Bedside Books - And now we are three...

yes, two gone and now  there are only three books left on the bedside pile. I feel this is very good progress. 

I finished this one recently.

Years ago I put this to one side ( or actually onto the shelves in the back hall, along with several others ready to go to a charity shop) and somehow the pile just stayed there. Come lockdown I retrieved them and put them all, bar two, in a charity shop box. I kept this one back  because I'd seen a recent reference to it somewhere and thought it might be worth another go, despite having read it previously and not being all that impressed. 

Well I gave it another go and I suspect I found it marginally more comprehensible and enjoyable this time than last. I don't know what I find wrong with it really, like Ben Aaronovitch it's the sort of book that on paper I'm going to like. And there's nothing wrong with it per se; in fact the general world set up is quite original, and there's a nice mix of fighting, back stabbing politics and conflicting agendas. Possibly the writer just isn't good at differentiating  his characters, possibly there are too many differing view points and groups to take in too quickly.

It's the first of a trilogy. The second one is lurking at the bedside ready to be tackled. It's probablyy telling that a) I can't remember whether I finished it and b) I never bought Book 3. But we'll see. 

At least I got through Winterbirth which is more than can be said for the other bedside book that has come off the pile. This was Love You Dead by Peter James. I actually gave up on James' series of Brighton based police procedurals a long time ago, but this one was in a bag of books passed on by my neighbour and I thought that after so long it might be worth a look. I gave it a good go but in the end I gave up. All the usual faults with these books were present; attempts at describing his main character's life outside work that end up being mawkish, prosaic writing, too many acronyms, too many pages ( James is yet another author who needs a good editor).the l-o-n-g on-going saga of the main character's disappearing wife that has been stretched over far too many books. Incidentally I found by skipping through various parts of the book that I couldn't be othered to read properly that this is now resolved, and even if the explanation had been a bang rather than whimper, which it most certainly wasn't, it wouldn't have warranted being dragged on over so many books. In addition to all of these, there were far too many characters, far too many diffuse plotlines, far too much skating over improbabilities (eg "she used her savings and a fake credit card, which she also managed to use to obtain cash a few times" - what? this is a young girl who has just left home. She's not very nice, she shoved her sister off a cliff because she was jealous of her, but where did she get a fake credit card? how did she use a fake card to get cash?  - the book is full of this sort of stuff that you're meant to take on trust as being perfectly easy to do) and too much truly boring detail about the lives of truly boring criminal people. I think James wants to write thrillers, but has stuck trying to lever a thriller into a police procedural because he knows that anything with his series character name on it will sell, and he, or his publisher, is averse to putting out a book without the name  to sell it. 

Tomorrow we won't be talking about books. We might be talking about knitting. Or Devon. Or something totally different. But not books.