nocto.com booklog

Blaming

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:00:00 GMT

This story concerns Amy, an older English woman whose husband dies early in the book whilst they are on a cruise, and Martha, a younger American on the same holiday who stays behind to help her. But it's quite an odd, somewhat dysfunctional relationship. Martha doesn't seem to provide much actual help and Amy doesn't want to keep up the friendship with Martha after they return home. A lot of the character's actions seem to be motivated by what society expects them to do rather than what they want to do, and read through modern eyes that looks like a whole lot of masking. But the characters do a lot of reflecting themselves and the 'blaming' of the title happens in the end.

I found the main characters and their ambivalent relationship highly believable, but the minor characters were as well. There was a lot going on behind the scenes that was only hinted at in the text. Amy's two young granddaughters seemed especially well written to me. The book was published in 1976 which I guess makes me about the age of the youngest granddaughter in the book too :D

It feels very much like a novel about the end of an era and not just in Amy's life as she is catapulted into widowhood. It's a look at how society is changing. It was also Elizabeth Taylor's last book, published posthumously. I've enjoyed a couple of her books before (though the last one was eighteen years ago!) and found this one in the library where my brain was vaguely searching for mid twentieth century writing to escape from the present day. It had exactly the kind of quiet vibe I was after. It's mostly about the characters and the relationships between them, but with a decent amount of plot twists as the book goes on which made it very easy to keep reading. I thank the author of the introduction for not spoiling the plot in case you read it first but also for realising that readers have been trained to come to the introduction last, as I did, just in case.

I really enjoyed this story. Easy reading, nice characters, a plot that's a little stilted but it fits the characters. Marnie is a copy editor who lives alone in London. Michael is a geography teacher in York. They both get invited to a walk along the coast to coast route across the North of England by a mutual friend who is trying to pair them up with other friends. Well, except these two have the book's narration split between them so, does the match making go to plan?

I've said before that if David Nicholls' books were written by a woman then they'd be filed under romance or chick-lit and they'd get looked down upon there. This is no different. But, like a lot of romance and chick-lit, it's well written, nicely structured and fun to read. I wasn't entirely convinced by the realism of some of the walking - the pouring rain and rapidly switching seasons were true to life but Marnie's ability to walk fifteen miles day after day after barely leaving her flat for years seemed a little suspect to me. She did whinge quite a lot though so that brought the realism back! Sometimes the plot points were a little obvious but I liked the day by day structure of the narrative and, without spoiling anything I hope, the ending wasn't quite what I expected and that was a good thing.

Altogether a quick fun read. No complaints other than I'd quite like a "what happened next" follow-up.

A City on Mars

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 13:00:00 GMT

The subtitle of this book is "Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?" and - spoilers - the answers seem to be maybe, a smaller maybe, and a big fat nope. One of the things that makes the book interesting is that the authors are probably more disappointed by those answers than their readers. And I think they've probably overstated the case for the "maybe"s to avoid falling out with a lot of people. Personally I find their arguments a breath of fresh air. Fresh air is something we have a lot of on earth that isn't there on Mars, or on the other big space settlement option: the Moon. Even an overheated, plague ridden, asteroid hit version of Earth is so very much more hospitable to humans than anywhere else. I very much liked the analogy that moving to Mars to avoid climate change is like moving to a toxic waste dump to avoid tidying up your house. I'll be using that in future!

My own feeling is that going to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s and having an orbiting space station today - and don't get me wrong, I think that's amazing and it's something I absolutely love - these are very much more about prestige than about the science. The authors point out that exploration has generally been more about fame and politics - "a short-term geopolitical advantage" - than the benefits of the actual exploration and I agree with them, space is no different. Are we doing the research that could lead to us living life in space? No, definitely not. There are guys blasting rockets and making inspiring speeches but it's all very much not an actual plan. Are we researching how groups of people can live in closed ecosystems for long periods of time? No, because recycling, psychology and sex (to name but a few of the poorly researched fields) aren't as interesting as shooting rockets out of the atmosphere. It kind of seems a bit odd to me that no one wants to research sex in space, but then I remember how little attention women and reproduction have historically got in the normal course of medical research and I realise that it's not really a surprise.

