Tag: Recommendsday

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Recommendsday: Women’s History month

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Okay, this is an American thing, but there was also International Women’s Day this month. And yes, I know, I know. It’s nearly the end of March so this is super late but I’m sneaking this in under the wire because I can. And I’m going to work my way back in history, because for some reason that seems like the most logical thing to do!

Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

This is really really good. A fascinating insight into the “normal” women behind the development of the Atomic Bomb. It’s the story of a pop up city built around a project so secret that you weren’t told what you were doing, and didn’t ask what other people were doing either. A few of the chemists put two and two together, but they were a handful out of tens of thousands. Really worth reading.

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley

There are a lot of books about Jane Austen, but this is a well researched look at Jane Austen’s home life, framing it in the wider world of expectations for women in Georgian England, the restrictions on their lives and how they subverted that. When Lucy Worsley is at her best, her books are very readable and accessible. At other times, she is very dense and scholarly and it’s hard work. This is much more the latter than the former, or at least it was for me. I had thought that the readability was an experience thing, because her first book was very scholarly, but the next one – Courtiers – was incredibly easy and yet informative. I still have her Agatha Christie biograohy on my shelf – I wonder which Worlsey we will get there!

She Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth by Helen Castor

And finally, lets go back to the Middle Ages, for a group biography of four women who ruled England (or tried to) between the Twelfth and the Fifteenth Century. If you’ve never come across Matilda, the daughter of Henry I and granddaughter of William the Conqueror, then you have a treat instore – especially as the period she was trying to claim the crown in is known as The Anarchy. The other women are Eleanor of Aquitaine (wife of two kings, and ruler of Aquitaine in her own right), Isabella of France (daughter of a French King and married to an English one) and Margaret of Anjou (who ruled on behalf of her mad husband and key figure in the Wars of the Roses). It’s really, really interesting – and looks at some parts of history that don’t really get taught in schools in the UK.

This time last year I did a post about Interesting Women – do go and check that out for some more reviews, including Hidden Figures, but I also wanted to flag The Radium Girls which was in a Recommendsday post a couple of years back, and Janina Ramirez’s Femina which was in a Recommendsday last year

Happy Reading!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Novels about the Movies

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It was the Oscars at the weekend, so what better opportunity to mention some books with movie stars or the movie industry in them

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Everyone is talking about Daisy Jones and the Six at the moment because the adaptation is out* but Jenkins Reid’s first book in what she’s called the Mick Riva universe is about an elderly movie star who wants an up and coming journalism to write her life story. I have vivid memories of starting to read this on my phone in the immigration queue at Dulles airport, but I actually didn’t finish it until months later. Daisy is the book that really broke through – probably because Reese Witherspoon optioned it – but I think Evelyn is just as good – it was a Book of the Week when I did finish it. And if you know your old Hollywood, there is a lot of fun to be had in figuring out what inspired which bits of Evelyn’s story.

The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty

It’s sort of a stretch to include this because it is before Louise became famous, but I’ve gone with it because I enjoyed it when I read it a decade ago and it’s a bit different. If Evelyn Hugo is a reimagining of Hollywood history creating a new legendary star, The Chaperone falls into the real people-adjacent category. I’ve written whole posts about novelised real people, and this is sort of that, except that our real person isn’t the main character. It’s 1922 and Cora Carlisle is in charge of taking the teenaged Louise Brooks from Kansas to New York to study dance. Louise isn’t at all happy about having a woman old enough to be her mother chaperoning her on the trip and Cora has her own reasons for making the journey too. Set over about five weeks, this has prohibition New York, Louise Brooks before she was a film star and the rapid changes that were happening in society in the 1920s. I didn’t realise until I was writing this that it had been turned into a film – but it did come out in 2020 and we all know that there was a lot going on then and you couldn’t go to the cinemas so maybe that’s not a surprise, but I’ll have to look it up on the streaming services!

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

Neely, Anne and Jennifer become best friends as young women in New York and across the course of the book climb to the top of the entertainment industry. But their lives are intertwined with the pills they take – the dolls of the title – and they cause more problems than they solve. This is a twentieth century classic – if you haven’t read it, you really should. My copy is a very pretty Virago Hardback, but as you can see the latest edition marks the book’s fiftieth anniversary, although we’re now closer to the sixtieth!

