Tag: books

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: June Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of the month, and that means Kindle offer time – and it’s actually quite a good crop this month, I mean I bought a few when I was writing this as well as spotting a lot of old friends!

One of my favourite reads of the year so far The Three Dahlias is 99p, I think because it’s just come out in paperback – and we’re not far away from the sequel arriving now either. Also arriving in the not too distant future is the new book from Ashley Poston – the last one Dead Romantics (a former BotW) is 99p too. I mentioned The Cazalet series only the other week when I was talking about World War Two set novels and this is your chance to read the series because the first one, The Light Years, is 99p. Fingers crossed that the others follow!

A couple of the buzzy recent (or recentish) romances are 99p as well – A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating a Demon and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. My mileage with magic varies, so I’ve downloaded the samples of these, with the intention of trying to read them before the month is up. I may or may not succeed with that! The new Alexandria Bellefleur is 99p too – The Fiancée Farce – which is in a new series (I think) for her.

In the Taylor Jenkins Reid universe, Malibu Rising is 99p, I assume to coincide with Carrie Soto‘s arrival in paperback. Magpie Murders is 99p again (or maybe it’s still) because the TV series is about – if you haven’t read it, it really is very good and so is the sequel, and I really hope that we get another one. I read Great Circle earlier this year – I found it a bit of a slog until (at least) the half way point, but then it picked up, but as you know I often struggle with award nominated stuff, so if you’re better at that sort of thing than me, you may love it and 99p for 600+ pages is a bargain.

I read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees well before I started this blog, but I keep meaning to reread it because it has just been adapted for the stage and had a run at Almeida theatre – which I suspect may go into the West End at some point. Dissolution, the first of the Matthew Shardlake novels is 99p – I keep meaning to read some more of these Tudor-set mysteries, I definitely have at least one on the Kindle…

In the Discworld, Guards! Guards! is £1.99 – I’ve been relistening to the City Watch series over the last few weeks because there is a new audiobook version with Jon Culshaw and it really is a treat. And obviously it has Errol in it. I’m nearly done with my relisten to all of the Peter Wimsey novels (and it’s been really good) and one of my favourites is the 99p offer this month – the seaside-set Have His Carcase, which is one of the ones with Harriet Vane. We’re still waiting for a date for series three of Bridgerton, but if you need a Julia Quinn fix, The Sum of All Kisses, from her Smythe-Smith series is 99p This one is a forced proximity, enemies to lovers romance. If you’re building your Georgette Heyer collection, Sprig Muslin is 99p and it’s one of the lesser spotted favourites – older heroine who has been left on the shelf but who has been secretly in love with someone for years. Another of my favourites, These Old Shades, is £1.52 but in the weird out of copyright editions and it’s sequel Devil’s Cub is £1.99 in a normal edition..

I bought a couple of books while writing this – the aforementioned Alexandria Bellefleur, plus Jane Ridley’s George V biography.

Happy reading everyone!

Book of the Week, books, new releases, romantic comedy

Book of the Week: The True Love Experiment

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I said yesterday that I hadn’t decided what I was writing about today, and this did take a bit of thinking about. Luckily I came up with a really good plan that means I can write about more than one of them, and today you get the new Christina Lauren which I absolutely devoured on Sunday.

As I said in my post on release day, The True Love Experiment features Fizzy, the best friend from The Soulmate Equation. Fizzy is a romance author suffering from writers block. Her fans are clamouring for her next book, but she’s just realised she’s never been really in love and now she can’t get past a meet cute in anything she writes. Connor Prince wants to make documentaries, but the small production company she works for has just pivoted to reality TV (there’s more money in it) and now he needs to produce a TV dating show or look for another job, which will probably mean moving away from his daughter. He decides Fizzy should be the heroine of his series after a chance encounter, she decides she’s going to teach everyone who looks down on romance novels and reality TV a lesson. Only trouble is, how can she fall for any of the heroes on the show, if she can’t stop thinking about the show’s producer?

Oh boy. This is so good. So good. I ate it up in one giant sitting, not even putting it down to eat my pizza for dinner. Fizzy and Connor are an absolute delight. There is snark and witty banter, there is just having sex to get it out of their systems (such a fun trope) and seemingly no way that these two can end up together without it being a professional disaster for one or both of them. And it’s just such a nice world to spend time in – awful parents aside; all the characters are a delight and it’s lovely to see River and Jess again along with lovely Juno and Connor’s adorable daughter Stevie. There’s boyband concerts and romance in jokes and I was so happy with how it turned out but sad that it was over too. Just lovely

So that’s pretty much an unqualified rave from me, which is why I’m bending some rules and recommending a Christina Lauren book again so soon after The Soulmate Equation. And I should say that this summer is shaping up as a good one in the romance stakes. I’ve read a few duffers, but the new books from Elissa Sussman, Annabel Monaghan and Curtis Sittenfeld have lived up to expectations and I have high hopes for the Ali Hazelwood too. And then there’s the Cathy Yardley I read last week – of which more in the not too distant future, I promise.

