Ellie (elliepotten) reads and reviews in 2019

Hello everyone! Happy New Year! I'm back again for another year of reading, hopefully bigger and better than the last one...

For those who DON'T know me, I'm Ellie, I'm 32, and I live in the Peak District (in the middle of England) with my mum, stepdad and three cats: Millie, Domino and Leo. I have Asperger's, anxiety and agoraphobia (all the A's!) AND chronic IBS, all of which cause their own issues and difficulties and result in me being a pretty isolated little hermit most of the time. Reading is a wonderful outlet and escape for me: a source of entertainment, distraction and a window into a world I'm not actually experiencing at the moment.

When I don't have my nose in my books there's a good chance I'm either posting about them on here, or talking about them on Bookstagram. If you're an IG user, I'm @bookaddictedblonde on there. I'm around a lot, posting to stories, reviewing my recent reads and chatting in the DMs, so come say hi!



My favourite books of 2018:
The Martian - Andy Weir (f)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J.K. Rowling (f)
Vox - Nicholson Baker (f)
The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2 - Jane Poynter (nf)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey (f)
Everything, Everything - Nicola Yoon (f)
The Kiss Quotient - Helen Hoang (f)
The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert 'JKR' Galbraith (f)
Columbine - Dave Cullen (nf)
The Pleasure's All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex - Julie Peakman (nf)
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (f)

This year's ticker



Good luck with YOUR bookish challenges and resolutions this year, and happy reading for 2019!

ELLIE'S READING FOR 2019

** Books in bold are my favourites so far! **

1. The Winter of Our Disconnect: How One Family Pulled the Plug and Lived to Tell/Text/Tweet the Tale – Susan Maushart (message 26)
2. Perfect Little World - Kevin Wilson (message 27)
3. Fat Ollie's Book - Ed McBain (message 31)
4. Adrift: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea - Tami Oldham Ashcraft (message 39)
5. Cut Me In - Ed McBain (message 43)
6. The Trees - Ali Shaw (message 44)
7. The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings and Discovered Life is Worth More than Anything You Can Buy In a Store - Cait Flanders (message 51)
8. Eat Up!: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want - Ruby Tandoh (message 66)
9. Shakespeare Wrote for Money - Nick Hornby (message 67)
10. The Trench - Steve Alten (message 69)

11. Two Steps Forward - Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist (message 71)
12. Walking Away: Further Adventures with a Troubadour on the South West Coast Path - Simon Armitage (message 74)
13. Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer (message 75)
14. Five Feet Apart - Rachael Lippincott, with Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis (message 82)
15. My Favourite Half-Night Stand - Christina Lauren (message 83)
16. Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid (message 87)
17. Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How To Love - Thomas Maier (message 94)
18. Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere - Jeanette Winterson (message 95)
19. The Flatshare - Beth O'Leary (message 98)
20. Horns - Joe Hill (message 102)

21. It's Not Yet Dark - Simon Fitzmaurice (message 105)
22. Heartstopper Volume 1 - Alice Oseman (message 109)
23. Heartstopper Volume Two - Alice Oseman (message 109)
24. Beauty Queens - Libba Bray (message 110)
25. The Pisces - Melissa Broder, read by Isabella Inchbald (message 116)
26. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (message 119)
27. The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas, read by Alex Dimitriades (message 124)
28. The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown (message 126)
29. I Found My Tribe - Ruth Fitzmaurice (message 133)
30. The Whisper Man - Alex North (message 136)

31. My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student - Rebekah Nathan (message 139)
32. The Tent, the Bucket and Me: My Family's Disastrous Attempts to Go Camping in the 70s - Emma Kennedy (message 141)
33. The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook - Ben Mezrich (message 143)
34. Crudo - Olivia Laing (message 144)
35. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now - Jaron Lanier (message 145)
36. A Head Full of Ghosts - Paul Tremblay, read by Joy Osmanski (message 148)
37. Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas - Adam Kay (message 150)
38. The Winter Wedding - Abby Clements
39. My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh

So, official intro welcome-y thing done, list set up... hellooooooo! After some deliberation, I'm starting the year off with The Winter of Our Disconnect by Susan Maushart, who embarked on a six-month digital detox with her three kids then wrote about it. So far it's amusing, well researched and a delight to read, so hopefully that'll turn out to have been a good choice!

I'm also still reading Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby (bookish columns) and It's Not Me, It's You!, written by comedian Jon Richardson way back before he got married, when he was still grumpily single. :)

I have a few books already pulled down to pick from in the near future, including Educated by Tara Westover, Eat Up! by Ruby Tandoh, The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie (this might be next, so I can watch the new adaptation before it disappears off iPlayer) and Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson.

I watched The Martian yesterday, and I'm in the middle of a few TV series including You (didn't finish the book but enjoying the series so far) and season 2 of Atypical.



I think that brings us bang up to date! :D

Welcome back!

Happy New Year, Ellie!

*waves* Hiya, Ellie!

Happy reading in 2019, Ellie!

Happy 2019, Ellie!
Glad to see that you had success with the ROOT challenge last year as I am doing that this year! :)

Yay! Ellie! Starred, of course.

Hi Ellie! I watched You last fall and it was so good!! I hope you're enjoying it.

Hey everyone! Oooh, I love dropping by a new thread and having happy familiar faces all around. Make yourself comfy! :)

>8 ChelleBearss: Yessss, good luck! I was quite proud of myself for finishing that, haha. I thought I'd be tempted to blow it off at some point - but I didn't use the library all year, which helped. And I read some of the very oldest books from my shelves which was lovely!

>10 norabelle414: Ooooh, I'm really enjoying it so far! Though it's not helping that Penn Badgley still has that total 'Dan Humphrey hanging out in an arty Brooklyn loft reading books' vibe. I VERY MUCH LIKE THAT VIBE. One minute I'm enjoying the nice view and then the next minute that same nice view's whacking someone with a mallet, y'know?

>11 elliepotten: No one on earth could play "I think I'm in a rom-com but actually this is super effing creepy" better than him! The scene in episode one or two where he's talking about how beautiful she looks and then he's actually outside her house whacking it in the bushes was astounding.

I loved Vox and Educated (it helped that I got to see her speak). Can't wait to see what else winds up on your lists!

Happy New Year, Ellie!

Our daughter and I are big Agatha Christie fans, and both of us loved reading and re-reading ABC Murders. I know she's excited about the new TV version coming out.

Hi Ellie!! Happy New Year! I'll go follow you on Insta from my personal account, I was doing bookstagram for a few years on a books-only account (@boughanfire) but I slowed down and then decided to take a break from it last September as it was consuming a lot of time to do set-ups, etc. I really enjoyed it though and hope to get back to it someday!

Looking forward to your reads this year! ^_^

Happy 2019
A year full of books
A year full of friends
A year full of all your wishes realised

I look forward to keeping up with you, Ellie, this year.

Happy New Year and happy new thread!

Happy New Year, Ellie! Dropping a star so I can find my way back.

>12 norabelle414: I was so intrigued about what lay under that spoiler. I WAS NOT DISAPPOINTED. :D

>13 Berly: Oh wow, that must have been brilliant! The closest I got was a feature article in a newspaper supplement here - it was so fascinating that it went straight onto my must-read list!

>14 jnwelch: I've never read this one before, but of COURSE I have high hopes!

>15 dk_phoenix: Oooh, I'm not surprised it was taking some time, your layouts are gorgeous!

>16 PaulCranswick: >17 archerygirl: >18 Crazymamie: Welcome, friends! Pull up a chair, pass round the cookies, you know the drill by now. :)

I finally finished reviewing LAST year's books on my old thread, so here we are, yaaaaay!

I've finished my first book of the year (but no review yet, oops), I'm now about SIX episodes into 'You' (ooooooooooooh so good!) and I'm reading Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson which is neither great nor bad yet. Hopefully tomorrow I'll actually have some time to sit and get over the 'settling into a new read' part, get to the good stuff... :)

>20 elliepotten: Penn Badgely has been on Twitter the last week or so, tweeting back at people who talk about how hot his character in "You" is. It is VERY funny. (but also sad and gross that he has to do that!)

>21 norabelle414: Haha, bless him. HE is hot. Joe in the bookshop is hot. Joe the charming thoughtful boyfriend is hot. But yeaaaaaah if anyone is like "Ah, yes, Joe Of The Mallet And Fire and Stuff is also hot, this guy really is the whole package, 10/10 would definitely date" then they should probably never go outside again tbh. Juuuuuuust in case. >:)

Wishing you a lovely weekend, Ellie

Ellie, Ellie, Ellie! I've missed seeing posts by you here and there :)

I hope to manage to peek in now and then!

>23 PaulCranswick: Hope you had a lovely one too! And a good week to come...

>24 mckait: KATH! *attack hug* I saw you pop up on my IG, haha, I was so excited! :D

1. The Winter of Our Disconnect: How One Family Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell/Text/Tweet the Tale, by Susan Maushart (4.5*) - non-fiction

"Our digital detox messed with our heads, our hearts, and our homework. It changed the way we ate and the way we slept, the way we "friended," fought, planned, and played. It altered the very taste and texture of our family life... In the end, our family's self-imposed exile from the Information Age changed our lives indelibly - and infinitely for the better."

What a great start to 2019! I've been meaning to read this one for years, and although it is a little outdated now in some ways, for the most part it's just as relevant as ever. Susan Maushart, an American social commentator and author then living in Australia, decided that she was going to launch herself and her three super-connected teenage children into an experiment in which they would give up their screens at home for six whole months and see what happened. They were allowed to use technology elsewhere - for example, Maushart sometimes took her laptop to a coffee shop to work, and the kids used theirs at the library or friends' houses for homework - but in their own house it was back to a pre-internet world.

This is my favourite kind of non-fiction, combining a very personal (and funny) journey - including diary entries and reflections on how Maushart's family adjusted and flourished under the new regime, and the difficulties and triumphs along the way - with well-integrated information on relevant studies, books, statistics and theories. I found most of it fascinating, even if some of the science has moved on; for example, when it was written the research into blue light and melatonin was in its early stages, the iPhone was new and social media was a different beast altogether. I did particularly hate a horribly worded couple of pages about the 'autism epidemic' (not a thing) and the possibility that it could be caused by screen time (nope), with lots of fun references to 'affliction', narcissism, lack of empathy and cure culture. I gave Maushart a reluctant almost-pass since autism was nowhere near as well understood a few years back, but the margins of that part are littered with my very vehement four-letter thoughts. >:(

Happily, the rest of the book is a delight. By making it personal, the author not only keeps things lively, but makes it inspiring, which is exactly what I was hoping for. I particularly loved her son's evolution over the six months, from a grunting games-obsessed teenager to a devoted reader of Murakami, lover of jazz and accomplished musician. Maushart draws often on one of her favourite books, Walden, for wisdom and insight, and I'm now really looking forward to picking up my own copy at last (along with several other books on digital media that she mentions along the way). I've found myself trying to be a bit more mindful about my own screen habits - and seeking ways to be MORE so - and I have a feeling I'll definitely be returning to this one in the future.

Quotes:

- "The urge to stay continuously connected, like the yearning to produce whiter-than-white cuffs and collars, isn't a problem technology has solved. It's a problem technology has by and large invented. So many of our standards - of normalcy, of effectiveness, of propriety, of safety - are consequences of our technologies. This is exactly what Thoreau was getting at when he warned us against becoming "the tools of our tools.""

- "... enlightened technology use is all about "seeing choice." Responding to our cell phones as if they were our masters, or our mothers - allowing their summons to interrupt our driving, our dining, our dreams - is a clear case of being blind to choice, relinquishing the privilege of choice."

2. Perfect Little World, by Kevin Wilson (3*) - fiction

Aaaaah, so much potential, so much disappointment. This one sounded like it was destined to be a favourite of the year. It's about a pregnant young woman, Izzy, who out of desperation signs up for the Infinite Family Project: a scientific experiment in communal parenting and child development, housed in a purpose-built state-of-the-art complex in the woods and lavishly funded by a local billionaire. There both she and her newborn baby - and the nine other families involved - will have everything they could possibly need, from childcare specialists to employment opportunities, for the next ten years of their lives. Or so they hope, anyway... Of course, cracks appear, things go wrong, and difficulties arise, all of which must be addressed if the project is to survive.

See, the thing is, this sounds great. A bit like The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle (which I LOVED) - people thrust into an unusual situation and given a chance or thrive or fail, with plenty of opportunity for interesting things to happen and for readers to root for the main characters. But none of this really materialised. Izzy's journey from 'Oh god, I'm alone and pregnant' to arriving at the complex was quite involving, and the early detail of how life in the study would work was absorbing, but it became less and less so as the book went on. Dr Grind, the young man running the study, turned into arguably the most sympathetic character, but elements of his personality and background were so far-fetched that even he wasn't completely believable.

For a novel about family, there was surprisingly little warmth to be found here. The other children and parents in the complex were so numerous that I barely remembered their names - Izzy hardly seems to interact with any of them on the page, so the reader doesn't get to know them at all - and I was very glad of the 'family tree' at the beginning of the book to help keep them all straight. There were uneven leaps in time to cover the span of the project, making the character development disjointed and distancing the reader still further. When bad things happened they were resolved quietly in a couple of pages, and when the climactic 'crises' occurred, they were handled with so little drama or emotion that they didn't make much impact either. It was like too much AND too little was going on at the same time.

On top of that, the writing was surprisingly clunky for a bestselling author (I haven't read The Family Fang but I know it was HUGE a few years back). Sentences ran on and didn't always make sense - clauses were bizarrely ordered, for example - the dialogue sometimes went round in circles, and the general prose felt flat and wooden. It felt more like a first book, unpolished and a little unsure, than a work by an established writer. I'm sure this contributed to the generally deflated feel of the whole novel.

