Sunday Salon | 28 July

It’s been so humid this past week that I’ve been hiding in the house with my aircon on and out of necessity actually reading; I finished two books but then stalled. Again.

I stalled mostly because of the last few stages of the Tour de France which was extremely exciting, and although I feel sorry for Julian Alaphilippe, I am also quite pleased with Egan Bernal’s win. He’s only 22; when I was 22 I got married for the first time and was pretending I was an adult. That was a long time ago *sighs wistfully*

Cue gratuitous cyclist photo:

So the books I read this week were Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown, an unusual and partly fantasised biography of the late Princess Margaret, which was very amusing and quite poignant in places, and Real Tigers, the third in the Jackson Lamb series by Mick Herron, which I read cover to cover in a single afternoon. Both excellent in their own way and both getting a review of their own at some point.

When it comes to what I’m currently reading then it’s very much as I was last week – I’ve set aside for now Slowly We Die and The Clockwork Scarab, and have started The Ka of Gifford Hillary, a Denis Wheatley novel with a cracking plot but heavy doses of eye-rolling right-wingery.

I also bought a few new books this week.

My single pre-order was The Last Astronaut by David Wellington, in which something big and alien is hanging above the Earth but won’t communicate, and our only surviving astronaut, a woman (hurrah), has to take a team of novices up there to make contact. I predict this will not work out as planned.

I ordered both volumes of the Roy Strong diaries purely because of the extracts in Ma’am Darling; volume one covers 1967 to 1987, and volume two 1988 to 2003. I think they are going to be a treat as Strong has been Director of two of my favorite London places, the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and comes across as a Grade A Gossip.

And the final two were based on recommendations. Via CrimeHub comes Murder in the Crooked House by Soji Shimada, a locked door mystery from one of the Japanese greats, and a Twitter recommendation led me to An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire, set in a small Australian town where a young woman has been murdered and the impact on her family is examined; it was shortlisted for heaps of awards so I’m looking forward to trying it out.

And that’s me done! Have a great reading week 😀