Bryant & May off the Rails

July 11, 2010 in Crime Month, Reviews | Tags: , , | 5 comments

I can announce quite happily that my reading slump is finally over, but what that means is that I now have a nice stack of reviews for both here and the Screen God blog that I need to catch up on (grammatically incorrect I’m sure but too hot to think of an alternative).

But I have an excuse (I think) and it’s not my normal gosh-I’ve-been-so-busy-at-work-poor-little-me nonsense. No, this backlog is all because of a hectic social life which has seen lunches and cocktails and catching up with friends before they go on holiday all having taken place since last Sunday. There won’t be another week like it until Christmas, mark my words.

I like excuses like that, it sounds like I know how to have a good time. Which I do, I just don’t get the chance to do it all at once. Anyhow, enough of all this nonsense.

First on the review pile is the latest Christopher Fowler, namely Bryant & May off the Rails. Now, it isn’t that long ago since I read and reviewed the previous book in the series (see here) and I normally don’t read sequences close together because I’m always afraid that I will somehow lose interest, but in this case I was really keen to get my hands on this because the events follow on almost immediately from the previous story and I wanted to know what happens.

And it doesn’t disappoint, building on what’s gone before, developing the character of the enigmatic Mr Fox, and throwing in loads of absolutely fascinating information about the London Underground. As before, not going to discuss the plot as I don’t want to spoil it for anyone but as always I really, really enjoyed this. Not terribly eloquent as a review, but that just shows what too many Cosmopolitans can do to a woman; although I’m not entirely convinced that there is such a thing as too many Cosmopolitans, but that may be a Scottish thing.

And behind the curve as always, I discover that I’m one of the last to know that Mr Fowler has his own blog which is really worth reading; you can find it here.

It’s already time for crime….

July 4, 2010 in Stuff | Tags: , , | 2 comments

So it’s a sunny if windy day here in London after a week of heat and humidity which I always find difficult to handle. And my usual summer grumpiness has arrived slightly earlier this year (I usually wait until August to feel annoyed with heat and my favourite people not being around and travelling on crowded public transport and all that jazz) but is not as intense as in previous years so I may just get through this OK (fingers crossed).

So my thoughts are turning to what I might read over July and August.

The latter is usually Crime Month and I will certainly be reading that sort of thing, but I had the thought that I might do some re-reading of old favourites in tandem with the murder/mayhem thing. Said thought was triggered by purchasing books for friends, a practice I’ve started in preference to lending things to people as (a) it takes the pressure off  (no hurry to read the thing just to get it back to the owner) and (b) I don’t get twitchy wondering what’s happened to my precious, precious books.

I recently got Espedair Street by Iain Banks for Silvery Dude and Fifth Business by Robertson Davies for another good friend, the Semi-Scandinavian. So that’s two for the re-read pile, plus I want to read the sequence of four novels by AS Byatt that starts with The Virgin in the Garden, plus I want to re-read all my Laurie Colwin books (especially Family Happiness) and suddenly this look like it might be fun.

But I’m not giving any hostages to fortune so no lists will be posted, and you’ll just have to watch this space……..

I also have a small stack of reviews to catch up on (hurrah, actually managed to finish some books), so hopefully activity on the blog will pick up over the next wee while.

What I’m reading

June 27, 2010 in Stuff | Tags: , , , , | 4 comments

So I’ve been talking recently about my reading slump, and several people suggested that I needed to be reading more than one book at a time (I have tended to be very traditional and have no more than two, three at most, books on the go); that way I can switch as my mood takes me.

That may seem very obvious to many of you, but let’s note for the record here that one person’s obvious is usually my “jings, why didn’t I think of that?”

