Did I go on a bit of a binge of Ovidia Yu’s Crown Colony/Su Lin series, why yes. Should I have been reading other things? Probably. Am I sorry? Not at all. And it was a pretty busy week too. And it’s only getting busier over the next few weeks too, so we’ll see how that goes.
Seven books bought – mostly because of writing the offers post – and one preorder arrived.
Bonus picture: Sunday gardening. This bag doesn’t look that big on the photo, but it’s actually huge, and yet despite that the garden doesn’t look that much better. Never mind.
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
Most read author: Probably Agatha Christie – with four audiobooks
Books bought: six ebooks, a couple of book-books and a pre-order arrived
Books read in 2024: 139
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 740
A pretty good month – a lovely holiday, some good books and not too much actually added to the pile. So for me a big win!
Bonus picture: Another picture from the holiday – this time from a pier looking back at the Apuan Alps that we had just driven through to get to Massa.
*includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – including this month!
Of course I went wandering in the bookshops while we were in Italy. Why wouldn’t it. And here is the first part of the results of my market research. This is one is in Pistoia and is part of a chain. I went into a couple of them and they were all in charming buildings. Now whether that’s because they like that aesthetic or because Tuscany is full of amazing buildings, I don’t know. Anyway, I appreciated the pretty locations.
Can I start with how much I love the fact that romance is called pink literature? Crime is called yellow literature so it just made me smile. And this bookshop had loads of them – in Italian and English.
There are also plenty of examples of English covers being used in translated editions in the romance and in the woman’s fiction sections – Lucy Score, Colleen Hoover, Taylor Jenkins Reid and more.
I’m not quite sure why the translated Mia Sosa is in the English language section, but there were plenty of options for the English-reader abroad – with a strong long in Italian-set books – Elena Ferrante, Hotel Portofino, Murder Under a Tuscan Sky, Italian-set romance novels, non fiction books about Italy.
And finally is it even a bookshop these days without a TikTok/BookTok mention somewhere! Of course it’s not…
I’m finally up to day with Ann Granger’s “other” contemporary mystery series, so the time is right for a Friday series post about them.
Jess Campbell is a detective inspector, who we first met in the Mitchell and Markby series, but who has now moved to Gloucestershire. In the first book Ian Carter is her new superintendent and they start their working relationship by investigating a murder mystery, and the murders keep coming as we’re due an eight book in the series just before Christmas.
They are definitely towards the cozier end of mystery novels with police officers as the leads and are rural-based in the main, set in villages and rural locations with interesting casts of characters. If you like Mitchell and Markby, these have all the same sort of vibes and feels, just with different lead characters (who are both cops this time) and a different location. They’re incredibly easy to read and once I’d got my hands on copies of the ones I was missing, it was hard not to just read them back to back. I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens in book eight – I started in the middle of the series then jumped back to the start and read the ones that I hadn’t read in order – so I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next and what happens with Jess and Ian. I#
I’ve got hold of these from larger book stores with big crime sections – like Waterstones Gower Street and Foyles, but they’re also in Kindle and Kobo and are often pretty reasonably priced.
I did a series post for Ashley Herring Blake’s Bright Falls series a few weeks back, and if you liked those – you might also be interested to know that there is a new Alexandria Bellefleur novel out this week. Truly Madly Deeply came out on the 30th and the blurb tells me it has a bestselling romance novellist who has just found out her fiancee is cheating – just after she signed up to present a podcast giving relationship advice. But when she meets her co-host, who is a cynical divorce lawyer she walks out. But Colin (that’s the lawyer) tracks her down and asks for a second chance and as they get to know each other they go from enemies to friends and then maybe more…
I’m been taking a bit of a break from enemies to lovers romances, but the description of this does interest me, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.
It’s May Day, so here I am with another batch of short reviews of other things I read last month that I haven’t already told you about – or in one case, updating you on something I mentioned on release day.
Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley
A lot has been written about Agatha Christie’s disappearance in 1926 – in non-fiction as well as fiction – and while that is one of the key moments in her life, this sets it in the context of her childhood, her marriage and her work as an author. If all you know about Christie is that she wrote mysteries and that she disappeared, this will fill in all the rest of the gaps for you and is very readable as you do it. It’s clearly got a lot of research behind it, but it wears it very lightly. Definitely worth a read if you’re a classic mystery reader.
Vanishing Point by Patricia Wentworth
I’ve read a few of Patricia Wentworth mystery novels now, both in the Miss Silver series and outside it, and although they’re not my favourite of the “other” Golden Age crime novels, they’re still pretty consistently good, more towards the thriller side of the scale than some of the others, but still with a body or two. They tend to have a slightly higher proportion of Plucky Young Women of various types, but there is variation within that as well. I picked this one up from a charity book exchange, but they’re also relatively regularly available at a good price on Kindle.
The Breakup Tour by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka
I mentioned this when it came out so it’s only fair that I come back with a bit of a verdict on it – and it’s bad news considering how much I enjoyed The Roughest Draft last year. Sadly this is a disappointment and a puzzle. This is slightly spoiler-y but I can’t explain without them: A puzzle because I don’t know who this is actually for. I don’t think the Taylor fans will like it because the Taylor stand in is just terrible and plays all into all the worse of the tropes about her life. I don’t think the non-Taylor fans will either because as a reader you just can’t see how they can be happy and be true to themselves. It feels like it has all the elements of a toxic relationship where it will just keep repeating in patterns.
