So this is slightly less bad than last month, in that in August there were ten books, and in this there are eight. We do have to remember though that I went so insane on our trip to Norfolk that I had to do an extra Books Incoming post to handle it and if I hadn’t done that, there would be 19 books in this post. Ahem. Anyway, here we have Dream on Ramona Riley and ZomRomCom which were my Saucy Books purchases and From Russia with Love which was my Penguin pop-up purchase and Fishing for Trouble and Buffalo West Wing which I bought in Piccadilly at the same time. That leaves the Spinal Tap book, which was a pre-order from Big Green, Hattie Steals the Show was a purchase and then Chris at the Kennels was a gift. And that’s all of them. Unless there’s one hiding somewhere that I forgot. But I don’t think there is…
Happy Friday everyone, it’s nearly the weekend, so nearly and I’m back with a post about a historical mystery series.
It’s the 1950s in the town of Temple Regis on the coast of Devon, where Judy Dimont is a reporter at the local newspaper, The Riviera Express. Across the course of the series she finds herself not just reporting on murders in the town, but also investigating them because the local police are inclined to play things down and rule every thing death they can as an accident to protect the resorts image and keep the tourist trippers flooding in.
The first book in the series was a Book of the Week back in 2017 and I stand by what I said then: Judy has an excuse to be rootling around in murder investigations and the portrait of an English seaside town with delusions of grandeur is excellent. Over the course of the four books the secondary characters are developed as well as Judy’s backstory, which involves mysterious doings in the Second World War. I read these out of order – with the second one in 2019 and then coming back through for the other two last month and neither the gap nor the out of order-ness messed with my enjoyment of the books. As it’s been six years since the last one, I think we can probably assume that this is a completed series now, which is a shame since I would happily read more of them.
I got the first and fourth from NetGalley but bought myself the middle two when they were on offer at some point in the unspecified past. You can get them in Kindle or Kobo and they did come out in paperback, but I suspect they’ll be hard to track down (new at least).
The sequel to Haunted Ever After is out today in the UK, (and came out on Tuesday in the US). Ghost Business features Sophie, who runs the ghost tour we came across in book one (if you’ve read it) who is faced with a new rival, Tristan, who works for a company who runs ghost tours across a bunch of cities. After a row between the two of them goes viral, they agree that whoever is the most successful at the end of the summer gets to stay…
I loved the first book and I’m looking forward to reading this one, albeit not as excited as I am about Jen DeLuca’s next book which is another in the Renn Faire series!
After breaking my own rules yesterday, I’m back with the pattern today, and as it’s the second Wednesday of September,it’s time for this month’s Kindle Offers.
In stuff I own but haven’t read yet, there’s The Whalebone Theatre and Kevin Kwan’sLies and Weddings. And finally in stuff I don’t own (yet), there’s the second in Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brody series, One Good Turn, the fifth in C J Sansom’s Shardlake series, Heartstone (although I did buy this one while writing this!), the novelisation of the recent TV seriesBookish, Ali Hazelwood’s Bride and Uzma Jalaluddin’s Detective Aunty. And finally, if you’re of a certain age, you’ll almost certainly have read some of Terry Deary’s Horrible History books, and his adult history book A History of Britain in Ten Enemies is 99p.
So I said yesterday I don’t know what I was going to do for BotW today, and I kept thinking about it and I still didn’t and I couldn’t come up with any enthusiasm for any of the new things I read last week so I decided to do something different because…
The Autumn new book deluge has really started now because today we had the arrival of the new Dan Brown book, the sixth in the Robert Langdon series. It’s been eight years since the last installment in the series, Origin, and I’m sure there were other people who, like me, thought that that might be it for the series. But no, he’s back and I think this may be the biggest print run of the books out this autumn – the announcement doesn’t say how big it is, but it’s a simultaneous release in 17 territories and the man has 250 million books in print. That is a lot of books.
