I read the first of Kate Rhodes other series a few years back and enjoyed it, but never got round to reading more of that series and it felt like it might be one of those series where you’d be missing the full value if you’d forgotten what was happening in the book before. When I saw she had another series going I picked this one up to try it out. It turned out to be the second in the series but that’s ok with me.

This is more of a straight forward police detective murder mystery than I was expecting, but I think that means I’m more likely to read another in the series! The setting is the Scilly Isles, which in this case means lots of sea, scuba diving and shipwrecks. The detective is Ben Kitto, thirtysomething and returned to his home from undercover police work in London (I’m not clear if that might be something covered more in the first book of the series) and generally I found him amiable enough. He felt like a character you could get to know over time rather than someone who puts all his cards on the table at once, again that’s something good for a series character.

There were parts of the plot that I thought were a bit weak, but I don’t want to give spoilers and it wasn’t anything book-breaking, perhaps I just wasn’t paying enough attention, it wasn’t enough to spoil my enjoyment. I’d definitely like to read more of this series.

Not my favourite of the series. The stars of the title refer both to the 1927 eclipse and the music hall stars that are involved in Kate’s murder enquiry. I’d have preferred a mystery that was more about the astronomy myself. Nothing terrible about it, it just never really quite grabbed me and I struggled to care enough about it to finish it. Though I did like the scene in Whitelock’s, a pub in Turks Head Yard, Leeds, which is still there today, and worth stopping in for a drink if you find yourself in the area.

I selected this audiobook somewhat randomly on the Libby app when I suddenly needed some listening material for an afternoon in the car and none of my podcasts were appealing. I wasn’t expecting much of it but really got into it and enjoyed it. I was put off by the title, if it had been something more like “code breaking girl mathematician can’t get a job doing what she actually wants but saves the day anyway” it’d have been more enticing, to me at least. It was perhaps all a bit of a girls own story but at the moment that’s fine with me and, somewhat paradoxically, I found the wartime setting really comforting. I think that’s because a lot of my favourite childhood books were set during the second world war so it’s an era that invokes safety to me, assured as I’ve always been in the knowledge that it all ends up being alright in the end, even if the characters I’m reading about don’t know that. At the moment that’s a good concept to bear in mind.

In fact I enjoyed this enough that I decided to carry straight on and listen to the next audiobook in the series, but that was a bad idea. There was a different narrator which seemed all wrong, I should have left it for a while. I think I will try reading the next one sometime soon though.

This all fell a bit flat for me. It’s the first book by an author whose later books I’ve loved. I think it was a case of the problem being me rather than the book though. It’s a novel in the form of a series of short stories, all about members of the same extended family, and though this is a format I have loved in other books I never really got deeply engrossed with the characters here. Usually I like it when you think a character’s an idiot seen through one set of eyes, but then an alternative viewpoint makes you think differently. Here I just felt that people were acting nonsensically a lot of the time. But also I’ve picked the book up and put it down over a period of three months rather than giving it a good read, and the world is rather distracting right now, so my lacklustre reaction probably says more about me than the book!

I’m losing faith with my commitment to read this series. For the most part this one bored the pants off me. Our hero has finally committed to a girl (I think), and perhaps that might turn out to be an interesting relationship. In the previous two books I’ve thought that some of the background characters were more interesting than the ones in the foreground. Here though, one of the more interesting background characters stepped into the spotlight and proved himself deathly dull as well, so I don’t hold out much hope for an interesting relationship with the girl. If she gets upgraded to wife I expect she’ll never be mentioned again. It noted that the characters said they were “nearing thirty” at some point and I was amazed, in my head I still had them down as just out of college. I’m not sure whether to carry on since I’m finding the characters more rather than less juvenile over time! Still kind of curious though.

I’d thought that this book might be a rehash of many stories I’d read elsewhere but was surprised by the amount of tales I’d never heard of that I found here. A couple of the stories that have stuck in my head are the one about how the Irish economy survived a six month bank strike in 1970 by using cheques and IOUs as a makeshift system of tradable debt, and how one of Selfridge’s novel visions for his department store was adding ladies loos so that women would stay and shop for longer. Even if you know these stories and others, there are many more than fifty interesting things in this book, each chapter has numerous examples and the book flows swiftly and interestingly by. It’s important to note that there’s no definite article in the title; these are fifty things that can definitely be shown to have made our world what it is today, but there’s no claim that they are the only ones or even the top fifty. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was a sequel to this with another fifty things at some point.

