#WOYBS
#WHATSONYOURBOOKSHELF
Dear friends. A more contemplative selection of books this month, with two outstanding memoirs and a couple of books set in the past.
I'm starting first with my 5 star read, the non-fiction The Apothecary by the Sea by Victoria Bennett. An inspiring and spellbinding read. Thanks as always to NetGalley and the various publishers of the books reviewed below for the advance digital copies.
#WOYBS
Dear friends. Welcome to another month's reading. It's a varied selection with a 5 star short story collection, a couple of mystery/thrillers, and a heart warming tale of bereaved women who find friendship.
Non-fiction features a book on the notorious Victorian baby killer, Amelia Dyer, and how to reinvigorate your body through menopause with delicious and time-saving recipes.
All the books were received as free digital advance copies from NetGalley and the publishers, in return for an honest review.
Dear friends. As I mentioned last month, the months leading up to Christmas are lean for new fiction. Not many new books are published at this time. Fortunately I do have a handful of good new books for you,
I've mentioned before that I mostly read books that I get via NetGalley. I thought I'd explain what this is, and why it exists.
Dear friends. The darker months bring the promise of more time for reading. I'm on target to finish my challenge of 100 books in 2023 (Goodreads) but need to read a bit faster to make sure.
As always I hope to bring a varied selection for you, fiction and non-fiction.
Dear friends. I've had a fantastic month's reading with 10 days on the beach in Greece, where I demolished several books. In the Good Reads' reading challenge I'm on 61 books, seven books ahead of schedule, with a target of 100.
Some of the books I read on holiday don't come out for a few weeks so I'm sharing those which are available now, or imminently.
First up, two 5 star reads, coincidentally both set in the 1950s.
Dear friends. March could be described as "the month that sunshine forgot." They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Unfortunately, it was a lion for most of the month! Let's hope for an improvement in April.
So what did I get up to? I continued with my monthly discovery of art, and I succeeded with my personal self-care goals. There were two colourful Kettlewell meet-ups and a trip to Devon for Mother's Day. Not to mention walks and books.
Dear friends. I didn't think I'd read many books this month but the list is quite long, and shows what you can do what you put your mind to it! My post is late this month but I've managed to join the southern hemisphere link-up by the skin of my teeth!
My books of the month are:
Henry VIII: The Heart and the Crown by Alison Weir
Metronome by Tom Watson
Dear friends. Have you ever paused to look at a particularly beautiful book cover, and maybe bought the book as a result?
As a Kindle reader, book covers have been less important to me. But now that I have access to thousands of unpublished books via NetGalley, and choose titles based on their description/author/book cover, I'm finding that the covers guide me to the right choices.
Dear friends. Another month has whizzed by and it's time for my round-up of TV watched, books read, and podcasts listened to.
This is the last post in the current format. There will soon be a standalone book reviews post, with the first one on November 18 to join the What's On Your Bookshelf link-up. Fear not, TV and podcasts will still be covered but in my review of the month, on the last Friday of the month.
All clear? Great - let's launch into Books.
Dear friends. Here we are again with the reviews and recommendations from the last month. Very strong in terms of TV, less so for books and podcasts. As before, I've included my "Didn't Like It" section at the bottom, which includes some controversial choices!
Dear friends. Here we are again - ready for the round-up of TV, books and podcasts consumed in April. Let's start with TV.
Dear friends - welcome to another edition of my monthly reviews of TV shows, podcasts and books.
Without further ado let's start with what the Muttons have been watching. And there have been a few duds this month, although some of you may think I'm mistaken (do let me know in the comments).
Dear friends -welcome to the October edition of Friday Favourites, my round-up of books, podcasts and TV. It was a much better month for new TV shows. Autumn always has a positive effect on the schedules. Let's start first with television, and two of Apple TV's big bets.
