The Last Devil to Die – by Richard Osman

22 06 2024

The fourth book in The Thursday Murder Club series is a good one!

The gang are back, and trying to work out who killed an acquaintance of theirs who worked in the antiques business – he was in one of the previous books, though I couldn’t remember him, but that’s probably just me!

There’s a side character in the books who has dementia, and that became a much more prominent part of this book. I always find dementia stories hard, but there was a whole chapter (23) written from his perspective that was just so heartfelt and beautifully written, I really appreciated it. A mention of dementia in the acknowledgements actually made me cry!

As per usual, I won’t be giving you much more about the plot for fear of spoilers, but I really enjoyed the characters, the story, all of it. I felt like I was there hanging out with them, it was just so enjoyable, and I flew through it in just eight days – it did wonders for my Goodreads goal!

Some of my favourite one liners from the book:

  • “You must only ever glance at new customers. Some people want eye contact, but most do not. You must treat customers like cats, and wait for them to come to you. Look too needy and you’ll scare them off”
  • “If there is one thing local councils like more than the Data Protection Act, it is money.”
  • “The nibbles were mainly Aldi, but with a sprinkling of Waitrose for effect.”
  • “He smells cheap, fried food and urine. The downside of never complaining is that the British really do put up with a lot.”

I learnt something from this book too: “An antique is anything over one hundred years old. Everything else is vintage, or collectable.” So there you go!


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Surprised by Joy – by C.S. Lewis

14 06 2024

As part of my ongoing “one C.S. Lewis grown up book per year” target, I picked up Surprised by Joy. This is his autobiography, but focussing solely on his journey towards Christianity, finishing with his conversion as a young adult.

A lot of the time seems to be given to his schooling in various forms (“Life at a vile boarding school is in this way a good preparation for the Christian life, that it teaches one to live by hope.”), and then through WWI, university and into work in academia. I enjoyed reading his story, but occasionally, and more so towards the end, he got quite philosophical, which got a bit too clever for me, which I’ve found to be a common occurrence with these books.

He’s friendly in the way he talks though, and quite self-deprecating, at the end of chapter one saying he’s written it so that people can “see at once what they’re in for and close the book with the least waste of time.”


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The Lazy Genius Kitchen – by Kendra Adachi

11 06 2024

I love the Lazy Genius content on social media, and I loved her first book, so getting this one was a no brainer! If you’ve not heard of her, I’d recommend reading my write up of The Lazy Genius Way to get a feel of what she’s about (TL:DR, be a genius about what matters, lazy about what doesn’t, and you name what matters, so it’s not a cult). Kendra writes in a lovely chatty way, so it’s very easy to read. She describes herself has having big sister energy, which she most certainly does!

This book is not a recipe book, but how to use the Lazy Genius principles in the hardest working room in most homes. There are two recipes in it, but they are more like side notes to her main points. The book is in three sections, the first goes through the five steps to use to Lazy Genius any part of your kitchen, the second helps apply these steps to various parts of of your kitchen, and the third section, my favourite, is a whole load of resources, lists, methods, advice, to help you use your kitchen better.

The only reason I didn’t give it five stars is, while this book does work for anyone, single, family, etc, there are a couple of points where it definitely assumes your kitchen is a little bigger than my tiny one-bed-flat kitchen, she’s a big fan of the zone, and I don’t have space for as many as she sometimes suggests, nor is any part of my kitchen far from any other part, so when she suggests storing certain things near each other, mine all is already!

But this doesn’t detract, it’s a great book to read through once, and then come back to as a reference, most definitely.


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The No2 Feline Detective Agency – by Mandy Morton

16 05 2024

I bought this for my mum as a bit of a joke as she loves the Alexander McCall-Smith books, and then she, possibly as an act of revenge, leant it back to me.

The thing is, there is nothing about this book that requires the characters to be cats, which is surprising given that’s the main thing they’ve changed from the books they’re spoofing. The cats drive cars, they use pens, they sit at tables, they wear human clothes, they don’t even lick themselves clean (there’s reference to scrubbing their fur with soap).

The story itself is fine. It’s cute and cosy, has dramatic turns and likeable characters. But the story would have been exactly the same if they were humans, so it all seemed a bit pointless. There is one tiny bit of the story that being a cat sort of worked better for, but a negligible change would have made it work for people too so it didn’t seem enough of a point.

Nice idea, decent story, just not enough made of it’s main selling point to make the joke work for me.


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The No-Show – by Beth O’Leary

6 05 2024

I needed an easy read and this definitely was one, evidenced by the fact I read it in eight days even though I was trying to get through a magazine at the same time!

Three women, unknown to each other, have valentines plans, but are stood up, all by a man by the name of Joseph Carter. Each of their stories begins there, and we see what happens over the following year.

It’s easy to read, engaging, becoming addictive later on, and I very much enjoyed it – great bank holiday weekend read!


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Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men – by Caroline Criado Perez

29 04 2024

I’d wanted to read this for ages, and then suddenly a friend was offering to lend it to me, so I jumped at the chance.

It’s not a happy read, the whole way through, you are pummelled with negative stories and stats, that make you realise just how far we still have to go; there’s not a lot of celebrating progress made. The afterword talks a little about what can be done to improve things, but I think it might have made the book a little less harrowing if this was sprinkled more throughout.

That said, it felt like a very important read, it’s a reality. And it’s not just one person blindly sharing their opinion, it’s incredibly well researched; at the back of the book are 70 pages of references used! (Which gives an added bonus of the book not being quite as long as you first think it’s going to be!)

The author talks a lot about the “gender data gap”, this is when studies/designers/anyone just use data from men and assume it’s the same for women, or use data of both genders but don’t disaggregate it to look for differences between the two. But this isn’t right, because being equal doesn’t mean being the same.