Of course there are loads of other books I could have included – I included Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents in a Quick Reviews post a few months back, so it’s a bit soon to write another review of it, but that is set in the world of the studio system during and after the Second World War. Fear in the Sunlight in Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey series is set around the production of a very real Hitchcock film in Portmeirion in 1936. Carrie Fisher used her own experiences in Hollywood to write Postcards from the Edge about a Hollywood star with a drug problem, and Angela Carter’s Wise Children also includes the twins’ experiences in the movie business

And as is traditional with these things, I have a bunch of stuff that would fit this still sitting on the to-read pile, like Blonde by Joyce Carole Oates (which Ana de Armas was nominated for in this years Oscars losing out to Michelle Yeoh), Their Finest Hour and a Half is about the only Lissa Evans novel (for adults) that I haven’t read – although I have seen the movie that it was turned into, which is just called Their Finest, and Laura Kalpakian’s The Great Pretenders, about the granddaughter of a movie mogul who strikes out on her own in the business, which I impulse bought in Foyles last summer.

Happy Wednesday everyone!

*and don’t this won’t be the last time I mention Daisy I’m sure!

books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: February Quick Reviews

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Another month is over so we have a fresh batch of quick reviews for your delectation, and for once it’s all non-fiction – which I didn’t really realise until I had finished writing the post, but I guess sort of gives it an extra theme. Go past Verity.

Going with the Boys by Judith Mackrell

Judith Mackrell’s group biography (which is called The Correspondents in some countries) took me ages to read mostly because I own it I hardcover (as you can see) and as you all know I don’t tote those around with me. But it’s also because the subject matter required me to be in the right frame of mind. The six extraordinary women of the subtitle are war reporters struggling for the right to cover conflicts in the first half of the 20th century. It’s fascinating and infuriating and sobering. Very much worth a read.

I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Se-hee

This is the English translation of a very successful South Korean memoir about the author’s therapy for depression. I read it in an afternoon but it gave me a lot to think about – not least that I didn’t think her therapist was very good, if the exchanges you see on the page are accurate! Anyway, there are some thoughts here about living with anxiety and self doubt and how it affects your perception of others and yourself.

Movie Star by Jessica Simpson

Just throwing an Amazon short story in here – because I read Jessica Simpson’s autobiography three years ago and if you’re interested in getting a taste of what her book is like, this will do that for you. My review of Open Book said that it’s very American and “There’s also a lot of god and a lot of evidence that Simpson has had some really awful men in her life – her dad is terrible and her boyfriend choices were also not great.” This has some of the terrible taste in men but a lot less of the god than the full length book does. I enjoyed it – and have enjoyed playing the guessing game as to who the movie star in question is! This is free if you’re in Kindle Unlimited too.

And that’s your lot. It’s a short month so the rest of this list is a bit shorter than usual. The books of the week were The Pot Thief who studied Pythagoras, The Soulmate Equation, Nora Goes of Script and Death of an Author. And there were recommendsday posts on novels with food and Swoony Romances.

Happy March everyone!

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Recommendsday: Novels with food

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So it was Pancake Day yesterday – aka Shrove Tuesday – and it’s Ash Wednesday today so it seemed like a good time to recommend some novels where food is a strong theme.

This post actually grew out of an idea to write a Recommendsday for books set in Lent, but I could only really come up with Joanne Harris’s Chocolat. If you’ve never read the book, it starts at the end of Carnival – just before the start of Lent – when Vianne and her daughter arrive in a small French town and open a chocolate shop, to the horror of the local priest, because Lent is the season for self denial. And it all goes from there. I’ve read it several times – and have the sequels too – and it would be a great read for this time of year. But that’s when I got stuck for books about Lent, so I picked up the food theme of the chocolate shop and ran with that instead!

Next up is an author I don’t think I have mentioned here before – Anthony Capella. And I think that’s probably because he hasn’t written anything under that name* for about a decade. But there are five really good mainly historical novels with food at the heart of them – one about ice cream, one about coffee and several set in Italy. If you’ve never come across him before, you should take a look – they’re all available in ebook, which is probably the easiest way to get hold of them.

If you want some slightly more recent fiction, there is Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler. I really liked the start of this, but then our heroine starts making some stupid decisions and lost me. But it was one of those “book of the summer” type picks in the US a few years back – so it’s one of those literary fiction type picks that work for other people better than they work for me if that makes sense.

Now obviously there are a lot of cozy crime novels with food. So many of them and they often/usually have actual recipes in them too even if the quantities are all in American measurements (so imprecise when it comes to baking, how does anything ever rise?). I’ve written about the Cupcake Bakery and the Maine Clambake mysteries, but there’s also Joanne Fluke’s long running Hannah Swenson series about a baker who keeps stumbling across murders and Wendy Tyson’s Greenhouse Mysteries feature a farm that has a farm-to-table restaurant and comes with recipes. I’ve been trying out a couple of new to me cozy series over the last few weeks, so watch this space for more suggestions there too.

