On Good Reads to-reads shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 441 (I’ve got to stop adding new books to the list and start reading them!)
New books* read in July: 18
Books from the Library Book pile: 0
Books from the to-read pile: 9
E-books: 6
Books read as soon as they arrived: 3
Most read author in July: Jasper Fforde
Books* read this year: 129
Books bought: 17 – 13 paperbacks (but they haven’t all arrived yet so the pile is smaller…) and 4 e books
Books acquired**: 9
Net progress: 8 books more on the pile…
Oh dear. I was going really well until the last week of the month – when I bought 7 books second hand on recommendations and another couple of kindle daily deals. But really the problem is the tempting Nature of Net Galley – and my ability to acquire books on there. But as they are all on the Kindle, they kind of don’t count right? I’ve decided that I need to weed the library pile – there are clearly books there I’m never going to read and I should take them back. And will August be the month that I admit defeat on Titus Groan – or will I finally finish it?!
**You’ll notice I’ve added a new category this month – books acquired – to cover the free books that I’m winning or being sent via NetGalley etc and free kindle books.
Out today (that’s Thursday 31st July) is this great chick-lit novel by Claire Sandy. If you’re a Great British Bake-Off fan, this may be the book for you if you’re getting panicky before the start of the new series next week. And if you’re not a baker or a cook, What Would Mary Berry Do? may still be the beach book for you this summer.
What Would Mary Berry Do? and some of my Bernadette Strachan collection…
So, first, the setup: After a disastrous school bake sale, Marie Dunwoody decides that by this time next year it will be different. With a Mary Berry Baking Bible in hand, she sets out to conquer cakes – and change her outlook on life thinking “What Would Mary Berry Do?” At the same time, husband Robert is struggling with office politics – where a muffin is worth more than sales figures and son Angus is struggling with problems at school – something his nine-year old twin sisters are determined to get to the bottom off…
I loved the cast of characters in this book – the Dunwoody family are a hoot and there’s a set of fully rounded supporting characters too, I particularly loved Marie’s employees at her dental surgery. The different strands of the plot work very well – and whilst I was frequently laughing, I also had a tear in my eye at one point too. You don’t have to be into making your own baked goods to enjoy either – the plot and characters are engaging enough to interest people who don’t know their Croquembouche from their Crème Anglaise.
The blurb says it’s ideal for fans of Jenny Colgan and I’d agree with that – but I’d also add that fans of Trisha Ashley and Alexandra Brown would probably enjoy this one too – and anyone who likes their chick lit with a dose of humour. And as Claire Sandy is a pen name for the fabulous Bernadette Strachan, if you haven’t read any of her work, can I point you in the direction of my favourite of hers – The Reluctant Landlady – where you’ll find loveable characters (Bing! Bernard!), a great plot, lots of humour but a bit less baking.
I’m hoping you’ll be able to get hold of a copy of What Would Mary Berry Do at all good bookshops, but in case you can’t get to an actual shop, here it is on Foyles website and Kindle. I’m hoping it will do really well – it’s my favourite book I’ve read this month.
Not a good week. I don’t know what went wrong. I was so excited about #Sunathon but somewhere in the week it all went off the rails. I had Monday and Tuesday off – and The Boy was off too so we had two lovely days together – but I didn’t do much reading. Then I was away for work for a couple of days – and couldn’t take the Kate Williams with me because it’s a hard back and just takes up too much space. Wednesday went really well though – as I read all of What Would Mary Berry do but on Thursday I was out at the theatre after work and didn’t read anything much at all. Then on Friday afternoon I got rained on in my lunchbreak and on my way to the station after work and ended up reading bits of several different things on the way home from work and not really making any progress much on anything. Then on top of that a busy weekend where I didn’t really read anything and this is where we’re at…
Read:
Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons
What Would Mary Berry Do by Claire Sandy
Started:
The Storms of War by Kate Williams
Tickled Pink by Christina Jones
The Beach Hut Next Door by Veronica Henry
Still reading:
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
American Blonde by Jennifer Niven
And as far as book acquisition goes, a copy of a book that I’ve won appeared in the post – and I’ve ordered a few more, but they haven’t turned up yet, so I’m not sure whether to count them in the total or not… Oh and the Christina Jones that I started was a Kindle Freebie this week. I’m trying not to think about the state of the July stats after this week. Here’s hoping this week coming (four day shifts, home every night) is better.
