Blog: Books

It’s a bumper post of best books – not just the past two months, but the past three. And I tell you, I’ve read a LOT these past few months, and it wasn’t easy to pick the best. But I’ve tried to narrow it down, and by total coincidence we have another all-female line-up! (To be fair, two of the books are by male/female writing teams.) Read on for the 16 best books I’ve read recently: Take It Back, Kia…

Hello, summer! We’ve had some lovely sunny weather in Scotland (that’s it over now, winter is back, get your coats out) so I’ve been spending many a happy afternoon immersed in a book. I read 32 books in May and June, and it was a real mix: fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, kids’ books; debuts, classics and collections of an author’s best. Here is my lucky 13 of the best books I read: The Night Visitors, Jenn Ashworth & Richard V….

Hello, Spring! There’s been a heatwave in Scotland, and sunny days mean sitting out in Mama Logan’s garden with a flat white or a G&T (depending on whether it’s before or after 5pm) and getting lost in a book. I read 35 books in March and April, and it was a great though unplanned mix of non-fiction, novellas and crime fiction. Here are the top ten: Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah – WOW. Just wow. This book is a punch…

Hello, 2019! I hit the ground running with books, books books (and how’s my own book going? The novel I’m meant to be writing? Uh… let’s not talk about that). I hit the ground running with my reading this year, and have finished 48 books so far. Although, to be fair, this includes 7 Point Horror books I read for the teen horror podcast I co-host, Teenage Scream. So far this year I’ve mostly been reading fiction, though I did…

This year I read 258 books – and for the first time in my entire life, I read more non-fiction than novels! The 258 books break down like this: 85 non-fiction, 63 novels/novellas, 41 YA/kids, 33 short story collections/anthologies, 26 graphic novels, 10 poetry collections. As always I have a slight female bias, with the authors 146 female and 103 male (the other 9 either genderqueer or I don’t know their gender, or multi-author anthologies). In no particular order, here…

Ah, September. What a dream you were. I spent the whole month in a Scottish castle. There was a library and an orchard and wild deer. I wrote 45,000 words of a new novel and went for 6-mile walks every day. I’m going to be dreaming about it for a long time. October was a little more prosaic, as I had to catch up on all the emails and chores I missed in September. But I still had time to…