It seems like we might have brought some summery weather home with us from Gran Canaria! And considering I was back at work from Tuesday, I’m actually pretty pleased with this list of reading last week. All I need to do now is get the hammock set up in the back garden ready for some quality reading time in the sunny weather.
The Unforgettable Loretta, Darling by Katherine Blake*
One ebook bought
Bonus picture: Saturday afternoon in the countryside. There is a boules tournament going on just out of shot, which is less quintessentially British, but this view just made me thing of Constable paintings for some reason.
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
As if there wasn’t already enough sport on TV at the moment, what with the Euros reaching the start of the last round of group games tonight, the grass court tennis season being well underway and the build up to the Olympics, I’ve got a football documentary for you today.
99 is Amazon Prime’s documentary about the 10 days that saw Manchester United win the treble in the summer of 1999, which I refuse to believe can be 25 years ago, because I remember it, and how did I get this old?! Anyway this takes you through the process that got them to that remarkable treble as well as those key days, with interviews with all the key figures involved as well as loads of archive from the time.
Looking back at this distance, it’s clear that no matter whether you support Man U or not (and I’m definitely in the not camp) this was a remarkable achievement – and they did it with a large number of players that had come through the club’s academy set-up. Clubs have done the same thing since – but they’ve done it after large injections of money from various sources and without the home-grown talent.
If you’ve seen the Beckham documentary series, this (unsurprisingly) has a lot of the same talking heads (and some of the same producers too) but obviously the focus is very different. But if you enjoy one, you’ll probably enjoy the other, from sporting point of view anyway.
Two different Waterstones in todays post – because I can to be honest, just be glad I didn’t include Birmingham airport W H Smith – but there wasn’t anything different to these two this time – I was actually disappointed with the options I had for the holiday really.
Anyway least start with Waterstones Piccadilly. This was the week before the holiday, on the first bumper release day in June. To be honest I think the only reason I took the photo of this fiction shelf is because Mona of the Manor made the cut!
And then this is the upstairs window display in the fiction section of Waterstones Gower Street this week – it’s got some of the same stuff as that first photo from Piccadilly, but it’s also got The Ministry of Time, which I have on the pile and got nominated for the Waterstones Debut Fiction prize this week, as did Glorious Exploits on the far right.
Happy Friday everyone, the sun is out, we’ve had the longest day and in the US the summer break is underway and children are heading off to Summer Camp, which means that it’s an ideal time to write about the Lumberjanes series.
The Lumberjanes are a group of girls spending their summer at a scout camp, which is presumably somewhere in New England, and though they never really say. The camp looks like any other camp you might have seen in American popular culture, but its environs turn out to be inhabited by various magical and mythical beings and across the course of the twenty volumes they meet them and battle some of them.
I’ve finally finished reading the series – for some reason the final two didn’t turn up at on my order at the comic book store when they first came out and I’d got so distracted that I’d forgotten about it until a month or so back when I looked at the shelf and saw it only went to 18. I can’t quite explain why I love the series so much – except that it mashes up loads of the stuff I loved as a child with great art and some jokes. It’ll make you smile – and if you’re actually the age it’s aimed at, it’ll teach you some valuable life skills for navigating the world. I guess that’s why it won a tonne of awards.
You can get these really easily – any good comic store will have them, as will any bookshop with a graphic novel section. They are in eformats too, but I find graphic novels really hard going on e readers so your mileage may vary on that too.
This is another mega week of new books ahead of the summer – I don’t think it’s quite as big a week as the first one of the month, but it’s pretty mega.
Firstly two of my anticipated not sequels post are out – Kirsty Greenwood’s Love of my Afterlife and the new Kevin Kwan. But as the popularity of sports romances increases there’s also a Wimbledon-set Tennis romance Match Point by Katherine Reilly which comes just a couple of weeks before the tournament in SW19 and the same week as the new Roger Federer documentary…
Over in cozy crime corner, Ellie Alexander is starting a new series – with the first two out on the same day. I had an advance copy of Body in the Bookstore – and I’ve read it – and now I have the second, A Murder at the Movies, thanks to the wonders of Kindle Unlimited are both out this week. In historical mysteries there is The Stranger’s Companion which is set on the Channel Island of Sark and A Curtain Twitcher’s Book of Murder which is set in the 1960s
And that’s just the ones on my (virtual pile)! So have a great Thursday everyone, try not to buy too many books…
Now we’re through the quick reviews and the kindle offers, I thought I’d do this week’s Recommendsday with some fiction picks for Pride month. And it turns out, I’ve already read and recommended a lot so narrowing the field down was the tricky bit – but I’ve given it a good go.
Now a lot of the stuff I’ve read the most recently has been romance – and I’ve told you about loads of them already. But that’s not going to stop me from reminding you about some of my favourites. So there’s Alexis Hall’s Boyfriend Material, K J Charles’s Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen and the Bright Falls Series. And of course it’s just a few weeks since Cat Sebastian’s You Should Be So Lucky was Book of the Week.
Talking of recent books of the week – there’s Mona of the Manor and in fact the whole of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series. I struggle a lot with comps for these because they’re just so wonderful and the early ones uniquely capture the moment that they were written in – San Francisco in the mid-1970s. But another book that captures the moment that it was written in is Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin – a fictionalised version of the author’s time in Berlin in the dying days of the Weimar Republic. Written a couple of years after his return, it was published in 1939. If you’ve read many/any books set in 1930s Berlin then this is worth a read even if only to see how it was seen at the time.
As I said yesterday, in a rare turn of events, I read all of the physical books I took on holiday with me, and this was one of them – an airport sized paperback version in case you can’t tell from the photo.
