June was ridiculous.
Twelve books. Nearly 5,000 pages. Books were being finished at a rate that suggested I had either developed a serious reading problem or temporarily abandoned every other responsibility in my life.
Then July and August happened.
Eight books. Combined.
Apparently I have discovered something called ‘doing other things’.
In my defence, the last couple of months have been busy. There have been radio shows, quizzes, gigs, website rebuilding and all the usual distractions that somehow manage to eat an entire evening while you’re convinced only twenty minutes have passed.
And some of that website rebuilding has actually involved books.
The Books section of Verso Media has had a complete overhaul, and I’ve finally pulled together six years of my reading data into one place.
Every book I’ve read. Authors, genres, pages, series, reading dates and various other statistics that nobody particularly needs but which I find enormously satisfying.
Because apparently simply reading books isn’t enough. I now need to analyse the evidence afterwards.
It also means I can see exactly how much I’ve read over the years, which authors keep cropping up, which genres dominate and, perhaps most usefully, which series I’ve started and then completely forgotten about.
There are rather a lot of those.
So while the amount of actual reading dipped during July and August, I’ve at least constructed an unnecessarily comprehensive database explaining precisely how badly it dipped.
Eight books in 62 days is pretty poor by my standards. At one point I took nearly two weeks to finish a book. I was beginning to worry I’d forgotten how reading worked.
So rather than inflict two embarrassingly short monthly reviews on everyone, July and August are being bundled together.
Eight books. 2,575 pages. Crime, murder, football comics, Fleetwood Mac, disappearing middle-aged women and a grandmother with homicidal tendencies.
So actually, fairly standard.
Songbird – Lesley-Ann Jones
We’ll start with Fleetwood Mac.
Obviously.
Regular readers may have noticed that what began as somebody suggesting I give Fleetwood Mac another listen has got slightly out of hand.
There was the music. Then the vinyl. Then more vinyl. Then books. Then more books about individual members of the band.
At this point I’m probably only a commemorative tea towel away from admitting there’s a problem.
Songbird tells the story of Christine McVie, and what becomes obvious very quickly is just how important she was to Fleetwood Mac. Not necessarily the loudest personality in a band where competition for that particular title was considerable, but quite often the person quietly holding the whole ridiculous operation together.
And what an operation it was.
Relationships collapsing. Affairs. Drugs. Arguments. People leaving. People returning. Albums somehow getting made while half the band apparently weren’t speaking to the other half.
Most workplaces would have involved HR by about Tuesday.
Christine comes across as enormously talented, complicated and much more central to the Fleetwood Mac story than the casual listener probably realises.
Naturally, reading it also resulted in me listening to even more Fleetwood Mac.
So that helped.
Our Deadly Summer – Emer McLysaght & Sarah Breen
Two friends. One summer. Some questionable men.
And a dead body.
Laura and Dee haven’t spoken for more than twenty years, which is perhaps understandable when one of your shared teenage memories involves burying somebody. The story moves between that chaotic summer in 2001 and the present day, gradually revealing exactly what happened and why their friendship fell apart.
This was great fun.
It’s funny without turning the murder into a joke, nostalgic without spending every third paragraph reminding you that Nokia phones existed, and underneath everything there’s a genuinely good story about friendship.
The early-2000s setting also made me feel approximately 147 years old.
There are plenty of twists, some properly awful men and that wonderful feeling of knowing fairly early that something has gone badly wrong but not quite knowing how badly wrong.
Very enjoyable.
All Good People Here – Ashley Flowers
Back to murder.
Normal service resumed.
Margot returns to her hometown to look after her uncle, where the unsolved murder of her childhood neighbour January Jacobs has hung over the community for years. Then another little girl disappears in circumstances that feel horribly familiar.
Small town. Old murder. Everyone knows everyone.
Everyone has secrets.
Basically, if I’ve learned anything from hundreds of crime novels, never move to a picturesque small town where everybody describes it as a lovely close-knit community.
Your chances of being murdered appear considerably higher.
This one moves quickly, has enough suspects to keep you changing your mind and uses the two cases cleverly without becoming unnecessarily complicated.
Exactly my sort of crime novel.
Grandma’s Little Secret – Becca C. Smith
Eleven-year-old Emma goes away with her family in 1985 and starts having visions that her apparently lovely grandmother is planning to kill Grandpa Roy.
We’ve all had awkward family holidays.
This is admittedly towards the upper end.
Emma eventually realises the visions may actually be warnings and, after interfering with Grandma Virginia’s plans, manages to place herself firmly on Grandma’s list of Things That Need Dealing With.
