Another really busy week, finishing in me staying up until all hours on Sunday night watching the Rams win the Super Bowl. I continue to try and work my way through the Paustovsky, but it is slow going and other books are really quite tempting as being easier and lighter going…
Three pre-orders and another Nancy Spain. All in actual copies. I don’t think I bought any kindle books last week, which might be a record in recent weeks…
Bonus photo: Another week – another trip to the theatre. This time it was to see Heathers at The Other Palace. I did three theatre trips in nine days – which is almost back to pre-pandemic levels so was really quite reassuring and normal!
An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley
Yes today is the day when people will be talking about Superb Owls and the Super Bowl. I am a Dallas Cowboys fan, and although my team won’t be playing tonight, I’m still likely to be staying awake to see at least some of the match – hopefully I’ll last all the way to the halftime show.
American football and the NFL have their problems. We’ve all seen about them – whether it’s CTE injuries to players, or race scoring retired players to determine their compensation, or Washington Commanders’ old name, or Tom Brady, but there is something I find hypnotic about the game. And not just because you can watch it whilst reading a book and not miss much action. I should have gone to the Dolphins at Jaguars in London before Christmas, but in the end, it didn’t happen. But as soon as the Cowboys come over, I will try again. I’m also currently (well at least before the Olympics started) working my way through Amazon’s All or Nothing seasons that deal with NFL franchises – I’ve just hit the Carolina Panthers’ season.
Why the Cowboys? Well I have family who live in Dallas, so that was what started it – back when I was in France on my year abroad and learning how American football worked from August in the Irish bar in Tours and had to pick a team to support. And by happy coincidence, the Cowboys organisation is also responsible for one of my great guilty pleasure TV shows: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Making the Team. If you’re in the UK you can find it on ITVBe every few months I early in the mornings, if you’re in the US it’s on CMT. And you too can watch women try out to wear unforgiving uniforms to dance on the touch line at the AT&T stadium for what presumably is not very much money at all, especially given the hours of training they have to do.
Anyway, in case you’re wondering why this isn’t a Not a Book post – that’s because I’m going to recommend some football books to finish! I personally am marking the Super Bowl by finally getting around to reading Paper Lion by George Plimpton. But as I haven’t read it yet, I can’t write about is, so let’s head off to my usual wheelhouse: romance!
Firstly Alexa Martin – Intercepted was a BotW and she writes fun football romances that feel like they are more grounded in reality than many of the others, which might be because her husband was a player! She’s been an NFL wife and although her books obviously feature shiny romance versions of what life in the NFL is like, they do also feature some of the worries and risks which adds an extra something to it all.
I wrote about several Susan Elizabeth Philips books in my Enemies to Lovers post last month, but her Chicago Stars series basically work their way through key members of a fictional football team. The first one is 20 years old now, which probably qualifies it for Old School Romance status, but the latest one When Stars Collide came out just last year – and I really need to get around to reading it! Alisha Rai’s The Right Swipe features a retired football player as the hero, and the other novels in that sequence have football connections in patches.
And finally, because my love of Girls Own books is well known, I have to mention Grid Iron Grit, which is American Boys’ Own from the mid 1930s and is about a spoilt teenager who is removed from his small but exclusive school for rich kids and sent to a much bigger school with a better academic record. There he learns the error of his snobbish and lazy ways and to become a proper gentleman through the medium of American football. Lots of fun, even if some of the descriptions of the football got a bit too technical for me!
Enjoy the game if you’re watching – if not, enjoy whatever you’re reading!
Two shelves today… but there’s a reason, I promise! This is what started as the Chalet School shelf, but then grew into the Chalet school shelf and a half and Other Girls Gone by shelf. And no it’s not very tidy. And no, I’m not stacking any books on top of the Chalet School ones. They are my preciouses. No it’s not logical. But you shouldn’t expect logic from me by now.
I should also probably fill you in on who Girls Gone By are – they’re a small publisher who are republishing Girls Own Titles, most of which were written between 1920 and 1960. They came to my attention in the early 2000s because of their reprints of the hardback versions of the Chalet School – at a point when I was on a student budget and buying a hardback copy of any of them was going to cost you at least £50. And so I started collecting them in their editions. At this point there are only a few they haven’t published so I have as complete a set as I can get.
