Tag: Currently Reading

Sunday Salon | 5 July

On By brideofthebookgodIn Reviews, Thoughts & Notes, Sunday Salon1 Comment

[Take Two – I wrote this post earlier and somehow managed to completely lose it, so here we go again!]

This has been a really good reading week, I mean, really good. I managed to finish four, count them, FOUR novels; two were complete cover to cover reads, and the rest were left over from June (if not earlier).

I feel this is a great achievement for me after several lacklustre weeks.

So, I finished:

The I-5 Killer by Ann Rule – not one of her best books in my opinion; it could have been shorter and still got all of the information across, but I was in the mood for some true crime and this caught my eye first.

Reviews of the last three will follow soon which is why I haven’t said very much about them here.

Currently reading…….

I haven’t picked my next book yet, but it will definitely be from my 20 Books of Summer reading list (which you can find here if you’re interested)

New books this week:

The Son and Heir by Alexander Munninghoff – full disclosure, this was a free ebook as I’m an Amazon Prime customer. What can a son say upon discovering that his father wore a Nazi uniform? Reporter Alexander Münninghoff was only four when he found this mortifying relic from his father’s recent past in his attic. This shameful memento came to symbolize not only his father’s tragically misguided allegiance but also a shattered marriage and ultimately the unconscionable separation of a mother and son.

The Truants by Kate Weinberger – this has been likened to one of my all time favourites The Secret History, so it was inevitable that I would succumb sooner rather than later. Starting out under the flat grey skies of an east Anglian university campus and ending up on an idyllic Mediterranean island, The Truants is about a group of clever and eccentric misfits who yearn to break the rules.

Relic by Preston and Child – I saw the movie version of this donkey’s years ago and though it would be fun to try out the series of novels featuring Agent Prendergast. As I am that person, I will of course start at volume 1 🙂 – Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum’s dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human… 

Let’s hope this coming week will be just as productive! Stay safe everyone!

Sunday Salon | 21 June

On By brideofthebookgodIn Sunday SalonLeave a comment

Happy Father’s Day to those celebrating with their Dads, or (like me) remembering Dads no longer with us.

It’s been a quiet week chez Bride, so let’s just get into the book stuff.

Currently reading – exactly the same books as last week, but I’ve made progress on most of them

Finished – nothing. So very dull.

New books this week:

  • The I-5 Killer by Ann Rule – another for my ever-growing collection of true crime books
  • Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine & Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J Mann – a fresh look at the unsolved murder of William Desmond Taylor in the 1920s
  • Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis – I’ve been reading about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, and a reference to Elmer Gantry led to me looking into Lewis’s work and this caught my eye
  • The Deadly Touch of the Tigress (Anna Lee #1) by Ian Hamilton – learned about this series by Musings from the Sofa and thought it sounded great
  • Forgetting Zoe by Ray Robinson – mentioned by Girl with her Head in a Book, I think this will be an intriguing companion to My Dark Vanessa, which is on my TBR.

We have watched all four series of Cardinal, and was sad to see that there will be no more series; a real shame. But series 3 of The Sinner has just appeared on UK Netflix, and along with Russian Doll is keeping me occupied. Also excited to start watching the new Perry Mason series.

Hoping this week will be more productive. Stay safe everyone!

[Not the] Sunday Salon

On By brideofthebookgodIn Challenges, Readalongs, Sunday Salon2 Comments

When is a Sunday Salon post not a Sunday Salon post? When it’s on a Tuesday, that’s when.

You know I had to check what day it is, right?

So here we are already in another week and I thought I’d round up what’s been going on since I last wrote here, not in the whole world because, let’s face it, there isn’t enough space in my wee blog to even begin to tackle what’s going on everywhere else. I’m just going to tackle my little bit of it.

image via Canva

This is not a summery illustration but it has been very oppressive and we have had quite a few thunderstorms around here over the past few days so this feels about right!

I haven’t finished any books in the past week, but I am still reading (almost) every day.

I’m happily making progress on my reading challenges, and so far:

  • PBB Book Club – I’m 64% of the way through Middlegame
  • 20 Books of Summer – I’m 15% through Gideon the Ninth

They are both really excellent and I would recommend.

