This isn’t as bad as it could have been. I know it looks like a lot, but four of them are off the pile already because I’ve read three of the Elly Griffiths and the Curtis Sittenfeld are already read and on the normal shelves. One of those Griffiths plus the two Streatfields and the Georgette Heyer detective novel came from that Carlisle trip, the Anne De Courcy came from a trip to Gower Street Waterstones to pick up another Elly Griffiths, the Benevolent Society of Ill Mannered Ladies came from a trip to buy a book as a gift because I have poor will power and then the other two Elly Griffiths were secondhand purchases because I’m on a proper binge as you can tell from the Week in Books posts. And on that basis I expect there will be more of them next month…
Addendum: The willpower has been weak this week. More books have arrive since I took the top photo and as the original photo was already pretty full, I took another rather than restaging (and hauling everything back off the shelves) because if I didn’t it was only going to make next month’s photo even worse…
So here we have the preorder of the new book by Charlotte Stein that turned up on Thursday, another Edmund Crispin and three more Ruth Galloways, one of which is already read and off the to-read pile and onto the “needs to find a shelf for it” pile.
Another busy week in life and reading – complete with a migraine in the middle to add to the mix. Anyway, a good proportion of actual books, even if some of them were new purchases rather than from the shelf. And I did get another one off the long running list. Yay me.
Here we go again, this week’s Saturday post is basically the result of me wandering around a lot of bookshops over the last few weeks and having some thoughts about it and about me and my reading habits.
Firstly, I think we’re living in a really interesting time for cover design at the moment. I think we went through a whole phase of being able to work out pretty much what genre a book was in just by looking at the cover – and now: not so much. Or at least not so much at the moment. I mean we all know what I read most of the time, and I still picked up a bunch of these to read the backs because of the covers. And some of them were intriguing, but we all know that I’d buy one and it would sit on the shelves for actual years as I picked almost everything else to read first!
Moving towards stuff that I might actually read, we’ve got some new hardback crime fiction, which actually makes me feel guilty all over again – because I have Alex Hay’s last book, at least one Tom Hindle and the Oskar Jensen that Helle’s Hound is a sequel to still waiting to be read. Lets move on quickly before I feel any worse.
Having just said that I’m feeling bad for not reading things, this has the book I acutally bought on it – I was in Foyles on the Tuesday before Show Don’t Tell was published and was delighted to see it out early – and signed. So I bought it. And I’ve read it now. Sue me
Moving on, this is actually my local Waterstones and the tower they use for new hardbacks. This is the crime side and it is interesting to me that this is the first place (I think) that I’ve seen Steph Plum 31 in the flesh, which as it came out in the autumn is a surprise. It’s also the first time I’ve come across A Trial in Three Acts – which like the Curtis Sittenfeld was out on the shelves a few days early – this was taken last Saturday and it only came out officially two days ago. Sidenote: it’s enough to make me think twice about pre-ordering books if I might be able to get a copy from an actual bookshop a few days early, but authors need pre-orders. What a dilemma. Anyway, a Trial in Three Acts is a legal mystery about a murder committed live on stage. And as we all know I love a theatre-set mystery, so this just went onto my list of books to look out for at the airport! Also, I love the cover of A Stolen Heart, which it seems is the second book set in Soviet-controlled Kyiv in 1919. As we know, I like to read in order, so I’ll have to find the first one in this series in a shop (or as a Kindle sample) and have a read because it sounds intriguing but also like it has huge potential to be Too Grim.
And finally, more new fiction, more lovely covers, more books I hadn’t heard about mixed in with books that I have. I have now picked up The House With Nine Locks at least three times because of the gorgeous cover before reading the back and remembering that blurbs that include “a dangerous game of cat and mouse with fanatical and brutal detective” and the phrase “morally complex” are usually Not For Me. See also 33 Place Brugmann which has the word “devastating” in the blurb and is about occupied Brussels in World War 2. I have also picked up The Book of Gold more than once – but it is the first (and so far only published) book in a promised trilogy so that can wait!
Favourite book: Hard to decide – either The Favourites or The Crossing Places per my stats page on Goodreads
Most read author: hard to tell because only one book finished for everyone except the Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie re-listens, but I did start a second Elly Griffiths book so maybe her?
Books bought: too many
Books read in 2025: 61
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 760
A solid month in the end, although a fair few novellas and audiobook re-listens in there. Onwards to March!
Bonus picture: A relic of my student days is that I am unable to resist a cocktail with Midori in it, even if it comes with googly eyes.
*includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – including 5 this month!
A good solid week in reading. Two off the long runners list, although the easier too as they are the ebook ones, but it’s still progress. And as we’re hurtling towards the end of February I needed a good week! This week coming looks like it’s going to be a busy one, so we’ll see how that all goes.
Yeah, so the reading list is being held up by the audiobooks and I’m not really sure why, because it felt like an ok week in reading. The Kings Loot is nearly finished though, and I’m not making bad progress on the Holly Stars. But that still reading list is looking a little long, so I need to do a bit of work on that front this week, or at least try to.
