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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World History in Minutes – by Tat Wood and Dorothy Ail

6 12 2023

I picked this up as a way to give myself a quick overview of lots of things I didn’t know. I didn’t like history at school (with a couple of exceptions for the Tudors and Victorians), but thought it would be good to give myself a basic education.

I don’t think this book was the right choice. A lot of the pages seemed to have a load of assumed knowledge on people/places/scenarios, so I didn’t have a clue what they were on about, there wasn’t enough explanation. It also had a large number of typos that a basic spell check would have picked up on, which made me question the quality of what I was reading too. Most pages had an illustration, be it photo, diagram, painting, but they were all in black and white, so when it was a map with a key, it was very hard to distinguish between various shades of grey.

It starts with pre-history and goes right through to the 2008 credit crunch. I particularly struggled with the early stuff, cos I found that I just didn’t care enough, which meant I had a negative attitude through most of the book, and combined with the quality issues mentioned above, I’m just very relieved to have got to the end and ticked it off – it took me a month! Not a book I’ll be keeping.


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Lessons in Chemistry – by Bonnie Garmus

29 10 2023

Another of the books that I’d seen everywhere, people seemed to rave about, it was on the shelf in the supermarket, so I grabbed it to try, and I’m glad I did!

It’s the 1950s and Elizabeth Zott is a scientist, specifically a chemist. It’s not an easy time to be a woman in science. She meets a man, a few things happen, which I won’t spoil, though he does get her into rowing, and then a few years later we find her as a single mother and unemployed. She ends up hosting a cooking show on TV, (because of course, cooking is just chemistry), but goes a lot more science-y and a lot less girly than her producers would like! There is so much more to it than this, but I don’t want to give too much away.

Her dog, “six thirty” is one of my favourite things about the book, she decides she’s going to teach him words, hundreds by the end of it, which sounds ridiculous, but it somehow seems reasonable, because after all, dogs are clever creatures! Sometimes the book tells things from the dogs perspective, and somehow it’s just the most heart warming parts of the book!

I really enjoyed this, have already passed it on for my mum to read!

One of my measures of writing I’ve enjoyed is when I’ve turned down a load of page corners, which I did with this, so here are some of my favourite lines:

“She certainly didn’t like favours. Favours smacked of cheating.”

“She continued to believe that all it took to get through life was grit. Sure grit was critical, but it also took luck, and if luck wasn’t available, then help. Everyone needed help.”

“People were always insisting they knew what [fiction] meant, even if the writer hadn’t meant that at all, and even if what they thought it meant had no actual meaning.”

“Not that there was anything wrong with being unattractive. She was unattractive and she knew it. […] But none of them were – or would ever be – ugly. Only [he] was ugly, and that was because he was unattractive on the inside.”

“As you well know, humans are biologically programmed to sleep twice a day – a siesta in the afternoon, then eight hours of sleep at night.”

“‘Sure as death and taxes.’
‘Everybody dies. […] But not everyone pays their taxes.'”

“‘I think we both know, […] that God is just a bit different from Yahtzee.'”

“‘All dogs have the ability to bite. […] Just as all humans have the ability to cause harm. The trick is to act in a reasonable way so that harm becomes unnecessary.'”

“The unrelenting burden of misunderstanding” – this sums up so much of the book, give it a go and you’ll see!


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Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, The Original Screenplay – by J.K. Rowling

14 08 2023

More books like this and I might actually have a hope of reaching my reading goal this year – I’m currently vastly behind! It was a three day read, mostly because it’s just the script for a 2 hour film so doesn’t take long at all.

Like last time, it was hard to keep track of the characters because you’ve had no description of them, and no face to remember. I didn’t feel like I cared about the plot too much, I guess partly because of this, mostly just read it because it was easy to read and is part of the Harry Potter universe. It was fine, I’ll put it on the shelf with the rest.

We start in New York from last time, and travel via London to Paris, including a visit to Hogwarts, so there’s a bit more of the magical world to see, and a familiar face from the original series is back, just a lot lot younger – Professor Dumbledore!

I’m currently watching the film on a streaming service – they’ve just got to Hogwarts and that familiar refrain started playing, which was lovely.

Overall it’s fine, but maybe these prequels have just struggled by not having the depth of full novels behind them like the original books? They definitely don’t feel like they’ve been the same roaring success…. of course, that doesn’t mean I won’t read the next one eventually.


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Daisy Jones & the Six

11 08 2023

Anyone who read this book seemed to rave about it, so I wanted to give it a try, and they weren’t wrong!

It’s written in a really unusual style – the book is about the [fictional] rise and fall of the band The Six, and the singer Daisy Jones, but is written as interviews with everyone looking back on that time. It reads like one of those documentaries with a load of talking heads that tell the story with a very occasional narrator, really clever.

Because the interviews with the author are done separately, you sometimes get little bits of the story that contradict from person to person, which makes it more realistic really when they’re remembering that far back.

The story they tell itself is gripping, the life of rock stars in the 1970s, with all you would expect to come with that – I flew through the book.

The only slight downside for me (and slight spoiler warning here) was a little twist at the end that was somewhat reminiscent of How I Met Your Mother, which I had never really liked. But I’d only knock off maybe a quarter of a star off for that, as the rest was so good.


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The Bullet That Missed – by Richard Osman

31 07 2023

The Thursday Murder Club are back for book three!

This time they’re looking into a cold case of a young local news presenter who’d been killed a decade previously – and while they’re looking into this, Elizabeth starts receiving anonymous threatening messages…

It’s so weird how a murder mystery can be such a cosy read, but the characters are so warm and real (special mention for Joyce and her dog, Alan), and you can just feel Osman’s sense of humour and enjoyment of British idiosyncrasies throughout.

As with previous books, there’s not a lot I can say without giving spoilers, but I was up rather late last night as I read the last 50 pages or so, absolutely hooked!

My copy from Waterstones had a little bonus bit of content at the back, a little insight into Joyce’s side project in this book, which was a good bit of fun.

Some spoiler-free quotes from the book:

  • “The Thursday Murder Club? Sounds made up.” “Everything is made up, when you really think about it.”
  • “I just think that you can be very talented and have lovely hair. Perhaps I’m shallow, but both of those things are important to me. Claudia Winkleman is a good example.”
  • “Everyone wants to feel special but nobody wants to feel different.”
  • “If life ever seems too complicated, if you think no one can help, sometimes the right person to turn to is an eight-year-old.”

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The ABC Murders – by Agatha Christie

8 11 2022

I watched an adaptation of this on TV years ago, and yet couldn’t remember what happened, so I was able to go into this completely free of spoilers!

Poirot received a letter from “ABC” telling him a murder is going to be committed in Andover on a specific date, it happens, and the victims name begins with A. So when he receives a follow-up letter threatening a murder in Bexhill, it’s taken as more than a hoax! You can see the pattern forming for yourself…

Thought to be the work of a maniac, Poirot is still keen to find reason, he insists that even a maniac will have a perceived logic behind what he or she is doing. So even when an arrest is eventually made, for Poirot the mystery was not solved until he had discovered why.

Obviously it’s a mystery, so I’m not going to tell you much more. I was worried it was going to be a bit sedate when something was revealed relatively early on, but not to worry, it’s as clever as any of her others that I’ve read so far!


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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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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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk44C0G2ZyE
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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