Book by my Bed – Wicked Witch's Blog

Sundays in bed with …….. My Kind of Happy

Sundays in bed with is a meme that was originally hosted by Midnight Book Girl. It is simply a chance to share the book that is by your bed at the moment (or that you wish was by your bed). This week the book by my bed (or on the arm of my sofa) is My Kind of Happy by Cathy Bramley

I only discovered Cathy Bramley a couple of years ago when I picked a book of hers up at the library. I really enjoy her novels so was pleased to spot this one on the library shelf yesterday.

Blurb from the book:
‘I think flowers are sunshine for the soul.’

Flowers have always made Fearne smile. She treasures the memories of her beloved grandmother’s floristry and helping her to arrange beautiful blooms that brought such joy to their recipients.

But ever since a family tragedy a year ago, Fearne has been searching for her own contentment. When a chance discovery inspires her to start a happiness list, it seems that Fearne might just have found her answer…

Sometimes the scariest path can be the most rewarding. So is Fearne ready to take the risk and step into the unknown? And what kind of happiness might she find if she does?

Fearne is still grieving for her brother after his death several months ago but when she begins to clear out his room, she discovers an unsent letter from her brother to her. In the letter, he talks about how it is important to live your life doing what makes you happy and hopes that Fearne will do that. This makes her realise that she isn’t actually doing the things that make her happy and she isn’t really sure what needs to be on her happiness list.

I’m really enjoying the start of this. I like the idea of making a list of the things that make you happy and make sure that you include them in your life. I really like the character of Fearne and the dog, Scamp, who she is looking after for a neighbour is just gorgeous.

What’s by your bed this weekend?

Sundays in bed with……..Together, Again

Blurb from the book-
Sisters Jolene, Marsha and Annis have convened at their beautiful family home, Fox House, following the death of their mother, the tricky Eleanor Vamplew. Born seven years apart, the women are more strangers than sisters.

Jolene, the eldest, is a successful romantic novelist who writes about beautiful relationships even though her own marriage to the handsome and charming Warren is complicated.
Marsha, the neglected middlechild, has put all of her energy into her work, hoping money will plug the gap in her life left by the man who broke her young heart.

Annis is the renegade, who left home aged sixteen and never returned, not even for the death of their beloved father Julian. Until now.

So when the sisters discover that their mother has left everything to Annis in her will, it undermines everything they thought they knew. Can saying their final goodbyes to Eleanor bring them together again?

I am really enjoying this book so far. So much so, that I really didn’t want to put it down and go to bed last night which is always the mark of a good book.

I love the gradual way that the sisters are getting to know one another again and the way that we are drip fed diary entries from their mother which cast light on their childhood. There is a bit of romance too but the main thing is definitely the three sisters and the relationship between them.

Sundays in bed with ………. A Day of Fallen Night

This is the prequel to the amazing The Priory of the Orange Tree and is set 500 years before the events that take place in that book. Both books are effectively stand alones although they take place in the same world and share some of the same settings.

Blurb from the book:
Tunuva Melim is a sister of the Priory. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms – but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation is starting to question the Priory’s purpose.

To the north, in the Queendom of Inys, Sabran the Ambitious has married the new King of Hróth, narrowly saving both realms from ruin. Their daughter, Glorian, trails in their shadow – exactly where she wants to be.

The dragons of the East have slept for centuries. Dumai has spent her life in a Seiikinese mountain temple, trying to wake the gods from their long slumber. Now someone from her mother’s past is coming to upend her fate.

When the Dreadmount erupts, bringing with it an age of terror and violence, these women must find the strength to protect humankind from a devastating threat.

The story is told through the different points of each of the women who live in different parts of the world. At the beginning, the POVs change quite quickly which I didn’t like that much as I like to get more immersed in a character. However, as I read through last night, the length for each POV became longer and I did begin to feel as though I was getting to know each of the women.

It’s definitely the longest book that I have read so far this year at a massive 850 pages and I’m glad that I’ve got my book couch so that I don’t have to hold it as it’s quite heavy😃It’s a great read so far.

Sundays in bed with ……….. A Winter Grave

Blurb from the book-
A young meteorologist checking a mountain top weather station, discovers the body of a man entombed in ice.

The dead man is investigative reporter, George Younger, missing for three months after vanishing during what he claimed was a hill-walking holiday.

