Tag: books

Book of the Week, books, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: Do Me a Favour

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Oh you’re so unsurprised by this I know. I can’t keep myself. I tried to pace myself with this one but in the end, I just finished it. On Sunday evening and here we are!

As I said in last week – this is the story of Willa and Hudson. Willa is a widow and she has just moved to an island in the Pacific north west where she has inherited a house from her great aunt. Her parents want her to get a “proper” job, but she wants to try and rebuild her career as a cookery book ghost writer. Her comeback assignment is for a viral social media star who is more famous for the fact he cooks topless than his actual recipes. But no matter, she is determined. Hudson is her new neighbour. He lives on his parents’ farm, along with one, sometimes two of his grown up children. He’s a handyman and she has a house that needs work. Soon they are spending lots of time together, more than is technically necessary and it’s clear there’s something between them.

In case you haven’t worked it out, this is another romance from Cathy Yardley featuring an older hero and heroine. Both are in their 40s, both have got baggage and like Role Playing a lot of what is going on here is two mature adults figuring out that they’re into each other and then working out if that’s a thing that can work in their lives long term. There is no big external conflict here – and no real conflict between them really – so despite the sadness in Willa’s backstory (and it’s not a passing reference to her late husband, it’s a big part of her) this is actually quite low stress. You want them to get together, they want them to be together; they’ve just got a few things to work through.

So it’s a really comforting read as well as being romantic. And I also loved the setting – in real life I could not cope with living on an island, but in a book: totally. A lovely way to spend a few hours.

Anyway, I had my copy of Do Me A Favour preordered, it’s currently £1.99 to buy on Kindle but it’s also in Kindle Unlimited and also an Amazon imprint in paperback.

Happy Reading.

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: July 22 – July 28

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A steady week in reading – one night at the theatre, a busy week at work and the start of the Olympics all adding up to not as much read as I would have liked – and I’ve still got those two on the still reading list as well. It’s Book Con at the end of this week, so the reading could go either way with that, and traditionally the reading there tends to be books that I have bought in the various book sales…

Read:

Murder by Evensong by Hugh Morrison

Lady of Quality by Georgette Heyer

The King is Dead by Hugh Morrison

Noise Floor by Andrew Cartmel

The Wooden Witness by Hugh Morrison

The Reluctant Widow by Georgette Heyer

Do Me a Favour by Cathy Yardley

Started:

Death on the Night Train by Hugh Morrison

The Swish of the Curtain by Pamela Brown

Still reading:

The Hazelbourne Ladies’ Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson*

The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmire*

My pre-order of Do Me A Favour dropped onto my Kindle, but nothing else bought. The guilt effect of Daunt Books’ crime tower remained strong!

Bonus picture: the outside of the Palladium before Hello, Dolly!

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

books, bookshops

Books in the Wild: Daunt Marylebone

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One of the reasons I love wandering over Daunt Books in Marylebone is because the building is pretty and I like to see what they’re highlighting in their windows – because it’s usually totally different to the other book shops in central London. So imagine my delight this week when they actually changed one of the window displays while I was browsing in the shop!

This was the one they swapped out – you can actually se there are already a couple of empty blocks in the picture – which is for a shiny new edition of a 1950s novel that I had never heard of, but that sounds really interesting. Green Water, Green Sky is about a divorcee and her daughter who lead an itinerant existence in the sort of European spots that rich people liked to hang out in, and what happens when the daughter tries to break free of her mother.

And this is what it was replaced with – The Damascus Events – which is about the 1860 massacre in Damascus, which I’m going to admit that I’d also never heard of, but which was significant in the change from the old Ottoman order towards the modern Middle East.

On the other side we have Family and Borghesia – which is two novellas about domestic life, isolation and the passing of time, which I’m sure are excellent but really don’t sound like a me thing!

The little window was Back to the Local which is a new edition of a book from 1949 about the pubs of London, which seems just perfect for the location!

Then the multi-book window just has all sorts of things – including several from my list of things I’d like to buy when the pile gets to a sensible state – like Once Upon a Time World about the French Riviera, Erotic Vagrancy, the latest in the stream of books about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and the sequel to Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, and Abroad in Japan.

The crime tower and table has quite a lot of stuff that I’ve read 0 but also enough stuff that I’ve still got on the pile to make me feel guilty enough not to buy any books! So along with the stuff I’ve read like the Richard Osman and Rev Richard Coles (who Him Indoors had not realised were not all Richard Osman), Eight Detectives and The Cracked Mirror which I’m reading at the moment, there’s also The Strangers Companion, Helle and Death and The Mystery Guest which are all sitting on the Kindle…

This side of the crime display was much less guilt inducing – just the Tom Hindle Murder On Lake Garda that’s sitting on the pile, and then the third Cesare Aldo and the Grave Expectations sequel that I want to read, but that I can resist until they come out in paperback!