And that’s your lot – have a great Wednesday everyone.
I mean it may not be a surprise to you that this week’s BotW is the new Emily Henry. I’ve enjoyed her previous books so much that I was hoping this one was going to live up to my expectations and, luckily, it did!
Daphne moved to Waning Bay, Michigan because it was her fiancé’s home town. But when he decides that he’s actually in love with his best friend Petra, she finds herself stranded in a new town, where she may have her dream job as a childrens librarian, but she’s got no friends and will soon have no where to live either. So she does what any one would do – moves in with Petra’s jilted boyfriend Miles. The two would seem to be absolute opposites – Daphne is serious, practical and so quiet her colleagues think she might be in witness protection. Miles is scruffy and somewhat chaotic and likes listening to heartbreak ballads on repeat. But when the two of them get drunk together they think it might be a good idea to post deliberately misleading photos of the two of them together, and then, well things get even more complicated.
I read this in less than 18 hours. I was reading it on the train to work and I was cross when I had to put it down and get off and walk to the office. I was reading it on the train home, and was cross when I had to stop reading and get off the train – even though I was really hungry and wanted to go home for my dinner. And I finished in bed that night when I should have been going to sleep. Luckily I was near enough to the end that it didn’t end up being a 2am finish and the Bad Decisions book club.
I enjoyed Happy Place last year, but I liked this so much more. This is back towards the pure romance end of the spectrum, whereas Happy Place was closer to the Women’s Fiction end. This was back to Book Lovers levels of enjoyment for me and I would happily have read another hundred pages, especially if those pages included more comeuppance for Daphne’s awful ex-Peter. The only thing I didn’t really understand – to start with at least – was why Daphne would have been with Peter in the first place, but Henry did a really good job of making that understandable.
My copy of Funny Story came from NetGalley, but it’s out now and will be where ever you get your books from, because Emily Henry books get massive wide releases. It’s a hardback – so it’ll be at the airports in the large format paperback if you’re going on holiday any time soon – and of course it’s in Kindle and Kobo.
We’re hurtling towards the end of April and I’m still not entirely sure how that happened. Anyway all the usual end of month stuff coming up, but for once I have already finished all the new releases this month that I had got from NetGalley. I’m not sure when the last time that happened was, and when you add to that the fact that I’ve also finished the May requests too and it’s really unusual. What I haven’t done is got the list of ongoing books down – because I got a bit distracted by the exciting new releases. Still you win some, you lose some!
Bonus picture: it’s wisteria season again! There were loads of them in Italy, but they’re also coming into bloom on the building I walk past on the way to work.
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
The TV adaptation of the first book in Robert Thoroughgood’s mystery series is here, I’ve finished watching it and so this Sunday is time for me to tell you all about it!
It’s a two part adaptation of The Marlow Murder Club, which is the first of the three books we have had so far in the series. It introduces us to Judith, Becks and Suzie who become friends and co-investigators as they try to figure out who killed Judith’s neighbour – whose murder she hears while swimming in the river. The police are initially sceptical that it’s actually a murder but then the lead detective makes the threesome become civilian advisors after realising that they were right. That’s about all I’m going to tell you except that more deaths follow.
This is definitely a cozy mystery series, it does have it’s dramatic moments, but if there’s a scale that goes from Sister Boniface and Father Brown (10) through to Morse (1) on the humorous to serious scale, it’s somewhere around a 6. I found some bits of it too cringe to watch – but they’re all things that are in the book and that didn’t bother me (or at least not as much) in the reading.This has been adapted for the screen by the author – who is also the creator of the Death in Paradise TV series – and I can’t work out if that’s a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, he clearly knows which elements of the characters’ backstories are important to keep for future developments, on the other, he might be a bit too close to the material to get the best out of it.
The acting is a little patchy in places – but I liked Samantha Bond as Judith, even though she’s at least a decade younger than Book Judith, and I find it traumatic that the actress who played Julia in the Joan Hickson Murder is Announced is now old enough to be playing senior citizen roles. But that’s my issue about how fast time has passed and how often I’ve watched those Miss Marples! On the whole, I prefer the books – because of the cringe-embarrassment factor, but I think it’s a fairly solid adaptation, and I definitely liked it more than I’ve liked a lot of the most recent Agatha Raisin adaptations and I think it’s better than them.
In the UK, this was shown on Drama, and also is available on UKTV Play. As you can see from the trailer that I’ve found it’s been on 7 Australia and it looks like it’s going to be on PBS Masterpiece in the US.
Last week I said there was more from Óbidos and so here it is!
This is the Livraria do Mercado, which is a bookshop and an organic market. I have no idea what the proportion of books to produce is when it comes to sales, but in terms of the look of the place, it’s mostly books!
I also have no idea what how the prices for the produce stack up compared to in the other stores, but it seemed to be good quality and I know I’d be happy to buy my veggies in a bookshop – after all I’ve done my fair share of book buying in supermarkets over the years, and this is definitely the better way around!
It’s mostly Portuguese books (obviously) but they have also got a section with foreign language novels – including lots of Portuguese authors in translation and, in English at least, some very random secondhand books!
You’ve already seen this one, but this is the book exchange – and this is all English books (or the vast majority anyway). It’s run by volunteers who have moved to the area and raises money for local charities. As you know, I picked up a few books while I was there!
And that’s it! Have a great weekend and I hope you have a comfy spot and a good book to read in it!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 