Tag: books about books

mystery, new releases

Out today: The Twist of the Knife

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After a theatre themed post yesterday, I’ve got another theatre-set book because this is out today! The Twist of the Knife is the latest in the other Anthony Horowitz meta-detective series. In the Atticus Pund series you have a book about murder in a book about murder. In the Hawthorne and Horowitz series, you have a fictional Anthony Horowitz getting involved in solving murders and writing a book about the process. This is the fourth book and sees Horowitz himself the main suspect in a murder after a critic is stabbed to death after giving Horowitz’s new play a terrible review. It’s really clever – it’s incredibly meta as Horowitz references the need to write the Moonflower Murders while he’s trying to slice the murder. Obviously you should start reading these at the start of the series, but if you’ve enjoyed the earlier mysteries, I think you will enjoy this one. My copy came from NetGalley, but it’s out in the shops today in hardback, Kindle and Kobo.

Enjoy!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Nonfiction roundup

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Yes, this was meant to have more than two books in it. Yes, I’ve been working on this for a while. Yes, it’s because I’ve been on a binge of re-reading old favourites and not reading a lot of non fiction. And then I used it for a book of the week. Looking at you Ask a Historian. So I’m going with the two, and then I will endeavour to pull myself together.

Worn by Sofi Thanhauser*

This is an interesting but also quite depressing look at clothing and the way that it is produced today. From fast fashion to microplastics and more, it covers all the issues that you know about from modern discourse about sustainability and clothes, but also explains the history of everything and how we got to this point. After reading it, I’m not sure that there is any fabric that isn’t in some way problematic and that it’s harder than I thought to be sustainable in your clothing choices. There aren’t a lot of solutions to that presented here – but as it’s a history of clothing perhaps that’s not a surprise!

Agatha Christie’s Poirot by Mark Aldridge

This is a really quite nifty look at Poirot through the ages, but manages to do that without actually giving away who any of the murderers are! I certainly hadn’t realised before reading this how long a duration the Poirot books were written over and that Christie kept him contemporary to when she was writing, rather than when she had started writing them. I suspect this is probably because I read a lot of these when I was in my early teens after watching some of the TV versions (which stay static in the inter war period) so didn’t notice/realise the time period differences in the books. I also enjoyed seeing the way that Poirot has been adapted for other mediums – and how many more of them there were than I was aware of, despite the fact that I’ve watched quite a lot over the years!

Voila. I have read some memoirs as well, but they sort of deserve there own post…

Happy Wednesday!

Series I love

Series I Love: Thursday Next

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As I mentioned in the Escapist reading post, coming up with a list of books for that made me realise how many series I love but haven’t yet written about. So I’m taking the opportunity to change, starting last week with the Rivers of London series, and now, continuing the fantasy and alternative reality theme, the Thursday Next series, which I’ve loved since well before this blog started and have unaccountably not written about before. Well may be not unaccountably – I think I was probably waiting for the next one to appear, but it’s been a long wait.

So Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next is really quite hard to describe. It is alternative history meets fantasy meets books about books. The Eyre Affair starts in 1985, where the Crimean War never ended (and Thursday is a veteran), time travel exists (and her dad is in the time travel police), cloning is a reality (and her pet is a dodo called Pickwick) and literature is taken very seriously. So seriously in fact that Thursday is a literary detective for the government. She says it’s mostly copyright and fraud, but then she’s called in to investigate when characters start going missing from books. As in one day people open the books and a character – and their plot strand – who used to be there is gone, from every copy. Soon she’s been seconded to a special unit where she’s chasing down the world’s most wanted criminal, who is holding Jayne Eyre hostage. I told you it was hard to explain. Here’s the blurb from the back of my edition, in case that helps at all:

There is another 1985, where London’s criminal gangs have moved into the lucrative literary market, and Thursday Next is on the trail of the new crime wave’s MR Big.

Acheron Hades has been kidnapping certain characters from works of fiction and holding them to ransom. Jane Eyre is gone. Missing.

Thursday sets out to find a way into the book to repair the damage. But solving crimes against literature isn’t easy when you also have to find time to halt the Crimean War, persuade the man you love to marry you, and figure out who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

Perhaps today just isn’t going to be Thursday’s day. Join her on a truly breathtaking adventure, and find out for yourself. Fiction will never be the same again …

Did that help? I hope it did. Anyway, I’m forever recommending this to people who love books – because there is so much love for literature in here. I mean what’s not to love about a world where the three most visited tourist attractions are Anne Hathaway’s cottage, the Bronte’s Parsonage and Dickens’ house? And even if you don’t usually read fantasy, if you like books (and books about books) then you should still give this a go. And if you do read fantasy, and like people like Terry Pratchett and Connie Willis, then you should read this (in fact, why haven’t you already?) It’s funny and clever and so well realised that the weird alternative world feels real within a couple of pages. Also they have the best puntastic titles in the business. There are seven books in the series – and we’ve been waiting for an eighth for some considerable time now – as in eight years. Maybe this year is the year? But anyway, if you like the first book there is plenty to keep you going. And as well as the Thursday books there are two books in the related (but in a sideways manner that may only make sense if you’ve read the Thursday books) Nursery Crime series (which you can see here too) so once you’ve read all the Thursday books you can go on and read those. If you’ve read Jodi Taylor’s Chronicles of St Mary’s series, you should totally try these too.

