Reading the first in the series after the second; it doesn’t sound ideal but I often find that authors get better as series go on so I don’t think it’s that bad an approach. Here I had an inkling that something was up with one of the characters based on the fact that they hadn’t featured in the second book but that didn’t spoil my enjoyment. The author didn’t make me care very much about the victim here, it was more figuring out the logic of the puzzle of who killed him and why, which is interesting and there’s no reason every fictional murder victim should be a nice guy but it just felt a bit uninvolving at times here. Darren’s reading this at the moment and pointed out that Sam seems to be far too liberal a character for the time and place (1920ish colonial India) but I think that if he wasn’t then he’d be insufferable to a twenty-first century readership so I’m glad he’s a bit anachronistic.

Really enjoyed this; I was in need of a non-fiction fix and this delivered it. Very well written essay on how the world could be a better place (and especially well written considering it’s a translation from Dutch). I went into it expecting to agree with the author on some points and disagree on others but mostly I felt talked a lot of sense. Certainly on the things I already knew a fair amount about he seemed to have his head screwed on. It left me with lots of things to explore (and lots of citations to follow up, though as always it’s super annoying not being able to access academic journal articles easily) and lots to think about.

An utterly fab book. Each chapter skips around to a different character, a different time, a different place. The sort of device I adore. Sometimes you know what tragedies are ahead of the characters before they do, sometimes you hope things we be resolved differently. It all revolves around the life of a reclusive movie star, but spreads out in all directions. You could end up feeling that it was all spread too thinly but instead I just wanted to know more about some of the minor characters who barely got mentioned. Just more please.

The bit that really made it marvellous was that the chapters skipping around to different characters/times/places were all so distinctly different. Lots of different ways of telling the story – of digging into a character’s personal archives – were embraced which made you want to read on just to see the ‘how’ of the story as well as the ‘what’.

Second in a series of graphic novels, actually they are omnibuses of comics themselves. Good stuff. I need to get hold of the final two parts.

Random audiobook from the library. Picked because I needed something lightweight and fluffy and it didn’t look like a very deep book. And it wasn’t. It was entertaining enough, I wouldn’t have finished it if it wasn’t, but nothing special. And yes, I am always kind of disappointed when I ask for fluffy and only get fluffy, but that’s my problem and not the author’s!

Second in a series. I read it before the first one. Set in 1920s colonial Indian. Given that the author’s name is Indian I was surprised at first to find the central character is a white British policeman who has headed out to India (which sounds awful when I write it down, after all, I probably wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d opened up a book to find a white author writing an Indian character.) Anyway, I liked Sam Wyndham and I didn’t have any problem getting to know him and his reasons for being in India despite skipping the first book. This story is about the death of a prince and there’s no shortage of non-white characters, including Sam’s sergeant in the Calcutta police.

I’ve since read the first book and my memory has rather merged the two stories together for me so I don’t want to say things that might be about the wrong book. I enjoyed the investigations in both the books but both times had difficulty being very concerned about justice for the victims as neither book really brought them to life. Other characters did come to life though and I’ll probably read some more in the future as I found these an interesting beginning.

I found this very easy to read. A nice jaunt round Venice. It’s billed as an “unputdownable thriller” on the cover and I think that whoever gets to decide on those tags for the cover needs to get a bit more original about it than that as that description almost put me off buying it. It doesn’t really do the book justice. I did read it pretty quickly, I was several chapters in before I left the bookshop, and I guess it does have plenty of thriller elements towards the end but mostly it was just a well written and interesting look at a guy living in Venice who gets mixed up in some rather weird goings on.

Graphic novel of Darren’s that was lying around so I picked it up and read it in one sitting. Nice bit of noir murder mystery. I quite like that it’s in parts so I couldn’t read the entire thing at once (well I suppose I could but all the parts weren’t available to me and that’s fine).

I borrowed this from Darren, who urged me to read it because he thought it was great. I don’t think I liked it nearly as much as he did though. It was full of film references that went over my head, at that level where they are just low enough to clip me and make me realise that I’m missing something. I enjoyed the story and the main character with agoraphobia seemed both just realistic enough and sympathetically portrayed. The Rear Window connection is one that even my mostly film-ignorant self did manage to make. And I did get to feel a little bit clever when I worked one of the twists out which is always nice.

Good, just not quite really good.