Tag: reading

Authors I love, books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: October 11 – October 17

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Did I finish all the books I had on the go from last week? No. Did I make progress on them? Yes. Did I spent a weekend in London doing activities rather than on my sofa reading? Absolutely. I regret nothing. I’ve absolutely had a blast.

Read:

A Time to Die by Hilda Lawrence*

Death on the Downs by Simon Brett

Fear in the Sunlight by Nicola Upson

The Visit by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This is Your Time by Ruby Bridges

Started:

The Torso in the Town by Simon Brett

Still reading:

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman*

Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan*

Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson

Heroine Complex by Sarah Kuhn

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym by Paula Byrne*

Pirate King by Laurie R King

One More Christmas at the Castle by Trisha Ashley*

Four actual books because I went into many bookshops and ended up buying stuff in the British Library shop, Skoob books and Foyles. And a few ebooks as well earlier in the week. What can I say. I just can’t help myself.

Bonus photo: one of the real life things I did was the Paddington exhibition at the British Library which I thoroughly thoroughly recommend. And the theatre was good too.

A model Paddington sitting outside the door to Windsor gardens

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

 

Authors I love, books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: October 4 – October 10

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Am I making progress at finishing the books I started on holiday? Well sort of, but not in anyway you can tell from this post. Is it stopping me starting other new stuff? Absolutely not. Is the list of books on the go getting out of hand? Just a touch. Did I also end up listening to sections of audiobooks I’ve listened to many times before? Yes absolutely (Gaudy Night, Crocodile on the Sandbank, Busman’s Honeymoon). Welcome to my (reading) life. 

Read:

V for Vengence by Sue Grafton

Death of a Tin God by George Bellairs*

The Littlest Guide by C R Mansell

The Body on the Beach by Simon Brett

Lila by Naima Coster

Started:

One More Christmas at the Castle by Trisha Ashley*

A Time to Die by Hilda Lawrence*

Still reading:

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman*

Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan*

Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson

Heroine Complex by Sarah Kuhn

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym by Paula Byrne*

Pirate King by Laurie R King

Bonus photo: I’m attempting to develop green fingers. I’m having mixed success, but have a picture of my downstairs window sill, where I’m attempting to sprout (is that the right word?) a baby spider plant from Cecil the Spider Plant, and an aloe vera that I’ve managed to keep alive for long enough that I’ve just ordered a fancy pot for it to live in – which is tempting fate to an extraordinary degree.

A baby spiderplant in water and a small aloe vera plant on a window sill.

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

 

Book of the Week, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: Ambush or Adore

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I’m going to start this review with an apology: Ambush or Adore is a fan service piece from Gail Carriger, so really it will only work for you if you’ve already read a lot of Gail Carriger’s works. But it was also the only book I read last week that made me cry and it was the book I enjoyed the most. So sorry to the rest of you – but you have mini reviews coming up tomorrow to help ease your pain and if reading this makes you want to read some of the Carrigerverse I will provide pointers on that at the end.

Agatha Woosnoss is the greatest intelligence gatherer of her generation, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her. In fact, so skilled is she that you probably wouldn’t be able to find her in the room to look at her, even if you knew she was there. Pillover Plumleigh-Teignmott is a professor of ancient languages at Oxford. He’s also probably the only person who has always seen Agatha, even if she doesn’t realise it. Ambush or Adore spans more than forty years and follows these two from school through Middle Age, so you can see what happened to them after Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Academy crashed.

If you don’t know what Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Academy was (or how it was able to crash) this book probably isn’t going to be for you. Yes it’s a slightly star crossed friends to lovers story across the decades but really this is for the fans. It starts with the flight home at the end of Reticence, skips back to the end of Manners and Mutiny and fills in the gaps of what happened to two members of the Finishing School posse across the course of the entire Parasol Protectorate and Custard Protocol Series. There are guest appearances from everyone’s favourite vampire* and some of the other finishing school crew. There are references to the ones you don’t see. There are nods to the events of the series. It has pretty much everything I wanted and I loved it. As I said at the top, it made me cry with all the heartache and yearning but it’s also incredibly tender and there is such a satisfying resolution to it all.

I had my copy of Ambush and Adore preordered but you can buy direct from Gail Carriger as well as from Kindle and Kobo and the audiobook will arrive some time in the near future.. There is no physical edition at the moment, but it will be included in a hardcover omnibus of the Delightfully Deadly series that it’s a part of early next year. If you have not read any Gail Carriger before and now fancy reading about a steampunk Victorian Britain with vampires, werewolves and a society of lady intelligencers, you have two options: chronological order or publication order. I’ve written a whole post about the series, but in short chronological order puts the Young Adult Finishing School series first, publication see you start with Soulless and the Parasol Protectorate series, then go backwards to Finishing School and then forwards again to Prudence, which is set a decade or so after the end of the Parasol Protectorate. I prefer chronological because you get some delightful reveals, but that may also be because that’s the order I read them in. How can I really tell because things are only a surprise once! Whatever you try it’ll be fun.

