Oh dear. All those train journeys and I didn’t manage to read much as I was hoping – the list was looking very poor until a concerted effort at the weekend. This week coming I’m on nights – so it could go either way…
Read:
The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris by Jenny Colgan
On the brightside, all I bought this week was a free short story on Kindle and a mystery novel on the Kindle for 99p and I’m counting that as progress!
Squeezed in a bit of over-time this week and had an elections briefing on Saturday – so you’d think that was plenty of commutes to get my teeth into some books, but I don’t seem to have covered as much ground as I was hoping. I’m blaming this on my attempts to reduce the number of non-fiction titles waiting to be read – because they take me longer to read than some light fiction does. But it remind me how much I enjoy good non-fiction and so I’m thinking of adopting a policy of having one on the go at all times. But then I already have too many rules and policies and it’s starting to get ridiculous.
The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris by Jenny Colgan
The Blessing by Nancy Mitford
Still reading:
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
A bad week for self-restraint – but one of these was free and another borrowed
Now I was doing really well on the not buying books front, until Saturday lunchtime when I arrived really early for my shift and ended up wandering into a charity shop. Four books later and suddenly the to-read pile was looking monstrous again.
I had a bit of a panic earlier in the week when Jenn McKinlay’s book turned up – as I didn’t remember ordering it. It turned out that I hadn’t – it was a win in a Goodreads giveaway – so of course that had to jump straight to the top of the pile so that I could review it because when some one sends you a book and wants you to review it, you should really do that as quickly as possible…
The Railway Detectives is borrowed from my Dad, and the Terry Pratchett is the replacement for my duplicate copy of Trisha Ashley, so only 6 (gulp) books bought this week and a net gain of 2 on the pile (because the Delilah Marvelle was an ebook). I really do need to try harder, still, I have many shifts this week. But then that’s what I thought last week!
I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway (I know! Two giveaway reviews in a week! This doesn’t usually happen – I’ve only won three giveaways ever!) but that doesn’t influence what I write.
Back on more familiar territory for me here, with a fun murder mystery story from American author Jenn McKinlay. Death of a Mad Hatter is the second book in the Hat Shop Murder series (and is the first book I’ve read by this author) and centres around American Scarlett Parker and her cousin Vivian Tremont, who run a hat shop in London. As usual I’m trying to avoid spoilers in my synopsis, and I can’t say too much about the set up without giving away the plot of the first book (or at least I think I can’t!), so here goes: In Death of a Mad Hatter, an unpleasant man dies at a themed party which the girls have provided the hats for. When a trace of poison is found in the hat, the girls get involved in trying to track down who was really responsible.
I love it when you get some extras with a book!
This is a cozy murder mystery with a fun premise and an ingenious solution. The plot is well worked out, the dialogue snappy, the humour works and the characters are engaging. I was never bored and always wanted to know what was going to happen next. In fact the book almost seemed to wrap up too soon – although that’s not to say that the denouement was in anyway rushed, I just couldn’t believe that the book was nearly over (which is always a good sign). I read the book in a day and enjoyed it.
For me it ticks similar boxes as Donna Andrews’ Meg Langslow series, although this series is obviously set in the UK. And therein was my only problem with it – as a Brit there were a few things that jarred for me as being just not “right”. Now I know that this book is written for the US market – and in fact I don’t think it has been picked up by a publisher over here – so for the vast majority of people reading it, this won’t be an issue. Mainly the problems came with things that the British characters said that weren’t “right” – although as we have the NHS here the idea of a British family having a event to raise money to build a new wing at a hospital struck me as a bit odd – but hey, it could happen, after all Great Ormond Street Hospital’s charity is probably one of the most famous charities in the country!
Now this is me being really very nit-picking – because the “wrong” moments were my only problem with the whole book and it’s really a very minor issue in the grand scheme of things, because in the main the British characters and British bits were so well done that the bits that weren’t “right” bit surprised me! And I’ll still be looking out for more from Jenn McKinlay – from the cards and bookmarks that came with my copy I think her other series may be right up my street too!
Death of a Mad Hatter is presumably available all good bookshops and book retailers who stock Mass Market paperbacks in the US and over here in the UK you can get it from Foyles and Amazon (and presumably anyone else who’ll order in from the US). Jenn McKinlay’s website is jennmckinlay.com, she can be found on twitter as @JennMcKinlay and on Facebook
Between the 1920s and 1970s, Georgette Heyer wrote nearly three dozen novels set Regency or Georgian times, along with a string of thrillers. I love me some Golden Age detective action, but this article is about her historical romances which, in my opinion, are sublime and nearly perfect examples of their type.
