Rainbow Valley – by L M Montgomery

1 11 2024

Gosh, over five years since I finished the main section of Anne of Green Gables books, I recently found the last two books which focus more on her children in a charity shop for 50p each, so it’s time to properly finish the series!

Anne is in this book occasionally, and when she does pop up, is still her wonderful self, but the focus is more on the Meredith family, which is the town’s new widowed minister and his four children, who are the same age as Anne’s four oldest children, and make firm friends with them, as well as a girl called Mary who they find hiding in their barn having run away and not eaten for days. Mary is taken in by the Meredith children (or the “manse” children), and with their father so deeply engrossed in his work, he doesn’t even notice for days! The book follows the various escapades of the children, as well as the impact on their father.

A couple of things really tickled me: first was the absolute hatred the author seems to have for Methodists – there are so many throwaway comments from various characters in the book despairing of them, for no given reason! For example: “Fortunately, all the people the Merediths have offended so far are Methodists.” Secondly there’s a key character in the book called Rosemary West – how was L M Montgomery to know that many years later there’d be a famous serial killer with this name!

Another thing that seems bizarre reading it over 100 years after it was published, is the absolute horror the characters recoil with when someone dares to say the word “darn”, and then the n word is totally permissable!

Right at the end of the book there’s a bit of foreshadowing of the coming First World War, which I believe is the setting for the next and final book which I intend to dive straight into now I’ve finished this one, but first, here are some of the lines from the book that made me turn down page corners:

  • “A manse cat should at least look respectable, in my opinion, whatever he really is. But I never saw such a rakish-looking beast. And he walks along the ridgepole of the manse almost every evening at sunset, Mrs Dr dear, and waves his tail, and that is not becoming.”
  • “I’ve always thought graveyards must be delightful places to play in.”
  • “A handsome rooster like Adam is just as nice a pet or a dog or cat, I think. If he was a canary nobody would wonder. […] I never liked dolls and cats. Cats are too sneaky and dolls are dead.“
  • “Oh, father only said that in the pulpit, he has more sense than to really think it outside.”
  • “Your wife never had a new hat for ten years – no wonder she died.”

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Mansfield Park – by Jane Austen

12 10 2024

The final one (just in the order I’ve read them!) of the six completed books completed by Austen, and I really loved it! I really warmed to Fanny Price more than I have when watching film adaptations. I’m most familiar with the 1999 film for which I can only find this trailer, which makes it seem far more American than it is! But the book has so much more to it, which is standard, and some things that just happened completely differently.

Fanny is originally from Portsmouth, in a family with not a lot of money, but age 10 is sent to live with her wealthy relatives in Mansfield Park, and the majority of the book takes place when she’s maybe 18ish, so has spent a good chunk of her life there. Because of this, there are some negative comments about Portsmouth in the book, which I couldn’t help but enjoy!

  • “Her daughters were very much confined; Portsmouth was a very sad place; they did not often get out.”
  • “How her heart swelled with joy and gratitude as she passed the barriers [out] of Portsmouth.”

Of course, Austen lived a long time ago, and so you do have to get over various cultural norms of the time, not least of which is cousins getting married being completely normal: “It began to strike him […] whether it might not be possible, an hopeful undertaking to persuade her that her warm and sisterly regard for him would be foundation enough for wedded love.”

It took me a long time, as these books tend to do, but the further I got through it, the more I was finding moments to read a few more pages, I really enjoyed it.

Some other bits that made me fold down page corners:

  • “Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”
  • “You seemed almost as fearful of notice and praise as other women were of neglect.”
  • “She does not think evil, but she speaks it, speaks it in playfulness; and thought I know it to be playfulness, it grieves me to the soul.”
  • “I had thought you peculiarly free from wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence.”
  • “Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.”

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Unrestrained – by Caroline Cameron

24 08 2024

Caroline is a colleague of mine who kindly gave us each a copy of her book when she joined our team a year or two ago, and I finally sat down to read it.

In the book she shares her story of abuse, including some truly awful examples of specific incidents, but also, her testimony of how God brought her through it.

