27th May 2023

The second book of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children follows immediately on from the end of the first, and is an action-packed adventure across 1940s Britain as the children race to save their mentor.

There’s no real recap of the first novel, so it took a while for my head to catch back up with some of what was going on, but in some respects that doesn’t matter as the pace is fast and it’s easy to get caught up in that.

It definitely shows through that this is a book built around the found photographs which feature throughout (and are likely the reason for the really high quality of the paper and printing - which ends up making this a really heavy book), and yet I think that’s a strong part of what makes the narrative move so compellingly.

I was thinking early on that I probably would stop after this book, but now I’m considering again whether to look out for book three.

read more

27th May 2023

The second of Alex White’s books I’ve read, this time an original story in which they create a happily queer future full of music, technology, and giant alien not-robots who attempt to destroy humanity.

I really love the worldbuilding of White’s future, in which they don’t bother to explain things that would be mundane to the characters - we don’t know how they interact with their computers for example, just how they describe doing so.

The nature of the interaction between the characters and Mechas of the title is also fascinating. White has clearly done a ton of research into this and thought a lot about how to bring character to what might otherwise be generic baddies.

I found some aspects hard to visualise, but that’s not unusual for my brain for science fiction concepts or battle scenes, so I think that’s probably more on me than the text.

Looking forward to seeing how White develops this world in book two.

read more

27th May 2023

Graham Norton’s third novel is a quite sad tale from the start about a community whose lives are all damaged by a local tragedy, and how that grows over the following decades.

I’m glad in a way that this book has lived on my shelf for some time, as the are definitely moments where I might have found it harder to read. As it was I raced through it in about three days and found it a really interesting look at lives and history of cultural attitudes.

There are parts of the narrative where we jump back and forth in time quite abruptly, and that did throw me off in places and I needed to reread a few paragraphs to work out what was going on.

But overall another really interesting story from Norton, and an encouragement to read his new novels too.

read more

27th May 2023

I picked this up purely on the strength of the marketing, which it seems I’ve become a sucker for. It’s a story of a woman who travels the country as a freelance killer of gods (gods being illegal), but also of a couple of other characters equally, who have their own complex views on the whole god situation.

I enjoyed it, racing through the back half on a couple of long train journeys. The world building is thorough, the characters are compelling, and they play off against one another well.

I especially liked the town built on a bridge that features around the middle of the book. I thought this was a fascinating idea and made for quite a few interesting scenes.

I shall be looking forward to the rest of the trilogy.

read more

27th May 2023

For nostalgia reasons, I’m revisiting the Enid Blyton series that I read as a kid, and have now arrived at this entry.

Three Cheers is a great Seven story, seeing them randomly find a mystery and need to investigate it. It shows a level of social consciousness that’s not often present, and paints a picture (maybe unintentionally) of the class divide of the era.

However as a modern reader there’s a hugely clear level of sexism within the seven - the boys must do almost everything, and only one of the girls gets anything to really do as part of the plot, most of the time just being told to stay at home or otherwise being excluded. Weirdly though this doesn’t extend to the protagonist character Susie, who although the boys act towards with sexism, refuses to partake herself and demonstrates a lot of agency. It’s an odd contrast between the characters and I’m not really sure what it’s meant to be saying to the reader.

Overall though a very simple, quick tale, without any risk or danger.

read more

27th May 2023

I’ve enjoyed Dan Schreiber’s audio works (podcasts and radio shows) for many years, so when his book was announced it went straight onto my list. This is a book of what he describes as ‘facts’ (quote marks his), which are things that people choose to believe, but likely aren’t quite actually true.

I can see this being an excellent book to keep in the bathroom. The chapters are short, and could easily be spread across a number of sittings. However you can also just devour the entire book in a couple of days, which was the approach I took.

As I had expected, the book is excellently researched, well written, funny and enjoyable to read. There are so many fascinating stories and I kept finding myself wanting to share some of its revelations, before remember that they are only ‘facts’.

read more

27th May 2023

The third Her Majesty The Queen Investigates novel takes us to overwinter at Sandringham, where another mystery awaits.

It’s strangely bittersweet, reading this in the week of the coronation. It’s another delightful and incredibly respectfully put together tale, and very much a price of fun to imagine that this is one of the late Queen’s activities.

I didn’t feel quite so hooked as with the first two novels, but then I also had a theory in my head which was not proved correct by the eventual reveal.