You’ll remember a few weeks back I spoke about my poor record with Booker-nominated books and their authors and my pledge to do better. Since then I’ve read one of the Muriel Spark’s from my backlog and then got distracted by upcoming new releases and #Sunathon. Well today the Booker Longlist is out and I thought I’d check whether this year’s nominees increase my hit rate!
As five of the list haven’t been published yet, I think I can be forgiven for not having read them, and there’s one book on here that I actually already had on my to read list (but not the pile!) and that is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, who is one of three authors on the list who I’ve read books by. And I need all of those three (the others are Siri Hustvedt and David Nicholls) to make the shortlist because it would really improve my record, with no extra effort from me. Of the other authors, I’ve got an Ali Smith waiting to be read – and I really should read some David Mitchell. As for the rest, I need to go away and read about them and read some reviews and decide which I might want to read and then wait for the Kindle discounts to come around!
The Longlist in full:
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Slightly derailed by an unexpected nightshift on Friday night but an unexpected Saturday evening at home meant I finished Bill Bryson which made everything look a lot better. This week coming up is #sunathon – as dreamt up by @EmmaIsWriting – so I’ve put together some summery reads I’m hoping to be reading this week – you can look at them here.
Read:
Death Cloud (Young Sherlock Holmes 1) by Andrew Lane
Tiger Milk by Stephanie de Velasco
The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde
How the Scoundrel Seduces by Sabrina Jeffries
One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson
Started:
Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons
American Blonde by Jennifer Niven
Still reading:
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Now as regular readers will know, nightshifts usually mean book buying in the early hours. Well I resisted – this time the impulse buying was from ASOS’s sale… So the bank balance did suffer – but not with a book splurge – which is an achievement! Several arrived in the post – a twitter competition prize from Doubleday for #bookadayuk, a Goodreads review copy of The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House (which isn’t due out until the very end of August so I feel very special to have that one) and Clare Sandy’s What Would Mary Berry Do which is out at the end of the month (and which the author sent to me so I’m very excited about that too). I’ve been through my diary marking up when the various books I’ve been sent ahead of publication are due out – in the hope that I’ll schedule posts for the appropriate times – I think there’s nothing more annoying than finding out about a really good book that someone else has read and not being able to get hold of a copy yourself!
Emma Louise over on her eponymous blog has come up with the fabulous idea of the #Sunathon which is all about encouraging people all over the world to take time and make time to read. It starts tomorrow (Monday) so I’m hopping onto that this week – and I’ve come up with a list of summery books that I have sitting on the to-read pile (or in the unread folder on the Kindle) that I’m going to be reading this week and wanted to share them with you (as I’ve found the best way to make sure I actually read what I say I’m going to is to put it down in writing so I can’t sneak off and do something different!) I can’t promise to get through them all but I’ll try. So the books on the #sunathon list are:
Unfinished Symphony of You and Me by Lucy Robinson
What Would Mary Berry Do by Claire Sandy
The Beach Hut Next Door by Veronica Henry
Longbourn by Jo Baker
The Storms of War by Kate Williams
The Physical part of the #Sunathon to-read pile and my sunlounger
You’ll notice that several of these are recent releases or due for release in the next couple of weeks, so hopefully there may be some reviews of them coming up too. For now though, follow my progress over on Twitter – I’m @WildeV and join the conversation or even join in yourself using #sunathon.
Apologies for this brief spurt of posting – I meant to post the Children’s/Young Adult blog earlier in the week and time got away with me somewhat. I do try and space my posts out, but to do that I need to actually schedule them when I write them not just save them in drafts *headdesk*
Despite appearances, I’ve actually made good progress this week – I’m more than half way through Tiger Milk now (thank you trip to the hairdresser!) and probably would have finished it already if I wasn’t working over the weekend, which necessitated taking a fresh book with me rather than a nearly finished one. I did re-read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – but I can’t count that as it’s one I read over and over when I was at primary school, and I’ve finished my Phryne Fisher re-read too.
Read:
The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde
Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell
Don’t Point That Thing At Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli
Ivy Lane: Spring by Cathy Bramley
Started:
Death Cloud (Young Sherlock Holmes 1) by Andrew Lane
Still reading:
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Tiger Milk by Stephanie de Velasco
One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson
As far as the buying goes – 4 from the charity shop and two from the Kindle means no net progress on reducing the pile – especially as Ivy Lane was on the Kindle. Bad times all around!