The way it’s written means that, while the content is really harrowing at times, it’s actually really easy to read; the chapters are short, each ending in a space for pause and reflection. In fact, the further you get through it, the more it feels uplifting as you see how there really is hope after abuse.

It really feels like it’s written for those who are suffering or have suffered abuse, but it’s helpful for anyone to read to give a better basis to support those we may know now or in the future who suffer through this.


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The Radleys – by Matt Haig

21 08 2024

I generally enjoy Matt Haig’s books, and saw they were making a film of this so thought I’d read the book before it came out. What I didn’t realise ’til I started reading it, was that it’s a vampire book, which isn’t really my cup of tea.

The Radleys seem from the outside to be an ordinary family – but actually, they’re vampires. The parents choose to live as abstainers – not consuming any blood, not human, nor vampire. The two teenage children don’t yet know that they’re vampires. Of course, the plot comes from them finding out who they are in rather dramatic circumstances and the fall out from that.

It still felt very Matt Haig to read, and the story itself was fine, easy to keep interested, it’s just not really my genre.

The trailer for the film is below:


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Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing – by Matthew Perry

31 07 2024

This was such a sad book to read, but I guess it’d be foolish to expect otherwise. It was published in 2022 in hardback, but he died in 2023, and so when the paperback came out this year, while the content of the book is the same, the “about the author” is in the past tense, and that alone broke my heart a little, but it doesn’t get much easier once the book starts. (I’ll be sharing more about the content of this book than I normally do, because it’s not exactly a spoiler to say life was hard for him!)

  • In the foreword by Lisa Kudrow, she finishes by saying, “He has survived impossible odds, but I had no idea how many times he almost didn’t make it. I’m glad you’re here, Matty. Good for you. I love you.” – the heart breaks a little more.
  • Then the prologue starts, “Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead. If you like, you can consider what you’re about to read to be a message from the beyond, my beyond.” – I mean, really, he had no idea how quickly that became true.
  • In chapter one he says, “It is very odd to live in a world where if you died, it would shock people but surprise no one.” – just so accurate for how we felt that day.

A big theme of the book is the problems he had with addiction for most of his life, and we hear how at a month old, he was given barbiturates for colic for a month, and he obviously wonders how much it all has to do with that. At one point as an adult he’s up to 55 Vicodin a day among other things, he names all sorts of drugs that I’d never even heard of before. He tells us that over his life he spent about $7million just trying to get sober, and we hear a lot about that struggle too.

He talks about the women he’s loved with such affection, sadly most of these relationships seem to end because he’s scared, or doesn’t want to bring them down into what he’s dealing with – but remarkably he remained friends with several of them. He also talks about his desire to have children, and knowing that it never happened makes it so sad to read.

He also speaks about God a LOT more than I expected, including a prayer in 1994, not long before he got cast in Friends of “God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous.”, then later, an experience he had of God’s presence in his kitchen when at one of his lowest points, and many of mentions of his sureness of God’s existence throughout. I’d seen articles referencing this in the past but never got around to reading them – I will now be going back to see what they have to say (here and here if you’re interested).

He talks about his weight fluctuation when on Friends: “You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season – when I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills.” He states that he was never high when they filmed it, but was hungover sometimes. Season 9 was the only season he was sober for the entirety of.

Towards the end of the book is where it gets tough. If you’d been reading it when he was still alive, it would have been full of hope as he talks about how he’s managed to quit drugs, drinking and smoking, and shares his hopes for the future, for the second half of his life. But of course, those of us reading it now, know that wasn’t to be, and it just made it yet another heart-breaking section.

The only criticism I’d have of the book, and the reason I only gave it 4 stars, is that the structure of it makes it a bit tricky to follow the timeline. It’s a series of chapters which I think are in chronological order, but with interludes between each which could be from anywhen, and even in the chapters, I’m not convinced he doesn’t sometimes flashback. Just a mention of a year here or there would be helpful. I mean, when he talks about Friends he does sometimes mention the series we’re at at that point, but maybe just something at the start of each chapter so you know how far time has moved on, and where we are, would have made me feel a little less lost at times. One story I think he told twice, but once in the prologue and once much later on when it fit in the timeline, and I guess he told different parts of it more the second time, either way, felt a bit odd.

