Two nights in London for work? Check. Three nights at book conference? Check. More chatting than book reading? Check. I mean I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about my weekend talking Girl’s Own books, but today basically all you need to know is that I mostly listened to talks about books and bought books rwther than actually reading them!
Two nights away from home, three theatre trips and an evening at the Commonwealth Games. Truly it is a miracle I read anything this week! But I did, go me. This week is looking equally frantic, so goodness knows what next week’s list will look like too.
Yes I finished this on Monday – but it’s out today so it’s actually time appropriate. Check me out with the ever so slightly forward planning.
Husband Material is the sequel to Boyfriend Material which was a Book of the Week back when I read it in early 2021. We rejoin our erstwhile heroes two years into their actual relationship (as opposed to the fake one, see Boyfriend Material) and its all going well for Luc and Oliver. They’re making their relationship work – Luc’s trying not to bring the chaos and Oliver’s getting therapy and it’s all lovely. Except that suddenly everyone is getting married and Luc thinks maybe they’re meant to too, because that’s what you’re meant to do when you love each other, right? Right?
I have strongly mixed feelings on sequels usually. I know I’m always saying that I want more of the happily ever after at the end of my romance novels, but I appreciate that an actual novel needs tension and conflict. Most sequels do this by breaking the couple up and getting them back together (or variations thereof) and that often drives me mad. Particularly when the breakup is because of something you could solve by having a conversation. This does not do that. There is conflict, but I was not really ever worried that Luc and Oliver going to end up together – just how were they going to work it all out. And I can’t really explain any more than that without massive plot spoilers.
All the supporting cast are back too – Luc’s friends, his crazy mum, thankfully not too much of his awful dad. And there’s lots of banter and pop culture references. And if I didn’t quite love it as much as the first one, it was a pretty high bar to hit and it was lovely being back with some old friends for a few hours. This is apparently a universe now – so there’s a third book coming, but about a different couple, one of whom briefly featured in this book. So that’s fun too.
My copy of Husband Material came from NetGalley (thank you bookish gods) but it’s out today in Kindle, Kobo and delicious paperback, including from Words and Kisses where they have signed ones. You definitely need to have read Boyfriend Material to get the most out of this though.
Well it’s been an amazing week – Martha Wainwright, Commonwealth Games Gymnastics and then England won the women’s Euros. Is it any surprise that the list is slightly shorter that usual this week? It’s the end of the month too so we have the usual array of review posts coming up this week too. You’re welcome.
Yesterday’s book of the week follows a friendship through three decades of life, and that inspired me to put together this Recommendsday.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Proviso: I’ve only read the first of the four books in this series, but I’m still recommending it here. Also apologies if you’re one of the millions who has already read these – as you know, I’m consistently behind the times on some things! Anyway, My Brilliant Friend is the the first book about Elena and Lila as they grow up in Naples in the late 1950s. They both want to escape the lives seem set out before them but chose different ways to try and do it. The book is about the two women, but also about the realities of life in a poor part of Naples after the Second World War. It’s harsh and hard scrabble and violent. I’ve got book two on the shelf waiting to be read, and I really must get around to it because writing this has reminded me that I want to know what happened to the women next.
The Group by Mary McCarthy
Mary McCarthy’s novel follows a group of young Vassar graduates in the 1930s. You follow them as they try to make their way in the world – to strike out and live different lives to their mothers, despite the obstacles still in the way of women at the time. They don’t all stay in touch with each other all the time, but their lives intertwine and the fellowship between them remains. You may have spotted this on the bookshelf on Saturday’s Bookshelfie – I read it a decade ago and I’ve kept hold of it because I liked it that much. But be prepared to be angry at the way the world treated women back then. It was written in the early 1960s, but McCarthy was born in 1912 so this is era she grew up in.
The Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
Another book written in the 1960s, another one that’s retained a place on my shelves for about a decade. I picked the Valley of the Dolls up in my initial Virago Modern Classics buying spree because it looked so pretty, and I’m so glad I did. Neely, Anne and Jennifer make friends when they are young and struggling in New York City. They fight their way to success in the entertainment industry, but it comes at a massive cost for all of them. If you’ve read anything about Hollywood or the entertainment industry in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, you can try and spot which actors and actresses might have inspired who (a bit like you can with the much more recent Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo). Don’t go expecting happy endings here, but it is a gripping read.
To add to these, you could probably put The Enchanted April – although the friendships there are developed over a much briefer period of time than the books I’ve mentioned above. And the Clary and Polly strand of the Cazalet Chronicles is definitely a story of friendship as well as one of family (they’re cousins). And there’s also The Lido by Libby Page, which tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a young reporter and an elderly woman as they try to save the community’s outdoor swimming pool.
Making a change from the run of BotW picks recently, this week I’ve gone for something (pretty much) new and also that’s not a romance or a mystery. You can thank me later.
Sam and Sadie first met when they were children. Then they didn’t see each other for years – until one day Sam sees Sadie on the subway platform. This chance meeting starts them on the road to success as video game designers. You follow Sam and Sadie over thirty years – as they play games, design games and grow up, always linked together but sometimes pulling in different directions.
