nocto.com booklog

The Trouble With Goats and Sheep

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT

I was having a search through my reviews for authors I'd said that I'd watch out for again and Joanna Cannon's name came up and I found this one lurking in the library. I read Three Things About Elsie a few years back and really enjoyed the unreliable narrator mechanic of a mystery being handled by the narrator suffering from dementia.

This book is set in the heatwave of 1976 and it felt rather bizarre to find the dates on the page being exactly fifty years to the day before I was reading it. But a nice coincidence. The setting is an estate of semi-detached houses named after trees: Pine Close, Rowan Tree Croft etc. This made me laugh because in the summer of 1976 I was living in a semi-detached house in Chestnut Way. So although I don't really remember a lot about that summer (I was quite young!) I didn't have any trouble picturing the setting. I did think it a bit odd that the cul-de-sac where most of the book was set was called The Avenue, I would have expected something named an avenue to have two ends but I went to Google Maps and the first results I found for "The Avenue" were in fact cul-de-sacs. So there you go, total authenticity on the setting!

The book starts when one of the street's residents has unexpectedly vanished. A lot of the book is narrated by ten year old Grace who goes around with her friend Tilly attempting to find out what's happened to her neighbour. These are intertwined with sections looking at the situation from the viewpoints of other residents, and some of these delve back in time to events surrounding a fire in the close a few years before.

I really enjoyed it for much the same reasons as I enjoyed Three Things About Elsie, which is nice. Though it's not a crime novel style mystery (and the lack of formula is in it's favour in my opinion) it has a very mystery-ish feel to it as you get to figure out what's going on as the book advances. Grace made a great narrator - being a child she was able to see what all the grown ups did and report it but not always understand it herself which left the reader to join the dots up, follow the undercurrents, and work out what was happening. And by the end of the book you understand exactly what's going on. It's really entertaining but there's a seriousness lurking underneath it all.

I'm pleased to see that Joanna Cannon has written at least one other novel and that's on my to-find list now and I hope that there are more.

What We Cannot Know

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 10:00:00 GMT

I keep picking up Marcus du Sautoy's books and then not reading them. This one has been sitting on my bedside table for years now. I finally decided it was about time I read it or got rid of it. The book is all about digging around at the edges of human knowledge. Are there things that we know we'll never be able to know about?

My own instinctive answer to the question is "no". There are plenty of examples in history of people presuming stuff can't be known but we eventually figured out what was happening, and why should today be any different?

It's taken me quite a while to get through the book. Some parts were definitely more interesting to me than others. I'd say the interesting parts bifurcate into "stuff I already know a lot about and still like to read about" and "stuff I don't know very much about and it's fun to learn new things". That seems kind of odd and I guess it means that there are some topics that I feel like I know enough about and they still aren't engaging. And I rather don't even want to name the stuff that I find uninteresting for fear someone tell me to read another explanation of the topic! The stuff I didn't know much about that I found interesting were the brain science bits and the study of consciousness. And the maths bits are the bits where I can read the same explanations time and time again and still find them fascinating. And du Sautoy is a mathematician so he very much leans into the things that fascinate me as well.

The book is a decade old now (I'm not sure how long it's been on my bedside table but probably most of that time, it's definitely survived two house moves) and the chapter investigating consciousness is anchored around a chatbot called Cleverbot. I expected this material would have aged badly with how fast this technology has moved on since 2016 but actually the chatbot was only really used as a motif and the real content was about brain science. I certainly don't think that the fact that the book is a decade old should stop you from reading it.

There's a lot of meanderings into philosophy, and also into religion and whether a God can ever be compatible with science. I felt du Sautoy does a decent job of that but I'm sitting in the same place in atheism as he does so it's not surprising that I think his view makes sense.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems tell us, very roughly, that if you create a system of axioms then you can prove things with them but there are things that are true about that system that can't be proved with just those axioms; you need to look at the system from outside to prove some things. And I think my takeaway from the book is that this is something that's not just about mathematical logic. There are things in the universe that are true that we'll never be able to prove are true.

The book is about probing around and trying to find out whether we know, or can know, what those things are. I wasn't expecting there to be a list of bullet points at the end telling me the things we cannot know (just to be clear, there isn't!) so I wasn't disappointed. It's an interesting read. In addition to the years unread in the wilderness it's taken me four months to read my way through it. At this point I usually get annoyed with myself for reading books slowly but this one was definitely worth taking my time over, and it's being transferred to the shelves where it's granted indefinite stay for reference purposes.