While it was a sad book to read, it was easy to read as far as flying through it goes.

I’ve used the words “sad” and “heart-breaking” so many times in this post, but even so, I’m glad I read this book.


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One, Two, Buckle My Shoe – by Agatha Christie

21 07 2024

I like that Agatha Christie gives some of her books nursery rhyme titles, so here’s another one I grabbed from a local charity shop – I wonder if there are any others, I’ve read a few now!

The title has very little to do with the story other than she does manage to tell it broken into sections which come under each line of the poem. The incident is actually set in a dentist’s surgery – Poirot goes for an appointment in the morning, then around lunchtime, the dentist is found dead with a gun by him; all signs point to suicide, but Poirot thinks there’s more too it.

I walked past my dentist surgery in the week and couldn’t work out why it gave me the creeps, until I remembered that I was reading this!

It’s good fun (murder aside), Poirot is on form as ever, and it keeps you guessing the whole way through. I do struggle sometimes with remember who each character is, but that’s probably more on me than the author!


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In A Thousand Different Ways – by Cecelia Ahern

14 07 2024

She’s back! For the last few books I’ve read of Cecelia Ahern’s they’ve been good, but not at the level of some of her earlier stuff that I really loved. With this book, it really feels like she’s back at her best, back at magical realism which is I think where her best work lies.

Aged eight, Alice suddenly starts to see colours around people, these colours represent their emotions, a sort of emotional synesthesia, and more than that, if she gets too close to the colours physically, she starts to feel them too. This results in her distancing herself from large groups, wearing dark glasses and gloves as much as possible, and refusing to get too near people – it makes life a bit tricky. On top of this, her mother has bi-polar disorder, and her younger brother absorbs every feeling she puts out, to his detriment as the book goes on. Alice ends up at a boarding school for troubled youngsters, and then we follow her through what happens after that as a young adult. One day she sees a man on a train who has no colours, she can’t read him at all, which she’s never experienced, and it intrigues her. I’ll leave it there!

It’s such an interesting idea to read about, and this is the sort of things I’ve always loved with Cecelia Aherns stories.

A few lines that made me turn page corners down:

  • “I sit in the quiet area, reserved for kids who aren’t feeling well, who have a broken arm or leg, or some sort of special needs. My special need is to be away from everyone. Every single person.”
  • “You can’t rely on other people’s weaknesses, you’ve got to work on your own strengths.” “But what if seeing other people’s weaknesses is my strength?”
  • “Training to do something doesn’t actually mean you can do it.”

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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – by Gabrielle Zevin

7 07 2024

Another book that seemed to have a lot of people raving about it, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, it was decent, but I don’t know if I’d rave about it.

The book is about two friends, Sadie and Sam, from age about 11 to 37. They love computer games, and start creating their own together, it sounds a little niche, and it is, a little. The basis of the story though is their friendship, as the cover says “This is not a romance, but it is about love”, which describes their relationship well.

Fortunately, they don’t go into too much technical detail, but when they do talk about the games, they more focus on the narrative or concept of them, and when there is technical language, (like making an engine for a game), I didn’t feel that I needed to understand it to follow what was going on, so it didn’t alienate me.

There were a couple of sections of the book that I found trickier to engage with (the book is divided into ten sections, each of which has a few chapters). One was a series of second person vignettes as someone goes through something that would be a spoiler if I told you, but it was the second personness that weirded me out a bit. The other was told from inside the world of a specific game, so suddenly you were in a whole new world with no warning, and all new characters to boot. But they were only a small section of the book overall, and other than those I enjoyed it and read it in good chunks at a time.

As I often do, a few out-of-context quotes that made me fold down the corners of pages, I’m not saying I agree with all of them, but that they made me think for a bit, or just smile:

  • “Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity. […] The people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.”
  • “The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.”
  • “Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.”
  • “If it doesn’t work, all we’ve lost is a lot of time and money.”


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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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