Well I can confirm that I am in a full on binge of the Ruth Galloway series. I read three this week, but I also spent a couple of hours tramping around central London after work one day looking for the next in the series at a sensible price (new and secondhand shops, from Charing Cross Road to St Pancras. It was good exercise and in one shop another customer liked my bag (from Strand Books in New York) so much he asked if he could take a picture of it. So that was fun. Anyway, we’re halfway through March, I’m not halfway through my NetGalley books for the month, and I’m acquiring books at a rate of knots. But I’m having fun doing it and I did make some more progress on Cher’s memoir, so I’m not too cross at myself.
Well as you could tell from Books Incoming, quite a few. That is to say four paperbacks bought and a pre-order arrived plus one ebook and another book preordered.
Bonus picture: the rather delightful wool display system in a haberdashers store in Soho.
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
Happy Sunday everyone, I’ve got a documentary recommendation for you this week, and I’ve bumped it to the top of the list because it was only on TV on Friday night – and so it’s on iPlayer now, and it’s important for arts documentaries to get viewing figures for us to get more of them. And this is a really good one.
Steven McRae is a Principal at the Royal Ballet – and in 2019 his Achilles tendon tore in the middle of a performance, leaving him lying on the stage in agony, thinking his career could be over. Dancing Back to the Light is the story of his rehabilitation and return to the stage in 2021. It’s a long and gruelling process, and as well as following him at work in the dance studio and the gym we also see him at home with his wife, herself a retired ballet dancer with the Royal Ballet, and their three young children.
I read a lot of books about ballet dancers when I was a child (and still re-read them now as an adult to be honest) and often wished that I had learned ballet. This will give you an unflinching portrait of the effort and sacrifice that goes into being at the top of your game in the modern ballet world, and how even the best dancers can have bad habits and be powering their way through in unhealthy ways. McRae is Australian and his childhood teacher always had the ambition for him to go to the Royal Ballet school – which seemed out of reach for a kid from a Sydney suburb on the other side of the world But 17 he flew to Switzerland to participate in the Prix de Lausanne and as he tells us in the documentary he won first prize – and a scholarship to the Royal Ballet. As that Instagram caption for the trailer says; he’s also a fabulous tap dancer – this is his tap solo from that competition:
McRae is very articulate and honest about what’s going on inside his head and how he’s had to rebuild the way that he dances and his every day routine as a result of the injury. He’s a dancer who has been incredibly acclaimed for his talent and dancing style – but it’s such hard work to be as good as he is. There are various jobs that I’ve seen described as being like a swan – serene on the surface but pedaling away madly underwater and ballet seems to be very like that – for the three hours of perfection you see on stage, there is untold dedication behind the scenes as well as whatever pain or injury the dancer might be carrying with them on stage at any given time. I think even if you’re not into ballet it’s worth a watch, because like so many documentaries about sports people it shows someone fighting to get back to the peak of their powers to try and make the most of their talent and passion while they can, but also about listening to your body and taking the time you need to do things properly.
If you’re in the UK, you can watch Steven McRae: Dancing Back to the Light on iPlayer here. It’s been broadcast as part of the Arena strand of documentaries. If you’re not in the UK, this has had a cinema release in France, and I’m sure it will be popping up on streaming platforms at some point.
This isn’t as bad as it could have been. I know it looks like a lot, but four of them are off the pile already because I’ve read three of the Elly Griffiths and the Curtis Sittenfeld are already read and on the normal shelves. One of those Griffiths plus the two Streatfields and the Georgette Heyer detective novel came from that Carlisle trip, the Anne De Courcy came from a trip to Gower Street Waterstones to pick up another Elly Griffiths, the Benevolent Society of Ill Mannered Ladies came from a trip to buy a book as a gift because I have poor will power and then the other two Elly Griffiths were secondhand purchases because I’m on a proper binge as you can tell from the Week in Books posts. And on that basis I expect there will be more of them next month…
Addendum: The willpower has been weak this week. More books have arrive since I took the top photo and as the original photo was already pretty full, I took another rather than restaging (and hauling everything back off the shelves) because if I didn’t it was only going to make next month’s photo even worse…
So here we have the preorder of the new book by Charlotte Stein that turned up on Thursday, another Edmund Crispin and three more Ruth Galloways, one of which is already read and off the to-read pile and onto the “needs to find a shelf for it” pile.
