19 - THE CAT LOVER’S COFFEE TABLE BOOK. By Nanette Newman, Graham Tarrant, and Edward McGlachlan.
A small, thin, far from coffee table book sized, 1983 novelty of amusing cat anecdotes accompanied by some great cartoons from McGlachlan that are somewhat of a highlight. Brief but amusing half hour timewaste, basically. A bog book, as it were.

18 - BEDLAM; LONDON AND ITS MAD by Catharine Arnold
Much better than the Amazons book by Lyn Webster Wild last time; this one’s written by someone who knows their subject, is in the same field, and catches the mix of accurate detail and cheerful readability. A history of London’s Bethlem Hospital from its founding to its influence on every haunted ( Read more... )

17 - A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE AMAZONS, Women Warriors In Myth And History, by Lyn Webster Wild.
I dunno if I should even count this, considering how little I got into it before skimming to the end.
Nah, there are immediate problems with it. First she says it’s not going to be this sort of book, but another sort of book, then mostly writes it as ( Read more... )

16 - THE WANTED by Robert Crais

Private eye Elvis Cole is hired by a woman to find out where her teenage son got a forty grand Rolex, and soon finds himself racing a couple of sociopathic hitmen.
It’s a fast, mostly tense read, very enjoyable, and nice to be reacquainted with Cole and Joe Pike. In fact Pike doesnt appear until a third of the way ( Read more... )

15 - SEVEN OF NINE by Christie Golden.
Only her third Trek book, a Voyager one, and not bad,though I confess I prefer her Assassin's Creed books, which are way better than the Oliver Bowden ones, being written by an actual storyteller and not a tame historian. The plotline is rather obvious, and tells us too much of what the guest characters are ( Read more... )

14 - SIN CITY 7: HELL AND BACK by Frank Miller
Yeah, Miller’s a git who hasn’t written anything not offensive propaganda since about 2005, but this is from 1999, and from a charity shop anyway, so what the hell. Solid neo-noir in his stark and occasionally confusing but usually striking solid black and white art style.
The plot is pretty simple, ( Read more... )

13 - CHANGELESS by Gail Carriger
I actually intended to read the first in the Parasol Protectorate series, which turns out to be Soulless, while this is the second book. I have the first four, but the first one seems to have been moved somewhere separate to the others, so…
Basically, it’s tongue in cheek steampunk with a Lady who acts as a secret ( Read more... )

12 - MY WICKED WICKED WAYS by Errol Flynn
This slog has taken about three months, bloody hell. It’s a weird one to comment on, cos I think my biggest actual problem is that it doesn’t focus on the bits that I’d hoped it would focus on. Mainly it’s about his travels and tall tale adventures, which are pretty unbelievably embellished [he admits he ( Read more... )

SPARTAN GOLD by Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood

The first of the Sam and Remi Fargo spinoffs, which comes over as sort of Cussler meets HartTo Hart with adventurous engineers instead of a businessman with a journalist wife. It’s the usual mix of historical treasure hunting and action-thriller chase, this time following chunks of mainly Napoleonic ( Read more... )

A VERY BRITISH MURDER by Lucy Worsley ( Read more... )