And finally, a new hardback fiction display – featuring Welcome to Glorious Tuga which I’ve read, and The Divorcées which is on the actual pile because I haven’t and Background for Love and Anita De Monte Laughs Last which sounds like I might really like them, if I can just get the pile under control some time…

Have a great weekend!

books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Sports romances

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The Olympics Opening Ceremony takes place in Paris on Friday, but actually the first bits of action happen today with the start of the football and rugby 7s pool games, so for this Recommendsday I’m reminding you of some of the sports romances that I’ve enjoyed – although full disclaimer, a lot of these sports aren’t in the olympics.

The men’s 100m at the weekend

But I’m going to start with one that is – football of the soccer variety and recent BotW pick When Grumpy met Sunshine which has a bad boy of football in a fake relationship with his ghost writer. There’s also Chloe Liese’s Bergman Brothers series, which has a couple of soccer stars among the heroes and heroines – like in If Only You, which has the double whammy of a soccer-playing heroine and an ice hockey player hero.

In fact ice hockey romances seem to have overtaken NFL players as the sport you’re most likely to see in a romance novel, possibly because the word puck rhymes so usefully for a title. Before the ice hockey romance craze, most of the sports romances were about NFL players, like Susan Elizabeth Philips’ Chicago Stars series or Alexa Martin’s Playbook series. And now we’ve got a growing group of baseball romances too, so I can only assume that we’re a year max away from a load of basketball player romances.

I have read more baseball romances than other sports recently – but that’s not saying much because it’s basically just Cat Sebastian’s two historical ones – You Should Be So Lucky and We Could Be So Good. It’s not quite a straight romance-romance, but Linda Holmes’s Evvie Drake Starts Over remains among my favourite novels of recent years.

I often find it quite tricky to recommend some of the more recently published sports romances, because everything is tending very New Adult and that is not my bag at all. I’ve read at least two NFL romances in the last six months where the blurb has seemed like it was right up my street and then in the reading I’ve wanted to throw them across the room* because they’ve annoyed me so much. And no I’m not going to tell you who that is, but I’m sure you can work it out if you look through my Goodreads reviews!

In terms of my own to-read pile, I’ve got Let The Games Begin which is actually set at an Olympics, Match Point which is tennis, Tessa Bailey’s Fan Girl Down which is about golf and Cross the Line which is about Formula One on my to-read pile.

Happy Wednesday everyone

*but I didn’t because they were ebooks and I might have damaged my Kindle if it hit something.

Book of the Week, books, mystery

Book of the Week: The Theft of the Iron Dogs

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As I said yesterday, a busy week in life and also a fairly busy week in reading. And I’m back with a British Library Crime classic pick today, because this is really good – and also has a beautiful cover.

It’s just after the war and Inspector MacDonald is hunting for a coupon racketeer who has gone missing in London, reported missing by his fiancée. In Lancashire Giles Hoggett, a book dealer turned cow farmer, has found something strange and potentially sinister in his fishing cottage. His wife is sceptical but he writes to a Scotland Yard detective who solved another case locally not that long before. Soon MacDonald is visiting for the weekend and it seems that his coupon case may be connected to the missing items at the cottage.

I really like E C R Lorac. Almost every time I read one her books it’s up there for Book of the Week – and it was a surprise to me that it’s been a year since I picked one. She is so good at writing about Lancashire and the communities there, and this really evokes the tight-knit community in the countryside as well as the immediate aftermath of the war. As the granddaughter of farming families (on both sides!) I really love the way she writes about people who know their land, the rhythms of the seasons and that you have to respect nature. Oh and the mystery is pretty good too!

The Theft of the Iron Dogs is available as a paperback in the British Library Crime Classics range and it is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, which means it’s not on Kobo right now, but as I’ve said before the BLCC titles rotate in and out of that still be back on Kobo at some point.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: July 15 – July 21

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A really busy week again – busy at work and busy out of work. And it seems like the sun has appeared – how long it stays for and whether this is the entirety of summer remains to be seen! And this week is another busy one. I’ve got at least one night at the theatre – and have you seen the news agenda?!

Read:

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

Muddled Through by Barbara Ross

Hidden Beneath by Barbara Ross

The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer

Notorious in New Hampshire by Patti Benning

The Next Best Fling by Gabriella Games*

The Theft of the Iron Dogs by E C R Lorac

Started:

Noise Floor by Andrew Cartmel

Still reading:

The Hazelbourne Ladies’ Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson*

The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmire*

One pre-order dropped onto my Kindle – the new K J Charles, which I have been very good and haven’t started yet!

Bonus picture: Saturday back at the Olympic stadium for the Diamond League. My first time back since watching Mo Farah win at the Worlds in 2017, and I can’t believe it’s 12 years since we were here for the Olympics!

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

books

Rationalisation ahoy!

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We are a couple of weeks out from Book Con and that means that I need to start thinking about what I might take to sell this year. Although it’s a conference about fiction for girls, it doesn’t just have to be books that fit that genre – last time I got some British Library Crime Classics in the sale for example. And we all know I’m always running out of shelf space so I’ve got my name down to sell a few and now I just need to figure out what, how much I’m going to charge and how people are going to pay me. Wish me luck.