I’ve read the first two Langtons, back at the original height of Da Vinci Code Mania 20 years ago and I also read his standalone Digital Fortress at around the same time. When the third book came out I had a go at it and then gave up on it and haven’t gone back. When I was reading the first two back I was in France and was borrowing any English books I could get my hands on and I don’t think I had the same motivation for them once I was back in the UK with free reign on anything I wanted to read. But there’s no doubt that he’s one of the authors who will shift big units – they’re the sort of books that people who don’t read many books per year will pick up at the airport. And I don’t say that as a derogatory thing – I do exactly the same with Richard Osman. And his new book is out in a few weeks too…
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…
As I mentioned in June, we have just had a new TV series about the Mitford Sisters, and today I am back to report in on it! Firstly a reminder of the trailer though:
Outrageous is the story of the Mitford sisters in the 1930s. There were six sisters – who are often characterised as Nancy the author, Diana the Fascist, Unity the Nazi, Jessica the communist, Deborah the duchess and Pamela. Poor Pamela – and just for the sake of accuracy she was the second oldest with the lone brother Tom being born third ahead of Diana. This covers the 1930s and ends before the war starts, so is only part of the story and focuses mainly on Nancy, Diana, Unity and Decca.
We watched a bunch of these back to back because they’re just so watchable. Bessie Carter is great as Nancy, who has definitely been made less mean and more likable to the viewer in the adaptation, but Joanna Vanderham is brilliant as Diana because she manages to be loathsome because of her political views, but you also see why the non-fascists among her sisters might still want to be friends with her. And that’s tough to pull off. But really there is so much fascinating material in this. I watched it with Him Indoors who was constantly asking whether things really happened or what happened to them next.
And there is plenty of next because this finishes before the outbreak of the Second World War and there were plenty of things after that that were major and could form part of series two should U decide to make one. And I hope they do, although Unity shooting herself when war is declared isn’t exactly cheerful, but you would then also get to see Deborah and the Devonshires and the Kennedy-adjacency of it all. Fingers crossed it happens.
Now we have finished watching this it has finally got me reading the Mary S Lovell group biography that it’s based on so I can see how they’ve done it and where they have left things out. And I’m also filling in some of the gaps in my reading of Nancy’s books – I’ve read the obvious ones, but I realised while watching that I hadn’t read Wigs on the Green aka the book that Diana and Unity fall out with Nancy over, so I have already remedied that too. And as you know I love reading about the Bright Young Things and Bright-Young-Thing adjacent people so there may yet be more reading off the back of this one.
Outrageous was on U in the UK and is on BritBox in the US. And in the UK you can stream it for free if you go to U directly. And that is a great deal because it’s loads of fun. And the more people who watch it, the better chance we have of a series two…
Happy Saturday everyone and did you know that there is a pop-up in the basement of Waterstones Piccadilly celebrating 90 years of Penguin books?
There very much is, as well as books it’s got this little mini exhibit in the middle – literally one display case – but it’s got this really cool pasteboard for the cover design among a few other bits.
It’s also got a section for the special archive shorts that they’ve released for the anniversary. If my maths is right there is space for 80 on this display, but I didn’t check to see exactly how many different ones there are on it. And they’ve also got another display of them on one of the other floors so if anywhere has a chance of having all 90, Piccadilly does!
And there is a huge selection of the clothbound special editions – again, the biggest variety of them that I remember seeing anywhere because often it’s the usual suspects that you see: Pride and Prejudice and David Copperfield and similar, but this has got some books I didn’t even know had versions in this format – like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Around the World in Eighty Days and Phantom of the Opera.
But there’s still loads more – the Puffin special editions, some vintage books, a load of non-fiction including memoirs, history and science writing.
And there’s loads more – lots of fiction in the various different special lines, but also normal (so to speak) Penguin new releases and similar. I really enjoyed my wander, and yes I bought a book – but you’ll have to wait until Books Incoming (next weekend) so see what it was!
Favourite book: probably The Mitford Girls, even though I haven’t written about it yet!
Books bought: possibly slightly better than last month, but still way too many
Most read author: T P Fielden of the new stuff, but Agatha Christie and Nancy Mitford if you’re including the re-reads
Books read in 2025: 251
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 808
Another fairly solid month in reading – especially considering that the Mary Lowell Mitford book is 700 pages long and that takes time, and there aren’t a lot of short stories on this month’s list.
Bonus picture: yarn bombing in Northampton for the rugby, courtesy of my mum!
*includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – including 1 this month!
We’re about to hit the big autumn new book wave, but before we get there, I wanted to mention that the paperback edition of Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker is out in shops from today. This was my Book of the Week at the start of October last year and was my favourite non-fiction read of 2024. It’s a fascinating re-examining of the life of Pamela Churchill Harriman, making a case for her as a behind the scenes political operator and power player rather than the husband stealing courtesan that she has previously been seen – and portrayed – as. I only read it because I’ve read a fair bit about Truman Capote’s Swans, where she appears fairly often, but it was so much more than I was expecting – and really really worth a look.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 