Billy Summers – Stephen King (AUDIOBOOK) – 06.02.23

One of my favourite audiobooks last year was Stephen King’s Fairytale, so I was excited to listen to this book.

Of course the subject matter is very different. This novel follows Billy (one of his many aliases) who is a killer for hire with a conscience, in that he will only kill ‘really bad guys’.

He wants to retire, and agrees to do one last job (always a red flag in fiction!). The job involves going undercover in a apartment block community where he is posing as a writer. To add credence to his cover story, Billy decides to actually write a book, which turns out to be his own memoire, which is how we the reader get his backstory in chunks as he writes it along with the present day plot.

On the whole, I really liked the book. I got a bit bored at the part in Billy’s memoires where he relived his time as a soldier and I had to grimace and hide behind my hands in a couple of the more violent or threatening scenes, but as always Stephen King is a master storyteller and character developer, and I felt invested emotionally in what happened to the protagonists.

Exactly What You Mean – Ben Hinshaw (AUDIOBOOK) -BOOKGROUP – 27.01.23

This was my book group read for February, and I have reviewed it on the ‘My Book group Reads’ page. Here’s a copy and paste of what I wrote:

Exactly What You Mean wasn’t universally loved by the book group members. I personally really didn’t like it at all, and the others were at best lukewarm, although a couple did say that the book grew on them. It is a ‘novel’ – at least it says it is a novel where each chapter follows different characters in different points of time who are all loosely connected to the island of Guernsey, but it is really a collection of short stories pretending to be a novel. This threw some of us, because of the disjoint between chapters if you are expecting a novel where things make sense as a whole. I found the stories to be quite bleak and depressing. Our host, Sheila had suggested the book after she had seen it praised on the BBC between the covers podcast, and we watched the podcast together. Ben Hinshaw talked about the book and actually came across really well, and perhaps if I’d seen his interview before reading I might have enjoyed it more (or maybe not!).

The Day Chuck Berry Died – Ian Inglis – 28.01.23

My daughter, Becca got married in September (it was a lovely wedding!) and I met her in-laws for the first time the day before. We got on very well, and I didn’t know that Chris’s Dad had written fiction until they sent us a flyer for a book launch event for his published collection of short stories.

So of course I bought the book and read it with the inevitable anxiety of ‘what will I say if it’s awful and I hate it!?’. Well, thankfully it is far from awful – it was obvious right away that Ian is a talented writer, and I didn’t hate it. Anyone who has read a few of my reviews might know that I’m not generally a fan of short stories, but I did enjoy reading this book. Here is a cut and paste of the review I left on Amazon:

A quote from one of the stories in The Day Chuck Berry Dies sums up how I feel about the whole book: ‘a combination of overt nostalgia and contemporary mischief, brimming with optimism and displaying a real talent for the use of language.’

Many of the stories are coming of age tales, often people later in life looking back on defining moments from their youth sometimes with fondness, or regret, or wistful wonderings about roads not taken.

My personal favourite story was ‘All About The Touch’, because it is the only one with supernatural or magical realism element, and that is a genre I very much enjoy.

As well as reading on my kindle, I like to listen to audiobooks when walking or running, and the one I was listening to while reading this book was the much hyped ‘Exactly What You Mean’ by Ben Hinshaw, another collection of short stories (although loosely connected and called a novel) and I couldn’t help comparing. In my opinion, The Day Chuck Berry Died is much superior. While both Ben Hinshaw and Ian Inglis are obviously gifted writers, I just found Inglis’s stories to be more engaging and satisfying and his was the book I looked forward to returning to.

A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers – Jackson Ford – 26.01.23

I’m still enjoying the Tegan Frost series. In this novel Tegan has a run in with her brother and sister which results in her losing her powers just in time for her to be caught up in a terrifying hotel hostage drama. A second thread which runs through the book in alternate chapters follows Annie who wakes up from her coma and rushes off to try and find Tegan, who she wrongly believes is being held by her siblings.

Again it’s quite an actiony book, and yet I loved it. I especially loved the ending and I can’t wait for the next book to see what the future holds for Tegan and friends.

Against the Loveless World – Susan Abulhawa – (AUDIOBOOK) – 25.01.23

I didn’t love this book. It was interesting to read a novel from the perspective of a Palestinian, trying to survive amid all the turmoil in the Middle East. My problem was that I just didn’t warm to the main character, Nahr. Awful things happened to her, and I could totally understand the choices she made, I just didn’t really like her personality. I know that it’s easy for me to say that, living as I do in comfort and not being afraid for my life or my family’s life and that things like that are bound to shape a person and being abrasive could be her form of self protection. I feel like not liking the book makes me a bad person, and why should I find cosy kinship with all the characters I read, and maybe that’s a fair point. Still, just saying how I felt, and how I felt was, it was interesting, but I didn’t love it.

If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe (John Dies at the End, Book 4)- David Wong – (AUDIOBOOK) – 18.01.23

I’m still really enjoying this series, even if it is infantile in its toilet humour overload. In this instalment the new toy that every child wants, a plastic egg that hatches into one of a few collectable fluffy plushies, turns out to be a tool by evil entities to control children and do really bad stuff.

The gang have to figure out how to beat this creepy badness and save the world (again) and they do it with their usual style, humour and character developing journeys.

Again, I found the story clever and engaging and I enjoyed the ride.

Nation – Terry Pratchett – 15.01.23

This is a lovely stand alone young adult novel by Terry Pratchett. Set in an alternate Victorian era, a young girl who by a strange quirk of fate turns out to be the daughter of the new king of England (a pandemic wipes out so many people that all the hundred plus closer in the line of succession than him are removed) is travelling by ship in a region which suffers a devastating tsunami and is shipwrecked alone on an island. Meanwhile, a young boy who had left the island to carry out a lone rite of passage on a neighbouring island returns to find his home ruined and the people of his village all killed by the flood.

The book follows them as they try to rebuild their lives with the other waifs and strays that turn up. It has some humour, but lots of meaty difficult issues are tackled in really intelligent and thoughtful ways – racism, sexism, colonialism, culture, religion, childbirth, bereavement and human character from all extremes from very bad to very good. How the choices people make form who they become and the relationships they build.

I think it is an amazingly good book, and I really enjoyed reading it.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul: Dirk Gently, Book 2 – Douglas Adams (Audiobook) – 13.01.23

I think I enjoyed the second installment of the Dirk Gently series (once again expertly narrated by Stephen Mangan) even more than the first. The plot reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, or American Gods, with Norse Gods interacting with modern day humans and causing mayhem.

Lots of fun.

The Half Life of Valery K – Natasha Pulley – 10.01.23

I have loved the other books I’ve read by Natasha Pulley, all of which have had a magical realism element in an historical fiction setting. When I saw the title of this book, I assumed it would be more of the same so I eagerly bought it.

Well, I was wrong in thinking this book has magical realism. In fact, had I read the synopsis of the plot if I didn’t know the author, I definitely wouldn’t have read this book, thinking it wouldn’t have been my cup of tea.

Set in the Soviet Union during the 1960s, the title Character, Valery K is an academic studying the effects of radiation on biology who had been imprisoned in the Siberian gulags for six years on trumped up charges.

He is unexpectedly removed from prison and sent to work with a team of scientists in an unknown town studying the effect of the nearby nuclear powerplant on the environment. He soon discovers there are deeper and more sinister things afoot, and others before him who had asked too many questions have wound up dead.

I really loved this book. I was totally gripped, I loved the characters. I loved Valery’s journey from barely surviving prisoner to respected colleague, to terrified secret keeper. I even loved all the historical detail. Fabulous book!