This is a potted history of how Formula One came to its current moment – massively popular and finally breaking America for the first time, in part thanks to the Netflix series Drive to Survive. This takes you through the many evolutions of the sport, to explain how the sport evolved into the sport-entertainment behemoth that it is today. The authors are journalists from the Wall Street Journal – who have previously broken down (in book form) the global success of the English Premier League. This is not a history of who won what and when – it’s a look at the evolution of the sport, the key characters and moments and particularly the business of F1.
Now regular readers will know that I’m a big motorsports fan, and Formula One is the series that I’ve been watching the longest* and I know a fair bit about it because I live with a massive petrol head who has been a subscriber to F1 Racing/GP Racing for about 20 years. I’ve watched with interest over the last few years the changes that have happened in the sport since Bernie Ecclestone was deposed from his throne as puppet master in Chief and new fans have arrived in the sport – including my own sister, who despite growing up in the same household as me, has never previously been interested in the sport – and still doesn’t watch the races, she just watches Drive to Survive when it comes out.
And this is a book aimed at fans like my sister (although maybe not my sister, because she’s heard me tell some of these stories before!), who are new to the sport and want to understand a bit more of the history and the personalities. I didn’t learn a lot that I didn’t already know, but I wasn’t expecting to – and it was all put together incredibly well and in a really readable way. I was interested in what stayed in and what got left out – I’m not sure Graham Hill got a mention, and neither really did the trend of the driver pool becoming ever more dominated by sons of previous drivers.
But that’s not what this book is here to do – it’s going to talk you through how the sport started, how Bernie Ecclestone took control of it and made himself a billionaire, the geniuses who have designed the cars that changed the sport – and how it all came together at the perfect moment when the series of Drive to Survive covering the 2019 season hit Netflix just before Covid hit and the world shut down. It briefly touches on the way fears that some people have about the Netflix-isation of the sport, but doesn’t go into the realms of speculation about what might happen next – for which I am thankful!
Him Indoors hasn’t read it yet – and I await his verdict when he does, because he knows the history more than I do and will undoubtedly spot some errors – but the only glaring one I spotted was late on when they described the famously Finnish Valtteri Bottas as Estonian – which given how his most famous Drive to Survive moment is probably the one where he’s naked in a Sauna (and he’s posted another Sauna videos on Instagram just three days ago as I write this) and he’s the latest in a long line of Finnish F1 drivers (many of them quirky) and Estonia to my knowledge has never had an F1 driver is a bit of a howler, but I’ll forgive them (as long as they fix it in the paperback!)
My copy came from the airport bookshop, but it’s out now in hardback if you’re not at the airport – my hometown Waterstones has click and collect copies available so you should find it pretty easily – as well as on Kindle and Kobo.
*I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the three things I watched on TV with my dad when I was little were Formula One, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Worzel Gummidge. How many episodes of Worzel we actually watched I don’t know, but it stuck in my head. The other two, we watched a lot.
So we’ve been on holiday! A week in the sunshine means I’ve read a lot of books – and I finished Travellers in the Third Reich!!! All it took was (another) holiday and I got it done. And it is very good – the only reason it’s taken so long is because it’s long and a tough subject. Anyway, my other major holiday achievement was that I finished all three of the actual books I took with me – one from home and two that I bought at the airport. I think this is the first time this has ever happened.
Bonus picture: A scene from our holiday hike. That’s me striding away from the camera on my way to the bottom of the giant rock. And it might look flat here, but this is the plateau after a bit of a steep climb!
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
On a slight tangent today, because the 2011 movie was on TV the other night and if I come across it I can’t help but end up watching it.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is John Le Carré’s Cold War spy masterpiece, where a retired spymaster is brought back into the fold to try and track down a mole in the British secret intelligence service. George Smiley had been forced out after a failed assignment which had secretly been to investigate the same mole- but is contacted some years later by the minister to investigate the potential mole. The title refers to the code names the former chief – Control – had given to the suspects in the case. What follows is a chess game of a book as Smiley tries to unravel what is really going on from a group of men who are used to obfuscation and secrecy.
This is one of those rare occasions where I have read the book, watched the TV series and seen the movie – and I’m pretty sure I read the book first to see if I could cope with the movie, and then the TV series was repeated on BBC Four after the success of the movie. And they’re all brilliant. The TV version was made in the late 70s, so less than a decade after the book was set, and has the authentic contemporary look as well as more time to tell the story, the movie has an all star cast doing excellent work and the adaptation to get it down to film length is very neatly done.
Warning: don’t look at the comments on the TV version of you haven’t read the book/seen the movie because it gives the culprit away.
I’m not normally a thriller watcher – or reader really – but the movie for such good reviews I made an exception and it’s really worth it. I wish they had made a sequel – there are more Smiley books and they did with the TV series – but I think too much time has passed now for it to be feasible. But in the absence of more, I’ll happily watch the film again. And again.
An eclectic selection this month. There are two Lumberjanes that I somehow didn’t get when they first came out, the two books I bought on the way to Lagos, the first Cesare Aldo which I ordered second hand after reading the first on holiday in April, a non-MaisieJacqueline Winspear and a Lauren Willig that I preordered ages ago and seems to have only just become available in paperback in the UK.
And what I realised after I took this photo is that – despite the fact that there is one Winspear in here so it should have jogged my memory, I forgot to include the final Maisie Dobbs in it. Now is that because I genuinely forgot or because my brain didn’t want to admit that I’d walked down to Waterstones Piccadilly on release day to buy it – and it a hardback at full price too. Thank goodness for a £10 Waterstones loyalty card reward. Even if that means I’ve already spent a lot of money there. And it’s not even the only bookshop I use…
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 