Happy Reading!

* Lord Akeldama of course. Who else could possibly be.

Authors I love, books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: September 27 – October 3

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Another busy week in reading and “real” life too. Some interesting stuff read here – and less progress on some of the books that I started on holiday than maybe there should have been. That can be a goal for this week. In case you missed it, the September stats are here and Mini Reviews are coming up on Wednesday.

Read:

Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L Sayers

The Blitz Detective by Mike Hollow*

The Visitor by Dodai Stewart

Say You’ll Stay by Susan Mallery

Hacked by Duncan MacMaster

Ambush or Adore by Gail Carriger

Speed Grieving by Allison Ellis

Started:

V for Vengence by Sue Grafton

Pirate King by Laurie R King

Still reading:

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman*

Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan*

Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson

Heroine Complex by Sarah Kuhn

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym by Paula Byrne*

Bonus photo: After last week’s photos from our holiday, today I’m going for some autumnal Britain – this is somewhere you’ve seen before here – as the leaves start to change and with a slightly stormy sky.

A small river/large stream and surrounding trees and fields

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

 

Authors I love, books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: September 13 – September 19

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Lots of interesting reading last week. Not quite sure what I’m going to write about tomorrow yet either!

Read:

Misfits by Michaela Coel*

The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer

The Cult of We by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell*

Bombshell by Sarah MacLean

Death Treads Softly by George Bellairs

Yes, And by Kristi Coulter

Started:

Traitor King by Andrew Lownie

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman*

Death in High Provence by George Bellairs

Still reading:

A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz*

A little Kindle buying spree and a couple of physical books too. But that’s ok. It happens!

Bonus photo: a Tuesday night theatre trip! Only my second show back but it was wonderful on all counts

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

 

Book of the Week, Forgotten books, mystery

Book of the Week: The Secret of High Eldersham

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Back with another murder mystery again this week. It’s another British Crime Classic, but it’s a new to me author so that makes variety right?!

Scotland Yard are called in to investigate the murder of the landlord of a pub in an East Anglian village known for its insular nature and hostility to outsiders. Samuel Whitehead was a stranger to the neighbourhood, but somehow he seemed to be making a reasonable go of it – right up until the point that someone stabbed him in is own bar around closing time one night. Detective Inspector Young is struggling to make inroads in the case, so he calls on a friend and amateur sleuth, Desmond Merrion, to help him solve the murder.

This is the first book by Miles Burton that I’ve read, but it has a number of recognisable Golden Age crime tropes – east Anglia and it’s villages being a bit strange (see also: a fair few Margery Allinghams, but particularly Sweet Danger, Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, the Inspector Littlejohn I read the other week) and of course the gentleman amateur detective. Burton’s Merrion has a military background – but this time it’s the navy, which is useful because there is a lot of sailing in this plot. It’s a bit uneven in places – the focus of the narrative switches abruptly to Merrion from Young, Mavis the love interest is a little bit of a one dimensional Not Like Other Girls character and the secret is, well. But if you’ve read a lot these sort of classic murder mysteries it’s worth a look – to see how someone different tackles all these things. I would read some more of these – partly just to find out what Merrion turns into and see if he evolves the way that some of the other similar characters did (but particularly Campion). The British Crime Library have republished at least one other of these so I’ll keep an eye out.

My copy of The Secret of High Eldersham came via Kindle Unlimited, but it’s also available as a paperback – which you can buy direct from the British Library bookshop as well as the usual sources.

Happy Reading!

Authors I love, books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: September 6 – September 12

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Another busy week (do I have anything but busy weeks these days?) but some interesting reading – some of which I’ve already told you about!

Read:

Chelsea Girls by Fiona Davis

The God of the Hive by Laurie R King

Beekeeping for Beginners by Laurie R King

The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton

Before Her by Jacqueline Woodson

Parable by Jess Walter

A Wedding Thing by Shea Serrano with Laramie Serrano

Started:

Misfits by Michaela Coel*

Death Treads Softly by George Bellairs

Still reading:

A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz*

The Cult of We by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell*

Bombshell by Sarah MacLean

After last week’s splurge I have been very well behaved and haven’t bought anything else!

Bonus photo: Another day out at the racetrack… this time for British Superbikes

British Superbikes racing

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

 

Book of the Week, fiction, historical

Book of the Week: The Chelsea Girls

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Yes I finished this on Monday. So yes, I’m cheating for the second week in a row. I make the rules, so I can break them if I want to. Anyway, you should all just be glad that I didn’t pick another mystery!

Maxine and Hazel meet on a USO tour in the last months of the Second World War. They meet again in New York in the 1950s when Maxine is an up and coming film star and Hazel is an aspiring playwright. Both living in the famous Chelsea Hotel, soon they’re working together on Hazel’s first play which is going to be staged on Broadway. But the red scare is well underway and the production and their careers are threatened by the witch hunt for communists turning its attention to the entertainment industry. As the pressure starts to build what will happen to the women and their friendship?