So I have thrown myself into this with gusto, and am currently at various stages of reading the pile at you see here:

  • Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock – a planned read for the Once Upon a Time challenge, this is a sequel to the equally excellent Mythago Wood
  • Making Money by Terry Pratchett – will confess that I’m stalled with this one, I should be loving it but am finding it difficult to pick up again – another planned read for Once Upon a Time
  • The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd – recommended by the Silvery Dude and only started late last night – creepy
  • The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell – because I’m in a bit of a non-fiction phase and I keep on meaning to read this
  • Foreign Devils on the Silk Road by Peter Hopkirk – as recommended by the Book God after an excellent lecture on engaging with China which we attended at the British Museum
  • Classic Crimes by William Roughead – what it says on the tin
  • The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks – vaguely unsettling what to do if they were real guide-book
  • The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping, edited by Jill Foulston – which called out to me by name when shopping in Blackwell’s on the Charing Cross Road for a present for Silvery Dude
  • Duncan Grant by Frances Spalding – a Bloomsbury fix for the Art History Reading Challenge

And I might even finish some of these!

The Burry Man’s Day

June 20, 2010 in Reviews | Tags: , | 1 comment

So, having read the first Dandy Gilver mystery (as reviewed here) and fallen in love with it, it seemed the natural thing to do to read the second as a way of getting myself a little further out of my current reading slump.

The Burry Man’s Day finds Dandy in Queensferry where an old schoolfriend and her American husband have come into their inheritance (a rather nice castle-type dwelling with attendant estate). With this inheritance has come some obligations around the annual fair – judging various competitions, awarding prizes and so on – and Dandy and her other friend Daisy are there to assist.

One of the highlights of the fair is the Burry Man – a sort of Green Man type character wearing a costume completely covered in burrs (hence the name) who progresses through the town collecting pennies and/or shots of Scotch to bring good luck to the town. Unfortunately said Burry Man drops dead at the end of the day and the big question is, of course, was it murder?

Step forward Dandy, who calls in her “Watson” from the first book, Alec, to assist.

I enjoyed this very much. There was sufficient uncertainty about whether there had been foul play to keep it going, and I liked the fact that Dandy did try to remind everyone that, though there may be a mystery about some of the actions of key players, that didn’t necessarily mean that murder had taken place. I thought the solution was plausible, but my only quibble is with the very end, which I did think was a bit far-fetched. But to be fair it didn’t spoil the remainder and did show (if it needed to be repeated) that the effects of the First World War were deep and far-reaching.

Still fond of Dandy, so much so that I’ve bought the three other books in the series so far, and will enjoy working my way through them over the summer.

Bryant & May On the Loose

June 13, 2010 in Reviews | Tags: , | 1 comment

Another excellent entry in the Bryant & May series, On the Loose  finds the Peculiar Crimes Unit disbanded and our protagonists looking for a new purpose, or possibly just having to accept retirement. But the finding of a decapitated body in a freezer in a derelict shop in King’s Cross leads to the unit being unofficially reconstituted and as more headless bodies are found it becomes clear that something very strange is happening in this part of London. And the authorities want it all kept quiet, hence turnign reluctantly to the PCU.

This is great stuff; I’ve always been a fan of this series and one of the great pleasures of the books is the way Christopher Fowler feeds in the history and mythology of London. Now, I’ve lived here for over twenty years and don’t profess to know huge amount about the city but one of the things I do know is that it is an ancient and fascinating place and there is still an air of mystery about certain parts of the city, and it is tapping into this which gives the Bryant & May books such depth.

You wouldn’t think that an area as seemingly prosaic as King’s Cross, with its major stations and regeneration programme would fit the bill, but digging up a place can reveal some interesting elements of the past, and the idea that change can lead some people to get in touch with history and use it to their own ends is really plausible. So the idea that the personification of an ancient myth (in the shape of a half man half beast with antlers constructed from knives) can be terrorising the workers on a construction site isn’t really that far-fetched, especially when you consider that many of those workers come from eastern Europe where some of these traditions are still very evident in everyday life.

