Tag: book reviews

Book of the Week, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Red Land, Black Land

veritywilde

Considering how busy last week was, I actually had choices for this week’s BotW, which was a bit of surprise to me, but these things happen and it required some serious thinking to work out what to pick. And hard thinking is tiring. So in the end I went with my first instinct. Whether that will work out in the end, who knows. Anyway…

Red Land, Black Land is Barbara Mertz’s social history of Egypt. It takes you through the daily life of an Ancient Egyptian, although perhaps unsurprisingly considering that most of what we know about them is from their tombs it tends towards the end of their lives and death!

Those of you who have been around here for a while will know that although I love history, it is rare that I venture before the Middle Ages and if push comes to shove, I would say that I’m most interested in the period after 1750*. So why did I venture more than a thousand years before my usual area of interest? Well Barbara Mertz is the real name of Elizabeth Peters, author of the Amelia Peabody and Vicky Bliss series, who did a PhD in Egyptology in the early 1950s and published this and a second book, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphics in the 1960s. They have remained in print ever since (having both been revised a couple of times – including in the case of Red Land, Black Land in 2008, which is when the audio book version that I listened to is from.

This is very much an introductory prime, written in an accessible, chatty style. I can imagine it being on the preliminary reading lists for all manner of courses on Egyptology, to get people into the swing of it before they go on to read the drier, more academic texts. In fact in many ways it’s got the same vibes as Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guide series (which I also listened to on audio). And if you’ve read the Amelia Peabody series you can see where some of the inspiration for the various plots came from as well as spotting the various real life figures that popped up in that series (Theodore Davis, Arthur Weigel et al) as their discoveries and tombs are referenced.

Your mileage on this may vary depending on how much you like your history books with asides. I really like that (well when it’s an author whose voice I like!) and I found the audio book experience for this a real delight. I listened to the whole thing across about four days, and liked it so much I’ve bought Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphics in audio too!

Red Land, Black Land is available as an audio book and as a paperback in its current revision, but not on Kindle or Kobo. If you’re tempted to buy secondhand, pay attention to the age and edition that you’re looking at – as from looking at the reviews on Goodreads it would seem that it did change and update a lot over time – especially given that there’s 30 years between the last two updates and scholarship can move a lot in that time!

Happy reading!

*and if you look at the history modules that I did for my degree you will see this born out!

Book of the Week, memoirs, new releases, non-fiction

Book of the Week: I Shop, Therefore I Am

veritywilde

Lets just take a moment for the fact that my pick this week is a book that came out last week so I am actually topical and sort of on time for once. Lets mark it, because it happens less often than it ought to, considering the number of advance copies I have of things!

Cover of I Shop, Therefore I A,m

I Shop, Therefore I Am is Mary Portas’s second memoir – I haven’t read the first, but I think this picks up where the first one ends – with Mary starting a new job in charge of window displays at Harvey Nichols. During her time there (which starts in the late 1980s), it transformed from a department store somewhere mostly patronised by older ladies from the Home Counties and in the shadow of their neighbour down the road Harrods, to a headline making store at the cutting edge of the fashion industry.

I grew up watching Absolutely Fabulous (not quite when if first came out, but not *that* long after that) and part of the joy of reading this is getting to see the impact that that show had on the store. But it’s also fascinating to see the mechanics of how the shop worked at a time which (in hindsight) was basically the heyday of the high street. I worked in retail for my first Saturday job was in a clothing store, but the behind the scenes of that was nothing like this – I was at a much lower level but also the clientele was very, very different. I also really liked Mary Portas’s writing style and her voice. She balances the day to day of what she was doing with fun gossipy insights into high fashion and celebrity. And she also seems incredibly normal and down to earth with it that it’s easy to forget that she was moving in really high powered circles until she suddenly mentions how upset they were when Princess Diana died because they all saw her in the store all the time, or when she gets Naomi Campbell to do her instore fashion show.

This is a really good read that would work whether you remember the time that Mary is talking about or not, but I think you’ll get different things out of it depending on whether you remember the time before internet shopping or not! It would also be a great Christmas book for someone who is interested in fashion.

