Death on the Nile – by Agatha Christie

31 10 2021

My third Agatha Christie and my second Poirot!

I’m starting to notice a pattern now (unless it’s just coincidence with the ones I’ve read so far), which is why I’ve struggled to get into each one, and that’s that she opens the book by introducing an absolute shedload of characters with maybe a couple of pages each, and then the story properly starts, at which point my head is spinning, trying to work out who’s who.

That said, it then doesn’t seem to take long after that, and always gets better once a diagram is thrown in. This time it was a plan of the cabins on the boat with all the names of the occupants, though it didn’t appear until about halfway through the book.

The early character confusion aside, I really enjoyed the book, the further I got in, the faster I read, and the less I was able to put it down! Obviously, it’s a murder mystery, so I’m not going to give much away as that’s the fun of the book (if you can call books about murder “fun”, but given Christie’s insane success, I think it’s ok to enjoy it!), but it’s got all the twists and turns and red herrings you’d hope for, and Poirot’s brilliant lines, as well as a couple from Christie herself!

As I was borrowing my mum’s copy I didn’t turn down pages to remember the quotes I really liked, but it turns out that this was time wasted since I fell asleep on the book last weekend and totally creased the cover – what a fail!

Anyway, there’s a Kenneth Branagh film of this coming out next year, the cast includes Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Russell Brand and Adam Garcia, so naturally I’m intrigued and excited to see that! Trailer below:


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Freckles – by Cecelia Ahern

11 10 2021

I’ve read everything Cecelia Ahern has written, but normally try to wait for paperback, so when my friend got the hardback copy and then passed it on, I was thrilled to not have to wait!

Allegra Bird is a traffic warden just outside of Dublin, and is unnerved when an angry driver tells her that people are the average of the five people they spend the most time with, and so hers must be awful. She realises that she doesn’t know who her five people are, and that’s the focus of most of the book. There’s also a storyline about her trying to meet her mum who gave her up when she was born.

It was ok, but definitely not my favourite among the other books she’s written. I have two main frustrations:

  • She decided not to use speech marks, which she hasn’t done before, but I’ve found a couple of other books do recently. I don’t get the point of this, all it really seems to do is make it harder to read!
  • The ending wasn’t strong. It was anti-climactic, convenient and just a bit twee. I was disappointed to be honest.

I gave it 3 stars on Goodreads, not awful, but low for me I guess.


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Sh**ged Married Annoyed – by Chris & Rosie Ramsey

23 09 2021

Yes, it has a rude word in the title, yes, some of the content isn’t the most edifying, but I’d just finished a 200-year-old novel that took forever and needed something trashy to fly through. Named after their stupidly successful podcast, there is some pretty rough stuff in there, scattered between just a load of chat between husband and wife.

Like the Ant and Dec books I’ve read, they’ve got different fonts to identify who’s talking, and a third font for the many, many letters from the public.

If you can get past some of the slightly gross stories, the rest of it is just a funny and easy read!


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Emma – by Jane Austen

17 09 2021

I’ve watched so many adaptations of this book, but never got around to reading it (though I did read the Alexander McCall-Smith version for the Austen Project a few years ago). But under my new goal of reading one Austen a year (among other things), I chose this as it’s the one I knew best of the ones still unread, so it was the obvious choice!

For those unaware, Emma is about 20 and lives a life of comfort and ease to the point of being somewhat spoilt, with her hypochondriac father. She has a habit for matchmaking, though doesn’t intend on marrying herself. She’s not someone you’d like in real life, but goes on quite a journey throughout the book. It’s a story about class and relationships, and looks at several pairings of people as you work your way through.

I really enjoyed it, but for some reason it took me 10 weeks to read! I didn’t realise it was broken up into three volumes, but at nearly 500 pages, I guess that makes sense! The other thing that really surprised me was that for a book that’s only just over 200 years old, how different some of the spellings are, I tried to note some down as I went:

“stopt”, “chuse”, “shew”, “dropt”, “staid”, “Swisserland”, “Surry”, “surprized”, “every where”, “every thing”, “what ever”, “&c”.

I quite like some of those, but they’d all be seen as wrong these days!

It feels like a warm hug of a read, probably because it’s just such a familiar story to me, but then again, there’s a reason why it’s a classic!

