Wednesday reads (on a Thursday) - 30/1/2020

What I’ve just finished reading:
The Husband Hunters by Anne de Courcy - this was one of the long overdue library books that I was trying to finish. It was really good, and in combination with a remark about the Gilded Age in a recent Doctor Who episode has made me really want to read more about this era. (Maybe I’ll finally finish the Anna Godberson books…)

Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen by Alison Weir. First in the Six Tudor Queens series, four of which have already been published. Howard is due out in May. You may recall that in my “what I’ll read next” last week I mentioned that we were going to see Six: the Musical and I expected that it would get me back into reading this book. I was right :-) While it didn’t send me into paroxysms of anything (joy or rage) it was a perfectly good book, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

What I’m reading now:
Arthur: Prince of the Roses by Alison Weir. She’s published a bunch of e-only short stories to go along with the main books in the Six Tudor Queens series. Some of them seem a little high priced for short stories, so I may not read them all, but Arthur was free, and the next, The Blackened Heart is .99c, so those two I’ll read.

Anne Boleyn: A King’s Obsession by Alison Weir. Yes, I’ve already started the next one.

What I’ll read next:
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo has arrived for me from the library. While I’m not sure I’m in the mood for high literature (this is last year’s Booker Prize winner) I also think it’s important that I read it, and I keep reminding myself that the Evaristo I’ve read, The Emperor’s Babe, was utterly fabulous and not heavy at all.

Moontangled by Stephanie Burgis is due out on Monday and I can’t wait. The other three books in the Harwood Spellbook series - Snowspelled, Thornbound, and Spellswept have been absolutely delightful, and Moontangled is f/f, to boot! (Angsty f/f, I suspect, but still, f/f.)

Oh, and there’s an Elle Spencer contemporary f/f romance, Casting Lacey, that I keep dipping in and out of. It’s on my iPad rather than my phone, so I don’t have it with me for easy reading at random moments.

Review: The Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry

The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers who Inspired Chicago by Douglas Perry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This came highly recommended by my friend Katherine Bruce, and although it took me some time to chase up a copy via the local library and then sit down and read it, I'm very glad I made the effort.

The book is about the real-life crimes and trials that were later turned into a play by Maurene Watkins, two different (not well-regarded) movies, and ultimately, the musical Chicago. It also looks at the wider context in Chicago (the city) of "murderesses" and the influence of the press and the ongoing press wars between various newspaper owners. The descriptions of Wanda Stopa's funeral kicked off some ponderings in my own head about celebrity and social media and crowd behaviour that I'll be musing about for some time.

There's very little about the musical itself here: a page or two in the epilogue at most. But if you know the musical well you can get a lot of insight by drawing your own lines between the real people and where they ended up on stage. That's not a criticism at all: it's an observation.

Honestly, my biggest criticism was something that no one could have done anything about: I just wish that the two main women had names that were more different. I found it difficult to distinguish between Beulah and Belva unless their surnames were attached (Annan and Gaertner, respectively), which meant a lot of flicking back and forward to work out from context which of the two women was the focus at any particular time.

Definitely recommended, especially if you're interested in that Chicago backstory.

View all my reviews

Wednesday reads (on a Thursday. Unless you're reading this in the USA.)

I tried to get back to doing Wednesday Reads, but it didn’t quite happen. Next week will definitely be on Thursday, and after that Trivia will be back, so we’ll see. Anyway:

What I’ve just finished reading:

The Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry - I'll review this one here properly later, but if you click through you'll see I gave it four stars - which honestly would have been 4.5 if the system allowed it. Really good read.

Dead Queen Walking by Tansy Rayner Roberts. YOU HAD ME GOING FOR A MINUTE, TANSY. Three-quarters of the way through this I did NOT know where it was going, or like where I thought it might be going, but it all came out okay at the end and yes, it’s Tansy so I should have trusted her, but OMG. (Seriously, a mostly highly enjoyable roller coaster. Leaving aside the fact that I don’t actually like roller coasters…) A fabulous conclusion to the Castle Charming series. All four novellas are available now, although as a Patreon supporter I got mine a little earlier. I just hadn’t got around to reading it yet because ... I have no idea why. I should have read this earlier.

What I’m currently reading

The Husband Hunters by Anne de Courcy - I love de Courcy’s popular history - I haven’t read all of hers but I’ve read a bunch of them. This one is on a fascinating subject that I’d love to look into even more: the ridiculously rich women from American families who married into titled families in England.

Courted by Celia Cohen - this one may be my first DNF of the year. If it was a fic I would have abandoned it already, but I paid actual money for this book and so I feel obligated to read more of it somehow? But the writing style just doesn’t work for me. Actually, that’s part of the problem perhaps - there’s a Clarke/Lexa tennis AU fic that has recently been completed that I’d probably enjoy reading more than I’m enjoying this one. I may just have talked myself into the DNF. (No link because DNF)

What I'll read next

We're going away for the weekend so I'm thinking eBooks, although there may be a hold waiting for me at the library. I'd like to get back into Alison Weir's Six Wives books - I'm still stuck on the first one. But we're going to see SIX at the Opera House tomorrow night and that's sure to throw me right back into a Tudors obsession. Guaranteed. I also have the first Bollywood Confidential book, Spice and Smoke by Suleikha Snyder, which was another Kobo freebie that I downloaded to test whether I felt like that series. And I've just noticed Hamilton's Battalion is there as well and how have I not read that yet???