The True Love Experiment is out now in paperback, and I’ve seen it in bookshops of varying sizes although not in a supermarket yet, but I’m hopeful. And of course it’s in Kindle and Kobo too.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: June 5 – June 11

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Well that was a bit of a week. Surprisingly so. I went to an RTS even about staging Eurovision (which was fascinating), a weekend in London for a house party (which was fabulous) and a morning at the dentist (which was horrid). And that last meant that I definitely treated myself to reading some of the new romances I had waiting on the shelf. And I also treated myself to two new houseplants. But I’m meant to be telling about about the books, not about my growing plant acquisition problem. I think I know what I’m writing about tomorrow. I think. But there are several options which is always a nice position to be in!

Read:

Ms Perfectly Fine by Kate Callaghan*

Buried in the Country by Carola Dunn

Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett

Role Playing by Cathy Yardley

Same Time Next Summer by Annabel Monaghan

Final Acts ed. Martin Edwards

The True Love Experiment by Christina Lauren

Started:

Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

Death of Jezebel by Christianna Brand

Still reading:

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes by Kate Strasdin*

The Empire by Michael Ball*

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd

One ebook bought – and I should have had two preorders arrive (the new Andrew Cartmel and the new Rivers of London) except that wherever Amazon think they delivered it to, it definitely wasn’t my letterbox…

Bonus photo: making a change from houseplant photos, here’s Olympic park from the Elizabeth Line on a very hot and sunny Saturday.

*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, historical, mystery, series

Mystery series: Cornish Mysteries

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Happy Friday everyone, I hope you’re all having a good week and have a delightful weekend planned. Allow me to usher you towards it with a post about a 1960s-set cozy crime series!

It’s the 1960s and Eleanor Trewynn is a retired widow who is living over the charity shop she’s running in a Cornish village. Her niece Megan is a police detective who has recently transferred to the local force and now finds herself with a commanding officer who doesn’t really think female officers are a good idea. There’s an artist living next door and a cast of side characters who work in the charity shop. Eleanor and her husband lived all over the world working for a charity and this life experience means that she can handle almost anything and is used to trying to solve problems. And thus you have all the ingredients for a satisfying mystery.

As I’ve mentioned before, I really like Carola Dunn’s other mystery series – the 1920s-set Daisy Dalymple series. I don’t love these quite as much, but they have good puzzles to solve and an interesting premise and it’s nice to read a series set in the 1960s – there are lots of interwar historicals, and some immediately post war and 1950s ones, but not as many sixties ones. Yes Inspector Alleyn gets into the 1960s, but none of them are my favourites, his age is getting a bit fuzzy and Ngaio herself was in her 60s when she was writing them. There are only four of these which is a shame but I’ll take what I can get in these cases.

My copies all came from various bookshops – I read most of them when they first came out a decade ago, but the last one came out a year or two later (as you can tell by the non matching cover…) and I hadn’t seen it in the flesh (or at least I don’t remember seeing it) until I spotted it in Gower Street Waterstones the other week when I was on that little buying spree. What a fortunate circumstance. They’re also on Kindle and Kobo.

books

Books in the Wild: Sainsbury’s

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It’s been a while since I’ve done a supermarket, so I’ve had a wander to see what they have to chose from at the moment. This is my local Sainsbury’s – and I should say that I went to the local Big Tesco first, but they have done another rearrange of everything and have massively shrunk the book section down from nearly a whole aisle on both sides (including children’s books and colouring books etc) to a couple of carcasses for everything. A Paddington stare to you Tesco. Very disappointing. Anyway, this is Sainsbury’s and it’s a bit chaotic in organisational terms, but it is at least bigger and better stocked than their competition…

So the headline hardbacks on this one are the latest crop – the Queen Charlotte tie-in novel, Happy Place, the final book in the Seven Sisters series – which I did try back when the first one came out but wasn’t really my thing but I know they’ve been hugely popular – and the new Tom Hanks novel which was the preorder that arrived chez moi last week! If you look carefully you can also see the new Mhairi McFarlane in the middle of the paperbacks as well. The Maid is in there too – which seems to be having a really long tail and hanging around a while, but I did see an advert on the tube this week for a sequel so that may well explain it.