I will leave you with trailers for three of my favourite Emma adaptations if you want to dip your toe in:

Firstly, the BBC version from 2009, this is a 4 part series so gets in a lot more detail. I think Romola Garai is my favourite Emma in an adaptation.
Then the film that came out a couple of years ago, I always like to have a film and a series version incase you don’t have time for a full series! Bill Nighy is excellent in this as Mr Woodhouse!
And finally, one of my favourite films of all time, Clueless – the story of Emma, but redone for a 90s US high school – and including the never-aging Paul Rudd.

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The Thursday Murder Club – by Richard Osman

3 07 2021

I was so proud of myself for waiting for the paperback of this to come out, I’ve wanted to read it for ages! My parents gave it to me for my birthday, with my mum asking as I unwrapped it, if she could borrow it when I’m done! (Of course I said yes!)

Cooper’s Chase is an upmarket retirement village built up around an old convent in Kent, and four residents (Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim and Ron) meet on a Thursday in the Jigsaw Room and go through old unsolved murder cases to see what they can discover.

But then there’s a murder in the village, and they decide to do what they can to investigate. They’re a bit rebellious, not always keeping the police informed when they discover something, and then wanting to trade information with them!

It’s a lovely bunch of people, all with really defined characters, there’s a decent backstory to each of the police officers involved too. It’s so so weird that a murder mystery could be warm and fuzzy, but it is!

Also, because Richard Osman wrote it, there are obviously some random thoughts he’s thrown in, including an excellent analysis of Escape to the Country which Dave Gorman would be proud of, and insistence on the correct way to work through a double layered box of biscuits, the idea of retirement village developers looking for 60+ year olds in Waitrose cafes, and this highly relatable line: “He had read a headline about Diet Coke once, which was so worrying he had chosen not to read the article.”

My only slight slight niggle? I don’t understand why there’s a dog on the cover – any insight is welcome!


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The Girl Who Saved The King Of Sweden – by Jonas Jonasson

11 06 2021

When I read Jonasson’s books about Allan Karlsson and thoroughly enjoyed them, a friend sent me this one, and I finally got around to reading it!

For the first part of the book it follows two stories separately, starting in 1970s South Africa, and 1940s Sweden respectively. Nombeko lives in the slums of Soweto emptying latrines, but gets run over by a drunk engineer, and as her punishment is taken to work on his compound. Ingmar is completely obsessed with the Swedish royals and desperate to meet the king, but when he manages and is disappointed with what he finds, he takes on a life mission to end the Swedish monarchy either by himself, or any decendents he may have.

It took me a while to see how on other these stories would combine, but that they did! I don’t want to give too much away, but hopefully without context this is enough to whet your appetite: the rest of the book contains: twins registered as one person, a surplus atomic bomb, a pillow warehouse, and a potato farm. It’s maybe a tiny smidge less wacky than Jonasson’s other books, but not much!

Right at the start of the book I struggled a bit as characters got introduced and then disappeared from the plot completely, so it was hard to know who was worth “getting to know”, it happened a few times through the book, but it became easier to identify who these were, and just focus on the characters that stuck around. Once it got into a rhythm I really enjoyed it!


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Run Baby Run – by Nicky Cruz with Jamie Buckingham

13 05 2021

Since reading The Cross and The Switchblade last year, which is about David Wilkerson and his work with the gangs in 1950s New York, I’ve been keen to read this which tells the story of one of the most powerful gang leaders he met, and his journey to Christ. I borrowed this copy off my mum, which her friend gave her for her birthday in 1971! Once I had re-taped the front cover so that it was a bit less fragile, I got going!

You kind of think that there at least had to be something in Nicky, some potential for good that would have come out in the end anyway, but from the first half of the book, you really don’t see it. As it’s told from his perspective, you get a real sense of his bloodthirstiness, his real enjoyment of violence, it’s pretty scary! And therefore even more amazing to us mere mortals, that he could come, not only to know Jesus, but to be an incredible witness for Him! The particular focus of his ministry is those still in the gangs and later, those whose lives are being wrecked by drugs.

It’s really encouraging to see that he doesn’t necessarily have a smooth journey, more than once there’s a real crisis of faith, of confidence in what he’s doing – it’s helpful to see that while he has this amazing story, he is still human just like the rest of us!