The Chelsea Girls follows a twenty year friendship between two women forged through a trauma in Italy, through the ups and downs of their careers. They’re both engaging and intriguing characters – Hazel’s mother is always comparing her to her brother who was killed in the war and finding her lacking, while Maxine is using the theatre to build a better life for her and her German immigrant grandmother. And as the red scare comes to Broadway, they both find themselves in the spotlight because of the actions of Hazel’s brother years before. And as well as being tense it’s also a wonderful portrait of the Chelsea Hotel – famously home to artists and bohemians, it becomes Hazel and Maxine’s refuge as they battle the outside forces trying to tear their lives apart.

I’ve been wanting to read this for ages. It came out two years ago and it’s been on my want to read list for about that long – so I’ve no idea where I even heard about it to start with. I read one of Fiona Davis’s other books a year or two back and liked the idea but didn’t love the execution, but this one really worked for me. It took me a day or two to properly get into it, but then I read 200 pages at a sitting because I wanted to see where it was going. I am fascinated with Old Hollywood, in fiction and non-fiction and this lives adjacent to that. I’ve written about some other books in this area before (like Trumbo and Karina Longworth’s Seduction) and this fitted right in to my wheelhouse. Well worth a look.

My copy came from the library, but it’s available now on Kindle and Kobo (and at time of writing is slightly cheaper on Kobo) as well as in paperback, although I’m not sure how easy that will be to get hold of in store – Foyles have stock to order, but not to click and collect.

Happy Reading!

Authors I love, books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: August 30 – September 5

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This list looks a little deceptive – because all of those Mindy Kalings are Kindle single Essays that form one single collection – there are six in all and two were on last week’s list. I nearly just put them on here once as a whole – but they count individually in the good reads list so it would throw my whole count out for the year (unless I start keeping separate lists, and we all know that’s not going to happen). Lots of time last week spent reading The Cult of We – which is long and non fiction which always takes me longer, even in times when I’m not mostly drawn to reading mystery novels! And just to recap in case you missed it – we had the mini reviews last week, as well as the stats and all the usual stuff.

Read:

Death at Dukes Halt by Derek Farrell

Please Like Me by Mindy Kaling

Help is on the Way by Mindy Kaling

Searching for Coach Taylor by Mindy Kaling

Once Upon a Time in Silver Lake by Mindy Kaling

The Ape Who Guards the Balance by Elizabeth Peters

First Comes Like by Alisha Rai

A Knife for Harry Dodd by George Bellairs

Death in the Dales by Frances Brody

Started:

The Chelsea Girls by Fiona Davis

Bombshell by Sarah MacLean

Still reading:

A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz*

The God of the Hive by Laurie R King

The Cult of We by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell*

I went into town on Saturday between getting my brows weeded and my hair done and I accidentally bought four books. What a pity…

Bonus photo: The aforementioned book haul…

Four books on a desk

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

 

Book of the Week, cozy crime, detective, fiction, mystery, new releases

Book of the Week: Death at Dukes Halt

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I’m finishing the month as I started it, with another murder mystery book pick for my Book of the Week, in a slightly cheaty move because I finished it on Monday, but I’ve talked enough about Inspector Littlejohn recently already, and that was pretty much all I actually finished last week! But before I get down to my review of the new Derek Farrell, a quick reminder that tomorrow is the Mini Reviews and Thursday will be the August Stats.

Danny Bird is facing up to a scary prospect: a weekend at a country house to help Caz fulfill a promise to a dead friend. Pub manager Ali is chauffeuring them down to Dukes Halt where they find a mismatched set of weekend guests: a Hollywood actress, a right-wing MP and an Albanian gangster among them. Soon there’s a body in their midst and Danny is detecting again to try and clear himself and his friends. But he’s also trying to work out what happened at the house decades ago when he discovers an unhappy boy’s secret diary.

This is the fifth outing for Danny and the gang and it’s a good one. Farrell has taken Danny out of the Marq (the Asbo twins are left in charge of running a talent night while they’re gone and I look forward to seeing how that works out) and put him into a country house murder mystery in the grand tradition of the genre. It’s got everything you would expect from an Agatha Christie – but updated to the present day. In one of the earlier books in the series Danny is described as Poirot on poppers, which is a great line but doing Danny a slight disservice now because he is not the isolated external figure that Poirot is. He’s got friends, relationships, a perspective and that all comes into focus in this. You also see him more on his own in this that he has been in the previous series so there’s a lot more about who Danny is and what he believes in that you’re used to and that’s a really good development. But don’t worry, there’s still plenty of witty banter and oneliners. The pandemic means there has been a longer break between full length books than I was hoping when I finished Death of an Angel (although Death of a Sinner did help) but I think Death at Dukes Halt has been worth the wait.

You can get Death at Dukes Halt direct from the publisher, Fahrenheit Press, who have it in various ebook formats and paperback. If you do get the paperback from them, you get the ebook with it as well which is nice – I started reading the paperback and then switched to the kindle so I could read it on the move. But you can also get it on Kindle.

Happy Reading!