Bookish this and that

So it's been storm after storm here in the UK, Storm Eowyn on Thursday into Friday, Storm Herminia following it on Sunday and really hanging around all day Monday. Best thing to do, if you can, is stay indoors and read! (Other hobbies are available...)

So what have I been reading? Well my book 3 for this year was A Cold Spell by Max Leonard, a non-fiction about the history of ice (the ice age, mountaineering, warfare under the ice, its use as a food preservative and so on) that I seem to have been reading forever. Which is a good indicator of how much I enjoyed it. It wasn't a bad book but it just did not grab me as some non-fiction books do. Never mind, win some, lose some. 3 stars on Goodreads.

Then I moved on to one of the lovely BLCC collections of short stories, Metropolitan Mysteries, edited of course by Martin Edwards.

This is a collection of murder mystery short stories all set in London. And look at that absolutely gorgeous cover! Eighteen stories in this collection and, as usual with most anthologies, there's a degree of variation in the quality of them. It starts with a couple of stalwarts, Dorothy L. Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle, and moves on to authors such as Baroness Orczy, Anthony Berkeley, John Dickson Carr, J. Jefferson Farjeon and so on. I had five favourites. The Case of the Faulty Drier by Josephine Bell was something I'd not come across before, a murder in a hairdressers! Great stuff. Unsound Mind by Anthony Berkeley... a doctor commits suicide... but did he? This was 'so' twisted, I'm not normally a fan of Anthony Berkeley but this was very good. Man in Bond Street by Anthony Gilbert, is just simply a police inspector talking about a strange case in his past concerning a lame man who lurks around Bond street, and a stolen ruby. Very nicely done, good twist. Death on Nelson's Column by Eric Bennett was again a very unusual setting! How did the murderer get the body up there! Well told and quirky. But my favourite of all the tales was, Back in Five Years by Michael Gilbert. There's a reason he's one of my all-time favourite crime authors. This was so clever and so well written, with his usual witty one-liners and a twist I did not see coming but should have. A good collection and particularly so if you like London as a setting for books. 4 stars on Goodreads.

So, I have three books on the go at the moment, well, two and another I'm about to start. These are they:

I'm halfway through Piranesi by Susanna Clarke and feeling distinctly underwhelmed, despite all the glowing reviews on Goodreads... apart from one person who gave it 1 star and said, 'Is that it?' I feel like that. Perhaps I won't when I get to the end. Says she, hopefully... On the Marsh by Simon Barnes is about marshes and bird-watching and I'm about to start it and quite keen after loving Winterwatch on the BBC last week. Virgil's The Aeneid was recommended by my Latin teacher as good background reading for my lessons and, you know, 'Romans'. Just started it and finding it interesting. We'll see how that goes. 

I haven't done a 'Plans for 2025' post because I haven't got that many. But a lovely friend and myself decided to do our own Book-Bingo chart and this is it:

Already having a lot of fun with that. We did twelve squares each and I think have managed a nice mix which will enable a lot of mood reading. I have so far crossed off, 'seasonal' with The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard (it's very summery) and 'a tree on the cover' with The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst because, well you've guessed, it has a tree on the cover.

Plus, I have a 'winter' tbr pile I'm working from, although I must confess to regular chopping and changing of the actual books. But this is what it looks like at the moment. (Not a great photo.)

 

And last but not least, a couple of new books I got from an independent bookstore I follow on Twitter/X that specialises in travel and nature books. They are Sherlock and Pages who hang out in Frome in Somerset, not a million miles from me so I feel a roadtrip coming on in the summer, maybe. Their website is HERE. I was very pleased with the speedy service and quality of the books.

Climbing Days by Dorothy Pilley is, as it says on the tin, all about the author's climbing adventures in the 1920s. The other book is Stories of Trees, Woods and the Forest edited by Fiona Stafford, an anthology of stories about, yes, 'trees'. Can't wait to read both of these. 

Anyway, I've rambled on long enough. I hope you're all well and if it's winter where you are I hope you're staying safe and warm and have loads of brilliant books to read.

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard

I have a thousand and one posts I want to do here but I made a resolution to write more book reviews and not fall behind in 2025 (cue hysterical cackling from the peanut gallery). So the other posts can wait a while and I'll talk a bit about The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard, my second book for 2025.

So, the setting for this book is two consecutive summers: 1937 and 1938. The Patriarch and Matriarch of the Cazalet family are William and Kitty, both in their seventies. They live somewhere near the south coast of England in a large house and every summer they host the whole family for the school summer holidays. They have three sons, Hugh, Edward and Rupert and an unmarried daughter, Rachel, who lives with William and Kitty. The sons all have wives and families so the house, in the summer, is very lively and full. 

