Emma Types Stuff

Until very recently, I had no idea reading styles were a thing. I was aware that some people bought a book and read the book, but put that down to them having some sort of inner self-control that I lacked. Those other strong-willed people didn't have what my mother calls the family 'butterfly brain', putting down books that they are enjoying perfectly well and fluttering off, unable to finish for reasons even they don't understand. I still haven't finished The Binding which I started long before Covid and enjoyed every moment of until I suddenly put it down and never went back. What are you even meant to call that? A temporary DNF? A ODIF (one-day I'll finish?) For those of you who do know about reading styles, it must be painfully obvious that I'm a mood reader. I'm not flawed, I'm not especially weird, and I'm no less disciplined than anyone else. My mood controls what I want to read, and what I can process at any one time. Sometimes the thou

And so we return to my very occasional series , 'books with the same vibe', in which I compare and contrast two books that for one reason or another, have a great deal in common in subject matter, theme, and marketing style. In this case it's The Lighthouse Witches [CJ Cooke] and The Lamplighters [Emma Stonex] which I read back in 2022. Both are female-focused stories about a group of people who vanish from a lighthouse, and both books switch between the current day and the past to tell their stories, and between multiple POVs.  People going missing from lighthouses is a common trope, following the real life Flannan Isle mystery , with The Lamplighters being a retelling of that story in a new era, and The Lighthouse Witches certainly taking some inspiration from it.  Naturally the covers both prominently feature lighthouses, with my preference being the night-sky reds of The Lamplighters over The Lighthouse Witches lovely but rather misleading design. I was under the impres

In preparation for my trip to Italy, I read a whole bunch of Ancient Rome themed books designed to educate and entertain me ahead of my holiday. Of course, after two weeks taking in the sights (and eating my bodyweight in pizza and pasta) you can understand that I was done with the theme for a while. 'A while' turned out to be... three months.  The bite of winter has sent me scurrying back to books featuring sunshine and olives. No wonder all these men are constantly thinking about Ancient Rome when faced with the bitter reality of Londinium as of Jan/Feb 2024.  So here is my second list of books to read when you can't stop thinking about Ancient Rome... The Books Falco: Shadows in Bronze by Lindsey Davis  The Falco series looks set to be my new obsession. It's set in Rome, about eight years before Vesuvius erupted. Falco is an informer (a private investigator) and the series delightfully inverts every 'hardboiled PI' trope imaginable. Falco may live in a scumm

If you have read this novel already and are now worrying about my personal character and how dangerous I may or may not be... never fear. It was only sometimes like looking inside my own head. Definitely not the bit at the end where things got freaky.  But even then I sort of got it.  If you haven't read it and are now confused... well... that's sort of the Motherthing experience. It's literary (not my favourite) but also somewhat campy, suburban horror (one of my faves). It's about grief and mother issues, and... hoo boy can I relate there.  Motherthing is the story of Abby, who prides herself on being one of the children from broken homes who made it. She has a good life and is wildly, desperately in love with her husband. Their conversation in the opening scene, as they await bad news at the hospital, shows two people who are exactly on each other's wavelength. They are supportive and playful, and even in their darkest moments they can ' yes and ' each

Sometimes you just have to admit that you've been played. You fell for an obvious scam that was specifically designed to suck in punters like you and all you can do at the end is carry on with as much dignity as possible. I talk not of NFTs, or MLM schemes, but of Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy.  In actuality, calling it a scam is unfair. There's plenty of things about Scorched Grace that might excite a publisher, plenty of cool ways to market it, and far worse books have received far more attention.  But as a punter, I felt decidedly ripped off.  Scorched Grace follows Sister Holiday, a nun who has given up her hard-rocking, hard-partying queer life in New York for a New Orleans convent school where she teaches music, aids prison mothers, and is firmly of the belief that she is the world's greatest sleuth. When a fire kills the school janitor, and then another kills one of the nuns, she starts investigating. Slap a cool stained-glass cover on that book and you might as w

When revealing my terrifying list of my TBR Books , it was with the caveat that it did not include a few old bags of books that are kept in my bedroom in my mother's house.  Technically I own these books, and bought them with an intent to read them, but honestly, I doubted there was much there to hold my interest in 2024. Many of them were 50p classics picked up in charity shops ten-to-fifteen years ago, and I'd much rather grab a digital copy than poke through a yellowed, cobweb-covered reminder of my years of trying to better myself in poverty. But I was home for Christmas and I thought I'd take an opportunity to go through and see if there was anything worth rescuing. Alongside the brick-sized Dickens and Tolstoy paperbacks, I discovered there were three short story collections just sitting there, waiting to be read.  Since my recent Short Story Advent really opened me up to a new way of consuming short stories, this seemed an ideal opportunity to find something meanin