Cameron Brodie, a veteran Glasgow detective, volunteers to be flown north to investigate Younger’s death, but he has more than a murder enquiry on his agenda. He has just been given a devastating medical prognosis by his doctor and knows the time has come to face his estranged daughter who has made her home in the remote Highland village.

Arriving during an ice storm, Brodie and pathologist Dr. Sita Roy, find themselves the sole guests at the inappropriately named International Hotel, where Younger’s body has been kept refrigerated in a cake cabinet. But evidence uncovered during his autopsy places the lives of both Brodie and Roy in extreme jeopardy.

As another storm closes off communications and the possibility of escape, Brodie must face up not only to the ghosts of his past, but to a killer determined to bury forever the chilling secret that George Younger’s investigations had threatened to expose.

This book is set in the year 2051 when climate change has flooded huge areas of Europe and turned parts of Asia and Africa into uninhabitable deserts. Scotland is now an independent nation and has used nuclear energy to secure its electricity supplies.

I love dystopian fiction and this intriguing murder mystery in a dystopian setting is fantastic so far. The first few chapters were a bit slow as the author gave us a lot of information about how the world has changed by 2051. I guess this will all be needed to make sense of the story but it did slow the pace down at the start.

Sundays in bed with ……… The Marriage Act

Sundays in bed with is a meme hosted by Midnight Book Girl but I came across it recently on Jill’s Book Blog. It is simply a chance to share the book that is by your bed at the moment (or that you wish was by your bed). This week the book by my bed (or on the arm of my sofa) is The Marriage Act by John Marrs

Blurb from Net Galley:
What if marriage was the law? Dare you disobey?

Britain. The near-future. A right-wing government believes it has the answer to society’s ills – the Sanctity of Marriage Act, which actively encourages marriage as the norm, punishing those who choose to remain single.

But four couples are about to discover just how impossible relationships can be when the government is monitoring every aspect of our personal lives, monitoring every word, every minor disagreement . . . and will use every tool in its arsenal to ensure everyone will love, honour and obey.

This is definitely a contrast to the Christmassy haul of books that I got from the library yesterday. I love novels that look at how society might evolve in the near future even though they are often very bleak and this one is no exception.

Marriage is seen as the best way of living and those couples who agree to ‘upscale’ their relationships get social benefits such as better housing, jobs and education chances for their children. However, they also agree to have an ‘audite’ installed in their house which will listen randomly to conversations and if their relationship is deemed to be in difficulties, help will be given and maybe the couple will be allocated a ‘Relationship Responder’ who will live with them and steer them through the tricky patch. When the relationship responder in question is a predator more intent on finding a partner for themselves, this can lead to disaster.

This is a very dark book and very few of the characters are particularly likeable but I am extremely intrigued by the plots in the novel.

This is one of the books currently on my Net Galley shelf and will be released early next year

Sundays in bed with …… Nights of Plague

This book caught my eye in a bookshop and so I reserved it at the library.

Blurb from the book:
1901
With the stealth of a spy vessel, the royal ship Azizye approaches the famous vistas Mingheria ‘An emerald built of pink stone’. The twenty-ninth state of the ailing Ottoman Empire.

The ship carries Princess Pakize, the daughter of a deposed sultan, her doctor husband and the Royal Chemist, Bonkowski Pasha. Each of them holds a separate mission. Not all of them will survive the weeks ahead. Because Mingheria is on the brink of catastrophe. There are rumours of plague – rumours some in power will try to suppress.

But plague is not the only killer.

The blurb for this one sounded really interesting but so far it hasn’t really lived up to my expectations.

It’s written (deliberately) in the style of a history book rather than a novel so is quite dry. As someone who loves novels to be character driven, this makes it quite hard for me to engage with what is happening. The Princess spends all her time in her room in the governor’s palace and her only role appears to be writing letters to her sister detailing the events on the island.

I’m about a quarter of the way through it so far but I’m not sure that I’m going to make it much further.

What are you reading this weekend?

Sundays in bed with …….. Babel

I really enjoyed the Poppy Trilogy by R F Kuang and I loved the idea of this book and the tower of Babel being a centre of translation in Oxford so this was a book that I was really looking forward to reading.

Blurb from the book:

An act of translation is always an act of betrayal

Oxford 1836
The city of dreaming spires

Ir is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world

And at its heart is Babel, Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation

The tower from which all the power of the empire flows

Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Robin Swift thought Babel a paradise.

Until it became a prison.
But can a student stand against an empire.

