Reading Old and New with Tea with Tales

Thinking about the upcoming hot summer weather we talked about our favourite tipple while enjoying cheese scones and apple and rhubarb cake.

We then discussed the recent Hawke’s Bay Readers and Writers Festival and some personal highlights which included pathologist Cynric Temple-Camp and large-animal vet and romance author Danielle Hawkins.

We started this month’s reads with the CS Forester Hornblower and the Hotspur. Something completely different for our reader but very interesting.

Jacqueline Bublitz’s Before You Knew My Name was a real enigma for one of our reader’s. She had to finish it but she’s still not sure whether she knows what was going on.

A light-hearted read but still very interesting was romance writer Barbara Cartland’s autobiography We Danced All Night. We learnt that after Miss Cartland was presented to society, she had 59 marriage proposals.

Fredrick Blackman’s A Man Called Ove was recommended several months ago and this month got the big tick from our latest reader who found it hard to put down, making her both laugh and cry.

Historical novelist Alison Weir’s book on Queen Mary, The Passionate Tudor, was a really good read.

One of our readers loves police procedural mystery novels and recommends Patricia Gibney’s Her Last Walk Home and Karin Slaughter’s This Is Why We Lied.

The Rose Code is the second book from Kate Quinn that our reader has read and so far she is enjoying it as much as she did The Alice Network.

Our last reader found a Stuart MacBride excessively brutal but couldn’t help reading another of his books. A Drink at the Bar: A Memoir of Crime, Justice and Overcoming Personal Demons by Graham Boal QC was deemed very well written and quite illuminating.

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