The book is absolutely jammed with interesting stories. And there's a very "well, actually" element to quite a few of them and I always enjoy having the record set straight. That story you've heard about how NASA wanted to send Sally Ride to space for a week with 100 tampons - there were women involved in coming up with that excessive number; it was all about safety margins and that the important thing is that no one wants to risk even coming close to running out in orbit. (And also, I don't think this was mentioned in the book, but there are plenty of non-menstrual uses for tampons, they are a useful bit of emergency kit.) It's also clear that a lot of things got left out of the book. I suspect the authors could write another on the things they couldn't include. The book would have been an easier read without the section on space law. It was definitely the least interesting part of the book and the hardest to make fun. And I suspect most of the readers will be people who read science books for fun rather than people who read legal books for fun. But I think it was essential that it was included and it gave me quite a lot of understanding into why things are the way they are on earth, so that's useful even if I never get to Mars.

Ultimately I came out of the book with the thought that if we can't manage to live peacefully on a planet that has enough resources for all of us, then why (on earth) does anyone think that we'll manage it on one that doesn't. That is kind of a depressing takeaway but I found it a very funny book with lots of silly but relevant jokes that made it easy to keep reading. There's a lot of light in with the darkness. I'd recommend the book, maybe especially to anyone who thinks living in space would be great.

A Home for All Seasons

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:00:00 GMT

The author investigates the history of the house he and his husband have bought in a Herefordshire village. And the house is pretty interesting and worth investigating. He puts it all into context with local history, art history, music history, literary history, natural history, and probably some more histories! And that should all be interesting but I found it wandered too far away from the bits I personally found interesting and some of it rather blurred for me. The personal stories of Herefordshire and their life in and around the house were more engaging than the endless paintings. I like art, I like writing on art history less I guess. Possibly there were just too many subjects packed into the book and the house felt forgotten about for long stretches, or those stretches might just have felt long.

It's seemed to take me an awfully long time to get through the book which is usually a measure that I'm not really enjoying it that much, but I got it finished so there you go.

The Frozen People

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Elly Griffiths has put her Ruth Galloway series to bed and come back with a new series featuring a police detective called Ali Dawson. I'm wasn't sorry to see Ruth walk off into the sunset as I thought she'd rather exhausted the story of those characters but I do hope Griffiths writes more of her other series of Brighton mysteries in the future - those are definitely my favourites of hers. Though in looking up whether there are any new ones I've just realised she has a series with Harbinder Kaur as well and I've only read one of those.

Anyway, back to Ali Dawson. She's a cold case investigator with the Met but - and this is a departure for Griffiths - she works with a unit who actually travel in time to investigate historic cases. To me Griffiths is always more about the entertainment than the actual mystery or the writing, and this definitely delivers on the entertainment front. It's a quick easy read, and I suddenly realised that there weren't nearly enough pages left in the book to tie everything up. Yep, though the main mystery plot gets a conclusion there isn't really a full resolution by the end of the book, it's very much set up for you to come back for the next in the series.

It's silly and interesting, and it's a bit hard to get annoyed about historical improbabilities when you're overlooking scientific implausibilities. All the same I rather liked some of the interactions between the twenty first century characters and the nineteenth century ones. Ali has a fair number of things in common with Ruth but doesn't feel like a transposition. I'm not complaining about any of that really, and I'll be back to read more.

Daughters of Night

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:00:00 GMT

Having enjoyed The Square of Sevens I was very much up for reading more by Laura Shepherd-Robinson and Darren reckoned this was better than the book it's a sequel to so I went straight to this. And this was also really well written and imagined and hugely enjoyable.

The story centres on Caro Corsham, who finds herself pregnant while her husband is away at war. Oops. Oh, and it's 1782, which is a bit of a complication. Then she finds an erstwhile friend dying of a stab wound which also complicates things. Especially when the friend turns out to be a prostitute and Caro seems to be the only person who thinks the murder is worth investigating. The writing here is great, what I really noticed was all the detail. Eighteenth century London absolutely bounces off the page, fully formed with all kinds of little bits of info coming at you in every sentence. This isn't just an overload of research being thrown at you either, it's all worked into the landscape of the story and utterly delightful.