This week I wanted to mention that we have a new book from B K Borison this month – and it’s got Sleepless in Seattle vibes. Borison is the author of the very popular Lovelight Farms books, which I’ve read one of, but have been all over all the bookshops in the last year. First Time Caller is the first in a new series called Heartstrings. That name seems to come from the Baltimore radio show hosted by the hero of the book, Aiden who despite the fact that it’s a romance hotline is over love. Our heroine is Lucie, whose daughter calls in to Aidens show for some dating advice for her mum. I am a big Nora Ephron fan and really like Sleepless in Seattle, for all that it has some slightly stalkery vibes at times, so I’m looking forward to seeing how Borison has taken inspiration from the movie and updated it for the 2020s
Well it all went a bit downhill this week after Ballet Shoes – work was insanely busy and I had a cold. And I didn’t even stay up for the start of the Super Bowl – which tells you something about how tired and grotty I was feeling! Fingers crossed for a better week this week…
It’s still early in the year, so the book release calendar is still getting itself sorted for new stuff, but I’ve been wandering the bookshops of central London to take a look at what is about at the moment so that I could report back!
I’m starting with a set of books from Foyles where we have a few that are almost certainly too much for me on one front or another! I read Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires a few years back and it was a great idea but the horror was too much for me. I have learned from that – this one is about a home for unmarried mothers in Florida in the 1970s and is clearly Not For Verity, even if I know it will be for others. I still have Alex Hay’s The House Keepers on my Kindle TBR so I’m not allowed to buy anything else from him before I’ve read that. And the same applies to the Tom Hindle. And the rest all look to be down the end of the thriller spectrum that is too scary for me!
There’s a few duplicates here in Waterstones Piccadilly, but there’s also a few that I’ve read too – the Richard Osman, Robert Thorogood and Richard Coles. I read the previous book in this Faith Martin series and I have the Leonora Nattrass waiting to be read too. And there are some lovely covers – The House With Nine Locks is beautiful and Ink Ribbon Red and White City are striking too – even if the actual books probably aren’t my thing.
For some reason, I like the crime and mystery covers that are about at the moment more than the women’s fiction/romantic fiction ones. So much at the moment seems so similar. And I know that’s always been the way with cover trends – see all the cartoon covers in the early 00s, and then the headless ladies of historical romance – but at the moment it’s like there’s four styles only that they’re choosing from. And maybe that’s why I’m buying more mystery in shops than anything else right now?
The first month of 2025 is over and so I’m back with another whistle-stop tour through a couple of books that I read last month that I didn’t already tell you about.
Vanishing Box by Elly Griffiths
Let’s start this month with a rule breaking mid-series book. But there’s a reason for this I promise. Vanishing Box is the fourth in Griffiths’ series set in Brighton in the early 1950s. It’s been five years since I read the third book but my mum’s book club picked the first one just before Christmas and it reminded me that I had forgotten to go and read any more of them. And this is a good instalment in the series. The general premise is that Edgar Stephens is a police detective but in World War 2 he worked in a shadowy unit with Max Mephisto who is a magician. They fall back into each other’s orbit during the first book (The Zigzag Girl) and have stayed there since. This book sees Max performing on the bill of a variety show in Brighton and Edgar investigating the death of a flower shop worker who happened to be living in the same boarding house as some of the other performers on the bill with Max. You could read this without reading the rest of the series, but it will definitely work best if you’ve got the background.
Natural Selection by Elin Hilderbrand
A short story on the list this month – this is an Amazon Original that follows Sophia, a New Yorker who has finally found a man she can see herself settling down with, but who finds herself on a couples trip alone after an emergency means he has to bail on her as they’re about to board the flight. This sends Sophia on a journey of self discovery – the holiday was his choice – so Sophia finds herself the fish out of a water on a once in a lifetime trip to the Galapagos Islands – without her boyfriend, without her phone signal (most of the time) and too embarrassed to talk to anyone about what’s going on. Hildebrand packs a lot into just over 50 pages and I found it surprisingly emotional as well as satisfying.
Not in My Book by Katie Holt*
As I previewed this when it came out, I thought I ought to follow up now I’ve read it. This is an enemies to lovers romance about two writers who are forced to write a book together after they take their classroom rivalry one step too far for their professor to let slide. If New Adult was still a thing, I would say that this is squarely in that area, but it’s not really any more so I don’t really know what to call it. And I think for some people this is going to work really well. It’s being compared to Sally Thorne‘s The Hating Game in the blurb and I think that’s pretty fair, but I think these two are maybe meaner to each other than those two. And that was my problem: they’re awful to each other and although I enjoyed it once they started getting along, as soon as there is any hint of conflict they revert to saying the most hurtful things they can to each other, and that’s just not my thing. Maybe it’s the age of the main characters and I’m just too old for that now – but it ended up being the end of the trope that I find hard to get on board with.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 