Another couple of new hardbacks at the top here – I keep seeing the Steve Jones around and obviously I’ve written about how much I enjoyed Pineapple Street and it’s suitability as a summer read. The paperback of Lessons in Chemistry is there too – which is another great summer read if you didn’t read it last year and prefer a paperback.

Having had the new Emily Henry in hardback, this one has got last year’s – Book Lovers – twice (!) as well as two of the Richard Osman series – including the latest one which is now in paperback – as well as Malibu Rising and the books from supermarket shelf regulars Jenny Colgan and Marian Keyes. You can also spot my purchase on this one – The Darkest Sin. I also keep seeing Icebreaker around and debating reading it, but I’m not sure I dare – it’s about a figure skater and an ice hockey player who team up and just the idea that a hockey player can transfer over easily makes me nervous and that’s without my recent poor track record in enjoying sports romances that turn out to be too angsty for my tastes.

And finally we have this one – with some (more) repeats from earlier as well as Daisy Jones and the new Philippa Gregory (which is a magicky one). And I guess this is the point where I muse about the balance between mysteries and thrillers and women’s fiction and how that seems to have changed over the last few years. It used to be fairly rare that I would go into a supermarket and come west without having bought a couple of women’s fiction books in whatever the current Two for… deal was and I would have had a hard time narrowing down which two that was going to be. But now there are a lot less options – and they come from a smaller group of authors. You can also see that in the colours of the covers – we’ve got a lot more of the dark covers – blues, greens, greys, blacks – of the thriller and mystery genre and fewer in the brighter hues. And some of that is also that the women’s fiction novels have gone for darker colours – and turned a bit darker. Basically what I’m saying is that it’s hard to discover new romance-focused novels at the supermarket now, and that makes me sad.

Still at least I did buy something, and if I was a casual consumer (aka not someone who reads 300 plus books a year) there are plenty of good options here for you to read – it’s just I’d like to see more variety of authors.

Happy Saturday and go and buy a book

Book of the Week, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Reach for the Stars

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A non-fiction pick today, just to make a change…

I was very much buying pop music through a lot of this era, so it was fascinating to read the story behind the music, as told by (most of) the people who were there. The majority of this book takes the form of quotes from the people involved – with comments and context from the author inserted where necessary. Michael Cragg is a music writer, who works (or has worked) for a lot of major UK publications – so if he hasn’t interviewed the people specifically for this book, he has interviews that he’s done with them in the past that he can draw on. So you have four of the five Spice Girls (you can guess which one isn’t in this) and members from pretty much every band that is mentioned.

As someone who was a young person at the time that a lot of this was happening, I found it really interesting to read about what was going on behind the scenes and the press coverage and see how that affected my perception of the various bands and band members involved. And of course the other thing that’s really fascinating is how the spotlight of fame affected the people in the bands. Many of them were very young when they joined the bands – and you get to see an array of different ways that fame – or being in a band can mess your life up. But in the early stages of this period, a lot of it was going on behind closed doors – as the book hurtles towards the mid 00s, you see the arrival of TV talent shows and people learning how to be in a band whilst on camera and making their mistakes in public.

As you may remember – I went to an event for this book where Michael Cragg interviewed Nicola Roberts from Girls Aloud – and it was absolutely fascinating (and sort of horrifying) to hear her talking about her own experiences, now she has the benefit of distance (and I suspect some counselling/therapy) to analyse what was going on and how it affected her. She also talked about how the era of the adverts in the stage, open auditions and TV talent shows provided a gateway for people without connections in the industry to get their big breaks – even if they didn’t have the advice and support that they needed to navigate the world that they found themselves in – and that the pendulum has now swung the other way and that music is the poorer for it.

This is really good – but it’s a big old book – so it took me a while to read just because you can’t heft a 500 page hardback around with you. It is however broken up into nice chapters so you can pick it up and put it down as you need to. But if you have an e-reader, it might be worth considering buying it on that for ease of reading! It is available on Kindle and Kobo although the prices reflect the fact that it’s currently a hardback release – the paperback is due out in October, in time for Christmas.