Most of the content can be summarised in three main themes, the female body and its invisibility, male sexual violence against women, and unpaid care work.

A few quotes to give you a flavour:

  • “They didn’t deliberately set out to exclude women. They just didn’t think about them. They didn’t think to consider if women’s needs might be different.”
  • “[Women] were often discounted from studies as “confusing factors””
  • “We continue to rely on data from studies done on men as if they apply to women.”
  • “Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash […] But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured […] She is also 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom.”
  • “There is one EU regulatory test that requires a […] female dummy. […] This dummy is only tested in the passenger seat. […] This female dummy is not really female. It is just a scaled-down male dummy.”
  • “PMS affects 90% of women, but is chronically under-studied: one research round-up found five times as many studies on erectile dysfunction than on PMS.”
  • “Getting to grips with the reality that gender-neutral does not automatically mean gender-equal would be an important start. And the existence of sex-disaggregated data would certainly make it much harder to keep insisting, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that women’s needs can safely be ignored in pursuit of a greater good.”

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The Other Boleyn Girl – by Philippa Gregory

22 03 2024

The next in my go through Philippa Gregory’s Tudor novels, easily the most famous, the only one I’m aware of that’s been made into a film, and characters that feel a little more familiar than in the last couple of books I’d read, which I guess made it a little easier to read.

That said, it’s still over 500 pages, and small font, so it took me about 6 weeks to read – not good for my Goodreads targets at all!

We all know Anne Boleyn as the second wife of Henry VIII, but this is the story of the affair her sister Mary had with him first, followed by the story we know better, but with other strings to its bow too.

Some people are critical of the historical accuracy of Gregory’s Tudor fiction, and yes, the conversations and how things happened are clearly imagined. However, some things that happened in this book were truly shocking and so as soon as I finished I opened up our friend Wikipedia, and found that the basic facts were indeed true.

The further I got through the book, the more hooked I became. And now I write this with the film on in the background, which has a ridiculous number of famous people in it, let’s see how it goes….


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Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, The Complete Screenplay – by J.K. Rowling & Steve Kloves

11 02 2024

I would say very similar comments to the second book in this series: a quick read, hard to keep track of the characters due to it being a script so no descriptions, and didn’t really care about the plot a lot. It’s fine, but just…. I dunno.

The only thing this had on the other two books, was that the book contained several illustrations, a mixture of costume sketches, renderings of scenery, designs for props, which did give a bit more of a feel of where you were. I wonder if it was managed by someone different to have this, as it also didn’t have the pretty cover the first two books had! It also seems to have an additional author who wasn’t on the first two.

I wanted to read it because I don’t like to leave a series half done, but I think it might be time to admit I should just stick to the original seven Harry Potter books…..


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Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd – by Jonas Jonasson

4 02 2024

Another great book from Jonas Jonasson, I’m a big fan!

It took me a while to get into this time – he does seem to have a habit of giving each character a very full and detailed back story, each of which are entertaining, but it can feel a bit jumping all over the place early on in the book as we meet everyone in turn, but once the main story got going it was great fun as per usual.

An estranged (without knowing it) son and an ex-wife of the same man, and seeking revenge, stumble across a business which sets out to do exactly that for people. Chaos ensues, there’s not much more to say without giving the fun away!

Some out of context quotes to give a feel for it:

  • “Murder was out of the question. But what if the boy died anyway? That would be a different story. The problem was that eighteen-year-old boys don’t just do that out of the blue. He would need some help along the way.”
  • “For years she had been certain that she wasn’t like other people, and that she therefore must be content with the small things in life. Now she lived with a person her own age who wasn’t like other people either; the two of them were more like each other.”
  • “She launched into a lecture, saying that some evidence indicated that Jesus would have voted no to Rohypnol and everything else, but that this theory was primarily based upon Matthew’s testimony that one must turn the other cheek if someone slapped you on the right cheek. She made special note of the bit about the right cheek. This could be interpreted to mean that we should be forgiving only of those who are left-handed, and that was practically nobody. It was, after all, difficult to deal a blow to someone’s right cheek with one’s own right hand.”
  • “His memory was all he could consult, and as everyone knew, that started to let you down once you were past thirty-five.”
  • “One of the many things he’d observed up to this point on his journey was the small plastic cards. It was a form of payment, and yet it wasn’t. The buyer always seemed to keep the card, but the seller never got upset about it.”
  • “No one was better than two Englishmen at becoming enemies over basically nothing. Over whose turn it was to use the dartboard at the pub. Over which football team one should support, actual quality notwithstanding. Two Brits couldn’t even agree on the simple question of whether or not they were part of Europe.”
  • [On the arrival of electricity to a Kenyan village] “The only woman on the village council had argued for washing machines, stoves and water closets. When she added the future potential of Netflix, she got all the men except the chief on her side.”

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Skipping Christmas – by John Grisham

29 12 2023

A couple who’s daughter has gone off on a gap year realised they could save a fortune by just skipping Christmas that year, and spend it on a cruise instead.

This means no decorations, no parties, no food, no presents. Needless to say, friends and neighbours are not impressed, particularly neighbours who try to be the best decorated street in the town! Chaos obviously ensues.

This is the book that the film “Christmas with the Kranks” was based on – I’ve not seen it, but the trailer seems to make it a bit more extreme and slapstick, which is fair enough.

It’s a fun book, nothing like Grisham’s normal stuff – and only 200 pages! I really enjoyed it, would recommend.

The only thing I’d change is to remove two unnecessary sentences about skin colour – the book is only 22 years old, but it seems things have changed even in that time…


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