Emma Types Stuff

One of the absolute joys in life is finding appreciation for something you didn't previously 'get'. For me, short story collections are that thing.  Whilst I have no issues reading short stories in general, collections and anthologies used to defeat me. I found them more exhausting than novels, much in the same way tapas can be more filling than a large meal. But after trialling a method of reading multiple collections and once, hopping between them as the mood struck, I have become an anthology devotee.  And so we come onto my Spring challenge. I actually intended to post this at the start of April, and keep it updated as I went, but life took a bit of a turn and so I chose to read the books and round them up later.  I had expected the books I chose to take the majority of the month, but a combination of three short page lengths and four very easy reads meant I was done in less than two weeks. See what I read below... The Collections The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by ...

If it wasn't for my recent Read What You Own challenge , I probably wouldn't have read True Crime Story [Joseph Knox]. It's been languishing on my TBR every since I bought it and immediately forgot it existed.  It was only when I felt the need for something true-crime related that I looked at it again - I figured the title was certainly a step in the right direction. Realising that it is faux true-crime, one of my favourite subgenres, I dived in right away.  The overall conceit is that the real author of the book is editing this on behalf of a fictional writer friend, who died before completing her investigation into a missing student. She has interviewed all the main players and those interviews are interspersed with her own email conversations with Knox.    The case is that of Zoe, who went missing during a fire evacuation at her student towerblock in Manchester. She is blonde and pretty but far from the ideal 'virginal' missing girl, with an increasingly complex...

I read it, ok? I read it! Can the whole Richard Osman publishing complex leave me alone now?  Yes I did used to watch Pointless, and yes I did like him on Taskmaster, and yes I do watch Midsomer Murders ... but sometimes you have to fight against being put in a box. So I decided I'd read The Thursday Murder Club, Osman's mammoth hit, when I was ready. Which, as it turns out, is four years after it was published. So, here was my theory going in: Richard Osman is a clever person, and a known wit, and wrote an above-average murder mystery. A clean-cut murder mystery is the exact sort of book his daytime audience laps up, and it was no doubt helped along by bookshops, keen to promote a celebrity book without the whiff of a ghostwriter. Once it got around that he'd actually written it and that it was pretty good, the snobbier end of the market read it, followed by the people who don't read much but will pick up a book everyone is talking about.  Did I begrudge him the suc...

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...

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...

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...

If you are still following me on social media at this point, I can assume you are either a fan of The Traitors or like me enough to somehow overlook my excited memes about murder, banishments and breakfasts.  The BBC reality series returned to brighten up our January after becoming a national obsession in late 2022. The show came from nowhere to become a word-of-mouth hit, with Traitors Amanda and Wilf ascending to national heroes, alongside faithful 'Maddie Marple' and - of course - Claudia Winkleman's knitwear. In what is essentially Werewolf , meets Among Us , meets The Crystal Maze , twenty-two players arrive at a Scottish castle in the hope of winning £120k. A number of them are secretly assigned 'traitors' and must meet every night to 'murder' a faithful. After the death is announced at breakfast, the whole group must work together to win money in folk horror-themed challenges, and then gather at the round table to evict a member of the group. It...

Very occasionally you can read a book that you don't enjoy, and think is terrible, and still not hate it. For me that is usually because there is some other emotional factor involved, which is the case with The Maidens [Alex Michaelides].  I bought it knowing that the reviews were lacklustre, but I was willing to read a comically pretentious Dark Academia thriller for a bit of fun. I popped it on as an audiobook during a deeply upsetting family crisis, which involved hours of driving and a solid day of cleaning in terrible circumstances. I didn't need anything clever, I needed something easy to follow and distracting while I was scraping years of filth off a kitchen floor and bursting into tears at random moments.   So it was only when I had a few moments to myself, much later, that I was able to go 'oh wait, it really was awful.'  The book follows Mariana, a fantastically wealthy group therapist, who is in deep mourning for her husband. She is guardian to her niece,...