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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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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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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The Girl Who Saved Christmas – by Matt Haig

23 12 2023

The second in Matt Haig’s Christmas trilogy, I correct myself slightly on what I said last year – the books are not completely separate. The boy in the first book is the adult Father Christmas in this book, but while there are a few call backs, it’s really not dependent on having read it, this stands alone well.

This is set in Victorian England, and as it’s a children’s book, of course we bump into Charles Dickens at one point, and crash into Queen Victoria’s bedroom in another (where she is sat up in bed wearing her crown – naturally).

The book follows the story of Amelia Wishart, a chimney sweep who early on loses her mother and is taken to the workhouse by a horrible man. This runs parallel to Father Christmas dealing with the lack of hope in the world and therefore lack of magic to power his sleigh, this is partly due a troll attack that stopped him from delivering last year at all!

So there’s a lot going on, the two stories obviously meet and overlap, and everything’s alright in the end.


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