Theatre Board Book Group

Can anyone recommend a good book about Broadway? None of those "Best 50 musicals in Broadway history" things - something like the West End Producer books for London or even a fictional story set in the world of Broadway musicals or something filled with anecdotes about Broadway... Hard to describe really, but I'm looking for a christmas gift for an American friend with an interest in Broadway.

Popped into Waterstones and decided to treat myself to a guilty pleasure - the third in the Jojo Moyes, Me Before You series entitled Still Me.

It has just come out and is half price. (Still £10. Eeek.) I got to the till. 

"Have you got a Waterstones card?" Chirruped the girl.

"Oh, er....." burrow, dig, people in queue tut....come up with Temptations card, Paperchase card, Nero card, Costa card.......rummage rummage.....

"It's green and black," added the girl, helpfully.

"Aha! Is this it?"

"Yes, thank you.......You've got £19.50 on there. Would you like to use it now?"

WHAT? WOW!

Bargain! I even got change!

Second this. Brought from Tesco recently for £4! Great value and great read.

Currently into the third installation of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihlation trilogy. Really enjoyable read, ranging broadly on the sci-fi scale. Going to have to re-read the full trilogy at some point as there’s parts I feel I’ve missed rushing through.

I'm nearing the end of The Lost Summer: The Heyday of the West End Theatre by Charles Duff, published by Nick Hern Books in 1995. It takes the career of actor, producer, director Frith Banbury and his various working and personal relationships as the organising idea for consideration of both well known and now less remembered plays, writers actors and producers of the 1940s-1960s in London's 'theatre land'. This probably makes it a bit lopsided—it is certainly not a text book—yet within its set limits it is systematic but also anecdotal, and I've learned something from it.

Not new, but I found Covering Shakespeare in a library the other day. If it's half as bitchy and gossip as Covering McKellen I'll be happy.

Have just got from the library Eric Idle's autobiography & the Richard Briers biography.

Been meaning to share this one. Right up my alley being both crime and theatre. 'If We Were Villains' By M.L. Rio (no, me neither.)

This is a whodunnit, set in an elite US conservatoire, involving 7 final year Shakespeare drama students. They are so pretentious that they constantly quote Shakespeare at each other in their everyday lives.  I thought I'd like this aspect more than I did - I'm quite up on my Shakespeare, but they quoted so much from his more obscure plays that I didn't recognise more than I did. lynette, this is probably one for you!

The book begins 10 years after graduation with Oliver, one of the 7, about to be released from prison, having served 10 years for murdering/causing the death of one of the other 6. The policeman who prosecuted him is not convinced of his guilt and thinks he is covering for one of the others and he meets with Oliver in an effort to get him to admit the whole truth.

Set over 5 acts (of course!) which are all flashbacks leading up to, and a little beyond, The Death, each act starts with a prologue set in the present. These drama students, a close-knit bunch of friends, are annoying, entitled and so incredibly arrogant that in their own minds the lines between acting and real life begin to blur; fight scenes are taken too far and they start to really physically hurt each other as their hidden animosities begin to surface. Who might have wanted another one dead and the reason why Oliver (if, indeed, he did) took the rap are plentiful. 

It could have been better - the characters are not particularly well drawn (making the first few chapters difficult as we try to remember who is who.) But I thought it was an original take on a whodunnit and I absolutely loved the ending.   

Being on sick leave from my voluntary job I've read more books in the last 3 weeks than I normally read in a year - and I love reading; it's just that the time would always be at the expense of something else. I stick almost exclusively to fiction as I struggle with anything else.

So I've read a huge variety recently, though I confess to including a lot of Elin Hilderbrand novels which I think must the the US equivalent of what we'd call an "airport novel" - or possibly "chick-lit", but I know the latter term is contentious. Anyway, they're the reading equivalent of fast food and though at times I didn't feel up to anything more demanding, read too many in succession and you feel the lack of something more nourishing.

The most challenging read was the english translation of Uwe Tellkamp's long (1,000 page) novel, The Tower, about life in East Germany immediately prior to the fall of the wall. I'd had it on my reading heap for months and had been looking forward to it, but though I persevered I was very disappointed by the treatment of such a promising subject and the style was very very off-putting: full of purple passages and endless description, which I hate. There are fascinating books to be written on that subject but for me, this wasn't one of them. I moaned so much that OH is now reading it and says he's enjoying it, but even he can only take a little at a time.

For light relief I also read a few crime novels (not my usual genre), but the implausible plots were annoying. My favourite type of book is somewhere in between all the above, ie reasonably literary, with credible plot and characters; hence I enjoyed an older novel by David Lodge which I hadn't read: Deaf Sentence. He was always one of my favourite authors when I was younger but as his output tailed off, so I was less aware of what he was writing.

Ideally there'd have been a new Kate Atkinson (one of my favourite writers), but I'd already read, and been somewhat disappointed by, her latest (Transcription), so no luck there.

And having confessed to my guilty pleasure in reading Elin Hilderbrand, I surprised myself by picking up and enjoying the 2nd novel in Kevin Kwan's "Asia" series (for want of an umbrella term). I hadn't even known that there was a trilogy and I hadn't read the first, Crazy Rich Asians, but I had seen the film and my local library had the second book, China Rich Girlfriend, so I devoured that in a matter of hours, though all the footnotes were irritating - reminiscent of a textbook - and I couldn't begin to understand all the layers of snobbery and one-upmanship in China, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Has anyone here read "Space Opera"by Catherynne M Valente? It may be the maddest book I've ever read, about an intergalactic song contest (clearly modelled on the ESC) and the hapless Earthlings getting caught up in it.

It's screaming for a stage adaptation that would probably be something of a love child of Eugenius and SpongeBob weaned on Acid and babysat by the Rocky Horror Show.

I found a pile of novels by Elizabeth Taylor * in a second hand book shop. I’ve been longing to read her for years. Two of her novels were adapted about a decade ago - ANGEL by François Ozon with Romola Garai and Michael Fassbender And MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT with Joan Plowright and one of the Ruperts. I loved them both so I can’t wait to tuck in.

*she who had the misfortune to publish her first story the year NATIONAL VELVET was released.