There's numerous other great characters and whilst the plot isn't nearly as tight as The Square of Sevens it's still very well done. Once again this one comes highly recommended from me. And I think the ending of the book is open enough that we might see more of what happens to Caro, or the other characters, in the future. I can hope anyway!

Less

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Well, this was an unexpected gem! I picked it up because I know Patrick Grant from the Sewing Bee on TV and he seems like a decent guy, and I'm basically on board with the argument that we could all do with buying less rubbish and I'm no fan of fast fashion to start with. So my expectations were pretty low I guess, I didn't expect to learn a lot.

I wasn't expecting a whole history of consumerism and how we got to this point where we want so much that we don't need. (It dovetailed nicely with The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker - a history of the English high street - that I read recently.) Nor was I expecting him to lay out a whole - fairly politically pointed - plan for how manufacturing in the UK could be much better to all our benefits. (While I'm dovetailing things I'll point out that if you like that bit of this book you might like Your Life is Manufactured that I read last year as well.) I was expecting plenty of railing about the excesses of the fashion industry, and I got it, though a lot of the statistics were still shocking. And I was expecting a large dose of Savile Row tailoring, and, as expected, that's a thread that runs through the whole book.

As already mentioned, I'm not a fast fashion fan. I have a friend who claims that every woman would like to wear a new dress every day and I have no luck convincing her that that's my worst nightmare. What I want is functional clothes that I'm comfortable in - both in the sense of personal comfort but also I've realised that there is the necessity of a bit of the sense of social comfort, I don't want everyone else to think I'm a complete weirdo based on my outfit I guess! (Is there a right level of weirdo-ness? I feel like there is.) But wanting functional clothes that never wear out is what's led me to make my own clothes. When my t-shirt eventually has more holes than fabric and dies then I can pull out the pattern and make myself a new one just the same. When the offspring was little I bought them a few outfits from Primark - kids grow out of clothes so fast and, I mean, how bad could they be? They were close to unwearable after one wash and I've never shopped there again. And as a result I've never been tempted to try any of the even faster fashion companies. I'm thinking that my friend's desire for a new dress every day might have more to do with never buying anything of quality that lasts than an actual desire for novelty.

Clothes-wise then I'm totally on board with buying good stuff and making it last. I have several items in my wardrobe that predate the offspring (now away at university) and I have many items that I hope will have decades of wear in them. I think Grant mentioned that he thought ten new items of clothing a year ought to be enough so I looked back through my records and I didn't even manage that last year. I don't know that everything I buy is quality though, one of the eye-openers in the book was how little correlation there can be between expensive items and good quality ones.

There are three parts to his overall thesis though: buy less, better and local. I don't think I do quite so well on the local. I flipped out around 15 years ago when I found out about Amazon's UK corporation tax contributions (£0) and haven't been enticed back yet, and nothing I've seen of the company since has made me think I'll ever shop with them again. (And it should be said that's been a stance that's mostly saved me money by making impulse purchases harder, or making me do a bit more research and discover that actually prices are often cheaper elsewhere.) But generally the local bit of the equation is not something I put that much thought into but I'll certainly be endeavouring to pay more attention to it from now onwards. And I could definitely do with paying attention to my consuming habits in other fields than fashion as well. The book does concentrate on textile industries in the main but makes it clear that all kinds of household goods need the same treatment.

Grant uses examples from his Community Clothing company throughout the book and when I reached the end I thought to myself, "Well, did I just read a 300 page advert for Community Clothing?". And I think I did. But I don't think that's a bad thing. If every business person had to write a 300 page explanation of how their company works and impacts the world around them then I think that would be a much better advertising landscape than the one we put up with.

I'm surprised how much I enjoyed the book and how engaging it was. Definitely one that I would recommend.

The Cartographers

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

I picked this up from the Science Fiction and Fantasy section of the bookshop, and for the first half I thought it had been mis-shelved. Not that I minded that, but once the second half of the story got going and things got weird it turned into a much more engaging book. As a result it's definitely one of those books that I don't want to say too much about, I feel like I might have already but then so does the book cover.