I don't know. I finished it. There were a couple of moments that made me tear up, and a handful of occasions where a particularly good turn of phrase made me stop and think "Yes! THAT'S what I wanted!" I was interested to see how the children would fare, and how the parents would cope, and what would happen to Dr Grind and Izzy and Izzy's little boy if and when the experiment imploded. The premise itself was a really intriguing one. But it was definitely more of a bored fizzle than the scandalous bang the blurb suggested; one Amazon customer titled their review 'All set up, little pay off' which I think pretty much sums it up. What a shame.

Quotes:

- "... what he didn't say, though he understood from his own experiences, was that there were no measures that truly protected against disaster; you simply held on to what mattered and hoped that you found your way to the other side."

- "She wanted to be on a team, to be a part of something, so that she could say, "I'm scared," or "This hurts," and someone who loved her would reply, "I'm scared, too," or "It will be over soon.""

- "When the world fell apart around you, when the walls of your house cracked and crumbled, Izzy now had some idea of how to keep living. You held on to the person you loved, the one who would be there in the aftermath, and you built a new home."

First two reviews of 2019 up, finally! I really need to stop procrastinating on that front this year and just Get Them Written.

Soooo right now I'm reading my first Ed McBain novel - Fat Ollie's Book - and weirdly enjoying the humour and odd tangents despite the horrible main character and not having read the preceding 50+ installments in the series. McBain is my Instagram Best Friend's favourite writer of all time, so I just picked up whatever I could find at the library to have a go. :)

Aaaaand it's been a crappy week, because my Personal Independence Payments (a sort of financial boost for disabled people) have been unceremoniously stopped after an absolute farce of an assessment. The report I've been sent detailing how I've somehow dropped from a sizeable number of criteria points to ZERO - despite my conditions being chronic and not having changed - sounds like it was written about a different person, goes into bizarre detail about things that apparently mean I'm fine (I chose the most appropriate chair in the room, so I can plan and follow a journey unaided??) and shows a dazzling lack of basic medical knowledge - so I'm having to ask them to reconsider and then go to tribunal. Which is great when you're autistic, agoraphobic and terrified. My sister is now slipping me sympathy cash titbits in return for helping her keep her new house clean, Mum's buying all my groceries for the first time since I went to university, and I feel very small and anxious, aaaaaall the time. :(

All of which is a very drawn out way of leading in to the fact that it's the '24 in 48' readathon this weekend ('the 24 hour readathon for people who like to sleep'), and I'm doing it. I've done all my cleaning and chores - here AND at my sister's - and next weekend we have house guests, so THIS one is all mine. I've been given popcorn chicken and chocolate chip muffins, I bought a pizza, I have new books bought with a Christmas Amazon voucher, and I'm (hopefully) going to have an entire weekend of relaxing, de-stressing, snacking and generally trying to feel a bit more like a person again.

Anyone else taking part? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

>28 elliepotten: Aarggh - really sorry to hear about the PIP decision Ellie :-( We applied for my husband for the first time last year (he has ME) so I can sympathise with how horrible the process is. Really hoping they reconsider and you don't have to go to tribunal.

Hope the weekend helped in relaxing/de-stressing you. {{{Hugs}}}

>29 souloftherose: Awwww, thank you! They really are a nightmare to deal with, especially when they start reeling you in for interviews and adding the well-publicized wonders of Atos assessors into the mix. >:(

The weekend helped a bit - I've been trying lately to get everything that needs doing DONE during the week so Saturday can be a dedicated day for books, pizza and a movie. I've been really enjoying it, having that one day to really look forward to every week!

3. Fat Ollie's Book, by Ed McBain (3.5*) - fiction

Well, this was a gamble that paid off! My best Insta-buddy has been recommending the 87th Precinct series to me preeeeeetty much since we first crossed DMs in March or April - McBain is his favourite writer of all time - so it was about time I finally gave one a go.

I did flounder a bit at first, struggling to get a feel for the book (it's set in a gritty fictional city that's literally New York but with different names) and to get the characters straight in my head. I'm still not entirely sure I managed - but then, I just picked up whatever the library had and it turned out to be #52 of the series, so I kinda expected as much. This is also, I believe, a slightly anomalous book in that the main detective/character is from the 88th Precinct, an 'equal opportunity bigot' and general fool (though apparently a decent cop) named Ollie Weeks. In this installment he has to solve the murder of a local politician, find out who stole his novel manuscript from the back seat of his patrol car, AND there's a drugs bust going down on the side.

This is not a politically correct book, because Ollie Weeks is not a politically correct man - despite being constantly called out for his homophobia, misogyny and deeply ingrained racism by pretty much everyone around him, from his fellow detectives to his own sister. The dialogue was almost too fast at times (because I don't know the characters yet), and the cast is large and wide-ranging, dragging in everyone from a transvestite junkie prostitute to an upper-crust family in a gated community. It's also genuinely not quite like any police procedural novel I've read before. It's so strangely playful; I laughed far more than I expected to, and McBain constantly ripped the rug out from under me with everything from lengthy extracts of Ollie's terrible novel (I came to think of it as 'The Crime Version of Belinda Blinked', which fans of My Dad Wrote a Porno will understand immediately) to riffs on Amazon reviews and the nature of crime writing itself. It all got very meta and self-aware in a deliciously pithy way.

Do I think this one suffered a bit for being first into my hands but one of the last in the series? Yes. Do I fully intend to rectify that by going back to the beginning and getting to know the 87th Precinct properly? Also yes. Can't ask for much more than that from a first foray into an author's work... :)

oh, Best luck with the tribunal thing. I know it's hard but I have faith in you. Also, enjoy your readathon!

Thinking of you and wishing you all the best Ellie. British bureaucracy at its worst.

>28 elliepotten: I'm really sorry to hear about the PIP :-( I've heard a lot of stories like that around the interwebs - those assessments are an absolute joke. I hope they reconsider without going to tribunal. My uncle (severe osteogenesis imperfecta, wheelchair user) also somehow lost most of his points for mobility at his last PIP, even though WHEELCHAIR and he'd previously had a lifetime DLA award because OI doesn't ever get better, just worse. Such a terrible system.

I'm glad the weekend helped a bit with relaxing/de-stressing. Setting aside Saturdays as a rest/fun day is a brilliant plan.

>32 mckait: Thanks Kath. They have a few weeks of pretending to reconsider first, then we have to request the tribunal. Could be another year before we actually get one. :(

>33 PaulCranswick: Thank you! It really is, it's so scary and just so... unfathomable. It's like a lottery rather than a fair and sympathetic system.

>34 archerygirl: They really are! Fortunately I'd read enough stories myself that I had an inkling something like this could happen, so it didn't send me into QUITE such a tailspin. It's actually been worse in the weeks since the letter arrived, you start to doubt yourself. "Well, if THEY think everything's fine, and that I'm capable enough to do all these things, maybe it's just me not putting enough effort in!" We did get the assessment report through this week though, and some of what she wrote is outright lies (like that I wasn't anxious at all). Her conclusion for each section was basically "She says she has problems with this thing, and there's evidence that she has problems with this thing, but she seems smart and polite so I'm awarding her no points." :(

I dunno, you guys. Things are not good right now. My entire household is kind of on the brink of dissolving and me suddenly losing that tiny bit of autonomy is not helping. I'm frantically treading water, trying to find things to do that might help keep me afloat, in all kinds of ways, but I'm a very tired sad lassie at the moment. *Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...*

Hugs for you, Ellie, as you deal with all of this.

Happy Valentine's Day!! ❤️💚💗💙


Hope things improve for you! *Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...* Keep swimming!

>36 MickyFine: >37 ChelleBearss: Awwww, thanks both. Nearly the weekend at least! :)

4. Adrift: A True Story of Love, Loss and Survival at Sea, by Tami Oldham Ashcraft (2.5*) - non-fiction

I honestly don't know how to review this one, because the filmmakers have taken a very particular approach to a couple of key elements of Tami's story; to talk 'normally' about the book would be to negate a huge swathe of the emotional impact of the film. For me, it didn't matter that much, because I already knew the basics of the true story, then watched the film, then filled in the details with the book.

In a nutshell, this is an incredible survival tale by a pretty remarkable woman. Tami was a young American sailor, travelling and exploring the world, working on various boats as she went. Along the way she met Richard, a fellow wanderer from England. They soon fell in love, continuing their travels together aboard Richard's boat, Mayaluga. When they were offered the chance to do a delivery job, sailing a beautiful Trintella yacht from Tahiti to San Diego, they jumped at the chance - but in a horrific twist of fortune, became caught in Hurricane Raymond halfway through the voyage. When the storm finally calmed, Hazana was a wreck: mastless, powerless and drifting. It was 41 days before she was spotted by a research boat, just off a Hawaiian island. This is the story of how she got there.

Sooooo why 2.5 stars? Unfortunately, the writing really lets this one down. The backstory elements - the travelling and romance - are lovely to read about, but marred by painfully wooden dialogue. Some of the sections aboard Hazana are so mired in technical sailing jargon that I had no idea what was going on; there is a glossary in the back (which I stumbled across by accident partway through reading) but I frequently ended up on Google looking for diagrams to work out what exactly was being painstakingly attached where. Speaking of which - there are a couple of mentions of sex in here, where Ashcraft suddenly flies into the most self-conscious, flowery language; elsewhere in the book, too, she veers wildly between practical, straightforward descriptions and flights of clumsy rhetoric. It's all rather disjointed, and I didn't get anywhere near as invested as I should have done given the intense and emotionally draining nature of the story.

On balance, I am glad I read it - though I struggled at first and wondered if I was going to end up DNF-ing it. Despite having already seen the film (which was brilliant, I bought the book immediately after watching it because I was so enthralled), I did like filling in the gaps in their story. There's more here about how Richard and Tami fell in love pre-Hazana, and about their backgrounds, and also more about the rescue and the aftermath of such a gruelling experience. If you're going to choose one or the other, however, I'd go for the film. Tami was pretty involved in the screenplay and filming process, I believe, and is still sailing today. Her story is amazing, and she kinda rocks. Shame the book let her down.

>26 elliepotten: Adding that one to the BlackHole. I try and spend my Sundays offline, but it often does not work out for me. I feel like I spend far too much time online for my own good :)

>39 elliepotten: Excellent review, Ellie.

Another one for me to look out for.

Have a splendid weekend.

>40 alcottacre: Oooh, hope you enjoy it as much as I did! If it ever makes it OUT of the Black Hole, of course... :P I'm in the middle of a sort of cyber-clearout at the moment - a little unsubscribing here, a little file-clearing there - so between that and spring being around the corner I'm hoping when I'm done it'll mean I'm less likely to WANT to spend all day in front of a selection of screens! Fingers crossed...

>41 PaulCranswick: Thank you! The weekend's around the corner again, so I'll wish you happy NEXT weekend... :)

5. Cut Me In, by Ed McBain (4*) - fiction

Another McBain novel! This time not an 87th Precinct offering, but one of the Hard Case Crime books, a collection drawn from all kinds of authors and eras and published with these deliciously pulpy old-fashioned covers. 'Deliciously pulpy' is actually a pretty good description of what's INSIDE the cover as well, in this case at least.

This is a story of money and murder, opening with Joshua Blake discovering his literary agency partner shot dead on the floor of his office. The safe is open, papers are scattered everywhere - and there's no sign of the lucrative contract that they planned to use as leverage in a Hollywood deal involving their bestselling author, western writer Cam Stewart. As if a dead partner wasn't enough, he's got a disgruntled would-be client and an unimpressed detective to deal with, more people are turning up dead, every woman he knows seems to suddenly be half-naked and determined to have her way with him, and he still has that megadeal to salvage.

I really enjoyed this one. It's a real vintage-feeling detective story, with an apparently irresistable hero, a fair amount of suspicious individuals for the readerly sleuth to be contending with, and the kind of cracking pace and rapid-fire dialogue that keeps those pages turning. There was also a bonus 'lost novelette', Now Die In It, included at the end of the book, which was a good little murder mystery in its own right. Time to go hunting at my local library, see how many more McBains I can dredge up in the next few months!

6. The Trees, by Ali Shaw (4.5*) - fiction

Wow. Where do I even start?! This is a sprawling, beautiful novel that begins with the arrival of the trees. Within a mere minute or two, during a seemingly ordinary night, the ground cracks open, buildings are shattered, and civilisation is almost instantly replaced by mature forest. No one knows how far the forest extends, or quite what to do next - but homebody Adrian quickly teams up with a local nature enthusiast, Hannah, and her teenage son Seb, and together they set out in search of loved ones, answers and a very new kind of existence.

This isn't just an enviro-dystopian novel though. It's almost like... a literary rewilding? It soon becomes apparent that animals that used to roam the British Isles are suddenly present again - wolves, for example - as well as creatures far more ancient and magical. The forest and its flora and fauna are not fully fantastical, but nor are they quite ordinary. Shaw uses them, alongside his human characters, as a solid base for exploring topics both physical and philosophical: woodland survival, the co-existence of man and nature, ideas of good versus evil, the history and future of the world.

It's gorgeously done. The group of travellers at the heart of the novel gradually have their deepest humanity revealed, becoming more real to the reader by the page. There is brutality and wonder here, scenes of cruelty and compassion, and a revelling in the rhythms of the forest (for example, the chapter titles are often repeated as the important people and events ebb and flow). I did feel like it got a bit lost somewhere in the middle, and things maybe started to drag a little, but Shaw always brought it back and towards the end it really found its way again. It's magical, it's sweeping, and I think it's going to end up being one of my favourites of the year!

Quotes:

- "Sometimes having something to head towards makes everything else seem clearer."

- "... you mustn't give up. You can't wait for the world to be perfect before you start living in it."

- "You could overcome most anything if you refused to turn your face from it."

- "I should have dropped it into the sea. It's served its purpose, now... It's got no future. Best to let it go and keep sight of what does."

Hi, Ellie!

>44 elliepotten: That one sounds so fabulous, but I have a question - is any of the cruelty animal related? I really want to add this one to my list, but I can't abide that business.

