Reading . . .

I am currently reading The Cold Calling by Will Kingdom (Phil Rickman under another name) - very good but not as good as the Merrily Watkins series. Then there's Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took my Dog which is improving the more I read of it and I'm familiar with much of the geographical area she writes about which has to be a bonus. The first 30 pages didn't impress me but it's growing on me.

Also reading Suffragette City by Kate Muir which I've had kicking around for ages. I finally picked it up and started reading it on Saturday and was hooked by it. Albertina is living a somewhat Bohemian life in New York when her grandmother gives her a trunk belonging to Agnes - Albertina's great great grandmother. The problem is that Agnes - in spirit form - keeps turning up and haranguing Albertina about her life and how she's wasting it. Funny and historically interesting.

Pretty mixed bunch there and I'm also still listening to Bill Bryson's At Home - on disc 13 of 14.

Currently listening

I have never read any of Bill Bryson's books but At Home appealed to me. I am currently listening to the Audio edition - all 14 CDs of it, unabridged - read by the man himself. I'm on disc 2 and it's really interesting - just the sort of thing I like. It's packed full of fascinating details. He sets out to give a potted history of houses and their contents by reference to his own house - a Norfolk rectory in a village which he doesn't name.

So far he's talked about clergyman in the 18th and 19th century - I hadn't realised how many of them had made inventions or discoveries in all fields of human endeavour. Then he's covered the Great Exhibition and all its interesting statistics. Only 25 people arrested for crimes out of 5 million visitors. The Chartists and their struggle for universal manhood suffrage and the design and construction of the Crystal Palace and its subsequent history.

There are so many interesting snippets that you immediately want to know about them and I suspect you really need to read it as an e-book so that you can look up more information about the things he mentions. I really recommend it to anyone who likes information and interesting and eccentric people.

Still reading Phil Rickman . . . .

I'm part way through The Lamp of the Wicked - which is the 5th in the Merrily Watkins series. It's good when books you haven't read for years are just as good - if not better when you read them again. I've read nearly five in a week and have stayed up later than normal on several evenings because I couldn't put the book down.

I'm also listening to an audio book of Jane Austen's The Watsons and Sanditon - her two unfinished novels. I really wish she'd lived long enough to finish Sanditon as I'm sure it would have been one of her best books.

I also have an audio book - all 14 discs of it - of Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life which looks like being good. I got that through the Amazon Vine programme - free - which can't be bad.