I’m very happy though to continue reading these cosy novels, and am intrigued to see how they will play out going back in time to earlier in the Queen’s life.

read more

27th May 2023

A creepy book which I picked up in an independent book shop. I can’t remember what had inspired me to look for a V E Schwab to buy, but something definitely had, and this stand-alone novel seemed a good place to start.

Olivia has had an unusual upbringing and can see things others can’t, and when she’s found by a letter from an unknown uncle, she starts to learn about her family and history.

Not really my usual choice of novel - I tend to avoid the creepy. Nonetheless, I raced through it in three days, and found it really interesting to see how things unfolded. It reminds me a bit of the level of creepy in the occasional Doctor Who episode.

I don’t think it’s done enough though to make me want to go out and seek out the rest of Schwab’s output.

read more

6th May 2023

The Hardys and Chet barely break a sweat when their friend/girlfriend/sister Iola is kidnapped in Florida. This is probably the most glaring plot hole in this novel, in which the only people to go looking for a missing teenager are three other teenagers, with all their parents just carrying on with their lives.

Beyond that, it’s the usual tale of near-misses, breaking and entering to look for clues, and eventually finding the coincidences that tie everything together. Pretty standard on that front from this era of Hardy Boys books.

Reasonably well paced though and with a good variety of characters and clues, and although Iola isn’t visible, she clearly has some level of agency throughout which is more than sometimes (although that hardly makes up for the incredibly low amount for any other female character).

read more

6th May 2023

Tom Felton, who of course played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter film series, delivers this autobiography covering his life from fishing child to LA megastar.

It’s incredibly readable. I devoured it in a day, and it’s far from my usual choice of reading material as I’m not generally a non-fiction person.

It certainly helps that I have a decent amount of familiarity with the HP film series, against which backdrop a lot of the book is set. Felton tells us how he became part of the world, and talks a lot about his relationships with other members of the cast and crew.

And then rather abruptly his life takes a turn, and I think we come to the chapters at the end of the book which reveal some of his motivation for writing. It’s very open, very self-aware, and very stark.

I hope that Felton’s got what he needed from the process of putting this book together, and I hope that one day in the distant future we might get a second volume, containing all his successes in life from here on.

read more

6th May 2023

Charlie Higson and James Bond make a surprise return in this coronation tie-in novel. When it was announced I thought that probably the publishers had had it up their sleeve for a while and were just waiting for the day to come - but actually it’s filled with right up to the minute references which make it feel like it was written within the past two months.

The book looks short - but feels on the inside quite reasonable in length. Less of a novella and more of a short novel. The narrative is comfortable and familiar, it’s not quite Fleming in tone, but it’s close enough that it definitely has the feel of a proper Bond story. And all the usual elements are there, some with an amusing modern twist to them.

I had wondered if this would be in continuity with Higson’s other Young Bond novels, but no, this isn’t the tale of a 103-year-old come back to save the country once again.

I enjoyed reading - it’s a nice visit to the character and the world, and the timely nature does add to the fun.

read more

6th May 2023

I really did not know what I was getting into when I picked up this novel after having read the author, Kim Sherwood, ‘s previous novel (Double or Nothing).

It’s a historical novel with a lot of history, ostensibly about smugglers who operate along the Devon coast, but really about a gender non-conforming child who is brought up by the smugglers.

I found it took a lot longer than usual to get my head into the narrative. The voice used for most of the story is intentionally styled after writing of the time, and so not in the form I’m used to. There are also chapters written in totally different voices and fonts, and one of these fonts I found challenging to focus on.

Very much not my usual type of novel, but once I got past halfway I was finally properly into it, and was able to flow much more though the second half.

read more

23rd April 2023

Marple is a short-fiction anthology, featuring 12 stories about the titular character, Miss Marple, as created by Agatha Christie, each told by a different contemporary author.

As individual stories, I found them a mixed bag, with my favourites coming in the second half of the collection. Some of them I found harder to read than others, and some of them I wasn’t sure I was really following. A couple of the authors I’m encouraged to look out for and try their own creations.

As a collection, they do well to emulate the world of Marple, and bring in a lot of connections back to Christie’s original stories. I noticed a few references to Bertram, and there’s a lot of appearances for Raymond. Possibly it sometimes felt like there maybe could have been a little more effort to avoid the same references repeating.

I don’t really think that short fiction is my thing, and so I suspect I was never going to be as into this collection as I wanted to be, but it was an interesting diversion for a couple of train journeys.

read more

23rd April 2023

I finally found myself with a copy of Tress of the Emerald Sea, the first of Brandon Sanderson’s Secret Project novels (out of 4 being released throughout this year), and I savoured it.

