Attempting a new take on superheroes was never going to be an easy premise for a novel. At the moment popular culture seems bogged down with characters with extraordinary abilities… and I don’t just mean my child’s seemingly extraordinary ability to sing the Spider-Man theme tune for about 10 hours a day when the only bit of the song he knows is the word “Spider-Man”. A fresh take is exactly what V.E. Schwab is attempting with Vicious and to a large extent she is successful.
A friend of mine recommended I Love Dick to me after I spotted her reading it on Instagram. I have to admit that I am not really sure where to start with this review or really how to describe this novel… if it is a novel because it is so different from anything I have ever read before but I am going to have a go nonetheless.
It’s no secret that I love a bit of Young Adult fiction and I have been known to jump on the bandwagon for the latest hyped up series. I suppose it’s a desire for a bit of escapism. The Bone Season falls into that category. Read more…
I was recommended this book by Mr O, who is predominantly a non-fiction reader and thought that I’d enjoy this look at life behind the Berlin wall. I was fortunate enough to travel to Berlin a few times for work in my previous role and to actually spend a weekend there in 2016 in the former GDR. I visited the wall and some of the historical sites related to the separation of both the city and the country. I was also a big fan of the film The Lives of Others so prior to reading this I had some interest in the historical context.
I am continuing to choose books from my long reading list on Goodreads, which you can actually check out here. This Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock has been on the list since 2013 and I have no idea where it came from. I think it might also have been a potential book club selection that was rejected. Interestingly the author, Matthew Quick, also wrote The Silver Linings Playbook. Read more…
For my latest reading adventure, I decided to go for a children’s’ classic and chose The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I was in the mood for something uplifting and not too taxing and I figured this would fit the bill. Read more…
When the O Family was in South Africa recently Mr O found a book by Bill Bryon in our Air BnB called A Short History of Nearly Everything. He had finished the books he brought with him to read so he decided to give it a go. He absolutely loved it and kept giving me little snippets that he was enjoying. Read more…
When I first got my Kindle many years ago, I downloaded some classic books that had become free as they were more than 100 years out of copyright. I think I found a list of recommended books somewhere and picked off a collection that I wanted to read. I have been working through them in between various books that I have purchased. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was one of those still hanging around. Read more…
I have something like 130 books to read on my Goodreads list. I remember where some of them came from… but not all. Usually when I finish a book I go to the list and see if there’s something on the list I fancy reading. I mean otherwise the list will never get shorter, right? This time I picked Teeth by Hannah Moskovitz. I have no idea where it came from. It might have been one of the suggestions for my old book club that we never ended up reading. Read more…
With all the recently holidaying going on around here, I decided I wanted a light read that wouldn’t require too much of my very limited brain power. I saw a load of adverts for The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue so I decided to give it a whack and see if it was up to the hype. Read more…
I became interested in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle because of his most well known character, Sherlock Holmes. I was a big fan of the Guy Richie film and decided to read some of the stories to see how close his interpretation of Holmes was to the original and became hooked. (Spoiler: he’s not far off. Also Watson is my ideal literary husband). Recently I decided to see if the magic was confined just to Holmes by checking out one of Doyle’s other novels. Read more…
I was poking around in my Amazon account the other day and discovered that I bought some books for my Kindle when Little O had just been born. I have no recollection of doing this or when I thought I was going to read these books. For some reason they never delivered to my Kindle so the whole thing seems a bit odd. Anyway, now that I have time to read on my commute, I am quite glad very new mum me somehow sort of pre-arranged me some reading material. A Wrinkle in Time is the first of these books. Read more…
A while ago I got a choice of free books after buying something on Amazon. I have no idea what since I buy all the things on Amazon. I chose The Corrections because it was the only one on offer that I had not read and I had no idea what it was about before I started reading it. Read more…
Black Like Me was the latest choice for my book club inspired by Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. It features a white character who passes as black. We all thought this sounded kind of far-fetched until my friend, A, remembered that she’d heard of a real life case where someone had done this. We were intrigued and decided to explore this for our next read.
Roland Mitchell is a literally scholar focused exclusively on the works of Victorian poet Roland Ash. He works for Professor Blackadder in a mostly unpaid position and lives in a mouldering flat in a miserable and distant relationship with his girlfriend, Val… not that he’d notice.
When Roland finds some of Ash’s personal papers in a reference book he is overcome by the sudden urge to take them rather than declare and catalogue them. Within these papers is an abortive letter clearly meant for a woman. After a bit of detective work, Roland comes to the suspicion that the woman in question might be Christabel La Motte, a minor poetess well loved by certain feminist researchers so he decides to get into contact with Dr Maud Bailey, a specialist on La Motte. Read more…
I was lucky enough to receive this book as part of a giveaway that Katya over at Life and Other Disasters did in honour of World Book Day. She was kind enough to post it to me all the way from Austria so I felt like it would make a perfect next bath book. Thank you, Katya!
Elena is a massive Star Wars fan and has been her whole life so when The Force Awakens comes out she decides she wants the ultimate fan experience, which means queuing up outside her local movie theatre in the middle of winter. Elena is expecting a massive turn out but instead she ends up being third in a line of… three. The other two are Troy, an middle aged superfan with a lot of stories that he is very keen to tell and Gabe, who is the same age as Elena and much more keen to keep himself to himself. As Elena battles the cold, her desperate need to wee all the time, her limited phone battery life and her mom driving around the block every five minutes she starts to realise there might be more to Gabe than meets the eye. Read more…
Most people know Chuck Palahniuk because he wrote Fight Club, which inspired one of the best films of all time (in not only my opinion it seems). Although I am a big fan of the film I haven’t actually read the book although I have read a few of his other novels, most memorably Rant. Mr O has quite a collection of Palahniuk novels knocking about since he’s one of the few fiction authors he’s actually interested in reading so when I was looking for my next bath book I decided it was time to delve back in and this was his recommendation. Read more…
Written by Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City was first published as a serial in the San Francisco Chronicle and later became the first in a series of books initially published in 1976 and follows a group of inhabitants of the city and their interwoven lives. Read more…
By now most people know that Robert Galbraith is JK Rowling going under a pseudonym and that she has published a series of crime novels featuring the private detective Cormoran Strike. Career of Evil is the third book in that series. If anyone is wondering why I started with the third book, it’s because it was recommended by one of my book club member’s father-in-law who assured us we didn’t need to read the first two. (He was right).
A couple of years ago a former member of my book club suggested that we pick Jung Chang’s Wild Swans as our monthly read and so it went into the hat (actually a sunglasses case) to be drawn out and it was the winner. We were all a bit drunk though and decided that it sounded too long and complicate and so we never ended up reading it. At the time I didn’t find the premise of the true story of three generations of women growing up in China all that intriguing, not sure why, but when I found an actual physical copy of this in our abandoned book cupboard I decided to make it my “bath book”. Read more…
My thoughts on the latest films released in theatres.
Little slices of London's history
A journey towards a more sustainable lifestyle
Thirty Years of Wonder
My crazy Chinese Family I married into...
and other excellent advice, probably.
Never get lost in the Sauce
Dictatorship is good. If the Dictator is me.
Sleep deprived; fur covered; cooking
The musings of a Londoner, now living in Norfolk
Journalist, copywriter, social media manager and a sleep-deprived mum-of-two who frequently asks - Is it bedtime yet? Not every post will be about my children. Honest!
Motherhood, Allotment & Gin
The life and times of a wife, mother and mature student.
I am a mum. I have OCD. I want to live well. Follow me as I try.
BABY | BEAUTY | LIFESTYLE
A great site about books, TV, movies, life and other disasters just like it
abbiosbiston 