Some books I've enjoyed lately

 According to my reading journal* I have read fifty four books this year. That seems like not enough and I cant help feeling that some of the ones I have read just never got recorded, because I was too tired, or took them back to the library and forgot to write them down, or they didn't count because I didn't/have yet to finish them. 

*I say Reading Journal, but that gives it more dignity  than it deserves.  It's a spiral bound A5 notebook that I started using to record my reading in May 2024. I struggled to keep up with it, because as well as recording the title and author I was giving stars out of five and recording brief impressions but that must have become too much like hard work because I abandoned it in September.  In January this year I changed tack and now it's basically just a list of the books I've read, decorated with a few stickers when I can be bothered. I note I am currently three pages behind on the sticker front. 

Anyway not everything I read is good or enjoyable and it would be very tedious to record all the ones I think are dull, badly written,  overhyped or whatever so I thought I would just occasionally write up a few of the ones that I've enjoyed. I may also, if I'm having a bad day, occasionally have a rant about one of the bad ones. 

I'm starting off with two series. Nicola Upson's Josephine Tey books were recommended to me by a loyal blog reader and good friend and I'm happy to report that I have enjoyed them. I did make the mistake of reading too many of them one after the other so I'm taking a break just now. I don't always like the conceit of taking  a real person and making him or her a detective in their 'real' lives, but Upson manages it well. It's helpful I think that Josephine Tey was a pen name and a totally constructed persona for the real writer Elizabeth Mackintosh who led somethign of a - not exactly a double life, as that implies deceit - but certainly two separate lives, as dutiful Inverness daughter and celebrated London author and playwright. The plots are good, the research spot on and the backgrounds varied and intriguing - the one I've used for illustration is set in Portmeirion. My one quibble is to do with JT's posited gay relationship; not the relationship itself but the long  dreary circular conversations she and her  lover to be  have which take up too much space in several of the novels I have read. The lover  herself comes off to me as a manipulative emotional bully especially as she is already in a relationship with someone else.  I note for balance that I am currently wading my way through Robert Galbraith's latest Cormoran Strike novel and a similar thing applies there; in this case it's not conversation but a tedious recital of all the things the two people concerned want to say to one another and all the reasons they then run through in their heads about why they're not going to say it. Over and over and over again! No wonder it's over 900 pages long. 

I have previously shunned Clare Mackintosh as she writes thrillers and I'm not a thriller fan but she has also recently written a police procedural trilogy. I came across the first one when I bought it in a two for One offer on Audible and had to take three goes to get through it i.e. I started it twice but only on my third go got all the way through. In the end I enjoyed it so much I put the next one on my Amazon wish list and someone duly coughed it up on my birthday. A Game of Lies is then the second one; the first is The Last Party. I've enjoyed them both and will read the final one Other People's Houses in due course. I'm not going to get it on Audible as there is too much going backward and forward in time, an both stories are told from multiple viewpoints and I couldn't cope with that when I was listening; it's so much easier just to flip back in a physical book and remind yourself who was where when. The Last Party had multiple twists towards the end, all of them clever, plausible and unforeseen by me so that was satisfying.