Hardback, paperback, different styles – my shelf has editions from the 1940s through til the 2000s
My mum had a shelf of Heyers on the landing the whole way through my childhood, but it was only when I was about 16 that I first picked one up (either False Colours or Cotillion, I can’t remember which) and that one led to another, which led to all of the ones she had and then to buying the ones that she didn’t. When my parents moved house a couple of years ago, mum passed them on to me as she “didn’t have space for them” any more, on the understanding that she could borrow them back if she wanted and that I wouldn’t get rid of them. Since then though, rather than borrowing them from me, she’s started re-buying them!
I have a lot of favourites, but if I was forced and could only have one, it would be The Grand Sophy. Sophy is feisty, independent, well-travelled and used to running her own life – and everyone else’s. She arrives back in England to live with her aunt and her cousins after her diplomat father is posted to South America. She finds them in the midst of a family crisis – with one daughter in love with an unsuitable poet and the eldest son engaged to a disagreeable bluestocking. Sophy proceeds to try to organise the household along more harmonious lines and arrange matches for her cousins and, in the end, herself.
My copy of The Grand Sophy – in what I think is a late 1980s edition
What I love about Heyer’s female characters are that they’re not weak and wishy-washy pushovers, but they also don’t feel like modern women who have been supplanted to the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Her women aren’t simpering misses sitting around waiting for life to happen to them or for a man to make their life complete, but they’re not doing anything that feels jarringly out of period either. I have a weakness for American-written British-set historical romances (you know, the ones with the buxom heroines bursting out of their corsets on the covers) which lead a shamefaced existence* on the uppermost shelf of my tallest spare bedroom bookcase – and that’s a problem I find with some (but by no means all) of their heroines.
One of the feistiest and most independent of Heyer’s heroines is Léonie in These Old Shades – who we first meet as Léon the page when he is bought “body and soul” by Justin, Duke of Avon – known as Satanas because of his lack of morals. Heyer books always have a lot plot and not a lot of yearning looks or heaving bosoms and Shades is a great example of this. At the start of the book Justin is a thoroughly disreputable character who buys Léon not to free him from a life of abuse and mistreatment, but because he sees a method of being revenged on one of his enemies. Léonie is in love with Avon almost from the start, but you’re not sure until the very end, after the plot has taken you from France to England and back to France again, whether Avon’s motives have changed at all. Most of Heyer’s books are standalones, but Shades is unusual in that some of the characters have appeared before, albeit with different names and in a less developed form, in The Black Moth – and Justin, Léonie and Rupert all appear again in Devil’s Cub (which I also love) where Justin and Léonie’s son Dominic – who has all of his father’s faults and his mother’s temper but does at least have a conscience – runs off with a virtuous young lady who is trying to protect her sister’s honour.
My copies of Moth, Shades and Devil’s Cub show some of the range of different editions in my collection!
In Regency Buck (another with a sort-of sequel – An Infamous Army of which more later) another strong minded heroine comes up against a domineering alpha-male and, dear reader, you may start to see a pattern in the sort of heroes that I like. Preferably tall, dark and handsome, he needs to be bossy, clever and with a bit of a dark side or at the least a temper – like Buck‘s Julian St John Audley, the titular Sylvester or best of all Damerel in Venetia. But they also need to be up against a smart woman who is prepared to stand up for herself and what she wants. I don’t want to see any woman being forced into a marriage by a man who holds all the power. The Heyers that come off my shelf the least are ones like Cotillion (Freddy’s too thick), Friday’s Child (Hero the heroine is too wet), Cousin Kate (Kate’s too stupid to see the trouble coming) and A Civil Contract (Adam needs a good slap).
My copy of Devil’s Cub has a note from in the front written by my mum
Those are the exceptions though and just looking along the shelf is like seeing group of old friends – they live in the sitting room so I have them to hand if I need them! If you’ve never read any Georgette Heyer, may I heartily recommend you have a look now – particularly if you are a fan of authors like Eloisa James or Julia Quinn. They don’t have the sex that modern historicals do – in fact there’s barely any kissing, but they’re still breathtakingly romantic in places and have tight well-structured plots – and a wealth of meticulously researched historical detail (An Infamous Army was required reading for trainee army officers because its descriptions of the Battle of Waterloo are so accurate – it also features Julian and Judith from Regency Buck and a cameo from a much older Dominic and Mary from Devil’s Cub) that I can only imagine the current crop of authors have drawn on. It also says a lot that more than ninety years since her first book was published and forty years (this year in fact) since Georgette Heyer died, her Regency/Georgian romances are still in print.