TV SHOWS
Oooh I thought: an alien invasion, and Sam Neill! But we're four episodes in, and not one glimpse of an alien. Instead, the drama focuses on individual people and families, and the real-time effects of the invasion on them. All we know about the invasion so far is that strange things are happening. Sam Neill, a sheriff about to retire in episode 1, was sucked into a strange hole in the middle of a corn field. A bus load of British school children careered across a field and haven't been seen by us since. A Japanese astronaut went into space, and her communications director, and girlfriend, pictured, mourned when the space ship disappeared.
So all very mysterious, but a bit ponderous too. I'm finding it hard to engage with the characters - the few that are constant. We've seen one family in each episode: the husband has been cheating on his wife with an Instagram cookery "influencer." He wants to leave his family, and comes across as spineless and weak. The two children are very whiny. I have high hopes for the wife, played by Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani, as she seems resourceful and spirited.
It looks as if many stars are taking part in the series, including Kim Cattrall and Elizabeth Moss.
At least Invasion has promise. The same cannot be said for the gloom fest that is Foundation. It takes itself very seriously.
We're still persevering, but I've long forgotten the original premise, spelled out in episode 1. I don't blame Jared Harris for bailing after one episode. Nobody smiles in Foundation. There aren't even any aliens to speak of, just angry people on planets which seem to have no natural resources, yet the people have been there for decades.
Maid is a mini series about the plight of a young woman who leaves her drunken boyfriend and tries to go it alone with their three year old daughter. It's a disturbing tale of how little state support there is for a woman like Alex. Things start to get a bit better for her but she's repeatedly let down by her bipolar mother, played by Andie MacDowell. Her father, who has a new family, offers help, but Alex is triggered by an incident when she's cleaning the house of a runaway who was badly treated by his mother. She remembers she and her mother fleeing from her father several years ago. It's an engrossing true story. We root for Alex all the way and despair when she makes naive decisions.
Brits are well familiar with the term "Cobra" by now, which is the Government's emergency committee convened to deal with crises like Covid. Boris Johnson famously missed several meetings of Cobra early on in the pandemic because he was writing a book about the Romans.
In Sky's Cobra, now in its second series, the Prime Minister is Robert Sutherland, played by Robert Carlyle. His Downing Street Chief of Staff is played by Victoria Hamilton with a snappy pixie cut and good tailoring. If Boris thought he was under siege with a pandemic, Sutherland has it in spades with cyber attacks and 300 people killed after a solar flare. Not to mention problems in his personal life.
The government's harried intelligence chief, Eleanor James (Lisa Palfrey) doesn't seem to have a clue who's behind it all. It could be the Russians, Chinese or Americans. My money's on the Americans, who were the villains in the recent drama Vigil, and seem to be the current scapegoats in UK dramas.
Cobra is an ambitious drama but sometimes it's very implausible. Big moments with special effects are done on the cheap. Some of the actors are far too hammy and cliched, like David Haig, who plays the villainous newly appointed Foreign Secretary. Mr Mutton and I were both engaging with our phones during the most recent episode, which speaks volumes.
If you're pining for Call My Agent, the wonderful French comedy drama series, you might want to try Family Business. There's a familiar face in the form of Arlette, who plays the family's matriarch. Now in its second series, this is the story of a family who unwittingly get into cannabis production after their butchery business fails. It's not quite as funny CMA, but is a nice little amuse bouche.
We only discovered Shetland recently: it's now back in series 6. I wonder how such a small place can generate so much crime, but we always said that about Midsomer Murders. Shetland is a non-flashy crime series, based on the novels of Anne Cleeves. It's got characters we can invest in, good acting and spectacular scenery.
ITV's new four-part crime drama this week also had spectacular scenery, and was also based on a book by Anne Cleeves. It was set in North Devon, and the cinematography was stunning with lots of back lighting and bokeh.