I very much liked how integral the maps were to the plot, it's not just a random object that could have been replaced by any other precious or antique thing but very much part of the plot. Funnily enough it was the actual setting of the book that didn't really gel for me, I didn't get much of a sense of New York in the parts that were set there. And it seemed like the character count was a bit excessive for the length of the story. The author did a decent job of differentiating most of them but I found myself not quite remembering the significance of some of them from time to time, and "who are you again?" always pulls me out of the story.

That sounds like a lot of criticism to me but mostly because it was a very enjoyable read and I just wanted it to be that bit better. It flowed better once it got going, and I'll be looking out other books by Shepherd in future.

Love Triangle

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 15:00:00 GMT

I enjoyed both of Matt Parker's previous books Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, which gets into maths beyond the third dimension and is kind of loopy, and Humble Pi, which is about the often hilarious things that happen when maths get misused. But it's taken me a while to get around to this one; triangles just didn't seem as if they could have that much depth of interest to them. Thankfully I'm always willing to admit when I'm wrong!

This was in fact a really fun read. I was definitely on team hexagon before reading but I think I might be swayed to team triangle by this book. I can always round up six triangles to make a hexagon after all. I tried to find some triangles to photograph the book with and found a surprising lack of them in my house - I eventually located some remnants of Christmas card making. Hexagons would only have been slightly easier because I could have opened a dozen board game boxes to find those; I conclude that more board games ought to feature triangular boards and grids.

The book is very accessible, you definitely don't need a big maths background to read it (though it's still fun even if you do). You'll go from vaguely remembering that trigonometry was a thing to more or less understanding how Fourier transforms work without any of the trauma I encountered the first time I trod that path. This version is all entertainment and a lot of information comes along for the ride. Vintage computing also gets a good look in for fans of the Burroughs 220, the HP-9100A or the SNES.

The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 17:00:00 GMT

I was really excited to read this history of the English high street, and it totally delivered. I was going to say British there but whilst I think the book might have mentioned Welsh or Scottish shops occasionally it was definitely pretty much all about England.

The story begins with marketplaces as they begin to spawn fixed shops in around about the seventeenth century and then each chapter takes you into a new era of the high street having a look at the different kind of shops that appear over time. And at the end of each time period there's a walk down a particular English shopping street. I think I've visited every high street covered in detail in the book. I know some of them better than others but it was really nice to feel at home in a book.

What's going to stick with me from this book is how much "it's not what it used to be" has been the cry for centuries. There's nothing new about the modern "death of the high street". As its true in many other contexts people complaining about change is the one thing you can rely on. Once upon a time the complaints were that middlemen were ruining everything - it was originally illegal to buy and sell and products were supposed to be purchased from their producers and household self sufficiency was the ideal, though not an ideal that was ever really a reality. It's all basically been downhill from there! More recently self-service was seen as the path to ruin - this isn't the self-checkout that we're currently converting to (and obviously complaining about) but the method of selecting your own produce from the shelves rather than being served from a counter. Everything new was complained about once. And it's very clear that the nostalgia is very much rose tinted in many places. For example needing to visit many different shops and exchange pleasantries to procure your shopping demanded you spent a lot of your time, or your wife's time, or you employed a servant to do it.

Though I'm really not someone who thinks the past was better I still really enjoyed the nostalgia of spotting all the chain shops I grew up with, many of which have gone now, the Woolworth's and the Debenham's. Then there's the mentions of things I knew but not in their hey day, like Whiteley's of Bayswater which I knew well in its 1990s shopping centre era. I enjoyed finding out about names that turn up in books but I never knew myself, Home & Colonial is a name that stands out in that category but there were many more mentioned that I knew but didn't. Plus all the tearooms! I feel like in the 1970s and 1980s of my childhood British Home Stores cafe was height of sophistication, it's odd to find out that that opinion isn't really so far off the mark.

It was a really enjoyable read and I'm left with a new appreciation for what we still have on the high street and how it serves us today; changing as it always has done.