You all know that I’ve been reading mostly stuff with happy endings or resolutions for the last *checks calendar* two years or so and this took me a little while to read because I wasn’t sure I was going to like how it all worked it. But I’m so glad I stuck with it because it is just wonderful – even if there was some crying involved, thankfully not on a train though. You watch Sam and Sadie grow and develop and try to help each other through life’s challenges. I can’t really say too much more than that because it’s going to give to much away.
I was a PC gamer when I was younger – mostly simulators like Sim City, the Sims and Transport Tycoon, but also Commander Keen and some of the other shareware games of that era, so I’ve played some of the games that Sam and Sadie played when they are kids and I understood the sort of games they were trying to create even if they weren’t my sort of games. But I don’t think you have to be a gamer to get this novel, don’t worry. It’s two people navigating friendship while working together. And it’s 400ish pages, so if you need a book for the beach this could be it!
I haven’t read any of Gabrielle Zevin’s books before, although I’ve had The Storied Life of A J Fikry on the list of books I would like to read at some point for years. But if her other books are anything like this one, I need to get to them sooner rather than later, just as soon as I’m in a more resilient state of mind, because this broke me at various points.
My copy of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow came via NetGalley but it’s out now in Kindle and Kobo and in hardback. And you should be able to get hold of it fairly easily because it’s had window displays in some bookshops which always a good sign – and Foyles have click and collect copies too.
Check me out. A remarkably good and varied week in reading by recent standards. Non fiction, new fiction, contemporary romance, adventure and golden age crime. This week I have two nights away (only one last week) and a day out at the Commonwealth Games so who knows how much reading time I have. This could be the high point of the whole month!
Positively restrained – two Adele Bucks to enable the binge, but that’s it.
Bonus photo: The British Museum on Thursday evening as I walked past on my way to a gig at the Museum of Comedy.We’ve just started The Deeds of the Disturber as ournextAmelia Peabody relisten so it seemed apt for this week’s photo!
An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley
I struggled with what to call this shelf because, well, there’s no obvious theme. It’s mostly historical – fiction and non fiction – but with a sprinkling of romance, a couple of essay collections, some non fiction and translated fiction. But there’s a lot here that I have written about before. My love of Laurie Graham is well known – here you see one of my (three) copies of Gone with the Windsors, plus the rest of my hard copies of her books. I cannot tell you how much it annoys me that they’re many different sizes and formats. There’s a gaggle of previous BotWs too – Love Lettering, Evvie Drake Starts Over, and then stuff I’ve mentioned in other posts like The Editor, Flappers and the 1920s/Bright Young Things collection.
In the next reorganisation – whenever that happens – I suspect I’ll try and create a non fiction shelf somewhere and get the Laurie Graham’s onto a shelf with fiction. The trouble there is that large old hardback of Grand Duchess of Nowhere, which limits the options for them somewhat…
So a slightly cheaty pick this week, as it’s not a book I haven’t read before, but as I finished the Phryne reread last week, I’m going to let myself break the rules!
Murder and Mendelssohn is the twentieth book in Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series and has a lot of the key threads in the series running through it. Inspector Jack Robinson asks Phryne for help investigating the murder of an unpopular conductor. Jack thinks the killer may come from among the choir he has been rehearsing so Phryne decides to infiltrate the choir and find out. But at the same time, one of her old friends from World War One is in town and needs her help keeping a mathematical genius alive.
My favourite Phrynes are the ones with a large cast of suspects, a love interest and a historical connection – and this has all of that. The full Fisher menage is here – with the exception of Lin Chung, and it has has Greenwood’s take on Sherlock Holmes in Rupert Sheffield, former codebreaker and current irritant to all around him except John Wilson.
I wouldn’t suggest you start the series here, because you’ll miss all the fun of getting to this point, but if you do make this your first taste of Miss Fisher, then it will give you a pretty good flavour of what everything is all about. One last thing – a warning: if you’ve watched the TV show, don’t expect this to be the same. I’ve enjoyed the series, but it’s a teatime drama and they have adapted the series to fit that – which means they’ve done a few things to Phryne’s love life, added some running plot strands that don’t exist in the book and reduced the size of the Fisher household somewhat. So treat them as separate entities if you can.
You can get Murder and Mendelssohn in all the usual ebook formats – Kindle, Kobo and the rest – and that’s probably the easiest way to get hold of them.
So a shorter list this week. Partly because I finished the Phryne Fisher re-read rather than read new stuff, partly because of an overnight in London where I went out, but mostly because of a nightshift on Friday, that made my brain tired and not great at concentrating, and also meant I slept through part of the weekend. What I will write about tomorrow I do not know. And we’ve got a mega heatwave continuing this week, so that may also fry my brain!
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin*
Three actual books bought and two ebooks
Bonus photo: hostel life! Before the nightshift at the end of the week, there was a night away in London at the start of the week. And things are starting to get back to normal at the hostels – this was my first time back at my second favourite/choice one since October 2021 before the Omicron wave hit.
An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 