Happy Wednesday everyone!

*He’s currently writing thrillers under a different name.

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Recommendsday: February Kindle offers

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Here we are with this month’s Kindle offers for your delectation – and there are a lot of them so lets get right to it.

Killers of a Certain Age

Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age is 99p this month, I’m not quite sure why as the paperback isn’t out until March, but take advantage while you can. I really enjoyed this tale of retired assassins on the run – and one of my besties is reading it at the moment and really enjoying it too (unless something has changed!). Jill Hornby’s Godmersham Park is 99p at the moment, Miss Austen was a book of the Week and I really enjoyed Godmersham Park, which is a sort of sequel – it’s definitely a continuation set in the same world. I mentioned Daphne Du Maurier in my post about books set in Devon and Cornwall – if you fancy a bit of Cornish Smuggling action, Frenchman’s Creek is 99p this month – it’s not my favourite, but I do love my beautiful Virago Designer Hardback copy!

Another recent BotW pick The Last Hero is 99p, but one of my all time favourite Terry Pratchetts, Going Postal, is £1.99. There are a lot of Georgette Heyers at £1.99 this month, including some of my favourites like Sylvester, These Old Shades, Devil’s Cub, Venetia and Frederica. It’s actually easier just to send you to the list than the original pages! On the Wimsey front, some of the series are now dropping out of copyright so there are a lot of quite cheap kindle books popping up, but I can’t vouch for their formatting and accuracy. Of the editions that match the Hodder and Stoughton paperbacks, The Nine Tailors is the 99p book this month – if you haven’t read it, it’s set in the Fenland, there are floods and church bells and bodies in the wrong grave and its really quite something.

If you were tempted by the Her Majesty the Queen Investigates books after my series review last year, the second book in the series is 99p at the moment – A Three Dog Problem is set around Buckingham Palace after a murder at the palace swimming pool (a real thing!). Very recent release Shipwrecked by Olivia Dade is 99p, as is In a New York Minute by Kate Spencer (which I talked about in my late summer reading post) and Miss Aldrige Regrets is on offer again.

We don’t have a date for series three of Bridgerton yet (please can it be soon Netflix, thank you), but the good news is that this month Romancing Mr Bridgerton aka the book the next series is based on is 99p – read it before the series. Interestingly Colin and Eloise’s story is actually the fourth in the series, not the third, but I do fully support the decision to skip book three (Benedict’s story) for now because it’s a Cinderella retelling and it’s a) not my favourite and b) doesn’t fit in with what they’ve been doing with the series. I am fascinated to see what they decide to do about it – and also about Eloise’s book which is number five, but now doesn’t fit in at all with the chronology they’ve created if she’s going to end up with the same person as she does in the books. And that’s all I can say without it being a spoiler!

Whistling through some other stuff – A Village in the Third Reich is £1.99 – you may remember I bought myself this and Travellers in the Third Reich when I was writing the Buy Me a Book for Christmas post last year! There are a couple of Mhairi McFarlane novels that are 99p – including You Had Me At Hello and Last Night. In other authors that I like, Christina Lauren’s Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating is 99p, and there are quite a few Trisha Ashley‘s for 99p including my all time favourite A Winter’s Tale, which is a Christmas novel but which I can read any time of year!

In stuff I purchased while writing this post, there is Nora Goes off Script, about a scriptwriter for a romance channel who turns her divorce into a screenplay and the “sexiest man alive” is cast as her ex-husband. In stuff I should have read but haven’t got around to (yet), Stephanie Gerber’s Caraval trilogy is 99p for the complete thing which is a total bargain. Likewise, in stuff I haven’t read yet, Jodi Taylor’s newest Time Police (that’s the spin off series from Chronicles of St Mary’s) novel About Time is 99p too. Also 99p is David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue which I really keep meaning to get around to!

It’s a short month, so catch them while you can! Happy Reading!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: January Quick Reviews

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Only two books this month, you’ll probably understand why when you see the stats tomorrow. There was nearly a third, but I fell asleep with 50 pages to go on Tuesday night and didn’t finish it before the end of the month and I do try not to cheat!

Death Spins the Wheel by George Bellairs

It’s been a while since I mentioned an Inspector Littlejohn mystery, as I’ve read nearly all of the ones that are easily available at the moment. But Death Spins the Wheel popped up and it’s a good one. Once again on the Isle of Man, it features an elderly lady who comes to the island to gamble at the casino and then turns up dead. There’s one strand of the plot that I’m wildly dubious about (if you know me and read it you’ll know what!) but I liked the actual resolution and the familiar characters. Maybe don’t start here, but if you’re reading them as they pop up on Kindle Unlimited then it’s definitely worth a look.