>44 elliepotten: That sounds fascinating!

>45 scaifea: Yes, there is one very strong sort of double incident of cruelty that springs to mind. It was there for a reason but it was deeply shocking. I sobbed. There may have been a milder incident or two earlier on as well, more along the lines of catching food or fighting off predators. I'd definitely steer clear if that's a booky deal breaker for you...

>46 lycomayflower: It was! Very real and earthy at its heart, yet with these deeply magical things filtering in on the periphery. So glad I took a gamble on it at last! :)

>47 elliepotten: Oh boy, yep, I think I'll pass on it, then. Thanks!

>48 scaifea: Any time! Forewarned is forearmed... :)

>49 elliepotten: Ha! Truth.

7. The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings and Discovered Life is Worth More than Anything You Can Buy In a Store, by Cait Flanders (3*) - non-fiction

Well, this wasn't quite what I expected. The blurb on the back talks about all kinds of topics related to 'living with less' - the zero waste movement, clearing belongings, a television ban - as if they will be important elements of the book. They aren't. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the zero waste movement thing, in particular, is only mentioned in passing at one point.

And that, in a nutshell, was my biggest problem here. Things I expected would be discussed in some moderate depth, at least, are skimmed over, occasionally with a "I wrote about this on my blog previously". Well, great, but I didn't find the book via the blog, I had no idea that was a thing - so there went a chunk of the story I thought I was buying. Topics about living with less are often glossed over in favour of information about Flanders' back story, family issues, and her travels for work and pleasure during her shopping ban. The balance just wasn't there for me. How did it really feel to not shop for a whole year? What were the major tests? What kind of workarounds did you use to repurpose what you already had? How about the decluttering - 'I gave away some more belongings' doesn't cut it. What did you give away? Why? How? How did you feel about it?

Don't get me wrong, it was a pleasant enough read. Flanders is self aware and her narrative voice has a gentle warmth which made it easy enough to keep those pages turning. She has some insightful things to say and her journey is broadly interesting in its own right. HOWEVER, I wouldn't have been in a hurry to spend my money on a nearly full price copy if I'd known it was going to go so far down the 'general memoir' route and away from the quite specific promises of the tagline and blurb. Oh well...

Quotes:

- "The truth, I was learning, was that we couldn't actually discover what we needed until we lived without it."

- "Suddenly it dawned on me that I couldn't remember most of the stuff I'd gotten rid of in the past 11 months, but I could recall details from every one of the trips I had been on. I didn't need to bring souvenirs back with me. I would be able to taste the food and see the sights and remember how the sun felt on my skin in each one forever."

- "... something I had learned time and time again was that every small change you make pays compound interest. It helps you make another change, another mind-set shift, another decision to live a new way."

>51 elliepotten: Sorry that one didn't live up to expectations. It sucks when that happens.

>52 MickyFine: OMG DUDE RIGHT. One of my biggest booky pet peeves is when nonfiction says it's going to do one thing and does something completely different. Like, I just splashed my cash and dived right on in there all excited and IT IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BOOK TO THE ONE THE ENTIRE COVER HAS APPARENTLY BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT.

>53 elliepotten: I had that recently with a finance book that spent the first half being feel-good self-help-y rather than brass tacks finance. And there's nothing wrong with that but not quite what I expected when I picked it up. Thankfully, it was a library read though so no buyer's remorse.

>51 elliepotten: annoying!!

>53 elliepotten: Yes, Ellie, I often buy a book excitedly based on a wonderful cover only to find a drab book inside.

Have a lovely weekend.

Haha, thanks all, nice to know I'm not the only one! :D

I've actually finished a couple of books in the past few days, but it's been a hell of a week so I haven't done anything reviewer-y with them yet. My dad had a heart attack this time last week and got ambulanced to a hospital about 45 minutes away, but we didn't find out until the next day because it was the wee hours of the morning and he lives alone, just down the road fortunately. He might be coming home tomorrow, finally. Then about three days later my sister split from her husband so we had TWO fairly major emotionally draining things going on at the same time. This little agoraphobic hermit has spent the last week going on road trips to Sheffield, cleaning other people's houses, dropping everything to go help out, and generally throwing herself headfirst into whatever needed to be done for whoever needed the thing doing. I am SO tired. But glad I could put all of my Asperger-y and agoraphobia-y stuff to one side long enough to actually be a sister and daughter and help my family when the chips were down. :)

Sooooo I've finished Ruby Tandoh's Eat Up! and Nick Hornby's Shakespeare Wrote for Money, and NOW I am working my way slowly through my last library book, Simon Armitage's Walking Away. It's about his hike along the coast of Devon and Cornwall, and is a follow on from his previous book Walking Home (about doing a similar thing up north near me) which I haven't read but now definitely want to. Nice and light and cheery, a tad Bryson-esque, perfect for reading over breakfast or at the end of a sleepy evening!

Hope you've all had a fab weekend! x

Oh Ellie, sorry to hear about all the challenges this week! My dad had a heart attack a few years ago, which was scary. Did your dad need surgery? And sorry to hear about your sister too :(

Wishing you some good reading and ability to relax after all of the emotionally draining stuff.

So sorry to hear about your family's hard week. Hopefully it gets better over the next couple of weeks. I'm sure they all appreciate everything you did for them.

>58 bell7: Isn't it so scary?! He had a stent put in, and there was some muttering about another blood vessel also being NEARLY blocked, but they decided to treat that one with drugs if possible. Something about surgery potentially being risky for something else in the immediate vicinity. Still no news on whether he's being released back into the wild today, but fingers crossed. :)

>59 fairywings: I'm sure the dust will start to settle soon! Thank you. xx

Sorry to hear about all the family drama, Ellie. Sending hugs for you and yours.

Glad to hear there's some great reads for you to escape into when you need to.

>60 elliepotten: It is. My dad just needed surgery to clear out a stent that had been blocked in the attack, but my mom and I were in the waiting room and no one would tell us ANYTHING about what was happening, so all we actually knew was that he'd been brought to the hospital in an ambulance, not that he'd had a heart attack or what the surgery was for or anything. I get that they have to for patient confidentiality and only doctors can explain what's happening and all but, yeah, it was frightening. Anyway, I hope that the other almost blockage does clear out with drugs and he's out of the hospital as planned and feeling good afterwards. I suppose this is less of an issue for you in the UK, but the one thing the doctors told my dad never to do again is shovel. Other than that, he's back to his usual self.

>57 elliepotten: Hugs Ellie - that is a lot to happen in one week.

>61 MickyFine: Thank you! He came home on Monday night, so at least he's two minutes away now instead of an hour!

>62 bell7: Haha, duly noted! We don't have to get the spade out often unless we're gardening (which he doesn't do) or there's the odd bit of snow. I'll bear it in mind in the latter instance and get my butt down there with a snow shovel myself if needs be. :)

>63 souloftherose: Awwww, thanks. Hey, at least it lit a rocket underneath my butt and got me out pretty much every day, right? Dad was quite surprised I think - as if I WOULDN'T be straight in the car to go see him, y'know?!

>64 elliepotten: Glad to hear he's back home. That's excellent news!

8. Eat Up!: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want, by Ruby Tandoh (4*) - non-fiction

Ruby Tandoh is perhaps best known from her very popular stint on the Great British Bake Off, but since then she has developed a bit of a name for herself as a champion for food, common sense eating, LGBTQ+ identity and mental health. In this book she drags all of those passions together into an eloquent, inclusive, sharp yet sweet celebration of food and its role in our lives.

This is a book of many parts, encompassing everything from beautifully written recipes, cheerful movie references and nostalgic memories to no-nonsense discussions on subjects like food poverty, food as it relates to race and gender, eating disorders, and the rise of the 'wellness industry'. Although it's occasionally a little repetitive, and at times the scientific information propping up her points is obviously being fudged a little (whether because Tandoh doesn't really understand it, or because she thinks we might not either, I don't know), there's a lot to think about here; she encourages us to explore our personal relationships with food, eating and our bodies, but also to reflect on the wider implications and context of our choices and attitudes.

This is a woman who makes no apologies for the strength of her opinions, and yet still manages to distill her arguments with intelligence, kindness and warmth. Indeed, the only real lashes are reserved for those who take the opposite approach: those who spout nutritional advice without any frame of reference beyond 'it worked for me', and those whose life purpose seems to be to shame and harass other people (frequently strangers or vague acquaintances) for daring to eat AND ENJOY meat/carbs/chocolate/Greggs steak bakes. Overall, a warm hug of a book that was scrummy to read and made me REALLY fancy a Creme Egg. :)

Quotes:

- "When the bread hits the oven, proteins and sugars in the dough transform in what is maybe my favourite chemical reaction of all time: the Maillard reaction. It gives that lovely, slightly chewy, golden top to a loaf of bread, as well as all these things: the rich, sweet, browned layer on the very outside of a steak cooked to perfection; the soft upper edge of a Madeira cake, that melts on your tongue; onions collapsing into a caramelised, sticky tangle in a butter-slicked pan; dulce de leche, scooped by a finger straight from the jar; the chewy, salty, mahogany crust of a fresh-baked pretzel."

- "... if you have eggs in the house, you have dinner, no matter how bare your kitchen cupboards."

- "That expensive steak your date ordered could be a symbol of his virility, or a way to show that he's got money, or a nod to his masculinity. It could mean any one of the million subtexts that steak - and pretty much every other food under the sun - has been imbued with over time. Maybe it's a connection to his Argentinian heritage, or perhaps it's a statement in defiance of what he perceives to be 'wet' lefty vegetarianism. It could be an assertion of his hunger, and his desire to satisfy it no matter the cost. Maybe he's anaemic, maybe he's a gym freak. Maybe he just likes steak."

- "By the 'you are what you eat' logic, junk food makes for junk people, and unfamiliar food makes for strange, 'different' people. It's worth questioning the assumptions we make about what's normal, plain, right or good in food, and what's not. Often, these judgements we make about food and identity say much more about the person airing them than they do about the people doing the eating."

- "Our memories are patchworks of taste. We might remember a particularly golden slice of lemon cake before we recall the birthday it celebrated, or be flung back to the fluttering happiness of being six years old by a bite of a Milky Way... My whole life - everything that's ever mattered to me - can be summoned to memory in a menu: chocolate cake with green frosting, red hot cinnamon sweets, Pom-Bears, ham and pickle sandwiches, a tin of Roses, instant noodles in pitta bread, cheese and onion pasty, mozzarella sticks, sweet potato doughnuts, pancakes with lemon and honey."

9. Shakespeare Wrote for Money, by Nick Hornby (3.5*) - non-fiction

I remember when I first read The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby, a combined collection of his first two volumes of columns for The Believer. It was early 2009, I'd inexplicably found a signed hardback copy in a discount bookshop, and I was SO EXCITED. Here was a guy talking about books in a witty, chatty, informal style. He was a 'normal reader'; he picked up all kinds of titles, bought more than he read, and not only mused cheerfully on the experience, but touched on all kinds of foibles of readerly life along the way. I believe I described it at the time as 'like the LibraryThing forums, but in book form'. It was new and charming and everything I wanted.

Anyway, the problem with buying the next volume then waiting ten years to read it is that SO MUCH has changed since then. Not only are many of his book choices - even the hyped ones - now waaaaay backlisted or all but forgotten, but given the rise of book blogs and bookish corners of social media like BookTube and Bookstagram, content like this is pretty much at our fingertips all the time, with the added bonus that we get to cherry pick the people who have similar tastes or outlooks to us.

All of which is a very long way to say that I liked this book, meandering onwards through Hornby's reading life, and I came away with one or two recommendations for my library list - but it felt a wee bit more arduous this time. I couldn't have devoured it almost in one go like the previous volume. I still plan on picking up the last installment (More Baths Less Talking) because let's be honest, books about books are my jam and Hornby is always worth a read - but maybe I'll manage my expectations a bit more given how many years have passed since they were written!

>66 elliepotten: and >67 elliepotten: Welp, that's two in a row I want to read!

10. The Trench, by Steve Alten (3.5*) - fiction

Well, if I was expecting the second book in this series to be the Lair to Meg's The Rats, I was to be surprised and ever so slightly disappointed. This is more of a Domain (which is also the name of a Steve Alten book but in this case I mean the James Herbert one... keeping up with me here? Nope, me neither!) What I MEAN is that I was expecting more of the same: lots of people going up against a very big toothy hungry fish, but this time with the already-in-the-picture Spawn of The Meg, the appropriately named Angel of Death.

What I GOT was more like a James Bond novel but with a few prehistoric monsters floating around the periphery. The megalodon - and other interesting wildlife of the Mariana Trench - did feature prominently, but their menace was very much secondary to human evil in this installment. Instead of man vs. shark, the focus is on a complicated plot involving everything from CIA spies and despotic geniuses to energy wars and even Osama Bin Laden (it was written in 1999). This is not one for the faint of heart, including as it does multiple gruesome deaths, endless psychological manipulation, a Lolita-esque relationship and more than one rape scene. Alten throws it aaaaaaall in and stirs it maniacally, and it's almost wearying at times. I wanted more shark, less casual murder, dammit!

Still, it was a page-turner, and it was good to be back with the characters we got to know in the previous book: Professor Jonas Taylor, his feisty now-wife Terry and her sweetheart of a father Masao, and the maverick helicopter pilot Mac, who provided a bit of much-needed black humour and straight talking. The parts that DID feature Angel were well done, with her early 'set piece' as a captive show monster reminding me a lot of the mosasaurus in Jurassic World. This one didn't live up to Meg for me, but I'll definitely be reading on to find out where on earth Alten takes this series - and his ghostly antagonists - next!

Quotes:

- "Fear is nothing more than the dark side of thought, it has substance only in the mind. We create it, and we alone can destroy it. But because most men never master their fear, they spend their lives living in its thrall... Force your mind to create solutions. Face your fear - and defeat it."

- "...all of the truly significant battles are waged within the self."