I’ve written a bit about Jasper Fforde before – his latest standalone book Early Riser was a BotW pick last year – and all of his adult books share some similar DNA, without being in the same world – so if you like one book or series, it’s worth trying the others. But whatever you do start at the beginning – so that’s The Eyre Affair (Kindle/Kobo) for Thursday – or get the omnibus of the first three for a pound more (Kindle/Kobo), The Big Over Easy for Nursery Crime (Kindle/Kobo) and The Last Dragonslayer for his middle grade series (Kindle/Kobo). I’ve found that most good bookshops will have a couple of Fforde’s in stock, but it does vary which ones.

Happy Reading!

 

Award nominated, Book of the Week, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Furious Hours

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Starting off the New Year with a book from that NetGalley backlog I said that I was trying to deal with.  I try to only have one non-fiction book on the go at once, and this one is one I kept meaning to get around to – and in fact even started a while back and then got distracted by the arrival of a bunch of non-fiction library book holds and I forgot about it.  But it made the final of the non-fiction category of the Goodreads awards* which jogged my memory and gave me the push I needed to come back to it.

Cover of Furious Hours

So Furious Hours is Casey Cep’s first book and it tells the story of an Alabama serial killer whose trial caught the eye of Harper Lee.  The first part of the book tells you about the frankly astounding story of Reverend Willie Maxwell, who was suspected of killing members of his family – and who was then killed at the funeral of one of his alleged victims.  And just to add to what is already an eye-popping story, the killer was defended at the murder trial by the same lawyer who had previously defended Reverend Maxwell when he was accused of murder.  The second part of the book is about Harper Lee – the author of To Kill a Mockingbird – who took attended the trial with a view to writing her own true crime book about it, in the same way that her friend Truman Capote wrote the story of the Clutter family murders in In Cold Blood.  Now as you probably know, until the (somewhat controversial) publication of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee famously had only one published book – so you know a bit about how that went for her, but that’s only really part of the story, and Cep takes you through Lee’s life that lead her to that point and beyond.

Both of the stories told here are absolutely fascinating, and if I have a complaint about the book it’s that they feel like two separate stories for a long time.  When I first picked up the book I had picked up on the Harper Lee element of the story and was surprised when the start of the book didn’t mention her at all.  But having now read the whole thing, I understand why it was structured like that and that you need to know one story fully to understand the other and I’m not sure I could have come up with a way of integrating the two that wouldn’t have been just far too confusing.  So it requires you to read the blurb properly (bad Verity) to understand what you’re about to read – and then to go with it because it will all make sense in the end.

As well as the Goodreads awards, this was a nominee for the Baillie Gifford prize (which was won by another former BotW The Five) and made a lot of end of year lists – including Barack Obama’s – so it’s well worth a look if you like true crime or books about authors and that sort of thing.  As previously mentioned, my copy came from NetGalley, but Furious Hours is out in hardback at the moment – with the paperback due in April in the UK.  You should be able to get hold of a copy from any bookshop with a reasonable non-fiction section.  It’s also available on Kindle and Kobo and as an audiobook from Kobo and Audible.

Happy Reading!

*Alongside previous BotW Catch and Kill – in fact there were a lot of books on that shortlist that I fancy reading – but they were all beaten by Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis, which given my experience with Girl, Wash Your Face I don’t think I’ll be reading!

American imports, Book of the Week, children's books

Book of the Week: Paperback Crush

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Another super quick BotW post – I’m sorry.  It’s been so busy. And it’s a day late because of the end of the month Stats.  Sorry again.  Anyway, this week’s BotW gave me some happy hours reminiscing about some of my teenage reading last week, and I thought it was worth a mention here.  If you’ve been hanging around here a while, you’ll know that I’ve written a fair bit about fiction for teenage girls and middle graders in the past – from my weekend at a book conference all about them, through my enduring love of classics like Drina and the Chalet School, through new books like the Wells and Wong series, the Sinclair Mysteries and everything in between, so you can probably tell from looking at the cover that Paperback Crush would be right up my street…

Cover of Paperback Crush

Paperback Crush’s subtitle is “The Totally Radical History of 80s and 90s Teen Fiction” and author Gabrielle Moss takes a fairly deep dive into the American books of those two decades.  If you read the Babysitters Club, any of the Sweet Valley iterations or the revamped Nancy Drews, there’s something here for you.  I was delighted to rediscover a couple of series’ I’d forgotten about  – like the boarding school series which I read a few of in the school library and was never able to find again.  This also covers some of the single titles and the notable authors – like  Caroline B Cooney’s Face on the Milk Carton, and it’s sequels which I remember devouring as an early teen and then watching the TV movie of!

This is an exclusively American book though, so if like me, you were a reader in the UK, some of your favourites and the series that you remember most won’t be here – there’s no Trebizon for example, which was one of the few “new” boarding school stories I remember reading.  It’s also exclusively about girls fiction – so there’s no three investigators, or Hardy Boys – but it does touch on career books a little.

My copy came via NetGalley, but Paperback Crush is out at the end of the month in the US and the UK – my suspicion is that you’ll need to order it in specially, rather than happen across it in the store.  Here’s the link for Amazon paperback and Kindle pre-orders if you want to get your bids in early.

Happy Reading!