’ll probably just be waking up as this is posted – or at least I hope I’ll just be waking up if I’m going to have got enough sleep for me to be able to stay up all night again. This week has been really quite busy – and my brain has been quite frazzled – so there’s a lot of comics and graphic novels on this list. This may continue next week because of nightshift brain, which as usual, means expect to see a lot of cozy crime and romance on this list next week!
Read:
The Summage Solution by G L Carriger
Simple Irresistable by Jill Shalvis
Reel History: The World According to the Movies by Alex von Tunzelmann
Bitch Planet Vol 2: President Bitch by Kelly Sue DeConnick et al
Rivers of London: Detective Stories 2 by Ben Aaronovitch et al
Bitch Planet Triple Feature 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick et al
Bitch Planet Triple Feature 2 by Che Grayson
Room For Doubt by Nancy Cole Silverman
Started:
A Quiet Life in the Country by T E Kinsey
Still reading:
Kick by Paula Byrne
The Greedy Queen by Annie Gray
Modern Lovers by Emma Straub
Two ebooks bought – both on deals and part of series that I’m following or want to read more of to work out if I like them or not!
This week’s BotW is another case of “why on earth haven’t I read this before”. I have no idea why I hadn’t got around to the Camomile Lawn before. All I can think is that the TV version had Jennifer Ehle in it and that my mum may have steered me away from it in the immediate aftermath of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice because I was 11 and if the TV series is anything like the book, it really wasn’t suitable for me at the time and I may have got it in my head that the book wasn’t worth it! Who knows. Anyway.
A book, a Pimms (sorry, summer cup for the Great British Menu viewers) and a weekend on the beach
The Camomile Lawn tells the story of five cousins, who we meet at their Aunt-by-marriage’s house in Cornwall in the summer before the start of the Second World War. We follow them through the war and meet up with them again some years later as they reassemble for a funeral. There is beautiful, mercenary Calypso, outwardly conventional Polly, Oliver, Walter and much younger Sophy, who watches what the older ones are up to and wants to join in. And then there is Helena – married to a man injured in the last war and bored by her life, watching the kissing cousins as they set out into the future. As the war begins, life changes for all of them – new opportunities open up for the women and danger lurks for all of them – not just the obvious ones for the boys in the forces.
Mary Wesley was in her 70s when she wrote this – and it was only her second novel. She lived through the war that she is writing about and was a similar age to the characters when it happened. If she hadn’t been, perhaps there would be a temptation to say that the characters were having too much fun and too much sex considering that there was a war on. This reminded me a lot of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles, but with the sex and antics turned up. Wesley doesn’t really bother with description – except for some of the details of the house in Cornwall – but she writes in a wonderful, understated way dropping bombshells in like they’re nothing so that you do a double take as you read it.
I’m off to read some more Mary Wesley and to try and get my hands on a DVD of the TV mini-series. You should be able to get hold of a copy of The Camomile Lawn fairly easily. I got mine from a secondhand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. The Kindle and Kobo versions were £$.99 at time of writing and the paperback version was £5.99 on Amazon albeit in a slightly older cover than I saw in Foyles.
Not bad going all in all – and some really good stuff. I’m going to have trouble picking my Book of the Week tomorrow!
Read:
The Hissing of the Silent Lonely Room by Paul Charles
Jeeves in the Offing by P G Wodehouse
Dead is Good by Jo Perry
Paper Girls Vol 2 by Brian K Vaughan
Killer Party by Lynn Cahoon
Lowcountry Bombshell by Susan M Boyer
The Camomile Lawn by Mary Wesley
Started:
Room For Doubt by Nancy Cole Silverman
Still reading:
Kick by Paula Byrne
Reel History: The World According to the Movies by Alex von Tunzelmann
The Greedy Queen by Annie Gray
Modern Lovers by Emma Straub
A couple of books bought (two secondhand and two Ebooks), but nothing too bad really. I mean not compared to the last few weeks! I did treat myself to a new Kindle though…
Started the week going great guns, and then slowed to a halt – partly because of a family party on Saturday. On the bright side I got to dress up as an extra from the Bronze and live out some Buffy-ish moments!
