Reading Roundup: The 17th week of 2025
busy days and an unfinished fanfic are this weeks key headlines, hardly good for the reader in me!
I've had a busy work/life week, and an annoying unfinished fanfiction took up the first half.
Nothing overly exciting this week, although I did hear yesterday that Philip Pullman has finally finished Lyra's story. The subtle Knife, book 2 of the original Dark Materials trilogy, was one of the last books I physically scanned into a computer to read, which is a bit of a landmark for me, and also the full-cast audiobooks of the whole series were some of the only thing of their type I'd ever heard. Interestingly, Pullman sounds older reading those than he does on the radio this week, wonder how he managed that?
Anyway, on with this weeks list ...
4 stars to Magpie Murders (Susan Ryeland, #1), by Anthony Horowitz
Book Description:
"Alan Conway is a bestselling crime writer. His editor, Susan Ryeland, has worked with him for years, and she's intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. Alan's traditional formula pays homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. It's proved hugely successful. So successful that Susan must continue to put up with his troubling behavior if she wants to keep her job. When Susan receives Alan's latest manuscript, in which Atticus Pünd investigates a murder at Pye Hall, an English manor house, she has no reason to think it will be any different from the others. There will be dead bodies, a cast of intriguing suspects, and plenty of red herrings and clues. But the more Susan reads, the more she realizes that there's another story hidden in the pages of the manuscript—one of ambition, jealousy, and greed—and that soon it will lead to murder. Masterful, clever, and ruthlessly suspenseful, Magpie Murders is a deviously dark take on vintage crime fiction."
My Thoughts:
"I was compelled by the nested story-in-a-story nature of this. The manuscript very much felt like an episode of your typical British television whodoneit, and as I have enjoyed many of them over the decades I was right at home. Loved all the little nods to other writers and the wordplay was brilliant. The final interview at the end confused me, but I was enjoying it very much up until that point."
This Book: has 477 pages, a community rating of 3.93 and was first published in 2016.
3 stars to The Original, by Brandon Sanderson
Book Description:
"Hugo Award-winning authors Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Kowal team up in this sci-fi thriller set in a world where one woman fights to know her true identity and survive the forces that threaten her very existence. In the near future, humans choose life—for a price. Injectable nanite technology is the lifeblood that flows through every individual wishing to experience the world through the lens of their own theme. While death from mortal wounds is still possible, life is made easier in a socially liberated society where automation and income equality allow passion pursuits to flourish over traditional work. Renewal stations are provided to every law-abiding citizen for weekly check-ins, which issue life-sustaining repairs in exchange for personal privacy. But what becomes of those who check out, of those who dare to resist immortality and risk being edited under the gaze of an identity-extracting government surveillance system? When Holly Winseed wakes up in a hospital room, her memory compromised and a new identity imposed on her, a team of government agents wastes no time stating their objective. With intent to infiltrate and defeat the terrorist group ICON, the agents tell Holly that she is now a Provisional Replica and has one week to hunt down and kill her Original for the murder of her husband, Jonathan. If she succeeds, she’ll assume her Original’s place in society. If she fails, her life will end. Holly’s progress is monitored by an assigned contact that feeds her information as she confronts the blank, robotic world around her, discovering that others view life through the theme of their own choosing. With her newly implanted combat and deduction skills, Holly fends off both attacks by terrorists and doubts about her own trustworthiness as clues lead her to her Original—and to the truth about Jonathan. In the end, one body remains and one walks away. Although questions persist, one thing is Life will never be the same."
My Thoughts:
"I was predisposed to be cross about having to wait for this due to it being an audio original, but I still didn't find it particularly engaging. This is unusual for Sanderson so perhaps I need to revisit, but I was hoping for more than I got. "
This Book: has 112 pages, a community rating of 3.96 and was first published in 2020.
Things not on Goodreads or reread
Choices and Consequences, by Batsnumbereleven
I made the mistake of starting a fanfic that was incomplete. I have a soft-spot for books that finish the Hogwarts years, and didn't notice there wasn't anymore of it until it stopped. Most irritating.