Anyway, along with the actual Chalet School books, there is the encyclopaedia of the series and a selection of fill-in titles. On the bottom shelf there is also stack of Mabel Esther Allens – both writing as herself and writing as Jean Estoril – some Gwendolyn Courtney, Antonia Forest, Phylis Matthewman and Patricia Caldwell. The non Girls Gone By books are a stack of really quite battered paperbacks – mostly puffins – by authors like Lucy M Boston, Enid Blyton and Anne Digby. Right on the end there are a couple of annuals.
I am running out of space on these two shelves (and on this bookshelf as a whole) but that’s mostly because I have stuff here that I don’t really want to keep forever, but that I’ve been holding onto to take to the non-dealer sale at the Bristol Conference – which should have happened in 2020 but has been postponed (twice) by the pandemic. So if it all goes ahead as planned this year, hopefully by the autumn these shelves will have been weeded and look a bit neater. Or at least that’s the plan. But last time I went to Bristol I came home with a lot of books…
Happy Friday everyone. Today’s series I love is an excuse to talk about my favourite book that I read last week which also happened to be the third book in a trilogy – which is a series right? – but which I think you really need to have read the other two books to get the most out of.
At the start of Miss Buncle’s Book, Barbara Buncle has a problem: she is running out of money. She is already living in Reduced Circumstances, with just her faithful former nanny to help her out, but when her dividends come in at a much reduced rate she needs to find another source of income. So she writes a book. The trouble is that she thinks she doesn’t have any imagination so she writes about the people she knows: the inhabitants of her village. She sprinkles in some excitement for them and that, as well as her very perceptive eye means that the book is accepted by a publisher. When the book is published, it is a great success but doesn’t take long for the village to find out about it and start to try to work out who is responsible.
Barbara is a charming character and watching her try to hide the fact that she wrote the book, whilst the resident search frantically and start to act like their fictional counterparts. She’s kind and often taken advantage of, but also wickedly observant and able to take her revenge (if she wants to) in her writing.
As you might guess from the title of the second book, Miss Buncle Married, there is also some excitement in Barbara’s personal life and the second book sees her moving to a new village to start her married life. By the third book, The Two Mrs Abbotts, it is the war and she has two children, and the focus of the book is less fully on her, but she continues throughout to be a delightful person to spend time watching.
There is no peril in these books and no body count. They are very gentle but very, very funny. If you like Diary of a Provincial Housewife, you should definitely read this. Another of DE Stevenson’s books, Mrs Tim of the Regiment, was a BotW here last year and that also is a delightful selection of characters not doing a lot or facing much peril but being very funny while they do it. And if you want Miss Buncle but *with* a body count, Death by the Book, the first book in Beth Byers’ Poison Ink series is so close to Miss Buncle that my good reads description says that it is “uncomfortably similar” until the murder!
All three of the Buncle books are available from Persephone books, both in Paperback and ebook. The actual books are gorgeous – if you’ve never seen a Persephone book in the flesh, the simple grey cover means the all match on the outside but on the inside each has a different pattern from an appropriate fabric to the period where it was published. They are delightful. And I’m told their new shop in Bath is also wonderful – Little Sister visited before Christmas.
Time for another quick round up of some recent releases that I’ve read but not yet told you about…
Shady Hollow by Juneau Black*
This is possibly the most unusual book I’ve read in a while. It’s a small town cozy mystery, except that the residents of the small town are woodland creatures. Or at least creatures that you would find in a north American woodland. Apart from that, there are the usual staples of cozy crime – a local reporter (who is a fox), a bookshop (owned by a raven), police officers (who are bears) and a murder victim (a toad). Think Jasper Fforde’s Nursery Crime series, but more cozy crime than comic crime. I’m still not quite sure how the differing scales of the animals works – is it more Animals of Farthingwood or Arthur the Aardvark? – or how the interspecies relationships work, but I read it and enjoyed it and would happily read the next one. This is the first in a series that was originally published in 2015 but is now being republished by Vintage – this came out last week and the next one is out in early March and the third (and final so far) follows in April.
The Missing Page by Cat Sebastian
This is the long awaited sequel to Hither Page and came out at the end of January. James is called back to the house where he spent his childhood summers for the reading of a will and discovers that he may not know the whole truth about what happened the last summer that he spent there. It is basically a country house murder mystery, except that the murder happened decades ago. Part Agatha Christie, part cozy crime, part romance, you get to spend more time with Leo and James and get to know them better Side note: the reading of a will is always such a great device for a murder mystery. Anyway, this will work better if you’ve read the first book – which is why it didn’t get a slot of its own, but it is delightful, so I wanted to talk about it!