My brain can’t quite get it’s head around it, but Wednesday just gone marked ten years since Terry Pratchett died, and I couldn’t let that pass without writing something about the Discworld and my enduring love for it.
I’d like to start by pointing you at my Where to Start with Terry Pratchett post for my suggestions about not starting at the beginning of the series unless you’re a frequent fantasy reader, but actually starting with one of the mini-series within the Discworld. It’s six or so years since I wrote that, and since then I think I’ve re-read most of my favourite sub-series, but not the series as a whole. And I think I’ve re-read or re-listen the first two Moist von Lipwig books and The Truth every year – and helped by the fact that there have been fresh audiobooks released I’ve also added in the early watch books, which were a very hard listen on the digital transfer of the original Nigel Planer recordings – or at least they were so hard a listen on Guards! Guards! that I never bought any others and just stuck to the ones that were narrated by Stephen Baxter.
I love the way that Pratchett skewers the modern world and the things that he picks out to create an alternative version of. I do wish we had got the Moist takes on the Tax system that was hinted at in the final stages of Making Money, but Raising Steam was fun instead. Basically I wish we had more. I wish so the Embuggrance hadn’t happened and we had another ten PTerry books by now rather than only having the old ones to re-read.
I’m also really glad that I went to see him and Rob Wilkins at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 2011 to talk about Snuff. Because I’m an electronic hoarder I went back and checked my emails – and the event was to mark the fact that snuff was his 50th book – but I know that I went because I wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to be able to do events and I wanted to hear him speak. It was four or so years since he’d made the dementia diagnosis public at that point, Rob did the reading from the book and Terry had already stopped signing books – he was stamping instead. My only regret from that night is that I didn’t queue up to get the book stamped and meet him – but it was a work night, it was already after 10pm when it finished and I had come from one 12 hour shift and had another one the next morning. But I went, it was great and I was right – there weren’t many more chances, because I didn’t manage to do another one.
And I really respect the job that Rob and Terry’s daughter Rhianna have done looking after the Pratchett estate – they’ve been really thoughtful and careful about what they do with it and tried to follow his wishes – right down to steamrollering his hard-drives so that nothing else could come out that he hadn’t approved. And judging by Rhianna’s post this week, hopefully we may have a new adaptation of something coming at some point in the relatively near future.
Anyways, I’m off to think about whether I should but some more of the pretty hardbacks, which will lead to me looking at the Discworld Emporium website and then maybe do a Discworld jigsaw under my framed picture of Errol the Dragon. I’ll leave you with the links my original tribute post and my BotW post for Shepherd’s Crown – which I still haven’t been able to re-read.
Happy New Book post Thursday. This week it’s a new book from Rosie Danan – who wrote The Roommate and Intimacy Experiment which were the subject of a double BotW post back in 2021. Her new book is called Fan Service and is a second paranormal romcom – following last year’s Do Your Worst. Now I have a mixed history with romances with supernatural or fantasy elements but I enjoyed the Jen DeLuca that had ghosts, so I’m prepared to give this a go. In Fan Service the star of a werewolf detective show finds himself in need of help from the woman who runs a fan forum for the show after he has an… unusual experience one full moon. I’ll be watching out for this, but also sort of hoping that the release coincides with a price drop for Do Your Worst – or in fact either of them appearing in a bookstore on a Buy One Get One Half Price table…
I already mentioned on Friday that the Lady Julia Grey series are on offer – but it bears repeating. Going further back in history, there’s PD James’s Death Comes to Pemberley at £1.79, the seventh and it looks like final Shardlake mystery Tombland is back on offer at 99p as is Philippa Gregory‘s The Constant Princess about Catherine of Aragon ahead of another joining the series in the autumn (The Boleyn Traitor about Jane Boleyn).
There’s a bunch of TV-tie in, or TV related books on offer this month too. There’s Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen which has just been turned into a TV series, as well as the first Hawthorn and Horowitz The Word Is Murder, not long after the adaptation of Horowitz’s Moonflower Murders (and not long now before the third book in that series arrives). THere’s also Enola Holmes and there are a few Julia Quinns on offer, including the final Bridgerton book, Gregory’s story On the Way to the Wedding and Mr Cavendish, I Presume,
On the non-fiction front, there are actually quite a lot of celebrity memoirs on offer too – I haven’t read these, but they all had good reviews when they came out: Pamela Anderson’s Love, Pamela, Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me, Viola Davis’s Finding Me and Lauren Graham’s Have I Told You This Already. Not quite a celebrity in the traditional sense but Anne Glenconnor’s Lady in Waiting is on offer too as is Susannah Constantine’s Ready for Absolutely Nothing.