The drama focuses on Detective Inspector Matthew Venn, who has returned to live in a small community in North Devon with his husband. It’s a place Matthew walked away from 20 years ago, after being rejected by his family who are part of the area’s Barum Brethren community. His mother is Juliet Stevenson who delivers a tour de force performance in her Brethren headscarf. As you might expect, this a community rife with secrets and lies - and a couple of murders.
We have yet to watch episode four but I'm told Anita Dobson, (pictured), who's unrecognizable as the downtrodden wife of Brethen leader Dennis (Martin Shaw), steals the show.
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Dear friends. Another month has flown by and it's time for my review of September's TV, books and podcasts. Highlights of the month: Manhunt, Dr Death series 3 (podcast), and books Magpie and The Dark.
Another lean month to be honest. We started a couple of dramas / comedies that looked promising but interest soon waned.
(ITV Hub, Britbox; season 1 is available on Prime)
This is the second series following the real life solving of puzzling criminal cases by Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton. It's old-fashioned, detail obsessed policing, nothing to do with the world of Line of Duty and its "covert intelligence sources" and raids by armed police.
Martin Clunes gives a wonderfully subtle and nuanced performance as the low-key DCI. In series 1, we saw how hours and hours were spent studying CCTV to find the van used by Levi Bellfield, the man responsible for killing Amelie Delagrange, Marsha McDonnell and Milly Dowler in the early 2000’s.
In series 2, Sutton, nearing retirement, is brought in to review the case of the Night Stalker, a terrifying serial rapist and burglar who terrorised the elderly of south London. His crimes had gone undetected for over 15 years and police were pinning all their hopes on finding a match for DNA found at the scene of one of the crimes. Sutton adopts a different strategy to catch the criminal, including a plea for a huge increase in resourcing for three nights of detailed surveillance.
Episode 1 was a little slow as it set the scene and showed the quiet animosity to which Sutton was subjected, but it soon picked up pace and I found it utterly gripping.
In a similar vein was this Swedish drama, also about a real-life criminal case. In March 1989, Sweden was rocked by the murder of 10-year-old Helen Nilsson, in Hörby in the country's south. The case remained unsolved for 16 years. Hunt for a Killer follows the unwavering journey of police officers Per-Åke Åkesson and Monica Olhed who led the investigation team that eventually, against all odds, found Helen's killer.
Again, there's no glamour here: police often pursue the wrong leads, the case gets sidelined, a senior officer seems determined to block the initiatives of Per-Åke to solve the case. Finally it is DNA and a laboratory in Birmingham (England) that unlocks the killer. But even so, police have just a few days to pull together a short list of suspects for DNA testing, and catch the killer, before resourcing is pulled.
In preparation for the new series we reprised the first season to remind ourselves of the plot. Jennifer Aniston and Reece Witherspoon return for more battles in the TV studio. The first season felt new and refreshing, with the 2019 drama revolving around a Harvey Weinstein type plot, with senior executives eventually exposed on air for ignoring a culture of misogyny and sexual misconduct.
Series 2 - based on the two episodes we've seen so far - is a bit lost, not sure which direction it's going in. Things have changed a lot at the TV network, and in an unlikely turn of affairs, it's decided to bring back Alex (Jennifer Aniston) as co-host for The Morning Show. The gloves are off as Bradley (Witherspoon) has a showdown with Alex and makes it clear she will no longer be treated as her lackey. It all seems a bit old-fashioned, diva TV presenters on a traditional TV channel. I have heard the series gets into a groove by episode 3, so fingers crossed.
I was initially attracted by an episode where the presenters were reviewing a Lake District stay which included e-biking and zipwires. I went through a whole episode without realising the presenters were Davina and her friend and hairdresser, Michael Douglas.
It's a rich seam of entertainment and very enjoyable too: each week the couple chat away, like the old friends they are, giving us advice and tips on all sorts of topics ranging from tubing mascara in the very first episode to travel features, TV reviews, decorating and pets' yoga.