New books this week (excluding any pre-orders which I mentioned in my May 31st post) – all links are to Goodreads:

  • Don’t Touch My Hair by Emma Dabiri – I meant to buy this when it first came out as I have always enjoyed watching Emma on Britain’s Lost Masterpieces, but somehow forgot. But I have it now.
  • Where Are the Women by Sara Sheridan – a guide to an imagined Scotland, where women are commemorated in public spaces. Couldn’t resist.
  • Judas the Hero by Martin Davey – a recommendation by the Book God, which doesn’t happen often and is to be respected when it does, this is all about Judas Iscariot “cursed with immortality by a vengeful and angry God, [he] finds himself in present day London and head of the secret occult crime division known as the Black Museum at Scotland Yard.”
  • The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem – we watched Motherless Brooklyn this weekend and when I realised that it was based on a novel I went looking for the author, and this caught my eye, especially as one of the main characters has his pet opossum in his desk drawer
  • Devolution by Max Brooks – I adored World War Z so wasn’t going to miss this, an oral history of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre. Bigfoot is real, people!

Hopefully I’ll have some finished reads to report on next time. Take care and stay safe.

Sunday Salon | 7 June

On By brideofthebookgodIn Challenges, Readalongs, Stuff, Sunday Salon2 Comments

I wasn’t sure whether I was going to post today given everything that’s going on in the world and that I’m a Scottish white woman pushing 60, but keeping quiet is how the status quo is maintained even if what you say sounds trite.

We Are the Flowers of One Garden (c) Shayda Campbell

Black lives matter and anyone who has a problem with that needs to stop and take a look at themselves. Access to equal treatment for other doesn’t mean that you somehow lose out, and for too long people of colour have been disproportionately suffering at the hands of authority and a system that was stacked against them from the outset.

I developed a love of history when I was at school and went on to get my degree in that subject (early modern history in particular which explains my obsession with the sixteenth century) but as I got older it became abundantly clear that the history we are taught doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality experienced by many, many people. The racism inherent in the British colonial/imperial rule is rarely addressed in those terms. We talked about our role in ending the slave trade without acknowledging our heavy involvement in starting it. As a Scot, I learned about the wealth brought to our cities, especially Glasgow, by those trading tobacco and cotton but with only oblique references to the slaves and that even after abolition Glasgow shipyards were still building the ships that would end up carrying slaves. In the UK we have huge swathes of people who don’t realise that there have been people of colour in our country for centuries.

And we don’t talk about issues surrounding police behaviour. It isn’t a crime to be black. We don’t have the same tendency to militarise our police force here in the UK (though some politicians would very much like to) but that doesn’t mean we are free from police brutality, deaths in custody and racial profiling.

This needs to stop. I want to continue learning about this issue, speaking out where I can while knowing that I may get it wrong sometimes. Better to make the occasional mistake in trying to be an ally than to stay silent. I also know that I need to read more widely than I do now; my TBR pile doesn’t have as many works by people of colour as it should, and I’m going to try to improve.

And don’t get me started on JK Rowling and her latest anti-trans stuff. Just don’t.

But let’s talk about books.

It’s been a good reading week. I finished two books – The Deep by Nick Cutter and Transcription by Kate Atkinson – and reviews will follow. Honest.

I made good progress on the two reading challenges/programmes in which I’m taking part, namely:

  • PBB Book Club – Middlegame by Seanan McGuire (I’m 30% in); and
  • Twenty Books of Summer – the two books I read this week were for that challenge, and I have just started the third, Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.

My full currently reading list is on the sidebar.

Three new books arrived chez Bride this week:

  • Closure Limited (and other zombie tales) by Max Brooks of World War Z fame (I loved that book so much);
  • Putney by Sofka Zinovie; and
  • Dead to Her by Sarah Pinborough, which was a pre-order that I thought wasn’t arriving until later in the summer but the Kindle edition was released and just appeared in my app the way ebooks just do.

And that’s it for this week. Please stay safe everyone.

Sunday Salon | 19 April

On By brideofthebookgodIn Sunday Salon4 Comments

So here we are at the end of another week of isolation and I have been outside exactly once when I went for some exercise on one of our sunnier days, but please don’t ask me what day it was because I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head.

OK, I checked.

It was Tuesday.

Apart from that, and as Mr B has been managing the grocery shopping, I’ve been puttering around the house doing chores, working on some of my hobbies (sorting out all of my neglected family history research notes for example), and reading, but mostly buying, books.So it seems that it’s time for a round-up.

Books read – in April so far:

  • Pet Sounds by Quinn Cummings
  • The White Road by John Connolly
  • The Mists of the Miskatonic Volume 2 by AL Halsey
  • We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory
  • A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

Reviews will be following in due course so I’ll say no more about them here, for now.