My copy came from NetGalley, but it came out last week and I’m expecting to see it in all the bookshops ahead of the festive rush, especially because it made a bunch of the anticipated book lists earlier in the year. And of course it’s also in Kindle and Kobo.

books

Book of the Week: Breakneck

veritywilde

Happy Tuesday everyone and today I have a non-fiction pick for you – and it’s a book that’s only come out in the last month or so, so I’m even timely for once!

Dan Wang is a Chinese-Canadian, who now works in academia in the US as a research fellow but who was previous a China analyst looking at the country’s technological capabilities while living and working in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. Breakneck is his attempt to put all of this work into one place and to look at the differences between China and the US. He sees the US and China as fundamentally similar in some ways – but that China is an engineering state and the US is a lawyerly one. He says this isn’t a grand theory to explain everything but a framework to put the recent past in and to help understand what might happen next.

I found this really fascinating and illuminating and really liked Wang’s framework as a lens to view China and its relationship with the US through. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about China and trying to understand the current geopolitical situation as part of my day job so on a macro level this is interesting to me. But on a micro level, my little sister and her now husband moved to China in the summer of 2019 and I was really looking forward to visiting them and seeing China – and then the pandemic happened and they were stuck where they were and we were stuck where we were. They came back in 2021 and a lot of the stories that they have told me from their time in Beijing fit in with what is being set out here.

This is a really thought provoking book that is also a glimpse at China beyond the big cities that people outside of China have heard of. I don’t know enough about China to be able to analyse this on a scholarly level (duh!) but as a casual reader and consumer of world news it made a lot of sense to me!

My copy of Breakneck came via NetGalley, but it’s out now and hopefully should be relatively easy to get hold of if you’re in a bookshop with a decent non-fiction section. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever

veritywilde

At this point I can’t tell if this is going to be a shock for you if you saw the list yesterday? I mean I feel it probably shouldn’t be because it was only Sunday that I wrote about how much I love books about behind the scenes in hollywood and this is a book about how a somewhat legendary movie got made.

If you don’t know what Spinal Tap is, I’m not sure where you’ve been, but they’re a fake rock band created by Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, and This is Spinal Tap was the first mockumentary. It’s the thing that all the others are based on and the source of various pop culture reference to the point where if you see it now it’s hard to imagine how different it was.

Most of this book is the history of how the film got made and what happened next – when a fictional band started become real – from appearing at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert to putting out albums. Rob Reiner has done most of the work on this part of the book and it is to tie in with the fortieth birthday of the movie (last year), the fact that the quartet have got the rights back to the movie and property again and that there’s a sequel which is in movie theatres now. We can gloss over whether the sequel was good idea or not (the reviews suggest maybe not) but it’s a really fun read to see how the movie got made – but also what a collaborative effort it was and what a pivotal role in all of the stars lives.

Now flip the book over and the other end is a mock oral history of the band written by the quartet in their characters. This has some funny moments, but it’s not as good as the other end is. But it’s also less than half the length of the other bit so it doesn’t outstay its welcome!

My copy came from Big Green Books who look like they may have a few signed ones left, but I think it’s going to be pretty easy to find normal copies in the shops if you want it. It’s on Kindle and Kobo too, but priced accordingly considering it’s a hardback release. There’s also an audiobook read/performed by the four of them. And if you haven’t watched This is Spinal Tap, you really should!

Book of the Week, cozy crime, detective, first in series, mystery, reviews

Book of the Week: The Last Supper

veritywilde

It’s been more than a month since I picked a murder mystery for book of the week. Can you believe it? I can’t – and even when I went back and checked I still sort of didn’t believe it. But it’s true, so who says there’s no variety in my reading. And there’s more murder mysteries coming tomorrow in the Quick Reviews, but first let’s talk about The Last Supper.

Prudence Bulstrode is a retired TV chef. But when one of her former rivals is found dead in the garden of a house where she was catering a shooting weekend, Prudence is called in to replace her. Farleigh Manor is notorious for an unsolved murder from a century ago, but when Prudence arrives she is soon convinced that Deirdre’s death wasn’t a tragic accident but murder. And while her granddaughter, who she brought along to keep her out of getting into (even more) trouble starts investigating the old murder, Prudence sets out to solve the new one.

