Entries Tagged 'What I’m reading' ↓

Knitting & reading

I’ve obviously been a slacker in the social/housework/get decent sleep departments of my life because it just occurred to me that despite constantly working long hours I have still managed to knit and read.



So far this year I have:


Knitted



  • almost 2 cabled jackets for the Washington twins

Read



  • Alexander McCall Smith, Morality for Beautiful Girls
  • Alexander McCall Smith, Kalahari Typing School for Men
  • Alexander McCall Smith, The Full Cupboard of Life
  • Patricia Cornwell, At Risk (not one of the Kay Scarpetta series)
  • Maggie Alderson, Cents and Sensibility (glorious chick lit)
  • Jennifer Cox, Around the World in 80 Dates (more chick lit)

and am now reading



  • Julie Powell, Julie & Julia (about a woman called Julie who decides to cook herself through Julia Childs’ Mastering the Art of French Cooking)

Quite staggering really!

#13 in the Kay Scarpetta series

Bugger, didn’t realise it’s been over a year since I started on my Scarpetta Marathon – I thought it was around Christmas last year!


Have finally finished the last in my collection – #13 Trace. Since I started re-reading them in August last year, another has been published, Predator, which I must get. I’ve enjoyed reading the series back to back – I certainly have not become bored with them and up until the last two books I couldn’t actually remember what happened in the story line!

# 3 in the Kay Scarpetta series

All that Remains by Patricia Cornwell. Found this one to be a page-turner. Have started the next in the series immediately.

Food, email, forensics and mystery

Devoured a few books In December/January:


Garlic & Sapphires by Ruth Reich – a great book that a friend gave me to read before we went to New York about a former New York Times restaurant critic that wore disguises and took on different personas in order to visit and review restaurants anonymously. Lots of great descriptions of New York neighbourhoods.


Who Moved my Blackberry? by Martin Lukes – written in a different style this is a collection of emails and text messages from Martin Lukes to various colleagues, friends, family and lover – you never read anything from their point of view so it’s an interesting narrative – story is about nothing much though.


Body of Evidence by Patricia Cornwell – finally finished the second in Cornwell’s series.


Metro Girl by Janet Evanovich – first in the third series from Janet Evanovich – this time the havoc-inviting chick stumbling into a mysterious crime only to become one of the main players solving it is Alex Barnaby. Typically Evanovich this was a light and very quick read.

The unofficial Bruce Willis biography

I have just started the first biography that I can remember reading. Bruce Willis: The Unauthorized Biography by John Parker. It’s quite strange reading a biography after reading mostly fiction because in this biography, every person mentioned in conjunction with Willis’s life or anything that might’ve influenced him is named.


Normally when reading fiction people are named if you need to remember them because they have a part in the story, otherwise you just gloss over their existence.



“Bruce called into a bar on his way home to drown his sorrows after yet another failed audition. The barman was sympathetic and poured him an extra shot at no charge.”


In this book, they are all named for their 1/10th of a second of fame.



“Bruce called into The Thirsty Actor, a bar located at the time on the corner of Greene and Thompson Streets in Soho, on his way home to drown his sorrows after yet another failed audition at the Paramount Theatre for a part as an extra in the Greenwich Village Community High School’s version of The Caravan directed by the enthusiastic principal Jimmy Jones. The barman, Ed Porter who’d worked in the bar for three years since leaving high school was sympathetic and poured him an extra shot of Bourbon, Bruce’s poison during the late 70’s.“


For example!

Chick lit

Last month I did begin on my Patricia Cornwell quest but before I could get onto the 2nd book in the series my partner got hooked so I have let him get a book or so ahead. To fill the gap before I start on the 2nd book I attempted an historical novel The Coffee Trader by David Liss set in 17th century Amsterdam, about a commodities trader who discovers the mysterious coffee fruit and it’s mysterious effects if you grind it up and drink it so sets about trading it. Unfortunately, because I read at night mostly and because this book was fairly hard going, I kept falling asleep after only 2 paragraphs and could not get into it. So I have put it aside for holiday time!


Instead I returned to chick lit and devoured Marion Keyes’ latest novel The Other Side of the Story and have just started on Sophie Kinsella’s latest Undomestic Goddess, which is not in the shopaholic series but is just as good.

Re-visiting Kay Scarpetta

Over the last 10 years or so I’ve read all the novels Patricia Cornwell has written and I would put her at the top of my favourite non-chick-lit author list. Seeing as I’m such a fan and seeing as my partner loves CSI on Sunday nights, I thought he might like Cornwell’s Scarpetta series. I have most of the books but not the first one, so purchased and re-read it. Fantastic. So now I’m on a mission to read them all again and at the weekend rummaged through second-hand book stores to get the 3 I didn’t have to complete my series.



  • Post-mortem
  • Body of Evidence
  • All That Remains
  • Cruel and Unusual
  • The Body Farm
  • From Potter’s Field
  • Cause of Death
  • Unnatural Exposure
  • Point of Origin
  • Black Notice
  • The Last Precinct
  • Blow Fly
  • Trace

urbis Landscapes

Yet again I do my proud sister act – my little sister has again been featured in glossy print – this time in urbis Landscapes – very posh! She’s so clever 🙂

One shot

Just steamed my way through One Shot by Lee Child. It’s the latest in a long series of crime/mysteries involving Jack Reacher, an ex-army cop loner brought in by various people to assist with solving crimes. It’s the first I’ve read and was very compelling – same format as all these type of novels: crime committed at the start, rest of the book to solve it, parties to the crime whether actual or suspected have their stories unwound, with the whole thing being revealed in the last two pages.

How to be a Man

Now that Vroom with a View is over I need something else to read. I have a stack of crime/mystery novels but last night I couldn’t be bothered going upstairs to sort through the pile at bedtime, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay awake long enough to really get into something, so I rifled through the mixed bag of books on the bedroom bookshelf. Hmmm, O’Rielly texts, World Wide Web Unleased (published 1997!), Icebreaker 2005 catalogue, Holy Blood Holy Grail, Rules of Golf and settled on How to be a Man (by John Birmingham & Dirk Flinthart) – given as a ‘joke’ present to my man last year.


It was rather amusing, the 2 chapters I skimmed through, but I already knew all that stuff … as I should … but still, interesting to see what men are being ‘told’ … smelly feet are a turn off, choose only cotton socks; scrunch fabric to see if it crinkles before you buy the suit, because if it does it’s cheap; listen when women are talking; don’t fart and think it’s hilarious … I think I’ll start a crime novel tonight after all!