There’s a shelf of books I keep hidden in my spare room. I’m embarrassed to own them. But some of their genre-mates live in my sitting room bookshelf. What am I talking about? Historical romances.
My historical romance collection – can you spot the UK editions and the US ones
You’ll have seen from earlier posts that I’ve got a bit of a thing for Georgette Heyer. Now a few years back, I started looking for other similar books that I could read – and stumbled into the world of historical romances. Mostly written by American authors, they’ve beguiled many a happy hour in the years since. So why the segregation? Well it’s simple. In this country (that is the UK) books by writers like Julia Quinn come with nice, innocuous pastel coloured covers. But where I’ve had to buy in from the US to fill in collections – for example the Desperate Duchesses series by Eloisa James – they tend to come with busty women breaking free of their dresses on the cover. I am literally too embarrassed to be seen to own them – let alone be seen out in public with them on the train.
In cases like this – the Kindle is a god-send – no one can see the cover of the book that I’m reading on my e-reader – and unless they’re invading my personal space, they’re not going to know that I’m reading a “bodice-ripper”. But take one of these babies out in public and I’m embarrassed about people judging me.
Some of these spines are not allowed on my downstairs bookshelves…
Now this is, of course, ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with reading historical fiction or even reading it in public. Many are very well researched and historically accurate – Eloisa James is actually Mary Bly, a respected Shakespeare professor at Fordham University – and they’re hardly (or at least not often) up their with Fifty Shades of Grey for their explicit content* and there’s nothing wrong with a bit of escapist fiction anyway.
I’ve read a lot of article recently about people not taking romantic fiction seriously – and I’d suggest that covers like these are part of the reason why. And some of them aren’t even that accurate when it comes to reflecting the content of the book – whether it is the look of the heroine or the action it portrays.
I also think the American style covers look incredibly retro and naff. If I had come across them in a bookshop before I’d read some of the authors, I would never have even thought of picking one of them up – I would have ruled them out as being clichéd, inaccurate and one note – the same way I did with old school Mills and Boons once I’d read a couple of dozen of my gran’s collection. And they’re not. For me, the best of them are the logical successors to Georgette Heyer – but with kissing. And some sex. Sometimes quite a lot of sex. But the world has changed since Heyer picked up her pen – and it’s mostly very well written sex.
Same author, different countries – completely different cover look!
I’d love to know what it is about the US book-buying public (or how publishers perceive them) that means that the books are packaged and styled like this – and what the authors think of such radical differences. But until the books start looking a little bit less like a cliché, my American imports will continue to be hidden away at the back of the top shelf of the spare room bookcase!
* I read the Fifty Shades trilogy on my Kindle, in secret, in Poland to make sure no-one would know what I was doing. And I read it so that I could tell my sister and my mum if they needed to read it. I concluded they didn’t.
I’m finding Tiger Milk (which was a Goodreads win) heavy going so far – and Bill Bryson is too big to take to work with me – so thee are some new lingerers on the pile, although of course Titus is still the King of Lingering. I really enjoyed Michael Tolliver Lives though – and I’m desperate to know what happens next in the Harriet Evans – as my pleadings earlier in the week will attest!
Read:
Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin
Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
A Place for Us Part One by Harriet Evans
A Bone to Pick by Charlaine Harris
Tom Brown’s Body by Gladys Mitchell
Started:
The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde
Still reading:
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Tiger Milk by Stephanie de Velasco
One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson
As far as purchases go – only two this week – but I’ve acquired two more – so the physical to-read pile isn’t even any smaller, because the Harriet Evans was on the Kindle. When will I learn? Still at least I only paid for two of them!
On Good Reads to-reads shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 422
New books* read in June: 19
Books from the Library Book pile: 2
Books from the to-read pile: 12
E-books: 0!
Books read as soon as they arrived: 5 (including a freebie)
Most read author in June: Donna Andrews
Books* read this year: 111
Books bought: 11
Net progress: -1 – the pile is a book smaller than it was last month!
There were 4 Phryne Fisher books from the Kindle this month – but very little else – which is naughty, but I’ve been focusing on the physical pile. It’s all excuses isn’t it?!
* Total includes some short stories (although none this month)
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 