Agent Zaiba Investigates: The Smugglers Secret by Annabelle Sami*
This is the fourth book about Zaiba and her group of friends who investigate crimes. It’s the first one that I’ve read, but I love a middle grade mystery series – and I would say this would work best for the younger end of the age group – it’s got illustrations and the language is simpler so it’s more of a first chapter book than say Robin Stevens‘ books – and there’s no murder which means it works for younger kids too. It’s fun, a little unlikely in patches – adults accepting eleven year olds helping investigate stuff – but no less unlikely than some other stories in the genre. I loved the sections with Zaiba’s aunt in Pakistan and all the food references made me really hungry! It’s out now in paperback, with the ebook following next month. These are going on my list of books to suggest for younger children – although I think all of the people I regularly purchase for are too old for this now sadly.
It was the 70th anniversary of the Queen’s accession on Sunday, so this week I thought I’d make recommendsday about books either about or featuring Elizabeth II. Some of these are a little tenuous… but that’s the way I role!
I’m going to start with Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader. In it, the Queen discovers the joys of reading after coming across a mobile library and borrowing a book to be polite. Soon she’s asking guests about their reading matter when they meet her and turning up late for events because she needed to read “just one more page”. It’s only a novella but it’s really very funny.
I haven’t actually read a lot of non-fiction actually about the Queen directly, although I have read various biographies of people whose lives have intersected hers. In fact the only one I could find on my reading lists is by Angela Kelly, who is the Queen’s dresser and I can’t really recommend it because I learned even less from it than is expected – and I didn’t expect much as she is still working for the Queen and the book was approved!
On a slightly surreal note, there’s a bit of Elizabeth in Darling Ma’am – which is a book about Princess Margaret that is described as “a kaleidoscopic experiment in biography” which is about right. In actual fiction, the young Princess Elizabeth makes brief appearances in various books in the Royal Spyness series, as well as in my beloved Gone with the Windsors. Elizabeth and her sister Margaret play larger roles in Princess Elizabeth’s Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal, but I had so many issues with that I nearly threw it at the wall – only the fact that I was reading it on the iPad stopped me!
Right, thats it – I’m off to try and work out which is the best of the actual biographies of Elizabeth II and dig out the Mountbatten book by the guy who wrote Traitor King for some more Elizabeth adjacent reading. And if anyone has read the new detective novel where the Queen is solving murders, let me know what it’s like in the comments – I keep seeing it but haven’t got around to taking a look yet!
Yes I finished this on Monday. So yes it’s cheating. But it is a book set in a ski resort and I spent the part of my weekend that I didn’t spend in London watching the Winter Olympics so I am going with it!
Death Goes on Skis is one of a series featuring Miriam Birdseye, written in the years following the Second World War. Miriam is a revue artist and has a champagne lifestyle and a coterie of hangers on. This is the first in the series that I have come across (and isn’t it gorgeous!) but Good reads tells me it is the fourth in the series. It sees Miriam on holiday in a ski resort popular with Brits. Her fellow travelers include a ballerina and her night club owner husband, a playboy, his wife and their children and their governess and a wealthy couple whose family make their money from perfume. Most of these people are awful, but when they start dying in mysterious circumstances, Miriam and her friends investigate. But, crucially, they’re investigating because they are bored and not because they have a burning passion for justice or to see the criminal behind bars.
And that is the difference to other Murder mysteries of the era that I have written about – this is a farce and a (black) comedy and doesn’t quite follow the genres connections that you might expect. Think Evelyn Waugh does murder mysteries. And it works very well. You’re not going to like any of the suspects, and the children are truly awful, but it’s really quite entertaining. It also comes neatly broken up into nice small chunks, which makes it perfect for bedtime reading – which is mostly what I’ve been doing with it, although I did read some of it on the sofa on Monday night because I wanted to finish it!
If the name Nancy Spain sounds familiar, well that may be because she’s one of the women featured in Her Brilliant Career, but in brief she was a great niece of Mrs Beaton (of household management game) she went to Roedean and then became a journalist after being asked to write about women’s sport. She served in the WRNS in the war and afterwards started writing detective fiction. This got her a newspaper column and also turned her into a personality who appeared regularly on TV and radio. Her partner was editor of She Magazine, Joan Werner Laurie and they lived openly together in what sounds like a somewhat complicated household with the rally driver Sheila Van Damme. They were friends with Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich and she was the inspiration for a song. Spain and Laurie died in a plane crash at Aintree in 1964 – they had been travelling there to cover the grand national.