It's hard to say what this book is about as it doesn't have an exciting plot that cracks along and whizzes the reader off on a roller-coaster ride. It's not at all 'pacey'. It's a book about the every day lives of the middle classes just before the war: what their attitudes to current affairs were, how their marriages worked, or didn't, how they dealt with their children, how said children felt about their upbringing, schools, relatives, that kind of thing. The big surprise to me was to discover that this book was not written in the 1930s but in the 1990s. But as I went along I realised that I would not have been under that misapprehension for very long. Some of the issues featured in some detail in this book, infidelity, sex, lesbianism, menstruation, married women not being happy with their lot and much more - these are not things that would you find in books by Angela Thirkell, D. E Stevenson, Molly Clavering, who actually did write in the 1930s. Not as blatently or in such detail anyway. But none of it is offensive... don't come away with that idea. It's all handled very delicately, matter-of-factly, 'this is what happened, you decide for yourself what you think about it' sort of thing. I love it when authors do not tell you what your opinion should be (happens far too much in modern fiction), that approach can be far more effective in informing and stretching the reader.

I loved the voices of the children. There were of course brothers and sisters, cousins, ranging in age from a newborn to fifteen or sixteen, a dozen or so in all. (Thank goodness for the family tree and list of characters at the beginning!) The dynamics between boys and girls in the 1930s was interesting, sometimes quite 'Enid Blyton', others very much not in depicting the selfishness of children, their very real worries, the manipulative or predatory nature of some teenage girls... even one of the wives is only just into her twenties for instance (second marriage) and has yet to grow up properly... and the sometimes uncontrolled violence of boys and what they're prepared to do to be top dog amongst their peers. 

There are some fascinating stories here. I was transported to another age but one that is about to change out of all recognition, and they know it. The writing is sublime (I was reminded of Rosamunde Pilcher), so much detail and beautiful characterisation, from the aging parents, to cheating husbands, bored housewives, vivacious children and even the cook and chauffeur were every bit as real as the rest of the cast.

I gave this an unreserved 5 stars on Goodreads. I had a feeling I would like it as I've seen glowing reviews from bloggers I respect, but as we all know that's not always what happens. Book two, Marking Time, deals with the outbreak of war. I already have it, having anticipated liking The Light Years enough that I would want to read the second book fairly soon. Good choice.

So, this is only my second book for January and I'm quite happy with that. Last year I decided to read more slowly and actually cut my number read by about 30. And I may well end up reading even less this year but enjoying more. 

I hope you're all keeping well and finding excellent books to read this first month of 2025.

The Spellshop - Sarah Beth Durst

So, I've now completed my first book for the brand new year of 2025 and it was The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst. This is one of those hyped up, flavour of the month books of 2024, so I was curious to see how it would go.

Kiela is one of many librarians who work in the massive library that is The Great Library of Alyssium. She's not a mixer or a joiner, and her job, where she also lives as well as works, gives her the opportunity to hide away from people and be solitary amongst the books. But revolution is in the air, The Emporer is unpopular and is about to be deposed. The city is burning and that includes the library. Kiela knows she has to leave but she can't allow the books to burn. Taking what she can rescue, her and Caz, her assistant who is actually a spider-plant, escape the city, by boat, carrying several crates of precious spell books. 

Where is she to go? Well, home of course, to the island of Caltrey, the place her parents left many years ago in order to get a better life in the city for themselves and Kiela. She can barely remember it but recalls enough to know her way there by sea and to know that the family cottage should still be standing and waiting for her. And it is but it's a little dilapidated and the garden is overgrown. 

Enter, Larran, naturally a hunk, who turns up with free food and help but Kiela, being a recluse and worried about the spell books to boot, is not exactly welcoming. She thinks she can go it alone and repel all boarders until it dawns on her she now has to feed herself and that requires an income. Can she use magic to facilitate that? It's illegal, but perhaps she can cover up the fact that she's using it...

So I think the correct subgenre for this would be cosy romantasy. If you want epic fantasy, conflict, angst, death, intricate world-building, this is probably not the book for you. Although there 'is' world-building. There is magic but ordinary people are not supposed to use it. I fancy it's a bit of an evil empire but it's not entirely clear. There's an amazing library apparently but we hear hardly anything about it

It's peopled by all kinds of individuals: Kiela is blue for instance, Caz is a spider plant. There are people with antlers, a healer who can fly, a centaur, mer-horses that Larran looks after and so on. Oh... and flying cats. So it's interesting all right, but all a little bit surface. I can't help feeling there is an amazing book here waiting to get out. 'More' would've been nice.

