I bought this in the Audible sale – it looked like the sort of thing I like so I gave it a go. The audiobook is narrated by the author, who has a lovely Geordie accent, like Sarah Millican!
The main character, Tanz discovers that she has strong psychic ability and, aided by her ghostly spirit guides, and new psychic friends she tries to help restless spirits and uncover crimes.
I wasn’t sure at first if the style of the book was fun or annoying – a bit chic-lit/rom-com, although it did grow on me and by the end of the book I was quite excited to read the next instalment.
I first read this book in 2020 and have been eagerly awaiting the promised sequel since then. Now the next book is coming out in February (Woo!) so I gave this book another listen to refresh my memory and prepare for the exciting next instalment.
The book is like a post apocalyptic Jeeves and Wooster (I said that to me 26 year old son and he said ‘What’s a Jeeves and Wooster?’ !!) so, for those of you who don’t know, Jeeves and Wooster was about very posh English people in the Early twentieth Century and mostly features young men getting into scrapes and young people generally trying to find socially acceptable marriage partners. Imagine that kind of thing going on, but in a future where social standing is determined by how much people are able to see of specific colour spectrums (in this imagined future, vision and sight seem to be generally much diminished).
The young hero (Eddie) shows a promising amount of red vision but falls for a social outcast ‘grey’ who opens his eyes to some of the secrets and conspiracies that exist in the society around him.
It’s a book that works on so many levels – it is often very funny, but also clever and intriguing and quite dark. I am very excited to read the sequel!!
I have a physical copy of this book, which I read a long time ago, so only remembered vaguely. This is the newly released extended version of the already long book, and it was a biggie.
A virus is accidentally released from a government lab in the USA somewhere and very quickly the world falls apart. Ninety something percent of people are dead within two or three days of being infected.
The book follows various strands of different characters who survive the virus and who start having mysterious dreams/visions, some of a benevolent old lady, who tells them to come and find her and some from a malevolent man who scares them.
People make their ways to the different camps and have adventures on the way. Those who make it try to build a new world order with the threat of a showdown between good and evil hanging over them.
I’m a big fan of Stephen King, and I did enjoy the book, although I was quite glad when it finally ended!
The annual Christmas short story by Jodi Taylor was fun as always. The team go on what should be a simple time jump to find the authentic recipe for mince pies (originally called Christmas Pies) and of course all kinds of shenanigans ensue.
It was narrated this time by Markham, which was a refreshing change from Max.
One Foot in the Fade: Fetch Phillips Book 3 – Luke Arnold – 20.12.23
After slogging through Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, I wanted something fun to read, and I remembered how much I enjoyed the first part of this series by Luke Arnold. Set in a world that used to have magic users and all kinds of magical creatures, until some event happened which removed all the magic from the world. The magical creatures are weakening or dying off and the world has to learn how to create science and technology to take over the day to day tasks that used to be performed by magic.
The hero is a human who lives with shame because of his past when he fought against magic users in the war. He is now a private investigator trying his best to atone by exclusively working for (ex)magical creatures. It has a darky comic noir feel and I found the series to be very well written with intelligent characterisation and plotting and I felt gripped and moved by it.
Wow – this is a BIG book. It took me a whole month to read, and I usually read at least two books a week! It’s not just that it had 700 plus pages (I’ve read other doorstops with similarly many pages) but that each page is so densely packed. It’s amazing actually that a book can be so dense and long and yet not very much happens. There are a lot of big words, which I often had to pause to look up the meaning of, not to mention the phrases, paragraphs and on one occasion whole chapter written in languages other than English and not translated.
It’s a coming of age tale of sorts, with a main protagonist, Hans Castorp, who is a newly qualified engineer. He goes to visit his cousin, a patient at a sanitorium in the Swiss alps, supposedly for three weeks but ends up staying for seven years.
The patients spend their time eating and sleeping and talking about philosophy and politics and religion and deep stuff like that. I don’t know if I was bored, as such, but it was definitely a slog to get through – I did really enjoy bits of it, and found some of the passages both very thought provoking and sometimes very moving. It’s a book that I have heard referred to so many times that I thought I really ought to read it, and I’m glad I have but I’ll not hurry to read it again!