The Killing Time

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 20:00:00 GMT

This is the second in a series of mysteries set in the modern day, well June 2024, except there's there's time travelling involved as well. The first book, The Frozen People, felt rather unfinished to me. This rounds out the story started in that book. It wrapped up so neatly at the end that I wondered if this was all we were going to see of Ali Dawson and her cold case team, but I see there's a third volume coming out later this year.

The crime side of the mystery in the book is completely overshadowed by the hilarious fun of jumping through time at inopportune moments. There are various psychic, medium and mesmerism charlatans (or are they?) involved and Charles Dickens gets a quick cameo. I especially enjoyed the bits at the Great Exhibition of 1851. For the most part the plot is just silly, but occasionally it's quite touching. And it's a good job the time travelling is fun because the actual mystery which you'd think would be the heart of the book is paper thin as if the author just couldn't be bothered with it. Either that or the time travellers will sort out the motivation in the next book < insert shrug emoji here >. I kind of wish these would get away from the mystery novel format. But all the same it was an entertaining read and despite being disappointed with the mystery I'm sure I'll be there reading the next one.

A Family Romance

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

It's been a while since I last read Brookner but this book was just what I was looking for. A very cool and quiet story to read in a heatwave.

The last book I read was about a character named Dolly, and so is this one, in fact it looks like that is an alternate title used outside the UK. The Dolly here is the narrator's aunt by marriage and the book slowly reveals the details of her life. In the book the eventful but dependent existence of Dolly is compared to the sparer life of the narrator Jane. I've commented before that I find Brookner rather anachronistic and this book definitely felt like that to me. It was published in 1993 and the narration mostly takes place in the 1980s and I realised that Jane was only a few years older than me and that in the end what I was actually comparing was Jane's life and mine. And we come from different worlds but that was only revealed slowly through the book.

When Jane's father marries her mother he occupies "a large bachelor flat. With a little adjustment he thought it would do very well for the two of them". Her father, as far as I can remember, is only ever referred to as working at a bank. The flat is in out of the way, unfashionable Battersea, though it overlooks the park. Generally it sounded quite nice but I had the idea that the family, once Jane was born, were quite squeezed in. They were obviously fairly well off and they'd be doing well out of rocketing London property prices as well. It's only late in the book that the flat is revealed to be seven rooms and two bathrooms: yes, I'd imagine the flat would do for two of them! There's a vast quantity of street name dropping in the book so you can go to RightMove and look up apartments on Prince of Wales Drive SW11 for yourself. The closest match I could find was going for £1.75 million today.

The story was however really about Jane slowly realising how privileged she was and that Dolly did things differently and had different advice for her because she came from a much less secure background. At least that's what I thought it was about. The author's summing up of the situation in the last chapter left me a little puzzled as to whether Jane actually understood that. Jane came to different conclusions - finding that their attitudes to relationships were the defining difference - but I didn't really agree with her. For most of the book I'd liked her as a child and the last chapter made me think I'd like her less as an adult. Perhaps that's the point, as children we overlook differences between people, as adults other things become important. I enjoy reading Brookner's prose and will continue to do so whilst probably continuing to disagree with her character's opinions quite a lot of the time!

Restless Dolly Maunder

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:00:00 GMT

I should really grep through all my book reviews and get myself a list of authors who I've said I'd like to read again. I said I'd look out for more of Kate Grenville's books when I read The Secret River but somehow that was almost twenty years ago. Anyway I'm finally making good on my promise. My leisure centre has recently been refurbished and now contains a mini (unstaffed) library where they have just a few shelves of books to borrow and a self-checkout machine where you can borrow or return books. Which is great. Hopefully they'll rotate the selection of books regularly but for the moment I really like having just a small collection to pick from and this is why the Kate Grenville book jumped out at me at long last.

I found this story captivating. It's a fictional biography starting with Dolly's birth on a sheep farm in Australia in the 1880s and following her through the various ups and downs of her life as she tries to get away from the expectations that society puts on her. It was a really enjoyable, quick moving read.

About halfway through the book I found myself wondering if the book was entirely fictional and it wasn't a surprise in the end to find that it was based on the life of the author's grandmother. I really liked the way she portrayed Dolly and imagined the forces that drove her to make various decisions. The book puts you inside the head of someone who probably wasn't very likable in real life and makes you love her because you can see why she's like that and hope that you would be too.