There are also some pretty good history books on offer, like Dan Jones’s The Hollow Crown, Lucy Worsley’s Queen Victoria, and although I haven’t read this one, the Elizabeth I book in the Penguin Monarchs series – these are really good short surveys of monarch’s lives written by notable historians, in the case of Elizabeth I it’s Helen Castor.
Happy Tuesday everyone and today I’m back with a new release (it’s under two weeks since it came out, that totally counts as new still) collection of short stories from one of my favourite authors.
This is a new collection of short stories from Curtis Sittenfeld, mostly looking at various aspects what it is like to be a women, usually a woman in her forties, in the Mid-West of America. It’s her first full collection of short stories since 2018’s You Think It, I’ll Say It which was also a Book of the Week when I read it in 2019 (and which is probably the only book of hers I don’t own. I should fix that). Since then she’s written Rodham, her alternative history of Hillary Clinton, and Romantic Comedy which was one of my very favourite books of 2024 and which I now want to go back and read again. It should also be noted that there is a bit of overlap here with some short stories having appeared elsewhere individually or in a mini collection. But given that I didn’t write about any of those at the time I’m feeling ok about recommending this – just if you are a fan (like me) you’ll have read some before and you may want to calibrate your expectations of new stuff accordingly.
Anyway there are not enough stories about normal women, with normal lives doing things and this is full of them. As with that last collection there is just enough action to keep things moving but not so much that you don’t get to know the character. And once again Sittenfeld has picked out a few things that are happening in the world and done interesting and often witty takes on them. It’s just lovely. Really really nice. I rationed myself to make it last longer. It’s that sort of book – and you can do that with short stories if you just let yourself read one in a sitting.
As you could see from my photos at the weekend, this is getting shelf space on display in the bookshops, but it’s also available on Kindle and Kobo.
Another busy week in life and reading – complete with a migraine in the middle to add to the mix. Anyway, a good proportion of actual books, even if some of them were new purchases rather than from the shelf. And I did get another one off the long running list. Yay me.
Happy Sunday, this weekend I’m back with a post about another documentary series.
I am of the age that I lived through the peak of the early boyband era and so the crop of documentaries that have popped up about them recently have been a total boon for me – even if the reality that the members of the bands that I loved wasn’t the shiny happy experience that we thought they were having when we were watching them back in the day. And we have had a run of them – BBC Two had Boybands Forever just before Christmas which looked at the whole crop of bands that came through starting in the 90s and now Sky has done this three part look at Boyzone.
So if you are unfamiliar with Boyzone, they were five young men from Ireland – Ronan, Stephen, Mikey, Shane and Keith, who were formed a public auditions by Louis Walsh later went onto manage Westlife and also to be a judge on the X factor. They really came to prominence after the demise or split of Take That and had a clean cut, wholesome and youthful image – Ronan for example wasn’t even out of his teens when the band came through. What I didn’t realise at the time was that they were from very working class backgrounds and from quite a rough area of Dublin and that’s a big theme of how the experience affected them. When I went to the launch event for Reach for the Stars a couple of years ago, Nicola Robers from Girls Aloud was the special guest talking to Michael Wragg, and one of the things that she talked about was the fact that TV talent shows were a route into the music industry for working class kids and the challenges that that presented, and although Boyzone were not a TV talent show group, I think a lot of the things that she spoke about also applied to them – not really having lived away from their parents before, a lack of knowledge about how the industry worked, a dependence on the management companies who were in charge of them but who didn’t necessarily have the best interests of the band members at heart.