Second in the dodecology. It didn’t make me rant as much as the first one, but it wasn’t as interesting either. Since it was basically three, possibly more, parties, a wedding and a funeral, I was trying to amuse myself by figuring out which character was Hugh Grant. But I haven’t come to a conclusion yet, I’m probably going to read the next one soon so it’s certainly an angle to bear in mind. There were certainly more roles for Charlotte Coleman here too, which can only be a good thing. In this book women get to throw sugar shakers over men and have hushed abortions which is considerably more animation than they had in the first, though they are still made of cardboard and the abortion is only imagined to be a disaster for the male half of the couple. There might have been a hint of homosexuality, I identified this by two of the characters popping into three dimensions for about a page. I thought the narrator was going to find himself a wife for a minute but not yet. I’d say he’s still too vapid for that yet but I don’t feel like he’s going to find any more substance in the series.

There are good lines here though and I did really like the closing paragraph where the narrator notices that “there are specific occasions when events begin to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last”.

Chick lit has never really been a big hit with me, I don’t like the name much for a start, but I picked up some of Freya North’s early books sometime back in the 90s and have been keeping up with her, more or less, ever since. The characters have grown up with me. When I started reading the books were about twenty-somethings looking for love, now we have forty-somethings with more complicated lives, they are still open to love, perhaps not actually looking for it, there are provisos and it’s a different beast than it was back then.

This is an intercontinental romance between Frankie, single mum on the Norfolk coast, and Scott, single dad from the mountains of British Columbia. There are aspects of it that I could tear to pieces if I wanted to be snide, and I’m sure other people have, but I don’t want to. It was an enjoyable story to me, I enjoyed sharing the highs with the characters and got very upset over their lows. But I like it when fiction fills me with emotions.

An author I read as a teenager, I thought I’d read most of his books but have gradually come across more of them over the years, and a quick glance at a list shows me there are several more I haven’t read. I certainly found them dated when I first read them, but entertaining, I expected to find this even more dated now, but I’m not sure I did really.

When I first read Shute I was young enough to wonder if the use of words like “mucking” and “mugger” rather than more explicit swear words was general usage at the time they were set; I know better these days but what dated this was having those replacements side by side with n*gger (which I can’t bring myself to type in a non-grawlixed manner in 2020). For a bit I worried that the central character, who similar to those in the other books, seemed to be a very British sort of nice guy were going to be revealed as horrible racists, and if so why was my library still stocking this book. I’m pleased to say that nothing like that came to pass, the book is very much against racism, which should probably have been clear from the title and that it’s still in circulation. There’s a thread of the story about an influx of black American soldiers who endear themselves to a Cornish village much better than their white counterparts do; and another about a mixed marriage in post-war Burma. There certainly are dated elements in those threads and elsewhere in the book though. Minor spoiler so I’ll hide it in tags: [spoilers removed]

Overall it was a good read despite bits of sexism and imperialism, it’s interesting these days from a historical perspective as well as an entertainment one. I like how the main character is no angel and I have a weird nostalgia for the bizarre framing device I’ve seen Shute use before where the main characters are introduced by another character who then plays next to no role in the story.

A completely brilliant mix of science and history exploring the causes and effects of the Spanish Flu epidemic that followed in the wake of the First World War in 1919. Spoiler (not much of one): the Spanish had nothing to do with it, they were just the west’s chosen fall guy of the time. Not everyone blamed Spain, other places picked whoever they fancied maligning at the time: “In Senegal it was the Brazilian flu and in Brazil the German flu, while the Danes thought it ‘came from the south’. The Poles called it the Bolshevik disease, the Persians blamed the British, and the Japanese blamed their wrestlers: after it first broke out at a sumo tournament, they dubbed it ‘sumo-flu’.”.

This was excellent information filled writing – I was waiting for that chapter you often get in non-fiction books where the author gives up on the story and dumps their research straight onto you but happily it never arrived – the book stays thoroughly well written and entertaining all the way through.

It feels apposite to have just finished reading this as the world worries about the spread of coronavirus from Wuhan but the book makes you realise that there will always be another epidemic waiting in the wings to have its day. A brief mention of how a pandemic of bubonic plague in the sixth century CE led to global cooling really had my brain going off on some rather sobering trains of thought. It might be a history book but it’s definitely not just about the past.