>68 lycomayflower: Woohoo! *adds a couple of notches to Book Bullet Belt* :D

11. Two Steps Forward, by Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist (2.5*) - fiction

Oh maaaan, I wanted so much to love this one. I THOUGHT I was going to love it. It's about two very different people - Yorkshire bloke Martin and American woman Zoe - setting out from Cluny, France to walk the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. Both have very different reasons for walking, and very different personal journeys to make along the way, yet they keep bumping into each other and for better or worse, sparks begin to fly.

Sounds great - but alas, it left me oddly cold. It felt too disjointed to be a romance, too fast to be a travel book, too dramatic to be a contemplative novel... It didn't really seem to know what it was. The Sunday Express reviewer on the cover describes it as "Sleepless in Seattle meets Wild" – but I would have described it as more like "Serendipity meets Wild". Unfortunately, what leaned towards being charming on the screen, with a limited run time, got outright frustrating on the page: chapter after chapter of near misses, reckless decisions and stupid miscommunications. I also had to check the authors' nationality (Australian) because the (apparently) English slang is used incorrectly on several occasions; sure enough, at least one of the slips is the Australian version.

The fellow pilgrims Zoe and Martin meet along the way drift in and out of the story as their paths cross and re-cross, but despite their many appearances and relative intimacy with the main characters in this intense shared experience (their 'Camino Family'), the authors wait until the last possible minute to suddenly shoehorn in a bunch of huge revelations about their backgrounds. It all gets a bit ridiculous and sentimental, before fizzling out right at what should have been their big moment, their hard-won arrival in front of the cathedral at Santiago. Which is a shame, because one thing the novel does quite well overall is evoke the 'magic' of the Camino, its beauty and the life-changing effect it has on so many pilgrims. This should have been the pinnacle, but... nope.

Maybe the Camino just doesn't work in fiction. Well, except the movie The Way, which was incredible and was what got me (and a whole lot of other people) interested in the Camino in the first place. The walk is such a profound and personal thing that perhaps the real stories, however wild and unlikely, are the way to go. To that end, I'd recommend the film Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago and Dan Mullins' wonderful podcast My Camino well above this novel. More's the pity. I have more (non-fiction) accounts of the walk to go at though, so maybe another book will hit the spot!

Quotes:

- "My experience of the last two weeks was of finding comfort in the simplicity of the daily routine, of having no time to think about anything but staying on the path, finding somewhere to sleep and washing my change of clothes - not even having to choose what to wear. I had rediscovered the pleasures of food, and of sleep that comes from exhaustion and leaves no room for rumination. The Camino existed on a different frequency to the rest of life."

- "Some wounds heal quickly; some wounds heal more slowly... What matters is that they are healing."

- "The Camino expands and contracts like a concertina; people move at their own pace, but with rest days and injuries they turn up again in a cafe or bar, at the gite or in the bakery. There are hugs exchanged, drinks bought, stories shared. Each time you know that you may see them tomorrow - or never again... moving forward on the Camino is the same as moving on in life: it can mean leaving things - and people - behind."

- "There were many reasons not to walk the Camino. But I walked it anyway. One day at a time."

>71 elliepotten: Sorry to hear about the dud reading experience. Don't let this scare you off of Simsion's writing though. I do think you'd enjoy The Rosie Project.

>72 MickyFine: Oooh yes, I'm definitely still looking forward to that one! I've had it forever, I really don't know why I haven't read it yet. :)

12. Walking Away: Further Adventures of a Troubadour on the South West Coast Path, by Simon Armitage (3*) - non-fiction

Okay, so this was really a book of two halves for me. It was like... if Bill Bryson wrote a book about walking the South West Coast Path, but spent a bit less time making pithy observations and more time trying to describe sixteen gorges in a row. There were moments where it felt lively and amenable, and moments where it got really pedestrian (no pun intended) and dull. At times I was thinking, "This guy is a famous poet, why isn't his prose better?", then there'd suddenly be a stunningly beautiful description or a perfect metaphor and I'd think, "Ooooh, THERE it is." (Leaping dolphins 'darning the water' was one of my favourites!) It would have been nice if the whole book had leaned more heavily towards its better parts.

It was a solid three-star Nice Read for me. I've been to some of the areas Armitage travelled to (or through), but I found it more interesting learning about the places I HADN'T been than trying to recognise ones I had. The section on Clovelly, a sort of self-contained fishing idyll, was maybe the most enjoyable, with more time given over to the people at its heart. At other times, though, the journey started to drag and become repetitive (for him and for us, I think), and if there hadn't always been the chance of another unusual character or unique place coming up ahead, I might have DNF-ed it halfway through. I also really wish there'd been proper full-colour photos. Perhaps Armitage wouldn't have had to try quite so hard if some of the places and people along the way were there for us to see rather than imagine. His dry humour (and grainy little black and white pictures) just about carried it though, and in the end I'm glad I finished it, even if I have a feeling I'll have forgotten it almost entirely by the end of the year.

Quotes:

- "Included within the terms of the guarantee is a lifetime insurance policy confirming that lost or damaged hats will be replaced by the supplier at the drop of a hat, as well as a strip of tear-off, pre-printed slips - the hat equivalent of the business card - to hand to admirers and enquirers, of which there will be hundreds."

- "A sloshing, gurgling sound in the shallow water signals the return of the sea, the first nudge of the incoming tide against the outflowing stream, just a slow churning at first, a rumour of some great turnaround out in the Atlantic that in an hour's time will have grown to a full-scale invasion, the retreating river being chased by saltwater threatening to surge as far as its source."

- "When I'd asked Ray about the walk to Port Isaac he described it as 'hard work'. He didn't know exactly how many combes there were between here and there but seemed to remember there were 'too many, followed by another three'."

- "... there is no road into Backways Cove, but no obvious reason why someone shouldn't or couldn't have built one, and geographically it has very little to distinguish it from Trebarwith Strand. Yet Trebarwith has residents, visitors, a jetty, public toilets, cars, a car park, an inn, a surf shack and a shopkeeper with luminescent facial hair, and Backways Cove has one herring gull peering into a rock pool."

- "I walked thirteen miles today but I'm getting to the stage where thirteen miles is something of a stroll, especially when the days are measured by talk rather than distance, and remembered as a landscape of anecdotes and stories rather than stretches of cliff top and views of the sea."

13. Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer (3*) - fiction

"The sea was ablaze with light, but nothing beautiful here fooled me anymore. Human lives had poured into this place over time, volunteered to become party to exile and worse. Under everything lay the ghastly presence of countless desperate struggles. Why did they keep sending us? Why did we keep going? So many lies, so little ability to face the truth. Area X broke minds, I felt, even though it hadn't yet broken mine."

How on earth do I even begin to describe or explain this book? Is it horror, sci-fi, fantasy, dystopia or a blend of all four? It’s certainly psychological in a dark and cerebral way that reminded me of Arrival, Lost, Bird Box and the Dan Stevens series Legion. It preys on and messes with the reader’s mind in the same way that the weirdness within it messes with our unnamed main character, a biologist on the twelfth expedition into a mysterious and dangerous zone known only as Area X.

In some ways, I think VanderMeer might have exceeded his own storytelling abilities. His world is so utterly other, his atmosphere so complete, suffocating and claustrophic, that it doesn’t always translate well into prose and I suddenly got glimpses of him struggling to put these giant concepts and sights into words. That’s one of the places where the Bird Box comparison leaped out – unlike Malerman, he tries to describe the undescribable, in some detail, and it starts to flounder and feel messy. There are no clear answers and no really definitive sections of the book, except where the biologist goes back to memories of her time before the mission, both as a younger researcher and later, exploring her relationship with her husband. Those parts were a welcome relief, in many ways.

This book is supposedly her field journal, in which she attempts to record her experiences in Area X and sort through all of her own questions. What is real? What is the nature of reality and consciousness? Is this place natural or unnatural, mutated or magical? Where is the line between monster and friend, human and creature? What can we ever trust? Our senses? Our knowledge? Other people? In that sense Legion definitely provides the strongest parallel. This is a book you have to pay attention to; I had to read a page at a time, or three, or five, then let it settle before I went back for more, questioning everything and trusting nothing. It felt bleak, hopeless and black and I’m not entirely sure if I liked it, or if I want to read more - but it was certainly one of the most intense reading experiences I’ve had in a while. I’ve heard that the next book remains on the outside of Area X so perhaps that will be a little more straightforward and fill in some of the blanks from this first mind-bending instalment!

Quotes:

- "... pretending often leads to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic, even if only from a distance."

- "I have never done well in cities... The dirt and grit of a city, the unending wakefulness of it, the crowdedness, the constant light obscuring the stars, the omnipresent gasoline fumes, the thousand ways it presaged our destruction... none of these things appealed to me".

Kudos for tackling that. Maybe something a little lighter for your next read? :)

>76 MickyFine: Haha, waaaay ahead of you. I have reviews for Five Feet Apart by Rachel Lippincott (aka That Cole Sprouse Movie One) and My Favourite Half-Night Stand by Christina Lauren coming up soon! :)

I've been ill for weeks, some kind of unknown neurological-esque dizzy exhausted unpleasant thing, but I'm finally almost out of it and back in my reading groove and I am SO EXCITED. I missed my book babies! I'm just over halfway through Masters of Sex, Daisy Jones and the Six AND I'd Rather Be Reading and I have five days home alone coming up where I'm THINKING about kinda doing a little one lady readathon. Celebrate being back in the game. WITH DONUTS. :D

Glad you're feeling much more the thing and that you've got fun reads ahead. But what kind of donuts???

Glad you're back in a reading groove, Ellie, and looking forward to reading your next reviews. I decided to watch Five Feet Apart before reading it this time, so we'll see what I think when the library DVD comes in.

Hi, Ellie! I missed your thread until just now -- how do these things happen? Anyhow, sounds like you've done some interesting reading lately.

>78 MickyFine: Our local supermarket has started doing powdered ones with melted chocolate in the middle. Only £1 for five and absolutely scrumptious. :D

>79 bell7: Yeaaaah I sorta have a feeling I'll like the film better, but even that might only be a one-watch, y'know? (Book) Review on the way....

>80 foggidawn: *waves madly* I can never keep up with LT these days, haha. Just readin' on, same as always!

14. Five Feet Apart, by Rachel Lippincott, with Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis (3*) - fiction

"If I'm going to die, I'd like to actually live first."

Weeeell, I pretty much got what I expected with this one. I believe the screenplay came before the novel, so it's really a novelisation of the film, but Lippincott doesn't fall into the trap of just writing down everything that happens; this is, at least, a fleshed out, dual-narrative, emotionally in-tune version of what I HOPE I'll see on-screen when the DVD eventually lands next month.

Essentially this is the story of two teenagers with cystic fibrosis - good girl Stella and bad boy Will - who meet on the CF ward of her local hospital. SHE has pretty much grown up here, with the same nurses and her best friend Poe, doing her treatments and keeping out of trouble as she climbs the lung transplant list. HE has been shipped around hospitals and trials across the world and is counting down the minutes until he turns eighteen and can finally give this up and live out his life the way he wants to. Of course, the impetus behind the novel/film is the hate-to-love attraction between them during their stay in the hospital.

Honestly, the best thing about the book for me was the insight into what it's like to live with CF. I looked up some articles and reviews by CF-ers to see how they felt about the representation and depiction of the condition, and almost without exception this element was praised. I felt like I came away having learned something, about the illness, about its treatments, and about the rule that people with CF must stay six feet apart due to the possibility of infecting and literally killing each other. I also thought that the impact of a chronic/terminal illness on a teenage life was explored sensitively - jealousy of friends and their 'normal' lives, awareness of a very different life trajectory, acceptance of an early end and how that affects whole families...

I did feel, however, that much of the rest of the novel was pretty unbelievable. Do I think two attractive hormonal teenagers could fall for each other despite the impossibility of doing anything about it? Yes. Do I think it was a necessary angle to make this novel work? No. I think they could have been a fabulous trio of friends and it would have been a better, more focussed story. I also found their shenanigans around the hospital increasingly ridiculous. They're still minors, still children, and although yes, I can see kids being treated kindly and given a bit of leeway when they're practically living there, it stretched credibility for me. A girl being given unlimited access to the NICU when there are babies and parents and medical professionals there trying to do their job? Being able to get into the pool area and the kitchens of a medical establishment, and be away from the ward for hours at a time without it being noticed? As minors under the care of a dedicated group of nurses and doctors? Really? The schmaltzy double ending was the final eyeroll for me. Never a good sign when I think "I could have just read a website about CF instead."

I'll definitely be watching the film - if only to see how it differs when both blossomed from the same screenplay. And to see Cole Sprouse's majestical hair and angsty beautiful face. It was a quick, fun read, with an unusual angle and setting, and the sweeter, less ridiculous moments made it worth pushing on to the end, BUT I think it'll prove very forgettable. Glad I gave it a go... also glad I picked it up cheap, haha. :)

15. My Favourite Half-Night Stand, by Christina Lauren (4.5*) - fiction

Okay, so Christina Lauren novels are kinda everywhere on BookTube and Bookstagram right now, but I WAS NOT CONVINCED. So I went to the library and had a little look through a few of their books (if you didn't know, Christina Lauren is actually Christina AND Lauren, two best friends writing together), and picked this one out to have a go. AND I BLOODY LOVED IT.

It was literally everything I wanted from a romcom novel, without the draggy miscommunications (The Kiss Quotient) or iffy ending (Attachments) that have knocked my previous favourites down the star ratings a teensy bit. Like Attachments, this one gave me a total 'Nora Ephron movie but on the page' vibe - perhaps leaning more towards When Harry Met Sally this time: a story of two smart, funny and awesome best friends going through the uncertainty and emotional upheaval of realising they're in love. The twist is that they've already had a drunken one-night stand, and have now been matched on an online dating website - but while Millie is well aware that she's messaging Reid, Reid thinks he's opening up to a stranger.