I managed to mostly limit myself to three chapters each day, up until the end when the traditional Sanderson-style climax made me devour the final dozen or so chapters in one sitting as everything came together.

It’s a really lovely story, about a girl who lives on an island and would be quite happy staying there thank-you, if only she didn’t have to rescue someone she loved, and on doing so learn a lot more about the world, and the cosmere.

My copy is beautifully illustrated, and printed, in a way that feels extremely uncommon in novels and yet truly made this book feel worth waiting for. There are all sorts of delightful little things throughout which made the act of reading it a joy on top of the story.

read more

23rd April 2023

Rather than a novel, this books is a collection of short stories about smaller cases which eternally elderly detectives Bryant & May have encountered through the decades.

Individually, the stories capture the essence of the characters and their investigations. Collectively though I felt like they lacked something that I usually appreciate about this series, and I don’t think for me that the short format works so well.

I did appreciate the commentary running throughout the book though from the author, adding notes about the inspiration behind each of the stories, and some of the background to his writing of the novels that have come before.

Really though I’m ready to go back to the longer stories, and have bought the next four novels to sit on the shelf ready.

read more

3rd April 2023

Becky Chambers’ third Wayfarers novel takes us to the Exodus Fleet, where we meet a variety of characters at different stages of their lives aboard this now-parked generational voyage.

It is, beautifully, a character driven piece where the plot is almost incidental to just getting to know the people and their lives, as they make a variety of choices about their futures or reflect on their pasts.

I have found these books incredibly relaxing to read, and to allow myself to fall into the worlds Chambers builds up in such an accessible way.

read more

3rd April 2023

The fourth adventure for the Vinyl Detective sees him trying to track down a rare record for a friend, and visiting the quite wacky band who produced it.

I found that this entry lacked something that I’ve come to expect from the series. The humour felt muted and less laugh-out-loud, and the peril almost felt more real and therefore less escapist.

The plot is outlandish, but I’m not sure it’s not too far, and seems to be a lot driving on coincidence rather than events that are caused by events. I’m still not entirely sure why many of the things in the plot even happened.

read more

3rd April 2023

The first Strange New Worlds book feels superficially like a lot of the old novels - with a planet of the week to visit and find out what’s going on, with a civilisation who appear to be from Earth’s history. In this way, it follows the pitch perfectly - a modern take on the original idea of Star Trek.

It is a modern take too - there’s a good balance between three focal characters - and it’s about much more than just the action and the science fiction concepts.

Miller focussed on the characters we know from before - from The Original Series and from Discovery - possibly reflective of how early the text must have been written, and without him having yet seen the finished product of Season One. But actually my favourite parts are those with La’an, whose voice Miller gets absolutely spot on.

The one thing I did find though was that this wasn’t a book I was able to read fast. I’d just come off a period of heavy reading where I’d be really engrossed for hours, and this broke that habit. I’m not really sure what aspect had that effect, but it meant that it took me nearly two weeks to read instead of two days.

read more

4th March 2023

Janice Hallett’s third novel takes her format - the novel equivalent of a found-footage film - on a new journey as we follow the writing of a true crime book, and the author’s interactions and investigations as she tries to uncover what really happened.

This one is a bit of a hybrid presentation compared to the first two - some is correspondence, emails and text messages, and some is transcripts of audio recordings.

Thanks to a delayed train journey, I got through the book in 48 hours. But it is that gripping and the format really helps make it incredibly readable.

The plot is darker than the previous entries right from the start. To the extent that I even had a bad dream that seemed to have been inspired by it.

Overall though another great story, and I’m looking forward to more from Hallett in the coming years.

read more

4th March 2023

“Cosy fantasy” is the term that has been coined to describe this novel, and it fits perfectly. This is the tale of a retiring D&D-style adventurer and her plans to start a new, less physically risky, venture.

It’s a lovely character-driven tale about friendship, and sets up a wonderful little world that definitely feels like it’s inviting me back for another visit in future.

I’ve already been searching for more similar low-stakes reading to add to my list.

read more

4th March 2023

Andrew Childs’ third Reacher novel takes us on an unusual journey to a prison, but not just for Reacher - but also for a bunch of other new characters whose motivations only become clear frustratingly slowly.

The writing style feels quite different from what I remember. It’s more bitty - there are a lot more point of view characters, and it was hard to keep track of them all, particularly while the narrative was trying to remain mysterious.