A selection of my favourites in a charming garden setting!
I like them so much I even have a couple of them on my kindle and as audiobooks in case I need a fix when I’m away from home. And, while I was taking the photos for this article I discovered I’ve got a couple of duplicates of my own – I think I bought the pretty Pan paperbacks of The Talisman Ring and The Masqueraders when I was living in Essex – in the days when mum had most of the Heyers…
Disclosure: I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway – not that that influences what I write…
So, as you may have noticed from the previous posts, I’m not a big thriller reader. Detective or mystery stories, yes, lots of them and preferably set in any period not now (I’m not a CSI girl). I have read some John le Carré before – because before watching the film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I wanted to have read the book – to see if it was going to be too violent for me to cope with (for my post about the contradictions of my job and my aversion to violence in films see this post on my other blog). I enjoyed it so much that I not only watched the film and most of the Alec Guiness TV adaptation, but also read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – which is also really good. I’ve been keeping my eyes out for more of his Smiley series at the library – but hadn’t read any of his newer books* – hence my entry into the Goodreads giveaway (despite the enormous size of the to-read pile) and I was really pleased when I won a copy.
Paperback copy of A Delicate Truth by John le Carré
I’m always very careful not to give away plot spoilers in my synopsis, and it’s quite hard with A Delicate Truth to say much about the plot without saying too much, so I’ve taken my cue for this from the Goodreads synopsis. The story centres around a top, top secret counter-terror operation in Gibraltar – what happened, how it was set up and whether it was the success that it was meant to have been.
The intertwining plots are carefully and meticulously constructed – I never thought that I knew what was coming next and at the end I still had questions (in a good way) and wanted to know more. The characters are believable – in some cases horribly so – and you really can imagine that these events could possibly have happened – although you hope fervently that they haven’t.
Le Carré still has the knack for describing the workings of government in a way that feels real, and in addition, in this book he turns his focus on the world of private defence contractors. I’ve read a lot of news articles about this new aspect of the military world and I can’t claim to know first hand what any of them are really like, but it’s clear that the author isn’t keen, shall we say, on this latest development. And if anything near of the shenanigans that go on in this book have gone on in real life (and I devoutly hope they haven’t) then he’s got reason.
This is an exciting and page-turning book – which I gobbled up in a day’s commute and an evening’s reading. I would recommend it to anyone who has read his earlier works or people who like a thriller at the cinema and want a book for their summer holiday. I’m not surprised this has done so well – I’ll certainly be passing it on to the thriller readers in my family (my dad and The Boy).
A Delicate Truth by John le Carré can be found on Kindle or as a proper book all over the place (although my link is Foyles, for reasons previously explained) and you can also see more reviews on Goodreads.
* I nearly put “contemporary books” but then I remembered that the Smiley books were written at the time that they were set in, it’s just me that’s reading them now!
Only two days at work this week – and it was looking like a really bad week for progress down the to-read pile until I put some effort in over the weekend to improve the situation…
Some of this week’s purchases – one of which never made it to the to-read pile…
On the plus side, I finally finished Tales of the Jazz Age after making a concerted effort not to go and start something new until I’d finished with it. And the Anne de Courcey was a book that I borrowed from my mum *literally* years ago so I’m really pleased to have read that so I could give it back to her. On the downside, the physical pile isn’t getting any smaller – as two books this week were from the kindle and that was before the Incident in the charity shops and the fact that the new Trisha Ashley came out – and was in two for £7 at the supermarket… On top of that I may have made an unscheduled stop in The Works in Leamington Spa on Saturday night and bought another one! At least five of the six were books that I already had earmarked to read on my Goodreads list. And I said last week that I wanted to get the number of books on the go at once down – and I have. By one. I’m grasping at straws aren’t I?!
I’ve girded my loins. I’ve taken a deep breath. I’ve done some dusting. Here is a photo of the to-read pile and the library book bag.