I loved the fact that both Reid and Millie are professors, one of biology, one of criminology. I liked that one has the same name as my cat and one I could imagine as a more suave SPENCER Reid. I adored the tight friendship group of lovable, capable men and one equally lovable, capable woman - especially because I tend to get on better in a group of male friends too. I loved the quickfire banter and the direct messages between them, the ribbing and hilarity and affection. I loved the steamy moments and the sweet moments and the fast-flowing bang-on-trend pop culture references (though it made me think I should get on with reading their other books before all those parts become a bit obsolete!). The pace never got sluggish, there were enough romantic encounters to stop me getting impatient, it was laugh-out-loud funny, and the ensemble cast was fabulous. It'd make an amazing movie. Bring on the next one!

Quotes:

- "I feel like we meet people in life and want so much for them to like us that we suck in our stomachs and pretend we don't fart and tell them a bunch of things we think they want to know. If it works they fall for the person we want to be, and not for the person we are."

- "The craziest thing about parenting must be that it's this huge experiment, and you have no idea whether it's successful until, like, decades later."

>83 elliepotten: Glad you found a romance that hit all the right spots for you. :)

>83 elliepotten: It is certainly true that parenting is a mix of trial, error, prayer and fate. I think our three have done great despite their parents!

Have a splendid weekend, Ellie.

>84 MickyFine: It did! I'm reading The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary now and that one's proving an absolute delight too! :)

>85 PaulCranswick: HA, well played sir. Well played. :D

16. Daisy Jones & the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid (4*) - fiction

"Just how honest do we have to get here? I know I told you I'd tell you everything but how much "everything" do you really want to know?" - Daisy

Another book that was very much a case of 'the hype made me do it'! I wasn't sure about this one going in - I love books with unusual structures, but I'd never read Taylor Jenkins Reid before and I'm not a massive music buff either. All of which probably contributed to my feelings balancing out at a four-star rating: I'm glad I took the gamble because I really enjoyed it, but it didn't rock my world (if you'll pardon the pun) as it seems to have done for others. It reminded me a little bit of Caitlin Moran's How to Build a Girl in some ways - there were so many quotable moments and such heartfelt insight into fame, substance abuse and love in all its wondrous forms, yet some certain indefinable something stopped it being a five star read. My lack of musical background, perhaps; I've never been to a live concert and I don't have a deep knowledge of that era of rock, so I probably didn't connect with it as much as some other readers will.

As I expected, I really loved the oral biography/history layout. It made it easy to sail through, broken down into little bite-sized chunks, and I thought it was constructed very well. Every single one of the 'interviewees' - members of the Six, friends, family - had their own distinct voices, biases and priorities, and I think every reader will gravitate towards certain characters depending on their own personalities and experiences. Karen was my favourite - she had such clear eyes and a kick-ass attitude while retaining a softer, more caring edge than Daisy. It did make for an odd kind of feeling that we as readers were both getting incredibly personal with the characters and events, yet were also being kept at a distance; the whole point is that we only see what the band members want us to see, decades on, and we have to grasp at tiny details to build up the bigger picture for ourselves. That said, the way the story unravelled, slowly unfurling new revelations and encounters, was beautifully done.

The reviews I read beforehand were absolutely right - this felt so real. I really wished I could go and find the songs that were being written and developed on the page, to pore over the album covers and iconic photographs, to watch the game-changing performances being so lovingly described. The back of the book has the complete lyrics for the album at the heart of the book - Aurora - which I believe is actually being made, in its entirety, as part of the upcoming television adaptation. I can't wait to see it come to life! All in all, a lively, quotable, interesting read that will have something - and someone - for almost everyone. Recommended, especially if you're a fan of 70s rock or have any kind of knowledge of songwriting and the music business, in which case I'm sure you'd get even more out of it than most.

Quotes:

- "Men often think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people." - Karen

- "There's just a quality that some people have. If you took nine guys, plus Mick Jagger, and you put them in a lineup, someone who had never heard of the Rolling Stones before could still point to Jagger and say, "That's the rock star."" - Rod

- "I always knew kids weren't in the cards for me. I think it's a feeling you get. I think you have it in your heart or you don't.
And you can't put it in your heart if it's not there.
And you can't pull it out of your heart if it is." - Karen

- "You have these lines you won't cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won't instantly come to an end." - Billy

- "Music can dig, you know? It can take a shovel to your chest and just start digging until it hits something." - Daisy

- "Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself. And Billy saw me the way I wanted to be seen. There is nothing more powerful than that." - Daisy

- "Acceptance is a powerful drug." - Daisy

- "Knowing you did the right thing doesn't mean you're happy about it." - Karen

- "... you show up for your friends on their hardest days. And you hold their hand through the roughest parts. Life is about who is holding your hand and, I think, whose hand you commit to holding. - Camila

Glad you've been getting in some good reads, Ellie!

I decided to switch up what I normally do and watched the movie Five Feet Apart without reading the book. So I reread your review more carefully now, and I think I had similar reactions to yours...so now I can safely leave the book unread. I didn't hate the movie or anything, just had some issues and don't feel like putting the greater time/effort into reading it. It was well acted, for all they're in their mid twenties playing high school students 😃

>87 elliepotten: Oh, you may have just sold me on that one.

>88 bell7: I did that with Dumplin' and To All the Boys I Loved Before, haha. I think I WILL read those books, but if I'd done it the other way with Five Feet Apart I probably wouldn't have bothered. I did actually watch the movie last week - it just came out to rent here - and I definitely liked the film better!

>89 foggidawn: I regret nothing. :)

I'm waaaaay behind on reviews at the moment - not least because I've just taken part in the 24in48 readathon, then the Reading Rush readathon, and NOW I'm taking part in the Magical Readathon: NEWTs Edition, so all of a sudden my reading's taken off. Ooops. I promised myself I'd make a start on one today but then the next volume of Alice Oseman's Heartstopper arrived and... did I mentioned oooops? Because that. :D

>90 elliepotten: Oh excellent, no regrets on my part then :) There's really no perfect way to do it with books-to-movies, is there? I think the reason I did movie first this time was because I liked the movie better for Crazy Rich Asians and feel like I'd have liked both book and movie better if I'd watched the movie first.

You could give yourself a clean slate with reviews if you wanted :D

>90 elliepotten: I could do with a readathon or three Eliie to catch up.

Have a lovely Sunday.

>91 bell7: WASH YOUR MOUTH OUT WITH SO...mething delicious because soap is disgusting and cruel. Wine, maybe. Or Nutella. :D

Tempting, very tempting, but once I've started a thread for a year and done reviews I always feel awful if I stop, haha. And they go on Instagram as weeeeeell and I'm just being lazy really. Ugh. The next one's nearly done though. :)

>92 PaulCranswick: There are so many at the moment! One after another, all different themes and times and goals. It's making me pick up some different books which is fun, but I'm quite looking forward to going back to free reading in September!

17. Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love, by Thomas Maier (4*) - non-fiction

I picked this up having already seen and loved the first season (and maybe half of the second?) of Masters of Sex on television. Aaaaand then it disappeared off Channel 4 here in the UK and the book sat on my shelves for years and years and years until finally I caved, bought the first couple of seasons on DVD, started from the beginning and my interest was whetted all over again. And here we are!

Maier's book does exactly what it says on the tin: it charts the rise and fall of the Masters and Johnson power duo, exploring the sweep of their personal lives, outlining their research and setting both firmly against the political and social landscapes of the passing decades. I was particularly interested in the role of Gini Johnson: how she rose out of nowhere and steered Masters towards pioneering studies that would help unlock female sexuality, enabled sensitive research by developing a much-needed rapport with their participants, and invented therapeutic approaches to help couples towards fulfilling sexual relationships in a way that Masters alone could never have accomplished. The book definitely seems to lean her way in both content and bias, perhaps partially because she was alive and happy to be interviewed when the book was being put together, and also because she seemed to have been a warm and personable woman, in direct opposition to Bill's notoriously detached, rather domineering chill.

I was pleased to find that while Maier is happy to explore the phenomenal and ground-breaking work the pair did, he doesn't shy away from the less savoury aspects of his subjects' lives: in particular, the heartbreaking decline of their research into utter shambles - in part due to Bill's increasingly lax approach to rigorous scientific testing before publishing new work - and their devastating and ill-conceived foray into homosexuality and conversion therapy. At the same time, he also happily revels in the more flamboyant details of their work; for example, Bill's mother showed her support by making silk masks for study participants to wear (to replace the pillowcases that had previously been concealing their identities), and the duo were partially funded by Hugh Hefner, writing articles for Playboy and even staying at the Playboy Mansion.

All in all, an absorbing and interesting look at the duo behind some of the biggest sexual breakthroughs in history - the good, the bad and the ugly. The television series is quite different - lots of additional characters, added drama, everything you'd expect - but if you haven't seen it I'd highly recommend it. Everything from the costume design to the emotional heart is fantastic, I can't wait to watch on now I have the remaining seasons on DVD at last!

18. Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere, by Jeanette Winterson (4*) - non-fiction

"I don't want a world where men and women can't flirt with each other, can't take pleasure in beauty, can't enjoy sex or sexual power or sexual difference, but biology is not destiny - there is no reason why women should not be equal, why women should not be safe at home or at work, just because they are women."

I sped through this tiny book in one sitting, over breakfast one morning, and really enjoyed it. It spotlights some of the people and landmark moments that have advanced women's rights thus far, looks at where we are now, and discusses what could yet be. Winterson moves quickly and eloquently from suffragettes to #MeToo, the Marriage Bar to Everyday Sexism, including some details and historical figures that I'd never even heard of. The last fifteen pages are dedicated to Emmeline Pankhurst's 1913 speech, 'Freedom or Death', reproduced here in full. A great little addition to my bookshelf - and it's extra special because my wonderful friend Katie works at Foyles in London and bought me a signed copy for Christmas! Recommended.

Bonus points: for reminding me of the iconic song 'Sister Suffragette' from Mary Poppins, which I haven't so much as thought of for twenty years but which has been stuck in my head ever since. :)

Quotes:

- "Don't protect me - respect me. When women are respected we don't need protection."

- "The grievances of those who have got power, the influence of those who have got power commands a great deal of attention; but the wrongs and the grievances of those people who have no power at all are apt to be absolutely ignored. That is the history of humanity right from the beginning." - Emmeline Pankhurst

>95 elliepotten: Very cool that you got a signed copy!

>96 MickyFine: Definitely! I've never stumbled across a signed Jeanette Winterson before, not being near a big-city bookstore, so I was well chuffed that she thought of me!

19. The Flatshare, by Beth O'Leary (5*) - fiction

"I rest my forehead against the fridge door for a moment, then run my fingers across the layers of paper scraps and Post-its. There's so much here. Jokes, secrets, stories, the slow unfolding of two people whose lives have been changing in parallel - or, I don't know, in synch. Different times, same place."

Finally, a five star book! My favourite of the year so far, in fact, and I'd go as far as to say it might be my favourite romcom novel EVER... I was intrigued by this one right from the first pre-publication buzz floating around social media. There was something about the basic premise - two people sharing a flat, one working at a publishing company by day and living there at night, one working night shifts at a hospice and sleeping there by day, somehow falling in love - that felt completely unique in a genre that tends to be dominated by sweeping trends from one year to the next (people opening bakeries, people who run little seaside B&Bs, people embracing country living...).

It definitely lived up to expectations. It has everything you could want from a romantic novel like this: laugh-out-loud moments, heartfelt ones, strong and sweet characters to root for, and a happy ending. Not only that, but the two leads don't actually meet until halfway through the book. They get to know each other and start to get attached in the most organic way: by sharing a home. Leon knows what Tiffy's working on from the manuscript on the coffee table, and if she's had a bad day because she'll have left him a tray of baked goodies on the counter. Tiffy knows how Leon takes his coffee from the cup left beside the sink, and if he's had an exhausting shift based on how much of his book he's read before dozing off. Not only that, but they leave each other notes every day, starting awkwardly and slowly progressing to a true friendship, without ever having laid eyes on each other.

What also sets this book apart is the blissful lack of miscommunication and pointless conflict. There IS conflict driving the novel, plenty of it, but it comes from external forces and so it unites them instead of driving them apart. Tiffy's recovering from the collapse of an emotionally abusive relationship, Leon's brother has been wrongly imprisoned, and they come together with their friends around them to get through it. It's so completely and utterly refreshing, and the deeper issues the characters are facing, depicted thoughtfully, make it an even more compelling and absorbing read. The two very different writing styles for the dual narrative also work really well, Tiffy's quick-witted and eloquent, Leon's almost Bridget Jones-esque in its clipped, deadpan manner.

I loved every minute of it. I definitely had a few questions about the logistics of the flatshare - What if you had a day off? What if you were sick and had to stay home? - but obviously once Tiffy and Leon met and became closer that stopped being an issue. If you like your novels sweet and a little bit spicy, with some well depicted mental health and therapy rep and grittier issues, a kick-ass heroine and a cinnamon roll leading man, this is the book for you. Completely lived up to the hype, and I'll definitely be snapping up whatever O'Leary publishes next!

>98 elliepotten: I agree so much with this review -- I loved that book.

>99 foggidawn: It was just so unexpectedly... more?! I got everything I wanted from it but then also MORE and I loved it so much. :)

>100 elliepotten: Yes! It exceeded expectations.

20. Horns, by Joe Hill (4*) - fiction

Hmmmm, this was an interesting one. It reminded me a tiny bit of The Trees by Ali Shaw, one of my favourite reads of the year so far, in that it placed a fantastical something into our modern world, then created an absorbingly human story around it, exploring its physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual ramifications. Unfortunately, this one hasn't stuck with me in the same way, and when it fizzled out into uber-weirdness at the end (also like The Trees) I didn't have quite as firm a connection to the characters to tether me to everything that came before.