I enjoyed the slightly bonkers premise enormously.
There’s something particularly unsettling about taking the person who’s traditionally supposed to be sneaking you extra sweets and turning her into somebody you probably shouldn’t accept a cup of tea from.
It’s dark, strange and moves along nicely.
Also a useful reminder that if Grandma starts behaving suspiciously, maybe don’t eat the homemade cake.
The Answer to Everything – Luke Kennard
This was the biggest change of pace across the two months.
After murder, murder, Fleetwood Mac and more murder, something contemporary and character-driven felt almost suspiciously civilised.
It is one of those books where the interest comes less from waiting for somebody to discover a body and more from watching people make decisions that you strongly suspect aren’t going to improve their lives.
Which, thinking about it, isn’t actually that different from a thriller.
Just fewer detectives.
There are relationships, secrets, self-deception and people attempting to work out what they actually want.
At 416 pages it’s the longest book of these two months, but never felt like a slog.
A welcome reminder that apparently I can read books where nobody gets murdered.
ROTR @ 50 – Ian Golden
Now this was pure nostalgia.
ROTR @ 50 celebrates fifty years since Roy of the Rovers first appeared, looking back through the stories, characters and features that made the comic such a huge part of British football culture.
And this is very much my territory.
Long before football involved transfer rumours appearing every eleven seconds on social media, there was Roy Race. Melchester Rovers somehow managed to cram more drama into a season than most clubs experience in their entire history.
Matches, transfers, cup finals, disasters, kidnappings and assorted catastrophes that would probably have resulted in most modern clubs employing a full-time crisis-management department.
The book isn’t just about Roy either. It’s a proper rummage through the comic’s history and the other stories and features that appeared alongside him.
For anyone who grew up reading football comics, there’s an enormous amount of nostalgia here. Names, strips and pictures trigger memories you didn’t even realise were still stored somewhere in your head.
It was also the only paperback I read across July and August, which somehow felt appropriate. Reading about Roy of the Rovers on a Kindle would have seemed slightly wrong.
A lovely celebration of fifty years of something that helped make football seem even more exciting when we were kids.
And considerably more enjoyable than discovering Melchester Rovers probably still have a better transfer policy than some actual football clubs.
Excuse Me While I Disappear – Lauri Notaro
A book about reaching middle age and slowly discovering that society has apparently decided you’re becoming invisible.
Well, this seems unnecessarily personal.
Lauri Notaro writes about ageing, relationships and the assorted indignities that arrive when your brain still thinks you’re considerably younger than the person appearing in photographs.
Funny, self-deprecating and painfully recognisable in places.
There comes a point in life when you injure yourself sleeping, make involuntary noises when getting out of a chair and discover that an exciting purchase is something practical for the house.
Nobody warns you about this.
Or perhaps they did and I wasn’t listening because I was young.
A very funny book and probably the one during these two months where I most frequently thought, ‘Oh God, I do that.’
The Psychopath – Iain Maitland
And finally, back somewhere much more comfortable.
Psychological darkness.
Iain Maitland is very good at creating characters where something feels wrong long before you know precisely what is wrong.
This was the final book of August and easily one of the darkest of the eight.
It’s unsettling rather than relying on constant shocks, gradually letting you realise that the situation is considerably worse than you initially thought.
Exactly the sort of psychological thriller I like. Characters you don’t entirely trust, motives you’re constantly questioning and enough darkness to ensure that when you put the Kindle down at night you spend another ten minutes thinking about what you’ve just read.
A strong way to finish two otherwise fairly quiet reading months.
July & August by the Numbers
Books read: 8
Pages read: 2,575
Average length: 322 pages
eBooks: 7
Actual physical books remembered to exist: 1
Books involving murder, death or people you probably shouldn’t trust: Most of them
Fleetwood Mac books read: 1
Likelihood the Fleetwood Mac obsession is now under control: Absolutely none
Overall
Eight books across two months isn’t exactly going to trouble the judges at the World Reading Championships.
Especially after reading twelve in June alone.
But that’s life.
Reading has always been something I do because I enjoy it, not because I’m chasing a target on a spreadsheet. Although, naturally, there is a spreadsheet.
There were some good books here too. Our Deadly Summer was probably the most fun, All Good People Here delivered exactly the sort of crime story I usually love, and Songbird fed an obsession that really didn’t require any additional encouragement.
And somehow, despite only managing eight books, I still encountered murderers, missing children, murderous grandmothers, complicated relationships, middle age, Roy Race and Fleetwood Mac.
Not bad for a quiet couple of months.
September, though?
September needs to pull its finger out.
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