Happy Reading!

books, The pile

Books Incoming: mid May edition

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So technically two of these arrived last month – but were delivered to my parents so weren’t at home for last month’s post – I’ve already written about Romantic Comedy at length, but the actual book is very pretty – although I do like the US version too. The other late arrival is the beautiful hardback Virago edition of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. Yes I already own a paperback copy AND the audiobook (read by Meryl Streep no less!), and no I don’t know whether I will manage to part with the paperback now I have this to add to my collection of Designer Classics.

Then we have a bunch of new releases and preorders. My copy of William Lee Adams’ Wild Dances came direct from the author, but The Tobacco Wives and Dressed to Drill were preorders – although they arrived later than I was expecting, especially the new Fixer-Upper which was nearly two day after release, but then it’s a US book so even though Amazon UK said they had it, they probably didn’t!

Then we have another Goldy Schultz as I continue to pick up second-hand copies of the ones that aren’t on Kindle, the next Cupcake Bakery that I haven’t read and a couple of impulse purchases: Beach Read which I bought after I finished Happy Place and The Golden Hour which I’ve had my eye on for ages. And then on Sunday I was in Sainsbury’s and couldn’t help myself when I saw a historical mystery series I hadn’t come across before. Poor impulse control.

And that’s your lot for this month!

books

Series redux: Josephine Tey

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To Love and Be Wise this week was the first time I’ve read any of the actual Josephine Tey books since I read Nicola Upson’s series that features the author and as various of the Nicola Upsons have appeared in my Kindle daily deals email at reduced prices, I thought it was a good time to remind you of my post from this time last year about the series – read all about them here. And as far as I can see, there’s no news yet on whether there is going to be an eleventh.

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: May Kindle Offers

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Slightly later than usual because I like to keep you all guessing, but here’s this month’s Kindle offers, as lovingly researched and selected by moi.

Cover of No Life for a Lady

Lets start with stuff I’ve talked about recently and Hannah Dolby’s No Life for a Lady is 99p at the moment – or free if you’re in Kindle Unlimited, which is a total bargain. If the Coronation wasn’t enough Royal content for you this month, A Three Dog Problem from the HM The Queen Investigates series is 99p, Stacy Halls‘ Mrs England is on offer again. Much less recently, but still recommended is Jasper Fforde’s A Constant Rabbit – also 99p as is V for Victory by Lissa Evans

There’s also an all time children’s classic on offer because the film comes out shortly – Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I’ve been listening to Dan Jones on audiobook recently, and the next one I have cued up to listen to Power and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages is 99p at the moment. He’s a very good narrator if you get the audio book, but if you find it easier to do monster history books in written form, this is a bargain. Rachel Lynn Solomon has a new book out soon, but one of her older ones, The Ex Talk is 99p – I prefer Weather Girl but if you’re not a journalist, you may be able to ignore the massive ethics violation in this – I know lots of other people have loved it.

If you’re collecting series, the Pratchett offers this month are The Truth (one of my favourites), Eric and The Science of Discworld III; the Julia Quinn is What Happens in London which is not a Bridgerton book but was my first ever of hers; the Wimseys are Five Red Herrings (which I listened to just last week) and the first one, Whose Body at 99p and Unnatural Death at £1.69 although that does look like a weird edition. Talisman Ring is the only Georgette Heyer on offer at 99p, but there are a few at £1.99 including Devil’s Cub.

And finally, here’s the books I bought whilst writing this post section: The Secret Barrister’s Nothing But the Truth which is 99p to mark it’s paperback release; TJ Klune’s Under the Whispering Door which I’ve been wiating to come down in price for ages and I think must be because of the release of In the Lives of Puppets; Africa Is Not A Country by Diplo Faloyin; Circling Back to You by Julie Tieu and The Neighbor Favor by Kristina Forest.

Happy Wednesday everyone!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: May 8 – May 14

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Well as expected, Eurovision week put a dent in my reading time. But I regret nothing. I also went to Tony! The Rock Opera on one of the non-Eurovision nights, which was fun, but also no reading time! Will normal service be resumed this week? We will see.

Read:

Death at the Dolphin by Ngaio Marsh

Prime Cut by Diane Mott Davidson

Famous for a Living by Melissa Ferguson*

Have His Carcase by Dorothy L Sayers

To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey

Started:

Proper English by K J Charles

Sticks and Stones by Diane Mott Davidson

Still reading:

Wild Dances by William Lee Adams**

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes by Kate Strasdin*

The Empire by Michael Ball*

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd

Reach for the Stars by Michael Cragg

Five books bought – including ebooks but also a preorder or two – and a couple of preorders arrived as well.

Bonus photo: it’s wisteria season again!

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