Each series of Dr Death tells the story of a real-life doctor who endangered the lives of patients for years before being apprehended. It's a sober indictment of the medical industry where managers and doctors often join forces to protect the guilty. Series 3 tells the story of the charismatic and handsome Paolo Macchiarini, a pioneering thoracic surgeon, inventor of a new technique and generally feted wherever he goes.
For the first few episodes the focus is on his relationship with Benita, who is creating a documentary about his life saving surgery. They start seeing each other once filming has finished and become engaged. It's soon clear that Paolo is living in a fantasy world. He undertakes the organization of their wedding but things are starting to unravel, and at one point he promises Benita that the Pope will officiate over their Rome wedding, even though Paolo is divorced and Benita is not Catholic.
The focus eventually shifts back to Paolo's medical misdemeanors, and an appalling cover-up by a prestigious Swedish medical institute, even after four doctors there had supplied proof that Paolo's surgeries were far from life saving and had not been fully tested.
I was interested to see that Dr Death is now a TV series with Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin, but it's on Starzplay which would be yet another subscription, so we won't be watching it.
This had resonance for me on many levels. Val McDermid, the queen of crime fiction, is a former journalist who trained on the same newspaper as me. And 1979 was the year I entered journalism.
1979 is the first in a new series of novels featuring journalist Allie Burns. She works on a Scottish daily where the pace is certainly a bit faster than the sedate little Plymouth weekly that Val and I worked on. As one of very few women, Allie is constantly patronized and under-estimated by the hard-bitten males working on the paper.
I enjoyed the nostalgia fest, and in particular the playlist at the back of the book, but I found the story a bit far fetched.
An Antarctic research station, totally inaccessible for several months of the year, is the setting for this tense and gripping thriller. Kate is flown in as an emergency doctor, after her predecessor was killed in a tragic accident. As the small team settles in for winter, Kate starts wondering about what actually happened to the doctor. She starts to do some digging. Then there's a murder, with no chance of police being able to attend, and the knowledge that the killer is living among them.
The writing is sloppy at times, lots of lazy stereotypes (the lesbian who wears dungarees, the Sikh who makes a good curry). Kate is an irritating heroine, addicted to prescription painkillers and and slow to cotton on.
Most of the tension is supplied by the setting and claustrophobic conditions, but it finally becomes a nail biter in the last stages of the book.
Broken Greek is the childhood memoir of music critic Pete Paphides, whose family came to settle in Birmingham when he was very young. Although he's a good 10-15 years younger than me, it's a wonderful return to the 70s and 80s and in particular to the music of the era.
He reminded me of a few things I had forgotten about, such as Dial a Disc, where you rang a phone number for 2p a minute and an unnamed song was played down the line to you.
Paphides has an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of that era. At first the lists of records, lists of what was in the top 20, and the analysis behind song words, was a delight. But by the last chapters it had become tedious.
I loved the reminders of how young kids often choose records: they become fixated with the singer rather than the actual song. In Paphides' case, he was often mentally choosing a foster parent in case his parents left him, and became obsessed with singers who had kind faces like Agnetha and Frida, one of the women in Brotherhood of Man, and the Barron Knights. The story of when he actually met the latter group is toe curling but fortunately has a happy ending.
It's also a poignant and sad memoir, because his Greek Cypriot father never got over his desire to return to his homeland once he had made his fortune from fish and chips. When it became clear this was not going to happen, and his sons didn't want to live there anyway, his father became morose and no longer wanted to go back for long summers.
The real tragedy for me was Paphides' mother. She started off a talented seamstress but ended up a slave to the fish and chip shop. During the long summers when her husband took the boys abroad, she managed the chip shop almost single handed for 12 hours a day. And when she had to have a hysterectomy, her husband was entirely unsympathetic and expected her to be back at work within days.
Dear friends - welcome to Friday Favourites, my roundup of podcasts, TV and books in August. Once again I found TV a bit underwhelming, although it perked up later in August with The Chair and Vigil. But let's start with books. This time I'm scoring the books read on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being utterly amazing.
