Tag: United Kingdom

ARC, Books

Book 637: The Vanished Bride (A Brontë Sisters Mystery #1) – Bella Ellis

Geoff W

As I mentioned in my June recap, I sort of Twitter-shamed Berkley into granting me access to this book—and I do still feel a little guilty about it. I tweeted because I was so mad that sites like NetGalley force bloggers/reviewers and publishers into tiny little boxes.

How are you supposed to represent everything you are as a blogger/reviewer when they give you 50 words or less and that’s about it? I get they’re trying to provide a service, but it’s like come on be user friendly for all the users. Why would I include that I have dedicated Jane Austen and Brontë pages on my website when I read hundreds of other books. UGH. Either way, the kind people at Berkley took pity on me and granted me access to the review copy and here I am.*

Continue reading “Book 637: The Vanished Bride (A Brontë Sisters Mystery #1) – Bella Ellis” →

Books

Book 634: The Mother of the Brontës – Sharon Wright

Geoff W

I somehow managed to read a biography of Maria Branwell Brontë prior to reading a biography of any of her offspring. I’m not sure why, but when I saw this one on NetGalley it just spoke to me.*

Maybe it’s because I finally got to visit The Brontë Parsonage last year, or maybe I some how knew that Kirkstall Abbey (which I visited over a decade ago while living in Leeds) was connected to the Brontës without really knowing it. Or maybe, like Wright, I was appalled that I spent a considerable amount of time less than 60 miles from their home. Or maybe it was just another opportunity to revisit God’s Own Country via this book which Wright references. Who knows?

Continue reading “Book 634: The Mother of the Brontës – Sharon Wright” →

Books

Book 589: Lethal White (Cormoran Strike #4) – Robert Galbraith

Geoff W

If Rowling is going to take so long between these – she may need to include recaps of the previous books. It would make life so much easier.

I didn’t realize it had been almost three years since the last Cormoran Strike book, Career of Evil. I actually ended up reading recaps of the books on Wikipedia because I knew it wouldn’t be easy to jump right back in and Rowling thankfully started right where the last book stopped, but then jumped forward a year.

Continue reading “Book 589: Lethal White (Cormoran Strike #4) – Robert Galbraith” →

ARC, Books

Book 588: Crashed – How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World – Adam Tooze

Geoff W

What a tome. I requested a copy of this from the publisher back in August 2018 after reading this review from the NYTimes.* It took me three months to get to it and another month-and-a-half to actually read it! And it was worth the read, now I just need to read the “Framing Crashed” posts on his website to see what else I missed!

There are some mixed reviews on Goodreads, some people think it’s boring (uh duh – hello finance, politics and history), some think they’ve written better books or articles (get out of here self-promoters, nobody wants you), and others, like myself, appreciated the staggering amount of ground covered by Tooze in this work.

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Updates

July Recap 2018

Geoff W

We are done traveling (long haul at least) for the summer! I know most people would not be as excited about this as I am, but it is exhausting.

I put a photo recap down below under books and bookish things because most everything we saw was connected to books, except for my friend’s wedding. We drove over 24 hours in total while we were visiting and it was awesome because we saw parts of the country I’ve never seen except by train or plane. The above photo is our full trip with a photo of our northern post point Ben A’an and our southern most point Brighton.

We did so many bookish things that I’ll just include a slide show below and put a caption explaining what they are rather than write them all out. We didn’t even set out to do that many it just happened (mostly because Tim told me this was our last trip to the UK for some time). Continue reading “July Recap 2018” →