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Books about Hollywood

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After writing about some Hollywood-set fiction yesterday, I thought this week might be a great opportunity for a round up of some of the Hollywood-set or related non-fiction I’ve read over the years. This has got a couple of things that I’ve not mentioned before, but also some that have been to a greater or lesser extent.

Let’s start with one of those new things: I read Shawn Levy’s The Castle on Sunset a couple of years ago, but I can’t find that I really wrote much about it here, so I can rectify that now. This is a history of the Chateau Marmont, possibly the most famous hotel in Hollywood, used by generations of stars for all sorts of things. Depending on your age you may remember it as where John Belushi died, or the hotel Lindsay Lohan got kicked out of – and both of those are in this, along with a lot more.

I’ve reorganised this bookshelf since this picture was taken, but there are a few here that might be of interest. Helen O’Hara’s Women vs Hollywood look at female pioneers in the early days of the movies and how women were then pushed out. I don’t know what it’s not on this shelf, but if you want Golden Age Hollywood of a similar era to Loretta, then Karina Longworth’s Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood which focuses on the women pursued by the millionaire movie mogul from the 1920s through til the 1950s. And from a similar era there is Trumbo about the screenwriter who was blacklisted in the communist panic.

There are loads of books about individual stars too. I remember Gerald Clarke’s Get Happy about Jusy Garland as being pretty good, but it’s been closer to 15 years than ten. And I don’t know where my copy is but J Randy Taraborrelli’s The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe was a good read when I read it even longer ago – I wonder how it holds up! Taraborrelli has a fair line in Kennedy-related books, some of which I keep meaning to get hold of, because we all know I like a good book about that particular dysfunctional family. He’s also written about Elizabeth Taylor – who is another frequent books subject. I’ve read Furious Love about her relationship with Richard Burton, Elizabeth and Monty about her friendship with Montgomery Clift – and I’ve got Kate Anderson Brower‘s biography on my to read pile too.

And then there’s the other stuff I want to read – Laurence Leamer’s Hitchcock’s Blondes – which came out last year, just as the adaptation of his book about Capote’s Women was appearing on streaming services. I’ve got another Marilyn book on the kindle too – this time about Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn. I also want to read Oscar Wars, Michael Schulman’s history of the Academy Awards and Katie Gee Salisbury’s Not Your China Doll about Anna May Wong.

Happy Wednesday!

Book of the Week, books, fiction, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: The Unforgettable Loretta, Darling

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It’s Tuesday again and as I promised last week, I’m back with a Book of the Week pick – and we’re back in old Hollywood for Katherine Blake’s The Unforgettable Loretta, Darling.

It’s the early 1950s and the titular Loretta is a Brit abroad, escaping from her past in Lancashire by reinventing herself in Hollywood, not as an actress but behind the scenes in the make-up department. She’s new to Hollywood and its machinations, but she’s a fast learner and she has got some weapons of her own as she fights her way through the studio system in the hunt for success.

It’s quite hard to describe what actually happens in this, or give it a genre. It’s historical fiction, but there’s a dash of mystery in there and it’s witty too. But there’s also some sexual violence that I need to warn you about because I know that’s a hard no for some people. I love a book that features Golden Age and studio system Hollywood and this has plenty of that – with faded starlets, up and coming ingenues and plenty of awful men. If you liked The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo this has some similar vibes – but with a darker edge.

This is a relatively new release – it came out in the UK last month, but in the US last week. I haven’t seen it in the shops yet, but it may be that I’ve been looking in the wrong places because of that genre thing I mentioned – or simply that I haven’t been in a big enough bookshop. My copy came from NetGalley but you can also get it on Kindle or Kobo and on Audible.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: July 8 – July 14

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Another massively busy week – but actually a reasonable list of reading, and I’ve got nothing on the ongoing list, which is always a nice (and unusual) position to be in. There are quite a few books out this week that I have from NetGalley, so I’ve started a lot of those to try and be timely for once in my life – we’ll see how that goes…

Read:

The Quiet Gentleman by Georgette Heyer

Wrapped in Murder by Patti Benning

The Way We All Became The Brady Bunch by Kimberley Potts

Seven Lively Suspects by Katy Watson*

The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer

Glazed Ham Murder by Patti Benning

Chicken Club Murder by Patti Benning

The Unforgettable Loretta, Darling by Katherine Blake*

Started:

The Hazelbourne Ladies’ Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson*

The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmire*

The Next Best Fling by Gabriella Games*

Still reading:

N/a

One ebook and one ebook pre-order.

Bonus picture: A rare picture of me because I did Cancer Research UK’s Race for Life on Sunday. This year has been particularly terrible one in my extended family and friendship groups for cancer, and I lost a very dear friend to cancer on Election Day so despite my incredible lack of ability at anything athletic, I rage-ran my way around Abington Park on Sunday. I was hoping to raise £200, but I’ve more than tripled that – so that really helped propel me around the course, which was much hillier than my regular route around the Racecourse. I’m just going to leave my donation link here, just in case anyone else wants to take pity on me and my tremendously red post-run face.

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.