I’m currently ploughing my way through Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain on my kindle (81% through – woo!) and although I’m enjoying it, it’s pretty heavy going so I wanted something light for my audiobook listening. I had previously listened to, and enjoyed Agent to the Stars, by John Scalzi, so I though this book would be just the ticket.
It’s a sci-fi story set during covid lockdown times. The hero is randomly fired from his job and ends up working as a food delivery guy when he meets an old friend who offers him an interesting job opportunity.
SLIGHT SPOILERS: The job is in an alternate universe inhabited by Godzilla like creatures and a whole ecosystem based on violent creatures struggling to survive in a world with giant predators whose metabolism is based on nuclear reactions! Sometimes these nuclear reactions cause a weakness in the boundary between the two worlds allowing the giant creatures to pass through (and have movies made about them).
I enjoyed the book – it was lightweight and it did make me laugh out loud once or twice as well as having moments of pathos and a satisfyingly evil baddy.
I also liked the afterword by the author explaining how he had been writing a serious tome but that covid and American politics had him in a funk, and he had to clear his palate by writing something fun, instead.
I have read and enjoyed several Adam Roberts books (Bete is one of my all time favourites) and I didn’t realise that he is a Professor of 19th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, London University and a leading authority on the works of Charles Dickens. Most of his novels are kind of dystopian sci-fi or horror, and this one is more of a Gothic Mystery.
The world in which it is set is like the love child of Dickens and Conan Doyle and others and many of the characters are lifted from the pages of their novels: Ebenezer Scrooge, Vavasour Holmes (father of Mycroft and Sherlock), the Invisible Man, Charles Dickens’ Inspector Bucket, Macbeth and the parade of kings, Hamlet, the Middlemarch Serpent and more. (I copied that list from a Goodreads reviewer). It was fun spotting the characters, some of which I knew and other I just wondered about!
A series of ‘impossible’ murders happen and the main characters have to figure out whodunnit and how. I mostly really enjoyed it, although I did get a little bit bored at times. It reminded me a bit of the The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H. G. Parry that I listened to early last year, although in that book characters from Dickens and other classic novels appear in contemporary Australia (where the book is set).
I read this book because I really enjoyed Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by the same author.
There is a lot to like about the book. Set in a bookshop and centred around people who love to read, it is definitely going to resonate with bibliophiles, and the characters’ journeys certainly tugged at my heartstrings, and yet…
I did enjoy it, in the same way that I enjoy watching Virgin River or Gilmore Girls – it’s almost like a guilty pleasure, because it is a bit smulchy and certainly predictable, but in a comfortable and nice way.
I don’t know if I would go out of my way to read more from this author though…
I absolutely loved Alix E. Harrow’s first novel – The Ten Thousand Doors of January, so I was excited to read this as the hype around it promised a return to form.
I did enjoy it, very much in fact, but… I guess I just wasn’t completely blown away like I hoped I would be. It’s not a retelling of beauty and the beast, but has nods to it, and I like that the male character was not super handsome, I can’t be doing with books (or TV shows for that matter) where all the characters are drop dead gorgeous – apart perhaps from some nerd or villain, who actually really is gorgeous, they just wear weird glasses.
Anyway – Opal was left to raise her little brother after the death of their mother, and she would and does do anything for him, including work several demeaning jobs. She is drawn to the creepy old house in the woods with a reputation for being haunted or cursed or both, and ends up getting a job as a cleaner there and that’s when her life gets seriously weird.
There’s clearly something spooky going on, and she seems to be somehow connected to the eerie mystery. Also some very bad people are putting pressure on her to spy for them in the house and she is torn between protecting herself and her brother from them and the sense of loyalty she feels for the house and the man who lives there.
It really is a fun book to read, and I think maybe I judged it harshly because I have hyped up in my mind just how good The Ten Thousand Doors of January was.
One thing I did really like in the book was the shift in the dynamic in the relationship between Opal and her brother as he grows up – she is so focussed on having to take care of him that she doesn’t see that he can take care of himself, and even her. As a parent of grown children, I remember well that feeling which is a strange mixture of pride and loss when you realise that your children don’t need you in the same way that they once did.
Sarah Wray Writer 