Read:
Lowcountry Boil by Susan M Boyer
Trans Like Me by CN Lester
Dimsie, Head Girl by Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Murder in D Minor by Alexia Gordon
Lumberjanes Vol 5: Band Together by Noelle Stevenson et al
Started:
Modern Lovers by Emma Straub
Jeeves in the Offing by P G Wodehouse
Still reading:
Kick by Paula Byrne
Reel History: The World According to the Movies by Alex von Tunzelmann
The Greedy Queen by Annie Gray
The Hissing of the Silent Lonely Room by Paul Charles
I bought rather a few books again. Ooops. But some came from the Barnes Booksale – and were total bargains – and three ebooks as well. Naughty Verity. Must do better!
As you’ll have seen from yesterday’s Week in Books, I had a less productive week in reading last week, but that didn’t give me a problem when it came to picking a BotW – because after I read Lowcountry Bonfire, I went and bought myself another book in the series straight away.
I kinda like this cover – its simple but stylish.
Lowcountry Bonfire is the sixth book in the Liz Talbot cozy crime series. Liz and her partner Nate Andrews run a private investigation agency on an island in South Carolina. Their bread and butter cases are suspicious spouses and adultery cases. They’re not expecting Tammy Sue Lyerley’s case to be any different. But when her husband Zeke turns up dead in the boot of the car that Tammy Sue has just filled with his stuff and is trying to set alight, they end up smack bang in the middle of a murder investigation. Soon they’re trying to work out the truth behind Zeke’s tall tales and uncovering buried secrets.
After a disappointing run of cozy crime novels during my holiday*, this was a breath of fresh air. This is just the sort of cozy crime that I like – a great cast of characters, a quirky setting and a satisfying murder mystery. And to top that off, Liz is one of my favourite things – a sleuth who has a legitimate reason to be snooping around. The plot is perhaps a little bonkers at times, but the book is so pacey that you don’t really have time to think about that – which is exactly what you want really.
As I mentioned at the start of this post, I liked this so much that I went off and bought myself the first book in the series so I could see how Liz got to where she is. I finished that on the train home on Monday afternoon and can report that that’s also a lot of fun – although the mystery and pacing isn’t quite as good as in Lowcountry Bonfire. Admittedly that may be partly because I could spot which townspeople were no longer about in book six and extrapolate some of the solution from that!
My copy of Lowcountry Bonfire came from NetGalley, but it’s out now and available on all the usual platforms, like Kindle and Kobo. But if you want to start at the beginning, Lowcountry Boil was £1.99 on Kindle and Kobo at time of writing, as was book two, Lowcountry Bombshell, (although only on Kindle) which I may have just bought myself. Naughty Verity!
Happy reading.
*Written in Dead Wax (in my book at least) is not a cozy crime. And even if it was, I read it at the start of the week – it was the mysteries afterwards that were a disappointment!
We had a lovely time on holiday last week and I read a lot of books. A lot. And the pick of the bunch was Andrew Cartmel’s first Vinyl Dectective novel, Written in Dead Wax. I’d had my eye on this for a while but finally managed to pick myself up a copy at Big Green Bookshop a few weeks back now.
My copy on the beach in Croatia last week. Lovely setting, made better with a good book!
The Vinyl Detective hunts down rare records. In fact he makes his living by selling the records that he finds while out and about in London. Then one day a mysterious woman shows up and asks him to find the unfindable – a priceless, impossibly rare jazz album. And so he sets off on an oddessy around the record shops, car boot sales and charity shops hunting for the elusive record. But soon it seems he has competition. Ruthless competition. He’s not a detective, but when people start turning up dead, he start trying to work out what’s going on.
This has a blurb on the front from Ben Aaronovitch – and Andrew Cartmel also co-writes the Rivers of London graphic novels so I thought that it might be right up my street and I was right. It was so much fun. There’s no magic here (apart from the magic of vinyl) but it definitely has some points of comparison with Rivers of London – there’s a similar sense of humour and wry way of looking at the world and it has the geekery that I love too – that makes you feel like you’re a member of a special club of people in the know – even if all you know about LPs is what you learned on your parent’s old record player* and what you’ve read in the book. The mystery is clever and twisty, there’s plenty of action and it’s really hard to figure out where it is going next.