Vermeer to Eternity by Anthony Horowitz

Another author I’ve written about relatively frequently, but this is another KU read – this time a really quite satisfying short story with a really neat premise and two interesting characters. If you’ve read the Hawthorn novels, you’ll probably see some similarities to “Anthony” as seen in them, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.

And that’s it for stuff I haven’t already talked about in January – or at least it is unless you want repeats or rereads! I wonder if I’ll manage more than two in February?

Happy Reading!

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Recommendsday: Books set in Devon and Cornwall

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Did I go on holiday last week? Yes. Did it inspire this post? Absolutely yes. You are very welcome.

Let’s start with the obvious: Daphne du Maurier. There are a whole host to pick from – but I’m going to go for Jamaica Inn because we drove past the turn for it and gosh blimey is the moorland there desolate and creepy – I don’t think I would be brave enough to read the book while staying anywhere near there!

Next up, previous BotW pick 1949’s The Feast – which I think is due for a rementiok because it’s so good. This isn’t creepy like the Du Maurier, but it is thrilling in a different way. Ignore any introduction your edition might have until after you have read it and meet the guests at the Pendizack Hotel in the run up to a fatal cliff collapse (and that’s not a spoiler because it opens after the collapse and then jumps back in time.

Still in Cornwall but written more recently we have Carola Dunn’s Cornish mysteries. As well as writing the Daisy Dalrymple series, Dunn also wrote four books featuring Eleanor Trewynn, a widow running a charity shop in a fictional coastal village in the 1960s. I’ve read three of the four and really enjoyed them. And this has reminded me to try and get hold of the final one!

Crossing the border into Devon, yesterday I wrote about a murder mystery tied to a fictional Golden Age crime series so I would be remiss not to include an actual Golden Age Crime novel as Agatha Christie set a lot of her novels in the county – as she lived there for many years (and her house is on my list of places to visit at some point). I’ve picked Sleeping Murder, because the theme of today is creepy and I’m still traumatised by the cover of the edition of Sleeping Murder my mum had when I was little which features a woman with a knitting needles stuck in her eye. You’re welcome.

I’ve only read a three of Ian Sansom’s County Guides novels but one of them is Death in Devon (book 2 of five) which sees the prolific author and professional know it all Stanton Morley and his assistant on a trip to the county where they end up solving a murder at a boys school. And finally I started with a creepy atmospheric book with moors and I’m going to finish with a book set on a different moor – Lorna Doone. Full disclosure: I’ve only ever read abridged children’s versions of this – and as it’s 800 pages long I’m not planning on changing that, but if you want a classic may be think about trying this story of star crossed lovers on as moor in the late 19th century.

Happy Wednesday everyone!

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Recommendsday: Even More British Library Crime Classics

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Continuing on from the cozy crime BotW pick yesterday, lets have some more murder mysteries today. After all, it’s been whole month since I recommended a British Library Crime Classic, so it must be time for some more – Happy Wednesday everyone!

Seat of the Scornful by John Dickson Carr

A very dislikeable judge is found holding a gun by the body of a murder victim. He says he didn’t kill his daughter’s fiancée but all the evidence seems to suggest that he did. Gideon Fell investigates a crime that turns into a game of cat and mouse. This is really strong on creating a set of characters that you feel that you’d understand and although the denouement feels very of its time, I did enjoy it.

Death on the Riviera by John Bude

This is another in the Inspector Meredith series and deals with an investigation into a currency racket on the French Riviera. Side note: I feel like the French Riviera gets more than its fair share of murder mysteries from this era – there are a lot of them in the Inspector Littlejohn series, as well as a few Agatha Christies and that’s just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head. If only Peter Wimsey had investigated down there we could have the full set. Anyway, this has an eccentric English woman with a house full of bohemian guests and quite a lot of the requisite glamour from the setting, but the solution is… a lot to deal with and I wasn’t sure if it all quite worked over all. Still if you like John Bude, definitely worth checking out, as it’s been out of print for yonks.

Mystery in the Channel by Freeman Willis Crofts

This is a little bit different – a seemingly impossible murder on a boat that turns into a financial mystery. The story opens with a ferry between Newhaven and Dieppe spotting a seemingly deserted yacht – and then spots what looks like a body on deck. When the crew investigates, they find not one but two bodies on board – but no sign of the murder weapon. Once the investigation gets underway, the victims are identified as two key figures in one of the largest financial houses in the country. Inspector French of Scotland Yard is called in to investigate and after a bit more digging it emerges that the firm is in trouble – on the brink of collapse. A huge sum of money is missing – and so is one of the other partners in the business. Were the dead men fleeing the country? And if they were, where is the money and who killed them? I really enjoyed this – and the denouement is really clever and fast paced. I’m not normally a boat person (save Swallows and Amazons) but this explains everything in simple enough terms for a non sailor like me to understand and yet is really quite complex. Definitely worth a look.