So not much more to say about the plot (don’t want to give anything away) but the villain of the piece is a very interesting character and the ending sets up a sequel very nicely. And I read this just in time for the next one (Bryant and May Off the Rails) which comes out towards the end of the month.

So, one of the best of the series and very, very enjoyable indeed.

Kipling and Bateman’s

June 12, 2010 in Book buys, Trips | 1 comment

So a literary day out; on a beautifully warm and sunny Wednesday we headed to Kipling’s home in East Sussex and it was a lovely experience. The house, Bateman’s, is, as you can hopefully see from the really not terribly good picture attached, is a genuinely beautiful building, full of wonderful things relating to the great man himself.

And that’s the interesting thing – I’m really rather fond of Kipling. When I was growing up, and especially when I was a student, reading Kipling was not the done thing – he was reactionary, imperialist, war-mongering and lots of other unpleasant things, usually said by people who had never read anything that he’s written. The most you could hope for was that people my age liked the Disney version of The Jungle Book.

I quietly hid my deep affection for the Just So Stories, but the more I read about Kipling the more interested I became, and although like all great artists he was probably a pain to live with, I came to see  him as rather a lovely man. So it was a real thrill to visit his house, see his things (the Book God was particularly taken with the Rolls Royce), and come home determined to pull together a Kiplingesque reading list:

  • Just So Stories – in a Penguin paperback with the author’s own illustrations; I do love these, especially How the Alphabet was Made
  • Puck of Pook’s Hill – am appalled that I’ve never read this
  • The Mark of the Beast – with an introduction by Neil Gaiman, this is a collection of Kipling’s dark and fantastic tales
  • O Beloved Kids – Kipling’s letters to his children between 1906 and 1915, the year his son was killed in the Great War
  • Something of Myself – Kipling’s memoir of his life as an author, written the year before he died
  • The Hated Wife – a short life of Carrie Kipling, not a woman who seems to have attracted much warmth
  • A Circle of Sisters – the story of Kiping’s mother Alice, and her remarkable sisters who all became the wives or mothers of equally remarkable men

It’s Only a Movie

June 10, 2010 in Reviews, TV & Film | Leave a comment

So I may have mentioned before that I have been in a bit of a reading slump recently, but that seems mainly to be about fiction. I am solidly working my way through a number of non-fiction books at the moment, and the first I’ve finished is It’s Only a Movie by the one and only Mark Kermode.

Those of you who wander over to my other blog will know that I love movies and one of the critics whose opinions I pay most attention to (even though I don’t always agree with him) is the Good Doctor Mark Kermode. His Friday afternoon reviews with Simon Mayo on Radio Five Live are a real joy and the podcast is one of my Saturday morning rituals. So good fun to read his memoir, subtitled “reel life adventures of a film obsessive”.

It has all the great stories that those of you who follow the Good Doctor have heard before (his brush with Helen Mirren who took him to task for saying The Queen wasn’t a proper film, Werner Herzog being shot while Mark was interviewing him, and so on), plus some new stuff that I hadn’t come across before (the trip to the Soviet Union to visit the set of Dark Waters). The only thing missing are the great rants about films he doesn’t like (Pirates of the Caribbean a special favourite) so if you can search these out on YouTube or elsewhere because when he’s in full flow there is nothing more wonderful.

It’s difficult to review this – I thoroughly enjoyed it, one of the few books I could be bothered trying to read while standing up on my daily commute, precariously balanced but any man who

grew up believing that Planet of the Apes told you all that you needed to know about politics, that Slade in Flame was a savage expose of the pop world, and that The Exorcist revealed the meaning of life

deserves to be listened to.

Bride on the loose

June 10, 2010 in Trips | 1 comment

So I’ve managed to wangle myself a week off work, most welcome given how busy I have been recently, as a means of celebrating my wedding anniversary at the end of May and the Book God’s birthday (which was yesterday).

We hired a car for a couple of days and have been tootling about the Surrey/Sussex countryside, indulging in what I have come to call “falling in love with houses we can never afford in places it would be impractical to commute from”.