Rosemary Shrager is a chef who has been a semi regular on British TV for about 20 years now and before that she ran her own catering company, so the setting for this falls very much into her area of expertise and it shows. I personally have never been on a shooting weekend, but it very much felt like she had and all is those details really worked. I also found this quite humorous – with the tension and generation gap between Prudence and Suki, but couldn’t work whether that was deliberate or not. But does it matter if it was or wasn’t? The only disappointment to me was the eventual solution to the murder, which without giving spoilers about what precisely happened, I didn’t quite feel like the reader had all of the pieces for it to work as well as I wanted it to.

But it was a fun read that I finished in an afternoon and evening and I will definitely keep an eye out for the sequel (there are two now) to see if the humour was deliberate!

I bought my copy of The Last Supper secondhand and I’ve seen it in the shops fairly regularly. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: A Star is Bored

veritywilde

Following on from The Celebrants two Tuesdays ago, today I’m writing about A Star is Born, which I discovered is written by Steven Rowley’s husband when I read the thanks for The Celebrants. And as I had on the pile already of course I went on to read that. And so here we are.

Charlie needs a new job and a gig as personal assistant to Kathi Kannon, an iconic Hollywood actress who played a character he had a figurine of as a child. He’s searching for meaning in his life and a way of moving on past his difficult childhood, she needs someone to organise her chaotic life. She’s impulsive and carefree, and everything that Charlie is not. She’s also Hollywood royalty with mental health and addiction issues and an octogenarian mother who was also an actress who lives next door.

Now if this sounds like Carrie Fisher (and her mum Debbie Reynolds) that might be because Bryon Lane worked as Fisher’s assistant for three years and says that that job inspired the novel. Now you can draw your own conclusions about how much of Kathi is Carrie and I can see from the reviews on Goodreads that it’s a polarising one. And if you’ve read any of Fisher’s memoirs that may also colour your opinions.

For me, Kathi’s hedonistic devil may care manic presence was there as a foil to Charlie’s own issues. He’s totally lost and allows the job to consume him and become his identity. It’s all amped up to eleven and Kathi’s antics seem purposefully extreme and exaggerated so that the reader is often thinking “come on Charlie, surely this is the thing that will make you wake up”. The blurb calls it hilarious, but a lot of the humour is too much towards the cringe for me, and I definitely wanted Charlie to pick himself up and grow some self worth well before he did. But by the end I was pleased with the journey that he had gone on and the person that had come out the other side.

Like The Celebrants, this one isn’t on Kindle and is going to be a special order, to the point where it’s not even listed on the Waterstones website. I’m not sure it’s a spend loads of money to get it type buy, but if it should come your way at a reasonable price it’s an interesting read. And I’d happy read another book by Byron Lane if that came my way.

Happy Reading!

Authors I love, Book of the Week, fiction

Book of the Week: The Celebrants

veritywilde

A diversion away from mystery and romance into “proper” fiction today. And this has been on my shelf since the paperback came out in February last year, but given that I had a Very Bad Year last year when it comes to people dying it has taken a while for me to be in the right place to read it, much as I love Stephen Rowley.

The Celebrants follows a group of friends, who made a pact in college to throw each other “living funerals”, after one of their group dies. Nearly 30 years later, the five of them are still in touch, but rather than the funerals making them think of all the reasons life is worth living, all they seem to do is make them remember what could have been. But one of the group has just had a diagnosis that there’s no coming back for, and the whole group will need to face their past head on.

As I said, I had a bad year last year on the losing people front, and wasn’t really in a place to want to be reading about impending death in a friendship group, given that I was living through precisely that. But I’m in a better place at the moment (or at least a more resilient one!) and so I went in. And it’s really good – it will remind you about the friends you’ve made over the years, how the friendships you made with people you met when you were young can sometimes survive all the changes that come with the years and still understand you better than almost anyone else and also that you never do really feel any older than you were just after you graduated college.