Pre-orders received since my last post

  • The Book of Koli – the first book in the Rampart Trilogy because its MR Carey and no other reasoning is required
  • Creeping Jenny by Jeff Noon because it sounded good
  • The Ratline by – because I’m currently interested in WW2

You can see the books I’m currently reading on the Goodreads shelf in my sidebar

Other Stuff

I am still very sad at the death last week of Tim Brooke-Taylor, one of the Goodies and a key figure in my teenage TV-watching years. I am also sad at the end of Criminal Minds, one of the very few series where I have never missed an episode. I liked the way it ended; its always pleasing when a series gets a proper and in this case positive ending.

We have also started watching DEVS which is extremely interesting, and Killing Eve is back and I had totally forgotten that they filmed some of it in New Malden, where I live. Super cool.

Hope you are all staying safe, sending virtual hugs to you all!

Sunday Salon | 10 November

On By brideofthebookgodIn Museums & Galleries, Reviews, Thoughts & Notes, Sunday Salon1 Comment

I seem to have spent a lot of time napping this week, which I’m going to continue to blame on the end of British Summertime even though that was a fortnight ago.

I am willing to die on that hill.

I’m still having problems progressing with fiction but my tried and tested anti-slump technique of reading non-fiction worked again, as I picked up and quickly finished A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup, which is all about the poisons Agatha Christie used in her dtective stories. really intersting and has sent me down a rabbit hole, the results of which will become obvious soon-ish.

Despite having just published two long posts about the books I bought during my hiatus in October, more books have arrived on my e-reader this week:

  • The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern – the long awaited follow-up to The Night Circus which I loved back in the day, this is getting much praise. I’m saving it until I know I’m going to be able to finish it
  • Made Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky – there are tiny puppety things and the main character is called Coppelia; I shall say no more
  • Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas – modern boarding school mystery with Russian twist
  • The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes – a novel based on the life of the French surgeon Samuel Pozzi, subject of one of my favourite John Singer Sargent portraits (though I’m not sure that there are any I don’t like)

Those were all pre-ordered. There was only on impulse buy this week The Spectral City by Leanna Renee Hieber, as recommended by the Book God himself. Oh, and I also got a free book from Amazon – true crime in the shape of If You Tell by Gregg Olsen which I must admit looks incredibly grim.

All links are to Goodreads btw.

In other stuff, I took myself to see Doctor Sleep, based partly on the Stephen King sequel to The Shining, and partly to the Kubrick movie of the same. If you have read/seen both then you will know that there are differences in plot, and if you have been visiting here for any length of time then you will know that I am not a major fan of the Kubrick movie, mostly because if the way it chooses to treat Wendy Torrance. But Doctor Sleep was excellent, and I’ll be writing about it more fully shortly.

In other “what I’ve been watching” news, I was absolutely (and surprisingly) gutted to realise that not only was last week’s episode of Instinct (starring the wonderful Alan Cumming) was the last in season 2, it was also the last one EVER. I was very cross about this as it was something of a guilty pleasure for me – at least it would have been if I believe there is such a thing. You should love what you love, people, and not make excuses for it.

And finally, our big outing this week was to the National Portrait Gellery to see the exhibition “Pre-Raphaelite Sisters” which was simply lovely and I learned a great deal. I may also have bought the catalogue….

It’s disappointing to hear that the NPG will be closing for efurbishment for around 3 years which seems rather extreme to me.

Hopefully some interesting things coming up this week. Hope you all have a great one!

Sunday Salon | 3 November

On By brideofthebookgodIn Sunday SalonLeave a comment

So, back to the old routine. Although I had planned to post before today I (as always) underestimated just how long it takes to get back to normal after a holiday. Especially where laundry is concerned. How can two adults create so much stuff in 10 days?

But what of this week? Well it was Halloween so of course I had good intentions of watching and/or reading creepy stuff but that just didn’t happen. Except for going to see The Addams Family, which I will blog about separately. I am hoping to rectify this oversight by going to see Doctor Sleep this coming week. By myself.

Books read – nothing finished since I got back home

New books – so many during October that two, count them TWO, posts will be necessary to cover them all.

