Holiday Reading

Here are the results of my holiday reading this year. The mark out of ten I offer is not related to literary merit or any sense of genre importance. I use it simply to tell you how diverting the book was as a holiday read:

Pete Paphides - Broken Greek (8/10)
Pete is a music journalist from a Greek family based in Birmingham. This autobiographical book covers his childhood and early teenage years. The pull of the music industry was strong but the peer pressure that formed his early opinions was also influential. As a Brummie who recognises both the landscape and the chart-music of my young adult years (I am older than the author) I loved this journey.


Ben Machell - The Unusual Suspect (9/10)
Ben is a newspaper columnist and feature-writer. This is the account of Stephen Jackley. He was an Asperger's student so his decision making was unconventional. Channelling Robin Hood he began, in 2007, a life of crime designed to help the poor by robbing banks and building societies. It didn't go as well as he expected.


Simon Mayo - Knife Edge (7/10)
Yes, that Simon Mayo. Page-turner, thriller, bit short on likelihood but ticked the boxes for a quick read.


Bill Bryson - The Body (7/10)
A very entertaining account of the different bits of our bodies and how progress into understanding them was made. No need to read in one go. Fit in a chapter here and there between novels. And rejoice that you were born when you were.


Val McDermid - Still Life (8/10)
The very undisputed queen of the police procedural at the top of her game.


Francine Toon - Pine (7/10)
Slow-developing, ghostly gothic Halloween weirdness in a Scottish community. Delightfully creepy with portentous moments regularly spooking the reader.

Catriona Ward - The Last House on Needless Street (9/10)
Two children, a weird guy and a cat take it in turns to narrate this story. All are unreliable witnesses at one time or another. Not so much a whodunnit as a who did what to whom and when? Brilliant.