I liked the found family aspect of it, but then that's a favourite trope of mine. There is some conflict in the second half of the book, that did pep things up a bit. You might be thinking that I didn't like this book but that would be wrong. I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads because it was gentle, with interesting characters, the island was gorgeous and, you know... 'raspberry jam'! If 3.5 was available that's what it would've got, Kiela needed a good talking to in my opinion, to the point of being annoying. The spider plant had the measure of her in my opinion! I should also add that there is no explicitness in this book so it's safe for anyone to read if that's not your bag. 

I hope your first book of 2025 lives up to your expectations. Mine was 'not bad' so I'm happy. I've moved on to a historical novel now, book one of the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard.

 

I know a lot of people adore this series and already I can see why, beautiful writing and interesting people... I love the occasional narrating voices of the children in it. I think I might be in for a bit of a treat. 

Happy New Year and favourite books

 A very Happy New Year to all of you who visit this blog during the year, especially those who comment and who I consider to be friends. I hope 2025 will be a good one for you and yours. If, like me, 2024 was personally a bit of a shocker, due to the death of a loved one or some other trauma, then I truly hope this new year will see better things for you and new beginnings.

Books-wise I read 74 books in 2024. Much less than in 2023, partly due to circumstances of course, but I did actually plan on reading a little less last year and to take my time more over books I was enjoying. That, I feel I succeeded at and will do the same in 2025. 

First, a quick list of the five books I read in December:

70. Steeple Chasing - Peter Ross. I finished this one in December having started it in September apparently! Anyway, a delightful non-fiction book about the author's trips around the UK visiting old churches. A lot of snippets of history and a good sense of place throughout. 4 stars.

71. Murder in the Falling Snow edited by Cecily Gayford. A solid antholgy of winter based crime stories. 3 stars (3.5)

72. Sherlock Holmes and the Three Winter Terrors - James Lovegrove. Three cleverly connected Holmes novellas, again with a winter theme running through. Enjoyable. 4 stars.

73. The Willows at Christmas - William Horwood. Toad's home has been invaded for Christmas by the Relative from Hell. Can Mole, Ratty and Badger save him? A fun read. 3 stars. (3.5)

74. Tour De Force - Christianna Brand. Book 6 of Brand's Inspector Cockrill series, wherein he's on his hols in Italy with a group of strangers. When one of them is murdered he's on holiday no longer. Closed circle murder mystery, similar in feel to the other book I read by her, Green for Murder. The group of suspects is very small and it's hard to believe any of them could've done the deed or why. 4 stars.

OK. So... ten favourite fiction books of 2024, in no particular order.

 Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky was an absolutely amazing sci-fi novel (possibly my book of the year) and I plan to read on in this series this year and read some of his other books too.

Dr Thorne by Anthony Trollope. Book 3 of his classic Barsetshire series, romantic, funny, beautifully written, just a joy.

Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge. 1930s holiday romance sort of thing involving a middle-aged woman and a younger man. Set mainly on the coast of present-day Croatia. Loved it, another author I want to read more of this year.

The Girl Beneath the Sea by Andrew Mayne. Diving skulduggery off the coast of Florida. Pacy thriller that I really enjoyed.

Black Sun Rising by Celia Friedman. An unusal blend of sci-fi and fantasy that really worked for me. Great world building, fascinating characters.

The Trouble with Mrs. Montgomery Hurst by Katie Lumsden. A historical comedy of manners, reminding me of Emma or Cranford. Joyous, I absolutely loved it. 

The Haunting of Aveline Jones by Phil Hickes. Children's/young adult spooky novella. Very strong sense of place and time of year, and quite creepy. 

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. Most peculiar in its ideas but this mix of fantasy and murder really worked for me. Looking forward to book 2 this year.

The Woman in the Woods by John  Connolly. Unlikely I'm going to do a 'best of' list and not include a John Connolly, if I've read one. Creepy, atmospheric, amazing back story, he never disappoints. 

Saving Missy by Beth Morrey. A delightful contemporary fiction book with an older protagonist making new friends in unexpected places. Loved it. 

So those were some of my favourite fictional reads of 2024. A mixed bunch but I see sci-fi/fantasy/supernatural have come to the fore a bit more recently and I plan to continue with that into 2025. Still loving my crime fiction though. 

I only read 16 non-fiction books this year so I may or may not do a favourites post on that. Several of those were really excellent so perhaps I might do a top 5.

Hope you're all well and here's to an excellent 2025, full of good books.