Currently reading: the same list I had before going away with two additions:

  • Gilded Needles by Michael McDowell – historical Gothic-ish novel recommended by Christopher Fowler and so far very gripping
  • Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore – ticks so many boxes! When you discover you have something sartorial in common with Samuel Beckett it kind of makes your day 🙂

What we are watching – too many series to list here BUT if you haven’t been watching John Turturro in The Name of the Rose then you must seek it out immediately. Yes, it’s “slow” (rolls eyes) but worth it if you loved the book. And of course this evening in the UK we have episode one of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series and I couldn’t be more excited.

Have a great reading week!

Two Mini-Reviews and a Hiatus |Sunday Salon * 29 September

On By brideofthebookgodIn Reviews, Thoughts & Notes, Sunday Salon2 Comments

It’s dark and windy outside and feeling distinctly autumnal and seemed like the right time for a Sunday Salon post.

As with last week there has been no progress on reading – I’m still [not] reading the same two books and that means I haven’t finished any either. But as we are in peak publishing season a few new books arrived on my Kindle app this week, mostly pre-orders. Here, in no particular order, are the details:

  • Grave Importance * Vivian Shaw – the third Greta Helsing novel, set in a health spa for mummies. The Book God has already read this and recommends highly.
  • The Monster of Elendhaven * Jennifer Giesbrecht – defnitely a Halloween book, this tells the story of the city of Elendhaven which “sulks on the edge of the ocean. Wracked by plague, abandoned by the South, stripped of industry and left to die. But not everything dies so easily. A thing without a name stalks the city, a thing shaped like a man, with a dark heart and long pale fingers yearning to wrap around throats.”
  • The Tenth Girl * Sara Faring – a Gothic haunted school set in a mansion in Argentina with a family curse.
  • The Flower Arranger * JJ Ellis – Tokyo-set police procedural involving a reporter teaming up with the police to look into the disappearance of a number of young women
  • Starvation Heights * Gregg Olsen – a true story of murder, malice, quackery, a snake-oil saleswoman and untimely deaths. Fasting treatment is rarely if ever a good thing. Bought this after hearing the ladies on My Favourite Murder outline the story; I was really keen for a deep dive and this came recommended.
  • My Name is Anna * Lizzy Barber – “Two women – desperate to unlock the truth. How far will they go to lay the past to rest? “
  • Gone * Leona Deakin – the first Dr Augusta Bloom mystery. I’m a sucker for any book where the protagonist is a psychologist and a private investigator, so here we are. “Four strangers are missing. Left at their last-known locations are birthday cards that read: YOUR GIFT IS THE GAME. DARE TO PLAY?“

So, plenty to be getting on with as the nights get longer and I hopefully start reading properly again.

But if I haven’t been reading, what have I been doing?

Well, for three days this week I was away from home accompanying the Book God to the annual Jeff Hawke Society meet-up, for the second year in a row at West Dean College in Sussex. Also for the second year in a row the weather was very, very rainy. We spent a lovely day in Chichester (see arty picture below), and thankfully the food, drink and company was excellent and we had a good time.

I also took the opportunity to think about the blog as I have a lot going on over the next few weeks.

On Tuesday I will be having a minor surgical procedure (under general anaesthetic no less, something I haven’t experienced since I got my tonsils and adenoids removed when I was five (or six?) years old). It should be straightforward, and the biggest concern I have is which physical book I’m going to take with me to read during the inevitable waiting, though I understand that my age and chronic condition means I might actually be first on the list.

After that the London Film Festival kicks off and for a few days in a row I have new movies to see.

And finally we go on holiday later in October, off up to Scotland where we haven’t been for any length of time in quite a few years. So looking forward to going home and eating all of the wrong things….. especially if those things happen to be Empire biscuits!

So I’ve decided to take some pressure off of myself and put the blog on a break during all of these shenanigans, hoping to return on Sunday 27th October. Fret not, because I will be occasionally tweeting and regularly posting on Instagram, so please follow me there if you don’t already. The link are above, (she says, gesticulating vaguely)

The only thing left for me to do is mention two books I read in September which I haven’t reviewed as yet, just included for completeness.

Swan Song by Robert Edric is the last in his Song Cycle trilogy about a PI working in Hull. Young women are being brutally killed, the chief suspect is in a coma but it becomes clear that he isn’t really connected to the killings. Add an ambitious chief constable and our hero Leo Rivers has a lot on his plate. This has been a great series (I reviewed the others here and here) and I recommend them heartily.

Dahlia Black by Keith Thomas – when I bought this I said “this is ” … a suspenseful oral history commemorating the five-year anniversary of the Pulse—the alien code that hacked the DNA of Earth’s population—and the response team who faced the world-changing phenomenon.” They had me at “for fans of World War Z” :-)” And I was right. Really enjoyed this one as well. Nice slow release of information through various characters as we all learn what happened and what it might mean.