If I had a problem with it, it was that the female characters weren’t always as three dimensional as they could be – but that was kind of in keeping with the Vinyl Detective’s record-centric world view: he’d be able to tell you (in depth) all the details about a rare record that he once saw, but he wouldn’t remember what you were wearing if you made him turn his back and describe your outfit to you! I tried to make myself read it slowly – and that worked for about 150 pages, and then I just needed to know what happened next and how it would all work out. Luckily it’s taken me so long to get around to reading this that book 2 is already out and so I can get another fix soon.
If you like PC Grant’s adventures, read this. And if you like this, then I think you might also like The Barista’s Guide to Espionage – which is really quite different but keeps coming into my mind when I was writing this review and trying to come up with if you like this then read thats. You should be able to get hold of Written in Dead Wax from any good bookshop – I’m planning a trip back to the Big Green Bookshop at the weekend to get hold of book 2 – or it’s also on Audible (you might need to be a member for this link to work), Kindle and Kobo. I don’t think you’ll regret it. I’ve already lent my copy to my dad…
Happy Reading!
*I spent parts of my childhood dancing around the dining room to a small selection of my parents’ records. A bit of ballet, the Beatles, some Carpenters, Stevie Wonder, and Tony Orlando and Dawn, the records I created routines too aren’t as cool as the ones the Vinyl Detective is looking for – but I still have my first LP (the Postman Pat soundtrack) even though I don’t have a record player plumbed in to play it on.
A relatively short Book of the Week post this week because it’s been a bit of a strange one really to be honest. So it seemed fairly logical to pick Bitch Planet Volume 1 because it was kick ass and a bit subversive and fitted my mood!
Last week’s comic bookshop haul – complete with Bitch Planet nestled in the middle!
So, Bitch Planet is a graphic novel set in the near future. And as always (or almost always) this is a dystopian near future. Bitch Planet is the nickname for the penal colony where women who don’t do as they’re told are sent. In volume 1 we meet a gang of new arrivals and follow them as they try to form alliances and work out a way to survive. It’s a dark and twisty take on sci fi and women in prison and it’s fabulous.
It’s not been that long since I picked Lumberjanes 4 as my BotW and this is a different sort of graphic novel, but it’s definitely as good. I had heard so much about this on the bookish internet and finally remembered to look and see if my comic book store had a copy last week. It did and I’m so glad I picked it up – I just wish I’d bought Volume 2 at the same time. I can totally understand why so many people love this – the tales of Non Compliant tattoos make sense to me now. But this isn’t just a graphic novel for women – there’s plenty here for comic fans and sci fi movie fans too – the assistant behind the till at the cash register was telling me how much he likes the series too.
You should be able to pick up Bitch Planet from any good comic book store and I would encourage you to do that – read my Lumberjanes post for further and better particulars but basically it boils down to help the little guys who are experts.
A busy week of news and work. Honestly I wish it would just stop. It’s starting to feel a bit end of days to be honest. Here’s hoping the world improves.
Read:
An Expert in Murder by Nicola Upson
Gridiron Grit by Noel Sainsbury Jr
Fatal Forgeries by Ritter Ames
Bitch Planet Vol 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick et al
Rivers of London: Detective Stories 1 by Ben Aaronovitch et al
Fatal Facade by Alison Campbell
The Antique House Murders by Leslie Nagal
Started:
Trans Like Me by CN Lester
The Early Birds by Laurie Graham
Nun Too Soon by Alice Loweecey
Still reading:
Kick by Paula Byrne
Reel History: The World According to the Movies by Alex von Tunzelmann
The Headmistress by Angela Thirkell
Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny
Written in Dead Wax by Andrew Cartmel
I may have bought a few Kindle John LeCarrés, but apart from that, well behaved. I’m also trying to make the Cartmel last because I’m really enjoying it!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 