Unlike Take That who had the hit machine that was Gary Barlow, Boyzone had no real songwriter – they were put together by Louis Walsh, boyband svengali and future X Factor judge, who it should be noted very much gets the villain edit in this – although I don’t think it took much editing to do that – a clip that’s been doing the rounds since the show went out shows him admitting that he told the press that the boys had been in a plane crash (they hadn’t) and then didn’t tell their families, leaving them to find out in the press that their loved ones had supposedly cheated death. Anyway, Boyzone were best know for a string of hit cover version of songs by people like Tracy Chapman and the Bee Gees. If you’ve only heard of one Boyzone song, it will likely be No Matter What – an Andrew Lloyd Webber composition that came from his musical version of Whistle Down the Wind that they released as a single to coincide with the launch of the musical in the West End, or their Comic Relief single* When the Going Gets Tough
After a couple of hugely successful years, they went on hiatus “for a year”, Ronan went solo and one year turned into more – until a hugely successful first reunion tour and then the death of Stephen Gately at the age of just 33. I still remember exactly where I was when I heard that Stephen had died, and that loss of Stephen is the bit of their story that is obviously tragic, but it turns out what was going on behind the scenes was something that has clearly left all four remaining members with a lot of issues. Mikey – or Michael as he is captioned throughout – was always the member of the band that was the easiest to forget about, but in this documentary he probably has the most to say about the impact being on the band had – and still has on him and how hard he’s had to work to build himself into the person that he is now.
It’s not exactly a cheerful watch – but it is fascinating. And when combined with Boybands Forever, you get a real picture of the damage that fame can do to young people when they find themselves in the limelight and at the centre of a press scrum (particularly the sort of press scrum that was going on in the late 1990s and early 2000s) without people properly looking out for them. I wish I could say that lessons have been learned and that emerging stars are better looked after, but I’m not sure that the evidence suggests that they are.
Boyzone: No Matter What is available to stream on Now TV and they’re showing all three parts back to back on Sky Documentaries next weekend.
*Truly having the Comic Relief single was a massive deal in the 1990s – Boyzone came in a run that went Pet Shop Boys; Chrissie Hynde, Cher, Neneh CHerry and Eric Clapton; the Spice Girls; Boyzone; Westlife; Gareth Gates andbMcFly; and if you don’t remember the era of singles sales you may not quite understand and I feel so old just typing that.
Here we go again, this week’s Saturday post is basically the result of me wandering around a lot of bookshops over the last few weeks and having some thoughts about it and about me and my reading habits.
Firstly, I think we’re living in a really interesting time for cover design at the moment. I think we went through a whole phase of being able to work out pretty much what genre a book was in just by looking at the cover – and now: not so much. Or at least not so much at the moment. I mean we all know what I read most of the time, and I still picked up a bunch of these to read the backs because of the covers. And some of them were intriguing, but we all know that I’d buy one and it would sit on the shelves for actual years as I picked almost everything else to read first!
Moving towards stuff that I might actually read, we’ve got some new hardback crime fiction, which actually makes me feel guilty all over again – because I have Alex Hay’s last book, at least one Tom Hindle and the Oskar Jensen that Helle’s Hound is a sequel to still waiting to be read. Lets move on quickly before I feel any worse.
Having just said that I’m feeling bad for not reading things, this has the book I acutally bought on it – I was in Foyles on the Tuesday before Show Don’t Tell was published and was delighted to see it out early – and signed. So I bought it. And I’ve read it now. Sue me
Moving on, this is actually my local Waterstones and the tower they use for new hardbacks. This is the crime side and it is interesting to me that this is the first place (I think) that I’ve seen Steph Plum 31 in the flesh, which as it came out in the autumn is a surprise. It’s also the first time I’ve come across A Trial in Three Acts – which like the Curtis Sittenfeld was out on the shelves a few days early – this was taken last Saturday and it only came out officially two days ago. Sidenote: it’s enough to make me think twice about pre-ordering books if I might be able to get a copy from an actual bookshop a few days early, but authors need pre-orders. What a dilemma. Anyway, a Trial in Three Acts is a legal mystery about a murder committed live on stage. And as we all know I love a theatre-set mystery, so this just went onto my list of books to look out for at the airport! Also, I love the cover of A Stolen Heart, which it seems is the second book set in Soviet-controlled Kyiv in 1919. As we know, I like to read in order, so I’ll have to find the first one in this series in a shop (or as a Kindle sample) and have a read because it sounds intriguing but also like it has huge potential to be Too Grim.
And finally, more new fiction, more lovely covers, more books I hadn’t heard about mixed in with books that I have. I have now picked up The House With Nine Locks at least three times because of the gorgeous cover before reading the back and remembering that blurbs that include “a dangerous game of cat and mouse with fanatical and brutal detective” and the phrase “morally complex” are usually Not For Me. See also 33 Place Brugmann which has the word “devastating” in the blurb and is about occupied Brussels in World War 2. I have also picked up The Book of Gold more than once – but it is the first (and so far only published) book in a promised trilogy so that can wait!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 