This was a lovely read – and although it made me tear up at the end, it was worth it (if that makes sense). I really like Rowley’s writing style and his characters are always so real – no one is perfect, they’re all three dimensional, flawed people. The narrative moves around through the years between their various funerals as different things happen in their lives and that really worked for me too and broke up the potential sadness nicely.

Annoyingly, this one isn’t available on Kindle (and nor is the Guncle sequel which is a right pain) so you’re going to have to get this in a physical edition. I’ve seen the Guncle in the Big Foyles, but not this one, so it may also be a special order. But it is worth it.

Happy Reading!

books

Books in the Wild: BLCC display

veritywilde

Not going to lie when I saw all of these in Waterstones Piccadilly it made me really quite happy. And of course it made me wonder how many of them I have read. And then I started writing it and realised there were a few more I had on the pile and a few I had read but not written about so if I could just do that the post would be better. And then suddenly it’s three months later. Ahem. Anyway after having finally finished and posted the BLCC roundup that that that started (slowed by several of them ending up as Books of the Week rather than round up post fodder), here we are.

And so here we go… One the wall from clockwise top right we have He Who Whispers (read but haven’t written about), The Lost Gallows – haven’t read, Capital Crimes, Murder in the Mill Race, The Hogs Back Mystery,then two more I haven’t read (yet) It Walks by Night and Miraculous Mysteries.

Let’s start on the back row and work left to right going forward: Guilty Creatures – which I haven’t read; The Ten Teacups, The Edinburgh Mystery – haven’t read, Murder in Vienna; Death of a Bookseller; Capital Crimes again, Murder as Fine Art and Post After Post-Mortem. One the second row: The Wheel Spins – which I haven’t read but which is the book the Hitchcock movie The Lady Vanishes is based on, Tour de Force, Metropolitan Mysteries, Blood on the Train, Quick Curtain, The Cornish Coast Mystery, The Notting Hill Mystery which is one of the very first murder mystery books and which I read nearly a decade ago and Crimes of Cymru which I haven’t read and doesn’t seem to be on Kindle which may explain why that is. And on the front row The Widow of Bath, Someone from the Past, The Lake District Murder, Castle Skull, The Corpse in the Waxworks (haven’t read), The Hogs Back Mystery (again), Murder Underground (one of the very first BLCC I read) and Tea on Sunday.

And there were even more… so here we go again with the table – this time just the ones I haven’t already mentioned: Port of London Murders, Who Killed Father Christmas, Dramatic Murder, Final Acts, Death of Anton, Murder at the Manor, London Particular, Serpents in Eden, The Mysterious Mr Badman, Family Matters, Surfeit of Suspects, and Murder by the Book.

And the other side of the table: Death on the Riviera, The Theft of the Iron Dogs, Quick Curtain, The Death of Mr Dodsley, The Sussex Downs Murder, The Chianti Flask and Seven Dead (read but not written about).

And finally – and this time just the front facing ones that I haven’t already mentioned: Continental Crimes, Settling Scores (read), The Port of London Murders, Crook O’Lune (read), The Z Murders (read but not written about), The Spoilt Kill, The Murder of My Aunt, The Santa Klaus Murder, Mr Pottermack’s Oversight, Scarweather, Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm, and Death of Anton.

Phew. Honestly, I’m pretty pleased with my hit rate on this front, but it has given me a shove to finish a few things off that I have had kicking around on the kindle and on the shelves and also made me aware of a bunch of books in the series that I didn’t know about. Expect a(nother) BLCC post in the near future I think….

Forgotten books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: British Library Crime Classics Summer 2025

veritywilde

It’s been a few months so I’m back again with some more from the British Library Crime Classics series that I’ve read. I’m starting to lose count of how many posts about BLCC books I’ve done now – whether it’s round up posts like this or Book of the Week ones, but I do rea a lot of them – thanks to their rotation in and out of Kindle Unlimited and the fact that they often pop up in the charity shop book selections at sensible prices. And so here we are again. And this has taken me way longer than I was expected because I kept ending up picking candidates for this as Books of the Week. I can’t help myself.