Definitely putting Grenville on my to-read-some-more-of author list now!

Death Goes On Skis

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The green Virago Classics spine of this book stood out among the crime books in the Oxfam bookshop. Crime fiction all seems to come in one of three styles of standard cover these days. I'm not sure why publishers think we'll only buy books if they look like other books! Probably for the same reason Aldi only think we'll buy their chocolate bars if we mistake them for big brand name ones. I certainly do judge books by their covers but I'd rather have something more original to judge.

Anyway this was a great cover and I picked the book up. I'd never heard of Nancy Spain before and she definitely seems like an interesting character. Unfortunately I suspect reading her biography is more interesting than reading her fiction. This is the fourth in a series of comic crime novels and was published in 1949. Sandi Toksvig's introduction is great and she manages not to spoil the book during it.

In the beginning of the book the characters are all assembling on a sleeper train to the alps and it reminded me more of Enid Blyton characters heading to boarding school rather than anything else. Unfortunately this runs a lot longer than Blyton and on a less interesting plot. As expected in a crime novel characters die regularly in suspicious ways and other characters investigate their deaths. I was never quite sure whether some characters were behaving badly for humorous reasons or whether the book was just conveying outdated attitudes, or in fact whether the author was poking fun at attitudes that ought to be outdated, I think/hope it was at least a bit of the last. Similarly the plot wandered and it took me way too long to work out that some things were supposed to be farcical and not just ridiculous.

The most badly drawn of the characters was Miriam Birdseye who I think is Spain's ongoing detective character who didn't even get an intro on the train so she just seemed to parachute in (not literally though she might as well have done). As far as I could see she did no detecting, but again, perhaps that's part of the humour. Who knows? Not me and I probably won't be trying another from this series to find out.

Love and Friendship

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:00:00 GMT

In 2012 I commented on my read of The Truth About Lorin Jones saying that I hadn't read any of Lurie's books since 2006 and needed to get on and read them faster. So now it's 14 years later and I'm just getting round to that. Ho hum. Time is ever weirder. I still have several more of her adult fiction titles to seek out so let's see if I manage to do that in any reasonable definition of time from here.

This was Lurie's first book, published in 1962. The characters are twenty- and thirty-somethings working at an isolated college somewhere in New England; at least the male characters are. The college is male only, though I'm not sure that's ever stated, and most of the female characters are simply "wives". The main female character is Emmy and the book deals with her relationship with her husband Holman Turner. For an American book this is very much a story of people from different classes with more or less every character being pegged out with their social standing at some point in the story. It's the sort of thing I'd expect in British fiction of the same era. Emmy has an income of her own provided by her wealthy father whereas Holman notably describes his father as having worked in a bank omitting the bit where he was a security guard. Emmy's income allows them to live in a nice house and have a cleaning lady two days a week, their friends are not so fortunate.

I felt the story took a long time to get going, and some of the writing early on felt downright clunky. Once everyone was introduced and Emmy embarked on an affair so that actual plot appears then the book was great. The beginning definitely gave off "first book" vibes though. I really enjoyed the structure, most of the story is from Emmy's point of view but other characters get chunks, and some characters only get very small scenes to show their point of view but it all adds up. Each chapter is concluded with a letter from a visiting lecturer at the college which initially appear to have little relation to the main plot. However as the book goes on these third party views put parts of the plot in context. It's an interesting choice of structure and one I enjoyed, and definitely shows off how Lurie would develop into a first class writer.

For a sixty-plus year old book it holds up pretty well really. Now, if I keep reading Lurie at the same rate I'll read her other five books in the next 22 years making me complete her ten adult novels in 2048. I'm certainly not planning to leave it that long, and I have a copy of one of the remaining five, but wouldn't bet against it taking me longer than that all the same. This also puts Lurie into my five book club where I'm very happy to welcome her as a member.

Same As It Ever Was

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:00:00 GMT

I picked this up because the cover had a quote comparing it to Anne Tyler, and I liked the picture on the cover which somehow reminded me of the view from the window of my house up a hill in Holmfirth. The second is particularly weird because the book turned out to be set in Chicago. I looked the artist up, and the cover painting looks to be a variation on this one: Mostly Maine by Rachel Campbell. The book cover version looks to have been recoloured to make the white houses darker, presumably so the white text of the title stands out, and the darker houses do make it look a bit more Yorkshire than Maine, though neither of those is Chicago. Who knows, anyway I found an artist as well as an author so that's cool.