In case you've been living under a rock, Joe Hill is Stephen King's son. I'd never read him before, but from this reading experience it would seem that he definitely inherited his dad's skill at creating flawed characters and using them to build a gripping novel that simmers away underneath the surface layer of horror. In this case, our antihero is Ig Perrish, a deeply depressed and angry young man who everyone believes killed his girlfriend Merrin a year ago. Waking up one day with budding horns growing out of his temples, he soon realises that something about his bizarre physical transformation encourages other people to confess their darkest and most depraved secrets to him - and that he could use this new skill to find out who really murdered the love of his life.

From this intriguing premise the story spirals out into a sort of twisted, clever whodunit, complete with lengthy flashback chapters, a dash of romance, family secrets, and musings on good and evil, religion and the nature of the Devil. Alas, something was still missing, which dropped it a star. Ig was a compelling character, but Merrin wasn't particularly, which didn't help since she was such a huge driving force behind Ig's metamorphosis. Sometimes the momentum started to drop away, and the weirdness and wonder would get buried beneath a long memory from Ig's childhood or an extended anecdote from when Merrin was alive. Occasionally these scenes were dropped at a really intense and exciting point in the 'present day', and we wouldn't return to the action for maybe forty pages, which was kind of irritating.

Still, this was a really inventive and complex read, definitely not my last Joe Hill - I already have NOS4R2 and Heart-Shaped Box on my TBR, I think? - and it stood head and shoulders above its movie adaptation, despite DanRad's valiant attempts to carry the entire thing for the full two hours' run time. I don't think I'll be keeping it for a reread, but I'm very glad I finally took the plunge and gave it a try!

Quotes:

- "Hopefully... Lee would learn the truth about music: that it was the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours, to feel something, to burn with all the emotions you didn't get to experience in the ordinary run of school and TV and loading the dishwasher."

- "Satan turns up in a lot of other religions as the good guy. He's usually the guy who tricks the fertility goddess into bed, and... they bring the world into being. Or the crops. Something. He comes into the story to bamboozle the unworthy or tempt them into ruination, or at least out of their liquor. Even Christians can't really decide what to do with him. I mean, think about it. Him and God are supposed to be at war with each other. But if God hates sin and Satan punishes the sinners, aren't they working the same side of the street? Aren't the judge and the executioner on the same team?"

- "The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better."

>102 elliepotten: I did quite like the movie, Ellie, so I should read this one soon.

Hi Ellie! Sorry about all of the bad family stuff for you this year, and your PIP issues. How is your Dad doing? And how are you? (((HUGS)))

21. It's Not Yet Dark, by Simon Fitzmaurice (4*) - non-fiction

"I do not eat or drink or walk or talk the way you do. I don't breathe without a machine helping me day and night. I cannot move my arms or legs. And yet. I'm still man.
I've lost so much. And yet. I'm still here.
I feel everything. The slightest feather touch anywhere on my body. And my heart is alive. To meaning. To value. To love. Which is all it's ever been about."

This memoir may be small, but it is both beautiful and profound. A young Irish filmmaker, Fitzmaurice was fresh from success at the Sundance Film Festival, and had a growing family at home, when he was diagnosed with ALS. In the tradition of books like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Fitzmaurice wrote this using eye-gaze software.

It's Not Yet Dark is, in part, a concise account of his experience of ALS, from the first drop of his foot to being almost completely paralysed. He is honest about the realities of living with a terminal illness, yet as the title suggests, there is acceptance and hope behind his words, right to the end. The reactions of other people to his disability, in contrast, were some of the most unpleasantly memorable moments in the book - particularly the way medical professionals tried to tell him that his life wasn't worth living now and that he should prepare to die rather than choosing to be ventilated.

His response was to live and live well, for as long as he possibly could. This is the flipside of his memoir: it is also a joyful celebration of one man's love for life, for his work, for his children, and most importantly, for his wife Ruth, who shines from the pages. As well as writing this book, Fitzmaurice travelled, fathered more children, and wrote and directed the feature film My Name is Emily (starring Evanna Lynch) before his death in 2017, nearly ten years after his diagnosis. He talks about the joy of watching movies with Ruth, feeling his children's touch, and watching the sun sparkle on the sea: things worth living for.

It's a wonderful little book, I highly recommend it. I also have Ruth's highly praised memoir, I Found My Tribe, on my TBR shelf - I bought hers a couple of years ago, in fact, but decided I wanted to read Simon's take on his own illness first - and I'll hopefully be watching both My Name is Emily and the documentary based on this book, narrated by Colin Farrell, over the next few months.

Quotes

"I am not brave in the face of death. I am terrified. Ruth said that surviving itself is a bravery. I don't know. I don't think I'm brave at all. Or that I handle my suffering with dignity and selflessness, as the books say. I try, and sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail. Sometimes ALS buries me until I cannot see."

- "Why would you want to ventilate? Why would you want to live? I have many reasons, if they are prepared to listen. But that is not why they are there. They are there because they have made a decision about my standard of living. To them it is inconceivable that I would want to live. But not for me. For me, it's not about how long you live, but about how you live."

- "I am not a tragedy. I neither want nor need pity. I am full of hope. The word hope and ALS do not go together in this country. Hope is not about looking for a cure to a disease. Hope is a way of living. We often think we are entitled to a long and fruitful Coca-Cola life. But life is a privilege, not a right. I feel privileged to be alive. That's hope."

- "History. All around us. Buildings older than any of us. The news telling us what's important every day. Yet there is a more important history. The things we gather. The photographs we hang. The things we use. Our living memory. The wake we leave behind."

- "This is a literary culture and the question has always been, what book changed your life? But it is a film that changes mine. I feel embarrassed it's not a book. But you don't choose what changes you."

- "You are what you are. It's up to you what you choose to do about it."

>103 PaulCranswick: Ooooh yes, if you liked the movie you should like the book, it's even better!

>104 LauraBrook: Hey jellybean! :) We're both alright, thank you! Dad's recovering nicely, still a bit unsure of himself but he's done all his rehab work and things now. I'm leaning closer to housebound again on the agoraphobia side, but reasonably healthy in other ways (all I ask is that SOMETHING be going well to offset whatever's not, haha) and my bad PIP decision got overturned by someone with a modicum of common sense, so I'm safe for a wee bit longer. :D

Just housesitting at the moment - now the kids have gone back to school my family's going on holiday one household after another so naturally I'm the first choice to move around the village, caring for all feline occupants and making sure the houses are still standing when their occupants return! Me and my cat nephew Wally are bonding at my sister's house this week, haha.

>105 elliepotten: That sounds like a really good one, Ellie! Adding it to the ever-growing list.

>107 bell7: I REGRET NOTHING. :P

22. and 23. Heartstopper Volume 1 and Heartstopper Volume 2, by Alice Oseman (5*) - fiction

THESE BOOKS ARE SO CUTE! I'd seen rave reviews on BookTube and Bookstagram - including Zoe from readbyzoe literally happy-crying over the pages during a live reading stream - and decided to take the plunge, and to my great joy they more than lived up to the hype. I believe there are going to be five or six of the books in all, based on a web comic which is already way ahead and available free online. They're also British, which I hadn't realised!

The story is sweet and simple - a YA queer romance between two boys at school. The younger boy, Charlie, is out as gay and has already dealt with a fair bit of bullying as a result. He believes his new friend Nick, a rugby player from the year above, is straight - as does Nick, in fact - but as their friendship deepens it starts to blossom into something more for them both. The second volume continues this story arc, with each boy reeling from the aftermath of their first kiss, dealing with the new emotions, fears and possibilities that have exploded into their lives.

The art style is equally sweet and simple. When I first flipped through it I was actually quite disappointed, thinking it was going to be childish, quick to read and a bit of a waste of money. I was wrong. Oseman's drawings manage to express so much in such a clean, lovely way that I laughed, cried and awwwwed probably even more than I would have done in a straight-up novel. The whole thing just swept me up completely; it hit all the right emotional notes and made my heart soar in all the best ways.

I've never read Solitaire (where Nick and Charlie first appeared as side characters) but since Heartstopper is set before the events in the book, it really didn't matter. These books are definitely a highlight of my reading year so far - two of my three five star reads of 2019 - and aside from how wonderful and heartwarming they are to read as an adult, I honestly think they should be in every school library. Such a healthy, organic, completely ordinary yet adorably lovely gay relationship, on the page, in a very accessible form, is something I never came across as a teenager (there's also great lesbian representation on the side!), and some of the more serious issues raised about coming out, bullying, gay stereotypes and mental health might be really helpful touchstones for queer or questioning teens. I believe some more intense material related to depression and anorexia is coming up in future installments too. Book 3 is on the way, and the series has been optioned for a TV show as well! Bring it on...

24. Beauty Queens, by Libba Bray (3*) - fiction

"Maybe girls need an island to find themselves. Maybe they need a place where no one's watching them so they can be who they really are."

Where do I even start with this one…?? While I was reading it (a while back now, I’m WAY behind on reviews and still dragging my heels like a kid who doesn’t want to do their homework), I described it to people as “a kind of bizarre mix of Lord of the Flies, Lost, Miss Congeniality, Austin Powers, Survivor and Pirates of the Caribbean”. No, really. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve read before: a heavy feminist YA satire on modern culture, but tangled up in a crazy desert island story involving everything from hallucinogenic plants to a secret evil volcano lair.

Everything in Bray's world is owned, run, influenced and overseen by The Corporation - including the Miss Teen Dream pageant, which is at the heart of the novel. Its current batch of contestants have been stranded on a desert island in a plane crash (well, the ones who lived anyway), and must now learn to fend for themselves if they want to survive and escape. This, for me, is where the story is at its sharp and shiny best. Sickly sweet, obviously vetted Teen Dream profiles for each girl are included between chapters, and Bray clearly relishes her characters’ gradual transformations from plastic pageant perfection, all smiles and clichés and rehearsed introductions, to outspoken and flawed young women with secrets, loves, talents, hopes and dreams. Y’know, about things other than world peace. The cast is diverse, including girls who are gay, transgender, disabled, and WOC, and Bray uses this as a jumping-off point for exploring issues like discrimination and tokenism, alongside beauty culture, misogyny and the media, always with her eye firmly on contemporary life and her tongue firmly in cheek.

I really enjoyed those parts. I thought they were warm, funny and smart. Where it all fell down for me was in the whole descent into Austin Powers farce, with a secret Corporation HQ on the island and armed agents intent on dastardly things like killing people, military coups and blowing stuff up. Of course the girls get involved, and then some young sexy British pirates from a reality TV show rock up, and it kinda turns into a different book altogether. I kept getting the weird feeling that bits of it were reminding me of other things I’d seen, TV shows and movies and books, like the influences were coming so thick and fast that the original idea and its momentum were getting lost. I mean, I did quite like it overall, but the premise definitely wore very thin for me, the super-tight social satire soon began to flounder, the humour became forced, and overall I didn’t find it quite as amazing as a lot of other readers, I don’t think. Shame – I’d been really looking forward to it, it ticked so many of my favourite booky boxes, but in the end it was a genuine disappointment.

>110 elliepotten: I had the same reaction (and the same rating) to that one.

>111 foggidawn: Oooooh, that's a relief! I felt like every review I'd seen was a total rave, both around the time I bought it and quite recently, I always wonder if I'm missing something... Apparently not. :D

>110 elliepotten: I didn't get through the first chapter of this one, after looking forward to it too. I loved Shirley Conran's Savages back in the day, great pulpy read with fairly similar plot.

I was a helper at a high school event a few years back where Libba Bray presented - she is a fantastic speaker and has a tragic personal story which she told in a really gutsy style. (Her answer to 'Your most difficult teen experience?' outlines it in link below)
http://www.yalsa.ala.org/thehub/2015/10/01/one-thing-leads-to-another-an-intervi...

>110 elliepotten: Don't reckon that one is for me, Ellie, but I would probably not get beyond the cover as per Kerry, but for obviously different reasons!

Have a lovely weekend.

>113 avatiakh: Oh wow, that IS a difficult teen experience! She definitely seems like if her speaking style is anything like her writing in this one, she'd absolutely kill it on a stage. I did like the book early on too, it just... lost its way. For me, anyway. The BookTuber Hailey in Bookland mentioned that she'd actually had it on the syllabus and studied it in college/university, and a lot of people absolutely looooved it, so clearly it's done something right over the years, even if I wasn't completely convinced! :)

>114 PaulCranswick: Haha, perhaps not... Have a good one yourself!

25. The Pisces, by Melissa Broder, read by Isabella Inchbald (1.5*) - fiction

Well, this is a first. I can't really review this book. It's been a little while since I listened to it (it was an audiobook) but that doesn't usually stop me. It's just... that... forgettable.

The big sort of selling point of this novel was the merman romance - it was even listed as 'erotica' on the library website. I'd imagined a kind of modern twist on Splash and The Shape of Water: a lonely woman finding happiness and renewal in a romantic entanglement with a fantastical being. I mean, there WAS a merman, but he might as well not have been. He could have just been a surfer on the beach, or not been there full stop; the sex scenes were read so woodenly and awkwardly that they weren’t even romantic, let alone sexy, and he wasn’t really the focus of the novel at all.

Most of the book was instead devoted to the main character's navel gazing and utter selfishness, which included but was not limited to making fun of her fellow love addiction therapy group members (the way the book was read, especially, made it sound like all of them were stupid), musing endlessly about Sappho, and slowly killing her sister's loyal dog with tranquillisers because she wanted to go have sex instead of looking after him. Did she ever get her come-uppance or in any way clamber out of the car crash of a mess she made for herself and everyone around her? Sadly not, because that would at least have been vaguely satisfying.

My rating has been slowly dropping ever since I finished it and ended up landing on 1.5* because I finished it - just - and because I have a feeling the narration might have at least partly exacerbated my feelings about this one, but... yeah. I kinda hated it. Particularly disappointing since I was convinced it was going to be one of my favourites of the year!