Murder as a Fine Art by Carol Carnac

Carol Carnac aka E C R Lorac is probably one of the best forgotten authors brought back to prominence through the BLCC series. Or at least she is in my opinion, so I try to grab her books as soon as I see them in KU. Murder as a Fine Art sees a Civil Servant crushed to death by a marble statue at the new Ministry of Fine Art. The minister in charge of the department already had some concerns about events in his department and now has to contemplate the fact that one of his staff may be a murderer. Inspector Julian Rivers is called in to investigate and try and work out what is going on. This has a clever murder but also work rivalries and grievances all mixed up with the world of fine art and modern art. It’s clever and readable.

Metropolitan Mysteries ed Martin Edwards

This is another of the short story collections from the BLCC and as the title suggests features mysteries set in London. I can sometimes find the collections a bit patchy – but this is one of the stronger ones with one proviso: because it’s got a lot of well known authors in it you may have come across some of these stories before. I had definitely read the Peter Wimsey short story before and the Allingham also seemed familiar. But if you haven’t read as much of Sayers or Allingham’s work as I have you may not have done and it’s lovely to come across familiar (and reliable) authors. And there’s one very clever if somewhat improbable mystery in here that I was completely bamboozled by and if I didn’t quite believe the solution was possible, it was so much fun I didn’t mind.

Murder in Vienna by E C R Lorac

Yes, I can’t deny it, this is the second book from the same author in this list, just under that other (main) pseudonym. This is one of her novels featuring Inspector MacDonald, but takes him away from the UK to Vienna, where he is taking a holiday and visiting an old friend Dr Nagler. Also on board the flight is Elizabeth Le Vendre, on her way to Vienna to take up her new role as secretary to a British diplomat, Sir Walter Vanbrugh. But in Vienna Elizabeth goes missing and there are a series of violent events – including murder – affecting Nagler and Vanbrugh’s connections and MacDonald finds himself investigating. This isn’t my favourite of Lorac’s books, but it is a fascinating picture of the turbulant post war situation in Vienna.

That’s your lot today – Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, new releases, reviews, romance

Book of the Week: Finders Keepers

veritywilde

It’s Tuesday and I’m using this week’s BotW to report back in on the new Sarah Adler, which came out back at the end of June, but which I bought in paperback which hampered my reading of it what with having started it right before I went to Ghana.

Quentin and Nina were best friends when they were at school, right up until they weren’t. But now they’re both back in their home town for the summer and living next door to each other again. Nina was expecting to be moving in with her boyfriend and getting ready for the new term as a professor. Instead she’s single, homeless and jobless. Quentin is back from Europe and also newly single and suggests resurrecting the treasure hunt that that they were trying to solve that last summer when they fell out. Surely after nearly two decades they can figure out what went wrong that summer – in the hunt and between the two of them?

Is it a second chance romance if they weren’t ever really together the first time and they just had massive crushes on each other? Because that is what we have here. It should also be noted that I absolutely loved Mrs Nash’s Ashes, and really liked Happy Medium despite the presence of ghosts and fake mediums. This is making the hat trick of BotWs for Adler’s first three novels but I liked this the least. But that’s because it turns out two of the main things it’s doing are not really my favourite tropes: this has got an incredibly oblivious heroine with anxiety problems that make me stressed and the two of them need to use their words more. If they had done that then they wouldn’t be in the mess they are and I wouldn’t find it so stressful to read and could probably deal with the cringey bits of their treasure hunt better.

But I’m still recommending it because I know that this is very much a me thing and I know other people are going to really love this. Yes I’m hoping adler’s next one goes back towards the vibes of Mrs Nash’s Ashes and gives more sunshine-but-quirky but given where we are in romance at the moment with a lot of college age pairings and early 20s heroines who are learning to adult I will still take it. Because that’s not where I am in my reading life at the moment and you just need to look at my post from The Works on Saturday to start seeing why that’s a problem right now!

I’ve got this in paperback so I’m hoping it will be one of my easier picks to get hold of and of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too for £2.99 at the moment (but who knows how long that will last given that it’s nearly the end of the month.

Happy Reading!