I think this has likely been the book that’s tipped me out of being a Reacher reader. A 30+ story series has been a good run, and kept me entertained over the past 13 years, but I think there’s so much more now I want to read that isn’t this. It’s fair to say my tastes change over time, so this may be more a reflection on me than on the books.

read more

25th February 2023

I recently read the biography of Terry Pratchett, in which it’s mentioned that as a young child he enjoyed reading Eve Garnett’s tale of a large working class family. And I remembered enjoying it, I imagine when read to me by my mum, as a small child (it was certainly her choice of a book she had known as a child - possibly even then her own original copy).

And so a second-hand 1975 copy very quickly made its way to my shelves, and then, once I’d finished the biography, into my hands and eyes.

The book remains delightful - there is surprisingly little to age it (although I realise it’s possible that between the 30s and 70s some editing might have gone on) in the style of language or the usual problems that early 20th century texts have. Perhaps there’s an element of sexism in the level of agency the boys control in their adventures, compared to those the girls experience.

But the book does, as I understand it sets out to, paint a picture of what working class life was like at the time - the professions and hardships of the parents, the daily happenings for the children, the cultural references, the challenges to overcome, and particularly the relationships with people of other classes.

I’ve very happily revisited this book - and have also obtained the two sequels, only one of which I read as a child.

read more

25th February 2023

The life story of Terry Pratchett, as told by one of the people who knew him the best, having been the only person there with him through much of the creative process.

Rob proves himself to be a really good writer here. You’d not expect less I suppose from someone with all that experience (as becomes clear in the book) of working with our era’s greatest storyteller.

There’s a happy balance between storyteller and subject, with Rob’s voice breaking through - especially for the parts he was present for - and interrupting with the traditional footnotes throughout.

And then the book becomes, as you might expect, terribly sad. It’s unheard of for me to cry at a book, but this one definitely brought me the closest.

read more

25th February 2023

Bob Mortimer is an extremely funny person to watch on television, so I thought that the idea of him writing a novel was definitely something that I’d like to read the output of.

The book is a tale of a lonely man who works for a legal firm, seeking companionship. Which doesn’t sound like the funniest setup, except that the man comes across very much as representing the young Bob Mortimer, with an imagination to match.

There’s an element of social awkwardness which could risk cringe, but I think the first-person presentation and that we are exposed to the internal logic of the narrator really reduces this.

The story is fine - but really feels like a vehicle for the funny moments, which start immediately with page two actually causing out loud laughter.

read more

22nd January 2023

This is John le Carré’s first Smiley novel, published in the early 1960s, and setting up a series that would continue for 56 years yet only contain 9 novels.

Smiley is a burnt-out member of the Security Service, having served pre-war, during WW2, and post-war. He’s just doing routine things, when something goes wrong.

Amongst other things, it’s a fascinating glance back in time - at surface level to pre-decimal coinage, and deeper into plot-affecting elements like the lack of constant mobile communication.

But it’s also a great mystery story, and an interesting first look at a character who feels like he shouldn’t be compelling, but nonetheless is.

read more

22nd January 2023

This book, the second in the Lost Fleet series, has been sat on my shelf for quite some years since I read the first novel, and I was really nervous about picking it up. Hard military sci-fi is not normally my thing.

And yet somehow immediately I fell into the flow of this novel and found it incredibly gripping. The narrative is not complex - we follow the fleet captain as he goes about the business of organising his mission - flipping between character moments inside his head, and epic space battles.

I really like how the space travel and combat feels very real - the author has clearly spent a lot of time considering the real physics of how spaceships and fleets would really move and communicate - and hasn’t cut corners with magic tech solutions but instead made them keep elements of the plot.

I will certainly try not to wait so long before book three.

read more

22nd January 2023

In my gradual re-read of Discworld’s Watch novels I’ve reached The Fifth Elephant, which is one that I have the least memory of from my previous reading which must have been around 15 years ago.

It’s a tale of diplomacy, as Vimes is sent to Uberwald for the coronation of the Low King. As such, it does that classic Vimes thing of putting him in an awkward situation and letting his character flow.

I found it a bit harder to get going than some Discworld novels, and it wasn’t until around halfway that I properly started to accelerate through. I don’t think it has quite the relaxed readability of some of the novels - there’s a lot starting to go on at a deeper level in this part of the series, and fewer quick surface level jokes.

Overall though, it’s a solid mystery story, with a fantastic amount of world building and proper exploration of several of the favourite Discworld characters.

read more