Ellie--I found you!! I hope the second half of the year has been easier than the first half. Yikes. I am really enjoying your reviews, even if I am not tempted to go out and buy all of the books. (Thanks for saving me from some of them.) I like the sound of Heartstopper and I am trying to branch out and get a few more GNs in, so I will keep an eye out for this one.

>117 Berly: OH HAI! :D Haha, yes, the first half of the year was a bit intense with my dad and all. At the moment my mum has an as-yet-undiagnosed illness so the stress is back on a bit while they keep narrowing down the symptoms and treating it as best they can... but not TOO bad.

And I LOVED LOVED LOVED both volumes of Heartstopper - two of my three favourite books of the year so far!

26. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (4*) - fiction

"But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom with him? - Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way."

I TACKLED THE BEAST. I TACKLED IT.

Not reaaaaaally one that needs reviewing, I don't think, but here are a few points anyway. Tips, as it were, in case you've been wondering if you, too, could take this one down. Maybe with a harpoon. But, like, MENTALLY.

1) The book reads way more like a non-fiction account of the whaling industry than an actual novel. One of the short chapters might cover, say, what the carpenter on board does, or the hierarchy of people working each boat, or how oil from a whale is stored. I assume this is at the core of most of the "GAWD THIS BOOK IS SO BORING!" reviews out there; for me, it was actually a massive advantage because I found most of it very interesting - far more so than Ishmael's daydream-y philosophical bits, for example.

2) Likewise, those short chapters make it really easy to divide the book up into manageable chunks to read - I went for around 25 pages a day - and it means that if one particular topic (or daydream-y philosophical bit) gets really weird or dull, it'll be over before you know it.

3) The Pequod doesn't set sail for over a hundred pages, and Moby Dick doesn't actually put in an appearance until about the last thirty pages. Seriously. I mean, it's HIS OWN BOOK. Rude.

4) If you're the squeamish sort, there are a couple of fairly gruesome whale kills in here. I mean, I guess that's to be expected from a book about whaling, and at the time whale oil was literally the way people lit their homes and businesses and it went into a bajillion other things besides - but still. Fair warning. There's also the usual historical racism, though that's balanced a little by the fact that on board the whaling ship, all men have their vital (and usually respected) roles to play, whatever their background.

5) Most of the book is really straightforward to read, which surprised me. I found it helpful to have the Sparknotes chapter summaries open on my laptop as I went, just to make doubly sure I'd got things right (see: daydream-y philosophical bits) and that I wasn't missing any major themes. Also, there was a chapter discussing how the men processing the whale oil would skin a *cough* narrow part of the whale, turn it inside out to dry, then use it as a kind of tunic to protect their clothes. I innocently thought they were referring to the part of the tail just before the flukes. Sparknotes confirmed that they really, really, WEREN'T. It would have been a terrible shame to have missed out on this knowledge.

6) My favourite characters weren't quiet Ishmael, or monomaniacal Ahab, or the white whale - they were the three harpooneers on board. THAT was where the real strength and skill (and frequently morality) lay. Queequeg is from a tribe on an island in the South Seas, Tashtego is Native American, and Daggoo is African. The moments when they got to demonstrate their prowess and prove their indispensability on the boats, despite not being all-American white men, were so satisfying. I also liked Starbuck, Ahab's refreshingly sensible second in command.

7) Speaking of harpooneers, the full-on bromantic relationship between first-time whaleman Ishmael and the huge tattooed Queequeg was one of the unexpected delights of the book. The blatant homoeroticism extends further into the novel; the scene with the 'squeezing of the sperm' (no, not in THAT way) was particularly memorable and unintentionally very funny to a modern reader.

Yeah. I really enjoyed it. It's a tour de force of literature, ambitious in scope, full of wisdom, information and adventure. I'm not quite sure what possessed me to pick it up and start reading during the hottest months of the year (when I'm usually more of a 'short books and cute books and easy books because my brain's melting' kinda girl) but I'm glad I did! I don't think I'd read it again - it doesn't have the reread potential of a giant like The Count of Monte Cristo, for example - but... I CONQUERED THE WHITE WHALE. :)

Quotes:

- "Ignorance is the parent of fear..."

- "... it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one."

- "'I will have no man in my boat,' said Starbuck, 'who is not afraid of a whale.' By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward."

- "For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner - for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable."

- "... there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men."

- "... though man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence."

GREAT JOB!!!! Congrats!!

>119 elliepotten: Congrats! So nice to knock a classic chunkster off the to read list. I'm glad you enjoyed the whaling history bits. I read it and had the reaction of "I could have read an abridged version." Or you know, just watched that bit of The Pagemaster...

Hi Ellie!

I've been saying that I'm going to read Moby Dick any day now - and I've been saying it for approximately a decade. I swear though, I'm totally going to read it! Eventually...

>120 norabelle414: A satisfying moment indeed.... :D

>121 MickyFine: Haha, yeah, I think there are two types of Moby Dick readers - the "grrrrr SHUT UUUUUUUP!" ones and the "please, do tell me more about on-board carpentry" ones. Apparently I am the latter...

>122 Ape: Well HELLO THERE! Tooooo be fair I'd been the same for quite a while before I read it. Way back in my bookshop book blogging days some friends did a readalong of it, and I bought a copy then because they all liked it more than they thought they would. I TOO SHALL READ IT, thought I... for several years... then a bit more... :D

27. The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas, read by Alex Dimitriades (3*) - fiction

I listened to this one as an audiobook, which was probably the right decision; I'm not sure I'd have persevered with it if I hadn't had someone reading it to me while I played games on my phone. :D

It gets off to a strong start, with a family-and-friends barbeque during which a bratty child menacing another kid is slapped by the aforementioned kid's father. From here the plot spins out across multiple narrators, deftly exploring the divisions between Greeks and non-Greeks, the old and the young, husbands and their wives - not only with regards to the slap incident and parenting a child, but also gender roles, friendships, tradition and all kinds of other things. I think for me personally, this one suffered in three ways: 1) I'm not Australian, 2) I'm not Greek, and 3) it's a whole lot less about that titular slap than I expected.

Instead it seems to descend into what I can only describe as 'Greek Neighbours: The Late Night Special'. Most of the characters are doing drugs, or perpetually drunk, or having affairs, or WANTING to have affairs, or horribly racist, or bitching about their friends all the time. The slap sort of drifts in and out as a topic, with characters clustering in groups depending on whether they think it was a one-off lapse in judgement or a heinous crime. Most of the time, however, it's suburban soap all the way. In this sense Alex Dimitriades - who starred in Head On, the film adaptation of Tsiolkas's debut Loaded, as well as the Australian TV series based on THIS novel - was the perfect choice of narrator. He deadpans through most of it, sounding coolly disinterested, and it works, in an odd way.

I quite liked Loaded, I survived this one (although a couple of the narrators got reaaaally dull and had only a peripheral connection to the families at the core) - and I'm really hoping that Barracuda improves on both. We shall see...

123: I'm not gonna lie, the biggest reason why I want to read Moby Dick is because I REALLY want to read Railsea by China Mieville, but I refuse to read it before I've read the original.

28. The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown, read by Paul Michael (4*) - fiction

Well, this one was a pleasant surprise! I know people like to rag on Dan Brown - his writing isn't the best and all - but he DOES know how to put together a clever page-turner. I wasn't a massive fan of Angels and Demons (I liked the main novel but the multiple endings got too ridiculous for me), I LOVED The Da Vinci Code, and then I came to this one and was like... "Huh. Masons? Noetic science? I know nothing about these things and it all sounds a bit dull tbh."

More fool me, because I was hooked from start to finish. I think it helps that I have a soft spot for Robert Langdon as a character - a super-smart good soul will always have my heart - and that I partially listened to the audiobook. Paul Michael was PHENOMENAL, my favourite audiobook narrator yet: he smooths out Brown's prose and effortlessly switches voices, capturing everyone from the main female protagonist to a character who's had throat surgery. It was a delight to listen to, so much so that by the end I was mainly just checking my paper copy for symbols and illustrations (which are neatly worked around or visually described in the audio).

Aside from that, the story itself was as complicated and twisting as ever, getting my brain fizzing trying to work out what was going on, and as usual I ended up Googling all kinds of things about Washington, Masonic lore, the Smithsonian, art and architecture, to see the very real places and art works Brown weaves into his novels. The antagonist - Mal'akh - is up there with Silas in Da Vinci for me, and once again there is a strong underlying theme of religion vs. science vs. spirituality. This does get particularly heavy handed towards the end - which dropped it a star - but I'd had so much fun along the way that it didn't affect my overall enjoyment too much.

Roll on Inferno - my mum just read it and really enjoyed it, AND I get another Tom Hanks movie to enjoy once I'm done! :)

Quotes:

- "Powerful truth has its own gravity and eventually pulls people back to it."

- "Throughout history, every period of enlightenment has been accompanied by darkness, pushing in opposition. Such are the laws of nature and balance. And if we look at the darkness growing in the world today, we have to realise that this means there is equal light growing."

- "Since the beginning of time, man had sensed there was something special about himself... something more. He had longed for powers he did not possess. He had dreamed of flying, of healing, and of transforming his world in every way imaginable.
And he had done just that.
Today, the shrines to man’s accomplishments adorned the National Mall. The Smithsonian museums burgeoned with our inventions, our art, our science, and the ideas of our great thinkers. They told the history of man as creator - from the stone tools in the Native American History Museum to the jets and rockets in the National Air and Space Museum.
If our ancestors could see us today, surely they would think us gods."

>125 Ape: I was kinda like that too, but with In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. And Leviathan by Philip Hoare, haha. The only book I allowed myself to read pre-original was The Pirates! In an Adventure with Moby Dick, which I thought I could prooooobably handle on its own. :D

>126 elliepotten: My dad gives historical tours of the U.S. Capitol building and grounds for a living, and for awhile when The Lost Symbol first came out he got lots of requests to give tours related to things that happened in the book. But the requests quickly dried up when people realized the tour was mostly about all the things about the book that were inaccurate. Whoops!

Hi, Ellie!

Delurking to give a Dan Brown high five! I know he doesn't exactly fit into the High Lit category, but I love him nonetheless. I haven't read this one, though - I should add it to my list.

I like DanBrown, too. When I read his books,I'm not looking for a history lesson. I read his books to be entertained,and usually enthralled.

Also,Hi Ellie!

I've never read Dan Brown, so I can't attest to his writing, but I feel like he gets a lot of flak from elitist readers just because he writes popular fiction.

>128 norabelle414: Haha, I do enjoy playing a game of "What unlikely giant institutions or buildings have had to add a Dan Brown section to their website this time?"

>129 scaifea: >130 mckait: Yaaaaay! It's been a while since I reread The Da Vinci Code but I'm so glad I finally carried on and picked up the next one. The book AND movie of Inferno are next on the list. :)

>131 Ape: Nothing like an accessible page turner that sells a bajillion copies to get some snobby knickers in a twist. :D

29. I Found My Tribe, by Ruth Fitzmaurice (4*) - non-fiction

Oooh, this one's going to be hard to review. Or even to rate, actually. The writing itself is pure poetry, which would usually mean a higher rating - but the book as a whole left me with a kind of bad feeling afterwards, which means that the lasting impact and enjoyment level is a little lower. Hmmmm. I actually started out listening the audiobook, because Ruth reads it herself, but her rather self-conscious delivery of her own beautiful prose didn't work for me and I enjoyed it far more on paper. It also provides a fascinating compare-and-contrast companion piece to her late husband's book It's Not Yet Dark, which I read (and reviewed) a month or two ago.

This, I think, is where that bad feeling came from - because I read his first. Where Simon's book was filled with hope and love for Ruth, who shines out of his stories like a beacon of everything worth living for, hers took me by surprise by being an eloquent howl into the void, a brutal exploration of loss and grief for a husband who was still alive when the book was written. To see him written about so frankly as a stranger in a chair, a husband lost, his ALS lurking like a kind of malevolent force hanging over the heads of the whole family, was a shock to the system after his vehement words about how much he still felt, his creative drive, his adoration for his wife and (sweetly accepting) children - how he was still very much a man, just a paralysed one.

That said, as I read on and started to get used to the cadence of the prose, the flitting vignettes and poignant imagery, I started to understand more: to see the moments of light, the humour, the happy days - but also Ruth's driving need to create a space of healing and feeling for herself away from a cottage full of kids, pets, medical paraphernalia, nurses and carers. Enter the Tragic Wives, an impromptu swimming group taking to the sea off the Irish coast, revelling in their wildness and in the strength of their mutual support. The book is less about them than I expected, but the sea and the Wives are a recurring theme as Ruth dances between anecdotes, reflections and memories, pouring her very soul out into the pages. It's brave, it's almost unbearably raw, and I can see why it has captured so many reader's hearts. I'll definitely be thinking about it - both of these books, actually, and the family behind them - for a very long time.

P.S. I don't know if any of the US folks out there watch Dancing With the Stars - but Simon Fitzmaurice was the director Evanna Lynch dedicated her dance to!

Quotes:

- "Some people understand that the small things make a difference. A nice pen to write with that slides perfectly on the page. Hot coffee in a particular cup. These things matter when your soul is on the edge."

- "We have lost many things. But sometimes I find my husband: lips on the curve of his temple, a crawl space in the crook of his arm. Some things are lost and found again. I email him words of love, and he emails back... Screen to screen, we're holding hands at last."

- "My own mother sees too much even from the end of a phone. She holds that special mother key. Turn it half an inch and the tears will flow. My mother might be my friend but really she is something else. She is the only person who will ever worry if I leave the house without a coat on."

- "Michelle says we just have to ride the wave. Ride the wave and remember that a wave came before you. Even if you've missed it, another one is coming up right behind you. Waves go on for ever, so just go with it."

- "They dote on him. They seek him out and put their hands on him. His face glows like a Christmas lantern. His eyes gleam and although there is so little movement left, they shine enough that you know he is at peace... Sadie pats his face, Hunter grins at him, Jack burrows for cuddles, Raife talks his talk and Arden leans nearby in true cowboy style."