A hugely powerful and challenging book, just like Wilkerson’s was, and I’d hugely recommend it.


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The Last Day – by Andrew Hunter Murray

1 05 2021

I was fascinated by the concept of this book. The year is 2059, 30 years after the Earth stopped spinning, after gradually slowing down between 2020 and 2029. The plant is now in lock-step with the sun, and so half the world is in cold darkness, half is scorching hot, and life only exists on the border between the two – interesting!

The book is set in the UK, where the sun is low in the sky as if just after dawn – this is one of the things I found hardest to keep straight in my mind, e.g. when the character returned home in an evening, in my head it was dark, and I frequently found myself having to completely reimagine scenes as they would have been!

As the author also happens to be a QI elf, the book explains what caused the rotation of the Earth to slow, some of the more detailed affects that has had, which make it much more satisfying for a logistical brained person like me! Things like: how the first day of The Slow, was only 0.144 seconds longer than the previous day, but how that in itself was enough to collapse GPS systems worldwide, how 15 months into the slow, countries were adding Dead Air to their days to cope with them lengthening, but how England updated Eurotunnel timetables daily, and France weekly, so after a while, there was a crash, and how houses have been adapted to simulate day and night with reflective shutters so people still have a chance to sleep properly.

I have one outstanding niggle, which is why the earth stopped spinning and and the deceleration didn’t continue into starting to spin the other way, but that might just be my lack of understanding – hopefully I will lend it to my dad at some point, and then he can explain it to me!

In all honesty, it’s these bits of the book I found most interesting, how it would all happen, rather than the ‘plot’ which involves Ellen Hopper trying to uncover a secret that the government wants to keep hidden, although that was interesting too, just not what gripped my attention and imagination the most!

Just two quotes to share from this book:

At one point, someone who remembers life before The Stop is talking about it and says “I always think it must have been better to be Cain than Adam,. No memory of paradise.”

And later on, “Everyone says they’re opposite endeavours, politics and science, that one deals with truth and the other with perception.”


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Such A Fun Age – by Kiley Reid

7 04 2021

I’m a huge sucker for hyped books, I always assume they must be hyped for a reason, so that’s what led me to pick this up.

The book focuses on the relationship between Alix and her babysitter/nanny Emira, and the fallout from an evening where, in a supermarket, Emira is stopped by the security guard as they think she’s kidnapped the white child who she has with her.

Emira is 25, works two part time jobs and is painfully aware that by her next birthday she will come off of her families health insurance, whereas all her friends seem to be doing much better as becoming adults. But she also has a beautiful relationship with the little girl she looks after 3 days a week, and seems to understand her much more than her mother does sometimes.

There were several twists in the book (and so I won’t say much more for fear of spoilers), one or two made me gasp out loud, but one I did see from very early on, which is the only reason I didn’t give it 5 stars to be honest!


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The Great Divorce – by C.S. Lewis

28 03 2021

I was thinking about what books I should aim to read this year, and having had this set of C.S. Lewis books for several years, I thought I should aim to read at least one each year, and I remember a friend saying how good this one was a long time ago, and at under 150 pages, it seemed like a doable step into “clever” books.

The book is essentially an illustration of Heaven and Hell, expressed in the first person of someone who’s in a grey town, and gets on a bus to a bright country. It feels very much like someone telling you about a weird dream they had, and takes some work to get your head around until they explicitly say what those places represent (around halfway through!), but once that’s happened, it makes a bit more sense!

When he reaches the bright place, everything is so much more solid than those who have arrived, so much so that he describes those from the bus as Ghosts in comparison. There are several stories where Ghosts are met by Solid People who they maybe knew in life, and we see examples of different ways people have lived, which they think are fine and good, but maybe weren’t so much.

Towards the end of the book I think I started to feel out of my depth again, I imagine cleverer people would get more out of it than I did, but certainly I enjoyed it and it gave me plenty to think about from the rest of the book!

A few lines that made me think:

  • “A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that pint, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good.”
  • “Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them.”
  • “Do not fash yourself with such questions. Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time until you are beyond both.”
  • “There have been men before now wo got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself. […] There have bene some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”
  • “I am in love. In love, do you understand?”


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