Back to the book. We meet Julia at the supermarket, shopping for her husband's sixtieth birthday dinner party, when she bumps into an old friend Helen, and the atmosphere is a little strange between them. The rest of the book is told switching between this present day and about twenty years in the past when Helen and Julia were friends and you gradually get to the bottom of how the friendship worked and how it dissolved. Incidentally I kept having to reset my brain with the whole twenty year span thing. Apparently it makes no difference that my own kid has gone from baby to twenty-something in much the same time as Julia's kids have, I still think twenty years ago can't possibly be later than the 1980s, and definitely can't be in the twenty-first century. Time is increasingly weird!

For the first half of the book I could have left it and not much cared. Sure, there are mysteries to unravel but they aren't ones where the reveal is worth much. It was in the second half of the book that things really came to life for me when you start to see how other relationships in Julia's life - husband and son, mother, daughter and prospective daughter-in-law, are affected by different events as well. It's a web that takes a while to weave.

I don't think the comparison to Anne Tyler is entirely misplaced; I do think Tyler gets to the heart of things faster than Lombardo did and this is certainly a longer book than most of Tyler's. In the end I was glad I stuck with it and I'd certainly read the author again. It's always easier to read a second book when you can trust the author to deliver.

Deadman's Pool

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

This book went two places that I didn't like, but I'd be spoiling the plot for anyone else if I went into detail about them. And that's also an odd thing for me to lead with since I otherwise enjoyed the book a lot! But I needed to get that off my chest first it seems.

I think we're on episode eight of the series and I'm always happy to be back with the characters but I guess I'm reaching the point where I wonder if things here have been exhausted.

I'm making it sound like I hated it, I definitely didn't. It was an entertaining, well written, engaging read. And perhaps there is more to come and that'll make sense of what happened here. I need to remember that there was another thread to the story that I though was really well done, and perhaps the series is just moving on with a bit of a refresh. I hope that's the case. For me it's very much an "it's complicated" type of a read, a lot that I like with a twist of something distasteful.

Random other whinge since I seem to be in mood for offloading negative vibes today: I wish author's could keep their websites up to date. I went looking for Kate Rhodes site to see if there were more books planned and found even this one wasn't listed. The same scenario has played out with numerous other authors lately. I'm sure it's just symptomatic of the downgrading of websites in general and social media being the source of truth, but I wish it had never happened. I much preferred it when authors actually used their sites and/or publishers cared about them enough to keep them up to date and use them for marketing purposes. I guess I should probably ask a chatbot these days. (Narrator: she will not in fact ask a chatbot.)

Ink Ribbon Red

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

My memory of Eight Detectives is that I was a bit disappointed by it, but when I spotted this book by the same author on the library shelf I went back and had a look at what I'd written at the time. I found I'd actually said it was really good in the end but the mystery was too loaded towards the end of the book, and I'd said I'd try the author again. So that was enough to make me check out the book and take it home. Where I got completely absorbed by it and read it in a few days. I'm definitely glad I picked it up!

Like Eight Detectives this story has a good setup and it made a difference that I was willing to trust that Pavesi could deliver on it's promise. A group of university friends are getting together to celebrate a thirtieth birthday and they play a game where they write short stories in which one member of the group kills another member of the group. These stories are then inserted into the "real" story of their birthday weekend, which isn't told entirely in chronological order and also includes various flashbacks to events in the weeks preceding the get-together. It's very much a case of the unreliable narrator on steroids and it definitely felt like it could have been a complete disaster and a tangled mess of a book. But it all manages to work out and I left the book happy, and it's very clear in the end what is fiction and what isn't.

The tangle is part of what makes it so readable: did that chapter you just read really happen or was it a figment of one of the character's imagination? Did it fit into a pattern by accident or by design? The book definitely has "just one more chapter" appeal.

I'm not really sure why the author set the book in 1999, making the characters just a couple of years older than me. I think it may have been wanting to remove mobile phones and reliable internet connections, more or less, from the equation, though I actually think more of the characters would have had them by then. And also it makes the typewriters used to write the stories slightly less anachronistic. But I'm picking at holes that aren't really there. I liked the disparate group of friends and, in the midst of a very fantastical book, there was a lot of realism to their relationships and their life paths diverging after university seemed realistic.

Overall though I'm glad that six-year-ago-me wrote down that she'd give the author another chance and trust him that time. I very much hope the author's got some more wild ideas for future books.