So that’s it from me for a while. See you on the other side!

Munday Salon | 23 September

On By brideofthebookgodIn Reviews, Thoughts & Notes, Sunday SalonLeave a comment

Better late than never, I guess, here is my round-up of last week which had very little in the way of reading (ie no progress on either of my books), a situation that’s likely to continue into this week as well, as I am away for a few days.

But still, the details……

Currently reading the two that I was reading in my last post, namely Roy Strong’s diaries and Sarah Lotz’s Missing Person.

Several new books arrived including a sighting of the rare lesser-spotted paperback:

  • A House of Ghosts * WC Ryan – a mystery of the classic kind set during WWI, described as And Then There Were None meets The Silent Companions, and therefore deeply intriguing
  • Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare * Giles Milton – The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Downfall, recommended by Christopher Fowler in a recent blog post, this looked fascinating and was heavily discounted so I snapped it up.
  • Monster, She Wrote * Lisa Kroger & Melanie R Anderson – all about the women who pioneered horror and speculative fiction, from Mary Shelley onwards. Given my interests it was inevitable that I would get my hands on this.
  • Mythos * Stephen Fry – just because I like re-tellings of ancient myths.
  • The Grip of It * Jac Jemc – so on Saturday afternoon I just happened to be in the Waterloo Station branch of Foyles buying a birthday card for my brother when my eyes fell on this actual physical book, which I then bought because of Jeff VanderMeer’s comment on the cover. Young couple. Haunted house. Yes please.

In other news we went to see the new Brad Pitt movie, Ad Astra, this week. I will be reviewing it properly shortly; just wanted to say that I think it will be divisive but I loved it.

I also hit Sadler’s Wells again on Saturday to see the English National Ballet perform a re-working of Giselle. The fluttering ghostly women in the second act were significantly creepier and 100% more vengeful looking in this version, and I adored it. Lovely start to the weekend.

Hope you all have a great reading week!

Photo by Kristina Tamašauskaitė on Unsplash

Sunday Salon | 15 September

On By brideofthebookgodIn Sunday Salon2 Comments

So here we are, halfway through the ninth month of the year and autumn is definitely on its way. This has been a bit of a stressful week – various medcial appointments meant that I spent a lot of time just hanging around waiting, which had an impact on my reading. I was very glad to end the week on a really joyful event (more on that later!)

The Stats

Books read = 1 single solitary volume – Dahlia Black by Keith Thomas which I really enjoyed and will be reviewing shortly

Currently reading – as I said above, I did a lot of hanging around so decided not to launch into Missing Person (as mentioned last week) but picked up the first volume of Roy Strong’s diaries, covering the period 1967 to 1987. Strong was director of two of my favourite museums – the V&A and the National Portrait Gallery – and moved in rarefied social cricles so this is a real treat full of gossip and waspishness and fashion. Ideal for reading in snatches.

Books bought – the pre-orders

  • Gideon the Ninth * Tamsyn Muir – “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” —Charles Stross
  • The Testaments * Margaret Atwood – the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale
  • The Only Plane in the Sky * Garrett M Graff – a comprehensive oral history of the events of 9/11

Books bought – the impulse purchases

  • The Outside * Ada Hoffman – superintelligent AI Gods rule the galaxy, apparently. Recommended by the Book God
  • The Golden Hour * Beatriz Williams – a romantic thriller set in the Bahamas in 1941 against the background of the Duke & Duchess of Windsor and the murder of Harry Oakes. Not that I’m suggesting the Windors murdered him, of course….
  • The Destroyer * Tara Isabella Burton – a mother and daughter mad scientist story
  • Ragdoll * Daniel Cole – a body is discovered but not just any body, oh no, this is built up of six victims stitched together.
  • A Memory Called Empire * Arkady Martine – civil servants in space! Recommended by Twitter and the Book God (again)

Other Stuff

On Saturday afternoon I went to Sadler’s Wells to see a programme of pieces performed by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. It was so, so good, especially Revelations which they perform on every appearance.

It’s set to a soundtrack of African-American spirituals, gospel and blues and reflects black life in the American South. Brilliant stuff, standing ovation and it’s not that often the company applauds the audience. I came out of the performance feeling so happy and energised.

Hope that we all have a wonderful reading week!