Enjoy the rest of the week everyone!

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Recommendsday: January Kindle Offers

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A new year and a new batch of Kindle offers for your delectation today. And it’s quite a good one so if you weren’t as lucky as me and Santa didn’t bring you what you told people you wanted, you might be able to pick some fresh reading material up in the offers.

One of my all time favourites is back on sale for 99p – Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. I’d love to get something new from her in 2023, but as it’s only three years since The Starless Sea came out and it was nearly triple that between The Night Circus and that, I’m trying not to get my hopes up! And Bridget Jones’s Diary is also 99p – it’s been years since I read it (rather than watched the film!) but it was such a huge part of my reading back in the day – even if I haven’t read either of the two most recent sequels! Another book that I read ages ago and loved is on offer too – Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility. I didn’t love his follow up A Gentleman in Moscow, but I have the latest one, The Lincoln Highway, on the Kindle TBR and I must try and get to it soon.

This month’s 99p Georgette Heyer is The Quiet Gentleman – which is from the more mysterious end of her romance books and features Actual Peril at times. On the contemporary romance front, if you read and enjoyed the O’Neil Brothers books after I wrote about them before Christmas, Holiday in the Hamptons from Sarah Morgan’s From Manhattan with Love series is 99p. I bought myself the new Mary Balogh while writing this – Remember Love is the first in a new series for her and I’ve had a good history with her historical romances – right back to my Essex days. There’s also one of the recent Lisa Kleypas’s – Devil’s Daughter – which is the next generation sequel to her fan-favourite Devil in Winter.

If you’ve been reading Philippa Gregory’s Tudor novels after I wrote about them last summer, The Taming of the Queen (about Katherine Parr) is the one on offer at the moment. It’s not a great month on the crime/mystery offer front though. Or at least not if you read the sort of mysteries that I do – all the books on offer are the sort with dark and brooding covers with ominous shadows on them or bare branches, which is an indicator that they’re too psychological or gruesome for my tastes! A Spoonful of Murder is on offer though, which is one of the crop of if you like Richard Osman… that are now appearing and which I’ve got on the physical to-read pile but haven’t got around to yet!

Happy Wednesday!

Best of..., book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Not New Books of the Year

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So yesterday we had new fiction books of the year, tomorrow I have new non-fiction for you, but today we have my favourite not new books of the year.

Ask a historian cover

Lets start with the newest – and it’s Greg Jenner’s Ask a Historian, which is out now in paperback and answers all sorts of questions that he’s been asked over his years as a public historian. He also has a new book for kids this year called You Are History, which I haven’t read yet but sounds like it’s a middle grade cross between Ask a Historian and his A Million Years in a Day. Anyway, Greg’s writing style is as much fun as he is in his podcasts, and Ask a Historian is a great book for reading in little bits when you get a chance, if you’re trying to get more reading done for example, because the question and answer format makes it easy to pick up and put down.

Moving on to some fiction, and I found it really hard to pick my favourite of the Persephone books I read as part of my gift subscription last Christmas, so I’ve ended up including a few of them here. Jocelyn Playfair’s A House in the Country was written during the war and deals with wartime life at a big country house. If you like books like The Cazalet Chronicles or Dorothy Whipple, then this maybe one for you to read. Then there’s The Young Pretenders by Henrietta Fowler about two young children who move to live with their aunt and uncle while they wait for their parents to return from India. I feel like if you’re the sort of person who liked Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes when you were younger, then this might be a book for you.

I’ve read a lot of classic crime this year – as all the British Library Crime Classics posts I’ve done demonstrate – but it’s been hard to pick favourites. So I’ve gone with a couple that were Books of the Week – Green for Danger by Christianna Brand, the creepy war time murder mystery in a hospital; Fire in the Thatch by E C R Lorac, about an arson attack; John Dickson Carr’s Til Death Do Us Part, with an impossible locked room mystery and Lois Austen-Leigh’s The Incredible Crime about a a murder and a drug gang in Cambridge.

This is already a long list, but two more before I go – for kids, Piglettes by Clementine Beauvais about three girls’ cross country cycle trip in France, and a romance: Jackie Lau’s Donut Fall In Love which features a Hollywood movie star and a baker falling in love and taking part in a baking show. Not necessarily in that order!

Happy Reading!