It looks bad doesn’t it? I know. It’s out of control. And the eagle eyed amongst you may notice that there’s two Jasper Fforde books from the same series on there too (breaking a rule of the to-read pile) and that’s because I spotted The Fourth Bear in a charity shop this morning for a pound and it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. I haven’t worked out an excuse for the Mrs Bradley mystery and the Frances Osborne which I bought in a different charity shop five minutes later. I’ll get back to you on that.
Not the busiest week reading wise – six things finished, a couple more started and still on the go.
Read:
Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris
I Am Shakespeare (a play) by Mark Rylance
Vivian’s Heavenly Ice Cream Shop by Abby Clements
Significant Others by Armistead Maupin
The Three of Us (short story) by Cathy Woodman
Manna from Hades by Carola Dunn
Started:
The Viceroy’s Daughters by Anne de Courcey
Sure of You by Armistead Maupin
Lavender Lady by Carola Dunn
Still reading:
Tales of the Jazz Age by F Scott Fitzgerald
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
What have I learnt making this list? I have too many books on the go at the moment. And I’m feeling guilty about the fact that I’m still no further on with Titus Groan, which I started in January… The fact that it’s still lingering is another illustration of the problem with the massive to-read pile actually – if I don’t get into something quickly, there’s always something else I want to read, but because the book has been sitting on my shelf for so long, I think that I can’t give up and say it’s not for me. Although with Titus I’m only 75 pages in and I usually read at least 100 pages or a quarter of the book before I’m prepared to admit defeat. On the bright side, Vivian’s… and I Am Shakespeare were long standing residents of The Shelf, and Dead Reckoning was from the pile too.
As you’ll see I’m working my way through Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series (expect a post on that at some point) and am nearing the end of the True Blood series – in fact Dead Reckoning was the last I could get for a penny plus postage from Amazon, so I was expecting to have to wait to finish the series and then I found the last two in the library on Thursday!
As for the others, Cathy Woodman is one of the authors on the list of people I automatically buy new stuff from so I picked up her short story soon after it came out, Manna from Hades has been on the Kindle a while but I’d forgotten about it (oops) until I picked up the next two in the series in The Works this week so I bumped it to the top of the pile.
My aim for this week? To reduce the number of things on the go…
I know, I know. Considering that the pile is so outlandishly large, the idea that it has rules seems ludicrous. But it does – although they are few and somewhat flexible.
The principle rule is No more than one book per author on the pile:I’ll admit this does get broken frequently (although I’m getting better at keeping to it) and for two main reasons – firstly when The Works have lots of books by the same author in one of their offers and secondly when an author writes more than one series – for example Charlaine Harris currently has three books on the pile – two Aurora Teagardens (from The Works) and one Harper Connelly (the last two Sookie Stackhouses are in the library book bag – different rules apply to library books).
The second is Don’t buy hardbacks. I’ll admit that this rule does mean I end up behind the curve on some authors. But its born from experience – I just don’t get around to reading hardbacks – they’re big, they’re heavy and they won’t fit in my handbag. They end up sitting on the shelf for months and months even when they’re something I’m really keen to read. I am sometimes given hardbacks, but I don’t usually put books that are only out in hardback on my gift lists. Most books come out in paperback in the end – and the few that don’t are usually books that I can buy for borrow from my mum.
The third is Don’t buy series out of sequence. This is because they end up sitting on the pile for ages waiting for me to buy/borrow the books leading up to it because I hate reading series in the wrong order in case I spoil a major plot point (it’s happened before I don’t want it to happen again).
Most of the sins of my to-read pile can be put under one of those headings. As I’ve said before, I’m terrible for discovering a series and then reading it through from start to finish (as I’m doing at the moment with the Tales of the City series) but the rules mean I usually only buy one book in the series at a time – although there are exceptions – like when I’m trying to get over a free delivery threshold – or those Works multi-buys again.
On Good Reads to-reads shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 387
New books* read in April: 20
Books from the Library Book pile: 3
Books from the to-read pile: 9
E-books: 3
Books read as soon as they arrived: 6
Most read author in April: Armistead Maupin (Three books in the Tales of the City series)
Books* read this year: 72
Books bought: 14
Net progress: 1 less book on the to-read pile…
April saw the end of the Lent Book Buying ban, so I can’t take too much credit for the progress down the pending pile, but I’ll try not to buy more than I read in May as well!
* Total includes some short stories (1 in fact in April – Trisha Ashley’s Finding Mr Rochester)
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 