So far I’m about a third of the way through and I am really enjoying the story and the ideas. I loved the discussions between the characters about how translations can never be totally honest as words don’t translate exactly into other languages. I’ve come across this problem in music when a translation that sticks very closely to the original words often doesn’t work as well as one that changes the words more but conveys the sense better.

What are you reading this Sunday?

Blogtober – Sundays in bed with…….. A Restless Truth

This isn’t the book that I intended to read this weekend. However I was at the theatre and only had my ipad with me so had to pick one of my ARCs to read instead of a physical book.

Blurb from Net Galley:
Maud Blyth has always longed for adventure. She’d hoped for plenty of it when she agreed to help her beloved older brother unravel a magical conspiracy. She even volunteered to serve as an old lady’s companion on an ocean liner. But Maud didn’t expect the old lady to turn up dead on the very first day of the voyage.

Now she has to deal with a dead body, a disrespectful parrot, and the lovely, dangerously outrageous Violet Debenham. Violet is everything Maud has been trained to distrust, yet can’t help but desire: a magician, an actress and a magnet for scandal.

Surrounded by open sea and a ship full of suspects, Maud and Violet must learn to drop the masks they’ve learned to wear. Only then might they work together to locate a magical object worth killing for – and unmask a murderer. All without becoming dead in the water themselves.

This is the second book in the Last Binding series and follows on from the author’s previous novel A Marvellous Light. It is very much a sequel and I think that it would be difficult to follow what was going on without having read the first book.

Maud is a secondary character in the first book and I like the way her character has developed in this sequel. The mystery is interesting and I do like Lord Hawthorne and feel that he is going to be a lot more important in this book. So far so good!

What are you reading this Sunday?

This is the twenty-ninth post for Blogtober 2o22. I’ve almost finished this challenge of posting every day throughout this month 😃

Blogtober -Sundays in bed with ……… The Ones We Burn

This is a Net Galley ARC which I’m fairly sure that I requested mainly on the basis of the cover which really grabbed my attention.

Blurb from Net Galley:
Ranka is tired of death. All she wants now is to be left alone, living out her days in Witchik’s wild north with the coven that raised her, attempting to forget the horrors of her past. But when she is named Bloodwinn, the next treaty bride to the human kingdom of Isodal, her coven sends her south with a single directive: kill him. Easy enough, for a blood-witch whose magic compels her to kill.

Except the prince is gentle, kind, and terrified of her. He doesn’t want to marry Ranka; he doesn’t want to be king at all. And it’s his sister – the wickedly smart, infuriatingly beautiful Princess Aramis – who seems to be the real threat.

But when witches start turning up dead, murdered by a mysterious, magical plague, Aramis makes Ranka an offer: help her develop a cure, and in return, she’ll teach Ranka to contain her deadly magic. But as the coup draws nearer and the plague spreads, Ranka is forced to question everything she thought she knew about her power, her past, and who she’s meant to fight for. Soon, she will have choose between the coven that raised her – and the princess who sees beyond the monster they shaped her to be. But as the bodies pile up, a monster may be exactly what they need.

I’m loving this so far although there do seem to be a few parallels with The Darkening by Sunya Mara especially with regard to the developing romance. But then again, there are only so many different ways you can spin relationships.

What are you reading this Sunday?

This is the twentysecond post for Blogtober 2o22. I’m well over half way through the challenge of posting every day throughout this month 😃

Blogtober 16 – Sundays in bed with ……. Fairy Tale

I can’t remember the last time that I was reading the same book at the weekend as I was during the previous week. It’s taking me a long while to finish this one partly because the book is fairly long at 577 pages but also because we’ve been really busy this week.

Blurb from the book:
Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. Then, when Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and his ageing master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it.

Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.

King’s storytelling in Fairy Tale soars. This is a magnificent and terrifying tale about another world than ours, in which good is pitted against overwhelming evil, and a heroic boy—and his dog—must lead the battle.

I am now about three quarters of the book and everything is looking fairly grim for Charlie. However, as the story is told in the first person, I’m fairly sure that he gets out alive as otherwise, who would be telling the story?

I haven’t read any Stephen King for years and I had forgotten what a good writer he is. I have thoroughly enjoyed this book so far. I really like the character of Charlie and the parallels and links that are drawn with different fairy tales.

What are you reading this Sunday?

This is the sixteenth post for Blogtober 2o22. I’m half way through the challenge of posting every day throughout this month 😃