This didn’t stop us identifying at least half a dozen large country piles which could be dream retirement homes. Assuming we win the lottery, that is….

On Monday we spent the day in Arundel, one of our favourite places (see not terribly brilliant photograph at the top of this post); this mostly involved eating a very, very nice lunch in a local hotel, the purchase of fudge, and a visit to a fabulous shop specialising in walking sticks.

On Tuesday, we headed down towards Portsmouth, mainly to visit Portchester Castle, an amazing place which consists of a Norman Castle in one corner of a huge Roman fort site (which has the best preserved Roman fort wall north of the Alps, apparently) with a lovely little Norman church in the opposite corner and a huge amount of space in between. While we were there a party of schoolchildren arrived for the traditional summer school trip – lots of small children being very excited to the accompaniment of teachers saying “shhhh” a lot.

We then headed to the Royal Armouries at Fort Nelson which basically allowed the Book God to look at a lot of very big guns. Which kept him happy.

Read slump seems to be over in that I am reading more, though still not finishing anything, but the week is yet young.

A Whinge Post

May 16, 2010 in Stuff | Tags: , | 8 comments

You may have noticed over the past week that both here and at the home of the Screen God I have been valiantly attempting to catch up with posts. And having done so I have come to the awful realisation that I haven’t finished a book since 11 April (end of the read-a-thon.)

That’s over a month ago (yes I know, stating the obvious but that’s my thing, OK?)

So I got to thinking about why that is, and there are a couple of obvious things that spring to mind:

  1. my morning commute is currently taking place at a time when I have to stand, making the reading of books difficult (for me, clumsy woman with poor balance and lack of natural grace) and then
  2. work is still really really busy despite the ending of a major project, and
  3. although my evening commute allows me to sit down my concentration is entirely shot  by then and I’m tired, which inevitably leads to
  4. vegetating in front of the TV when I get home and falling asleep before my head hits the pillow (neither conducive to reading) and all of this means that
  5. my weekends are spent catching up with loads of other stuff

And much as I’m reluctant to say so, I just can’t get into my current read, so there’s no incentive to even try.

So going to permit myself to ignore challenges and just find something interesting to read, even if I have to open every book in this house – and believe me, that’s saying a lot.

When Last I Died

May 15, 2010 in Reviews | Tags: | Leave a comment

So I want it noted for the record that I love Gladys Mitchell, and have done so for years. I read my first one (The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop – my old paperback has an absolutely hideous cover) in 1991 and was sad to see them go out of print, despite quite a good BBC adaptation starring Diana Rigg, who was brilliant in the main role despite being far too glamorous for the character.

However, chuffed to see that Vintage is bringing the novels of the Great Gladys (so named by Philip Larkin) back and grabbed the opportunity to pick up one I hadn’t read before as a way of rounding off the read-a-thon.

First published in 1941 When Last I Died kicks off with Mrs Bradley visiting a reformatory school where she has been asked to consult as a psychologist on behalf of the government. She subsequently takes a house on the coast to give some of the boys a chance for a break from the institution, and once they’ve been packed off she spends some time there with her grandson, who finds rather an interesting diary. The diary’s author (now dead) used to work at the same reformatory and was once accused of murdering her aunt. This is the starting point for a mystery involving haunted houses, investigations of the paranormal and missing schoolboys.

And I absolutely loved it. Really satisfying story, clever plotting and Mrs Bradley is a gloriously grotesque character. Suspect I will be building up my collection over the next few months.

Bride of the Book God

Follow brideofthebook on Twitter

Scottish, in my fifties, love books but not always able to find the time to read them as much as I would like. I’m based in London and happily married to the Book God.

I also blog at Bride of the Screen God (all about movies and TV) and The Dowager Bride, if you are interested in ramblings about stuff of little consequence

If you would like to get in touch you can contact me at brideofthebookgod (at) btinternet (dot) com.

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