Another frantic week here in Jersey and the autumnal weather has arrived with a bang – I write this with the wind whistling around the house which means that finally life should slow down a bit and I can once more cuddle up under my blanket of an evening, and read.
This Week on the Blog
I started the week with my monthly Five of the Best post revisiting those five star reads from the last five years and reminded myself of some cracking titles into the bargain.
My excerpt post came from the book I have chosen from my Classics Club reads for October, Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan.
This Week in Books featured the authors Rachel Abbott, Liane Moriarty and Angela Marsons.
My first review of the week was for the book I have been listening to on audio book; My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises by the hugely talented Fredrick Backman.
On Friday I reviewed Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty, a bonkers book which was a fun read and just what I needed.
The week was rounded off with my review of Ronnie Turner’s debut novel Lies Between Us for the blog tour to celebrate the publication of this novel on 1 October 2018.
This Time Last Year…
I was reading the non-fiction book The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler in which he has collated ninety-nine authors who for one reason or another are no longer seen on the bookshelves of bookshops or libraries but somehow glimmer on our collective consciousness, and their works fluttered at the edges of many when he kicked this project off.
Unlike so many such lists that are produced this collector of these forgotten authors has brought together a set of authors from the Victorian times up to the more recent, the entire range of genres taking in slapstick comedy through Sci-Fi, poetry, literary fiction and crime. Obviously with so many authors each one gets a brief mention detailing the often prodigious output, why they were popular and why they may well have fallen out of favour as the years rolled on.
This really is the perfect present for any bibliophile.
You can read my full review here or click on the book cover.
Blurb
Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. It makes people think you’re dead.
So begins Christopher Fowler’s foray into the back catalogues and backstories of 99 authors who, once hugely popular, have all but disappeared from our shelves.
Whether male or female, domestic or international, flash-in-the-pan or prolific, mega-seller or prize-winner – no author, it seems, can ever be fully immune from the fate of being forgotten. And Fowler, as well as remembering their careers, lifts the lid on their lives, and why they often stopped writing or disappeared from the public eye.
These 99 journeys are punctuated by 12 short essays about faded once-favourites: including the now-vanished novels Walt Disney brought to the screen, the contemporary rivals of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie who did not stand the test of time, and the women who introduced us to psychological suspense many decades before it conquered the world.
This is a book about books and their authors. It is for book lovers, and is written by one who could not be a more enthusiastic, enlightening and entertaining guide. Amazon
Stacking the Shelves
Just one new book was added to my shelves this week, an unexpected and yet very welcome addition from Katherine Sunderland at No Exit Press! The Conviction of Cora Burns by Carolyn Kirby looks just my kind of read partly of course because I do love anything that looks back to the Victorian era.
The Conviction of Cora Burns won’t be published until March 2019 but now’s your chance to put it on the watchlist!
Blurb
To believe in her future, she must uncover her past…
Birmingham, 1885.Born in a gaol and raised in a workhouse, Cora Burns has always struggled to control the violence inside her.
Haunted by memories of a terrible crime, she seeks a new life working as a servant in the house of scientist Thomas Jerwood. Here, Cora befriends a young girl, Violet, who seems to be the subject of a living experiment. But is Jerwood also secretly studying Cora…? Amazon
What have you found to read?
Since I last reported my figures I’ve read 3 books and somehow in the same time I’ve only acquired 1! The total is therefore still tumbling to 161!
Physical Books – 109
Kindle Books – 40
NetGalley Books –11
Audio Books –1
I haven’t added any reviews of my own books this week but nor have I spent any tokens so I still have 3 1/3 book tokens. I might be a little short for the annual book sale next week… but hey rules are made to be broken!