I bought my copy of Death Goes on Skis as a birthday present for myself, and I’ve already ordered another one of them, as Virago have helpfully reissued several of them now, all with delightful covers in this style. They’re also on Kindle and Kobo and in a matching audiobook to this from all the usual vendors.
Okay – blimey Charlie the Konstantin Paustovsky is long. And I also had two nights out in London last week. So the Still Reading list is looking longer – as the Nancy Spain and the Julie Andrews are actual books. But I might have finished one of them if it wasn’t for the arrival of The Two Mrs Abbotts on Saturday – which was my first pick from the Persephone Book a Month subscription I got given for Christmas, and which I just couldn’t resist reading straightaway!
Bonus photo: As part of the London trip on Saturday, as well as going to see Elizabeth and Mary, we went for a wander around the National Gallery, where as well as seeing the Blue Boy, I spotted this rather faboulous John Singer Sargent.
An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley
I had a day out! And there are bookish things ton talk about after it. And so, voila!
The British Library has got an exhibition on at the moment about Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. The two women never met, but their lives were intertwined from the moment that Mary was born. If you’ve never studied the Tudors (hi non-Brits!), both women were descended from Henry VII. Elizabeth’s father was Henry VIII, of six wives fame (Elizabeth’s mother Anne was a beheaded if you know the rhyme) and because of his complicated marriage situation and because she was a woman, her place in the order of succession was always in doubt. Mary was descended from Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, who married James IV of Scotland and thus had a claim of her own on the throne. Mary was queen of Scotland in her own right and married the heir to the French throne, so had a lot of power in her own right. And of course when Elizabeth I didn’t marry, the succession was always an issue.
Anyway with all that background sorted, this being an exhibition at the British library it’s based around documents written by, for or about the two women. So if a lot of 500 year old documents appeal to you then this will be exactly your jam. It was absolutely mine. Check out Elizabeth’s very distinctive signature! Check out Mary’s and her sixteenth century French! There is also old school coded letters. And letters with fancy paper locks to keep letters secure. And old books and proclamations.
It was delightful, I had a blast – and I remembered a lot more detail from my Tudor history classes than I was expecting! I particularly liked the maps and aerial drawings and trying to work out what everyone had written. I was in there for more than 90 minutes – and it was only the knowledge that I was going to have to carry everything around with me all day that stopped me buying a lot of stuff in the shop!
And finally a question for you: how much time did Mary have on her hands when she was being held prisoner by Elizabeth?
Answer: a three metre by two metre tapestry amount of time! This was made by her and Bess of Hardwick across the span of 15 years. It’s big. And complicated.
Do you know when you can’t find a book and it’s really annoying you? In last week’s Bookshelfie I spoke about the fact that I didn’t have to even check the shelves much to know what was on there. And no, I don’t know all of my shelves that well, but I do know where roughly most of my books should be. So when stuff is not there it gets frustrating.
I used to loan books out a fair bit in the before times, but then I would forget who had what and end up with missing books or duplicate copies. You may remember when my copy of Gone with the Windsors went awol and it was A Drama. I have three copies now because I cried about it on Twitter and Laurie Graham saw it and sent me one, which was too nice to read and so I bought another copy of it and then I got the original one back as well. So now I have three copies and I started a list of who I had loaned what to. Which helps. But occasionally, there’s a book that I can’t find and I don’t know why.
At the moment it’s Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. It was one of the extended reading list books for my A Levels – where we did a module on War Literature. I read all the books on that list. And for years while I was at university and slightly beyond, my copy of Goodbye to All That lived on the bookshelf that ran across my bedroom wall above the door with the other books from that module. Then when I moved into my own house I took all the books with me. Well I did a bit of a weed. But of that collection of books from that module, the only one I ditched was Testament of Youth. Because I hated it.
So now they lived on the downstairs bookshelf at the old house. And it should be on the same bookshelf now. But it’s not. And it’s really annoying me. Especially since my copy of Strange Meeting returned to base the other week (even if my mum didn’t realise it was mine, despite the fact my name was written in the front of it!). So where have I put it? And what do I do? I could buy a new copy, but it wouldn’t be the same edition – and I want the same edition. And of course if I do, the original one could turn up. Although I’ve been waiting for years for my copy of Regeneration to turn up as it was one of a matching set and it hasn’t yet so what do I know.
Maybe the act of writing this will magic my copy back to me? It’s a turn of the century small paperback sized Penguin one, with the black and white photo of the trenches on the front. It’s completely the wrong size for all the other books from that module, but I don’t care because it’s the *right* version for me. Thanks.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 