Review: The Lawyer's Luck

The Lawyer's Luck by Piper Huguley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This novella prequel to Hugely's "Home to Milford College" was available free on Kobo, which I appreciated. I'm trying to read more books generally by authors of colour, but particularly romance by Black women, but while the idea of Home to Milford College appeals to me, as a queer Christian, I'm wary of most books marketed as Christian fiction. So a free novella meant I could taste and see whether I was going to find the particular flavour of Christianity offputting for me. I really didn't. I think the only problem I'm going to have here is the same one I had with beginning to read The Brothers Sinister with the prequel novella, written later. I want more stories with *these* characters, when the story is actually written later about the predeccessors to the characters the series is actually about . I got over that quickly with the Brothers Sinister and I'll get over it here, too.

I loved the setup - I love the contradiction between Lawyer as "I should be the protector" against his actual approach to life and then Realie's pragmatism and complete lack of romanticism. And the ending was absolutely satisfying. I'm definitely adding the series proper to my reading list.

What I read in 2019

I couldn't work out how to share the Goodreads "My Year In Books" graphic to a blog (rather than to Twitter or Facebook - although I did finally find a permalink) so I won't - also, despite telling me that I'd read 40 books for the year in the reading challenge, it only acknowledges 38 in "My year in Books", so something is skew-wiff there. 

I will say that when you (I) look at my reading for this year... there's a lot of romance. I did a very rough genre breakdown and came up with the following numbers:

Historical Romance: 10
Contemporary Romance: 10
Historical fiction that is not strictly romance: 2
SFF: 9
YA (I know, it's not a genre): 1
School Stories: 1 (only one?)
Self help: 5
History: 2

Some other things of note:

• all female authors but one and a half (Max Gladstone is half of This is how you lose the time war)
• all authors but three are white, and this is something I really want to work on next year. I have a goal of reading at least twenty books by non-white authors in 2020.
• Some of the SFF could just as easily have counted as Romance, and vice versa. In fact, I've switched the Heather Rose Jones books from Historical Romance to SFF and back a couple of times: they're not strictly historical (being Ruritanian) and they're not strictly Romance, either, which is why I've finally left them in SFF.
• There is at least one long-form fic counted in here - Telanu's Truth and Measure. I went on a massive re-read of fics after finishing Casey McQuiston's Red, White and Royal Blue, and earlier in the year I went on a massive NCIS re-reading spree, but for some reason the only one I went looking for (and found) on Goodreads was T&M. Might try to do better with that next year?

As for the 30 (oh, help!) books on my Currently Reading list... there's actually quite a lot of NF History there. A couple library books I need to finish sooner rather than later - and some that have already gone back to the library. Must update the list...

Hopefully I'll be a bit better at updating this blog in 2020.  Wouldn't that be nice?

Wednesday Reads - 23rd October 2019

After a very long hiatus...

What I've recently finished reading:

Goodbye Picadilly, by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

First of the War at Home series, which I've begun mostly because I'd been reading some really great Downton Abbey fic and that reminded me that this existed. I enjoyed it: it's about a family who are comfortable upper-middle class (although the local Earl and Countess do figure!), and their servants and other members of the community. The structure of the series is that each book covers one year of the war (plus 1919 for the beginning of the post-war period), so this one is really only a few months, although plenty happens! There's some parts from the perspective of those on the battlefield, but very little: the series is the war at home, after all. Sadly this was not quite as good as the Downton Abbey fic, but it was perfectly readable, and as you'll see, I've already begun the second in the series.

[fic] Trust and Providence by Rachel Smith Cobleigh (rated M, m/f, Matthew/Mary, Anna/Bates)

This is the Downton Abbey fic mentioned above. It's a WIP, and last updated in 2015, so I don't have my hopes up. However, it ends at a nice enough spot as it is, and there's 400k words "so far". Christianity plays a significant role in the fic, so it's not for everyone. But I really rather liked it.

What I'm reading now:

Keep the Home Fires Burning by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Second in the War at Home series.

The Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jones

Second in the Alpennia series. I read the first a few months ago and loved it. The fourth in the series is coming out late this year.

What I'll be reading next:

More Alpennia, more War at Home, and I hope to get back to Alison Weir's "Six Tudor Queens" series.

A portion of the TBR pile

I came home from work tonight with a small pile of books to read.  It's not as though my existing TBR isn't already significant, but things just kept jumping out at me today.

Current loans from work include:

New Guard, by Robert Muchamore - the latest "Cherub"
A Call to Duty, by David Weber and Timothy Zahn - first of the new Manticore Ascendant sub-series
The Danish Girl, by David Ebershoff
While We Run, by Karen Healey
Queen Isabella by Alison Weir
Gay and Lesbian, Then and Now: Australian stories from a social revolution

So - how long will it take me to get all these read...?