>133 elliepotten: Sounds like a tough read, Ellie! I can see why you were conflicted.

>134 Ape: Haha, yes, it was a bit. Particularly after reading Simon's, hers felt so strangely hostile to begin with - it really took me aback to be honest. But it's beautifully written, and once I settled into the very different voice and blindingly honest point of view I enjoyed it a lot more, I think. Hmmmmmm.

30. The Whisper Man, by Alex North (4.5*) - fiction

"If you leave a door half open, soon you'll hear the whispers spoken.
If you play outside alone, soon you won't be going home.
If your window's left unlatched, you'll hear him tapping at the glass.
If you're lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you."

Oooh, this was so gooooood! Like The Flatshare, I picked it up for a fiver at Tesco on the off chance that it might live up to the Bookstagram hype - and like The Flatshare, it turned out to be one of my stand-outs of the year! LOVE it when a gamble pays off.

On the surface this is a novel about the appearance of a child abductor in Featherbank, a kind of copycat of the original 'Whisper Man' who menaced the town years ago, targeting little boys, luring them away from their homes and families - but it's so much more than that. The main characters, Tom and his young son Jake, have been tragically bereaved and are trying to rebuild their lives in a new home. Their grief, the accompanying loneliness and isolation, and the relationship between a father and son are all strong themes throughout the book. Alongside this emotional core, the emergence of a successor escalates the ongoing Hannibal Lecter-esque cat-and-mouse game between the murderous Whisper Man, who has been in jail for going on twenty years, and the local police.

In terms of the feeling of it, it actually reminded me a little bit of The Hound of the Baskervilles, maybe, or an episode of Jonathan Creek, in that you know it's a crime novel set in the real world, so there has to be an explanation for the odd things going on - but at the same time they seem to DEFY explanation so convincingly that you're just not... quite... sure... if something supernatural isn't happening after all. I did actually guess the identity of the new Whisper Man, and work out one of the spookier elements, but other twists and turns completely ripped the rug out from under me. It was a really nice balance between satisfaction and surprise, always good in a thriller like this! I thought the big climax was a little rushed, but for the most part it hit all the right beats from start to finish, mixing a very human story with a seriously creepy vibe. It even managed to make me cry at least once! Highly recommended...

Quotes:

- "As a younger, more impetuous man, he would probably have yearned for greater excitement than the trivial crimes he was dealing with, but today he appreciated the calm to be found in boring minutiae. Excitement was not only rare in police work, it was a bad a thing; usually it meant someone's life had been damaged."

- "When there was something awful that had to be faced, it was better to face it immediately; as bad as the event might be, it would occur regardless, and at least that way you wouldn't have to endure the anticipation as well."

- "...grief is a stew with a thousand ingredients, and not all of them are palatable."

- "Whatever works - it was that simple. In a war, you used any weapon to hand to win an individual battle, and then you regrouped and fought the next one. And the next. And all the ones that followed."

- "Pete had seen a number of skeletons over the years. In some ways, they were easier to look at than more recently deceased victims, who looked like human beings but, in their eerie stillness, somehow not. A skeleton was so far removed from everyday experience that it could be viewed with less emotion. And yet the reality always hit home: the fact that people die, and after a short amount of time only objects remain, the bones little more than a scattering of possessions, abandoned where they fall."

- "For so long now, he'd buried himself in distractions: he'd used books and food and television - ritual in general - as a way of clicking fingers at one side of his own mind to distract it from glancing in more dangerous directions." - Well, don't I feel seen...

>126 elliepotten: Do I get extra points if I went to college with Dan Brown? I did! Even had classes with him. : ) But I haven't read this one yet and now I have to.

>137 Berly: You 100% get extra points! Ten for the college thing, ten for the classes, and ten just because I'm playing favourites. :D

31. My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, by Rebekah Nathan (3.5*) - non-fiction

I couldn't resist the premise of this one - an academic look at academia by an undercover... well, academic? YES. Unfortunately, I then waited about ten years to read it, which is a long time when it comes to the social and educational mores of university life. Oh well. Rebekah Nathan is actually the pseudonym of Cathy Small, and AnyU (her attempt to keep things anonymous until the students in her study were safely graduated) is Northern Arizona University. In classic form, a newspaper exposed her before the book was even published, so that was a swathe of her carefully considered ethical considerations laid to rest...

This is an anthropological investigation in which she does exactly what the title suggests: enrols 'undercover' as a student at her own university (in 2002-3), taking a full courseload, living in the dorms and participating in all classes and activities, in order to explore and understand undergraduate life from the OTHER side of the lectern. Some of the detail was actually quite nostalgic in a strange way; I started university in 2005 so some of the prevailing attitudes and pop culture references were the same, although the American twist did immediately set it apart from my experience (the legal drinking age, Greek life and so on).

The most interesting areas for me were where Small's perceptions as a professor collided mightily with reality for students. For example, the glossy prospectus ideal of students mingling with other races, religions and nationalities was quickly shattered by the realisation that students were largely mixing with people like themselves, ironically helped along by the university's pre-start-of-term social weekends for, say, Christians, or children of immigrant parents. Students made friends during these activities and then stuck with them into their university lives proper. Likewise, she quickly realises that her irritation with her students when they don't remember everything from a previous class, or haven't read every single thing on her extended reading list, is probably misplaced when they have five times as many classes in between as she has, with a full workload for each one. She sets certain trends - like students having to work alongside their studies - against their wider social, economic and political context, which I found very illuminating, and looks at how international students view American students and education compared to their systems back home.

In short, although this is now well out of date in many ways, in others it feels just as relevant as ever. She covers everything from dorm room decoration to skipping class, and seeing it all from her multiple perspectives as an older woman, a student, a professor and an anthropologist is a very different angle to anything I've read before. She's also very upfront about her limitations and privileges, which I appreciated. I'd love to read a more up to date version sometime, with a whole new generation of students under the spotlight!

Quotes:

- "I attended information sessions on meal plans, registering for classes, how to get tutoring and advising help, different tuition payment options, and how to budget our time. There was a walking mall of tables for new students, highlighting services and groups on campus. As a new student, I was overwhelmed; as a professor, I was surprised to see how three particular spheres - sororities and fraternities, religious organizations, and commercial services, including credit cards and phone services - dominated the scene and vied for student attention. As an anthropologist, I was humbled to see how little I, as a professor, knew of my students' academic world."

Dropping by to wish you a splendid Sunday, Ellie.

32. The Tent, the Bucket and Me: My Family's Disastrous Attempts to Go Camping in the 70s, by Emma Kennedy (4*) - non-fiction

Well, wasn't this a joy to read... If I had to describe it in a nutshell, I'd probably go with: "This is what you get if you put Caitlin Moran and Bill Bryson in a blender, magically form the resulting mixture into a small girl, time travel to the seventies, send her on a bunch of really crap holidays for ten years, then when she grows up make her write about them." Indeed, the book does pretty much what it says on the tin. There's a tent. There's a pink bucket. There's a slightly eccentric but undeniably tight-knit family. And shit goes DOWN. Often literally.

Now, I've never had a holiday like these. I wasn't alive in the seventies. I've never been camping. But if you've ever been on, say, a caravan holiday, or sat behind a windbreak on a beach eating faintly sandy sandwiches, or tramped the clifftops in the rain, or had any kind of bodily function... mishap... on a trip, you'll still find something to relate to in here. If you can’t relate? Well, you can always laugh hysterically. The Kennedys try so optimistically to have a good time year after year, in Wales, in France - wherever they feel they might outrun their bad luck - while all the while the Holiday Gods are lurking malevolently around every corner wielding everything from bad prawns and freak storms to local madmen and dead sheep.

It's a very, very funny book - although I found I enjoyed it more when I read one holiday/year at a time rather than running them together - and they definitely got better and better as the book went on. I've been recommending it to everyone in my family, and as a BONUS recommendation for potential readers and non-readers alike, if you ever meet Emma Kennedy, whatever you do just... don't go on holiday with her.

>140 PaulCranswick: Happy Sunday Paul! Hope you've had an excellent weekend! :)

33. The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook, by Ben Mezrich (3*) - non-fiction

This is the book the award-winning film The Social Network was based on, but it's far less serious in many ways than its screen counterpart. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's positively tabloidy. Lots of salacious details, Harvard elite clubs and 'We cannot know for sure what happened that night, but we can imagine that... *insert soapy ultra-dramatic completely fabricated scene here*'... It’s clearly biased (Zuckerberg refused to be interviewed, which inevitably skews the storytelling), has a whiff of the wisdom of hindsight, it's quite misogynistic, repetitive, clunkily written, and Mezrich seems to really like describing how people’s shoulders look in their clothes. Nope, no clue.

Not what I expected, but once I dragged my expectations down a few levels it was quite a fun romp through Facebook's beginnings and the various legal proceedings brought by fellow students over the next few years asserting that boundaries had been crossed and ideas had been stolen. The main events and players are obviously all present and vaguely correct (the Winklevoss twins, Sean Parker, Eduardo Saverin), and I learned a fair bit even if I took the details with a hefty sack of salt. It was especially interesting to hear how the earliest incarnations of Facebook were conceived and spread across Harvard and beyond; I was in my first year at university when Facebook arrived in England, back when you still had to have an academic email address and everything from groups to fan pages were fully user-driven. I can literally remember the girl in the room next door coming in and telling me I "had to check out this new website, we're all joining!" - within a couple of days the 100-strong dorm was hooked. Fascinating to find out how it started, especially now that a few years have passed and we can see the runaway titan it's become.

Quote:

- "If you were going to do something like this - really do it, really succeed - you had to live and breathe the project. Every minute of every day.
Mark Zuckerberg was living it. He had the drive, the stamina, and the ability. He was obviously a genius - but more than that, he had the strange, unique focus that was necessary to pull something like this off. Watching him program at four, five in the morning - every morning - Sean had no doubt that Mark had the makings of one of the truly great success stories in the modern, revitalized Silicon Valley."

34. Crudo, by Olivia Laing (4*) - fiction

I picked this up at the library as a bit of a gamble, fully expecting not to like it, or for it to be a bit incomprehensible. Turns out, I really enjoyed it! I'm sure there's a lot that went over my head - Laing draws together elements of her own life (such as marrying a much older man), the life and writing of Kathy Acker (who I've never read), plus various media posts and cultural references from the summer of 2017 - but a bit of Googling combined with the source notes in the back of the book helped straighten out the basics.

At its core, from my 'every reader' perspective, it was a novel about the small everyday realities of life, and how those things clash with very modern politics, news, social media and the ability to Google everything under the sun. Quotes from Acker's work clash with Donald Trump's tweets; quiet afternoons sunbathing in the garden are juxtaposed with mentions of Grenfell Tower and Brexit; moments with loved ones are interrupted by the urgent need to read online articles about random topics. Underneath all of that it's also about a woman getting married, learning to love, to not be afraid of sharing herself with another person, and to stop running from intimacy and companionship.

I can see why the reviews are so mixed - where one person will find it lyrical, angry and astute, another will find it vacuous, apathetic and irritating - but I'm glad I took a chance on it. I may not have understood it all (I'm sure Acker fans would have fun spotting things I'd never have thought twice about) but it was one of those books where I looked forward to coming back and reading a little more whenever I got the chance. A pleasant little surprise!

Quotes:

- "What a waste, what a crime, to wreck a world so abundantly full of different kinds of flowers. Kathy hated it, living at the end of the world, but then she couldn't help but find it interesting, watching people herself included compulsively foul their nest."

- "You think you know yourself inside out when you live alone, but you don't, you believe you are a calm untroubled or at worst melancholic person, you do not realise how irritable you are, how any little thing, the wrong kind of touch or tone, a lack of speed in answering a question, a particular cast of expression will send you into apoplexy because you are unchill, because you have not learnt how to soften your borders, how to make room."

- "It was hot, it was magnificent, there were several drunk butterflies and a dragonfly her husband characteristically praised. They'd talked themselves into tatters, now they needed to recharge on sunbeams and the basic smell of grass and dirt. Definitely almost autumn, the slant of the light, the lovely rotten ripeness. Plums, blackberries, the first few fallen leaves."

- "Apparently Jacob Rees-Mogg would be the next Prime Minister, he went on Good Morning Britain and explained pleasantly that he thought abortion should be illegal even for rape and that he would like to ban gay marriage. Kathy hated everything, her head hurt even after two coffees, she couldn't abide smiling men policing women's bodies, smiling men deporting immigrants, smiling men telling smiling lies on daytime television, it was all so tawdry, the endless malice of the polite right."

- "You make divisions between people, countries, races, and out of the gaps the warheads emerge. It was that simple, she was watching it happen with her own eyes."

35. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, by Jaron Lanier (3.5*) - non-fiction

Well, this was a very interesting read. I mean, it does exactly what the title suggests, but it takes a completely different tack to the one I expected. I thought it would lean towards the Cal Newport/Tanya Goodin sort of arguments, emphasising individual responsibility, exploring the nature of technological dependence and maybe advocating a digital detox of some kind.

Instead, and rather refreshingly, Lanier broadens his scope right out to what he knows best: the massive structures and business models behind social media, and how they are driven by insidiously manipulative, constantly self-refining algorithms that allow outside advertisers (often unknown entities) to mine your preferences and literally change your behaviour. He calls this ‘BUMMER’ (‘Behaviours of Users Modified and Made into Empires for Rent’). I think most of us know this on a vague level, but Lanier spells out how painstakingly these algorithms work to tweak the end result – your actions – and explains how it is usually negative factors like fear and anger that create the biggest shifts. An algorithm doesn’t care if it’s working in a damaging way, whether on individuals or society, so the only people losing in this scenario are the users. You. Me. Us.

Lanier is quite frank about the fact that most people won’t leave social media – and they don’t need to. His aim with this book, he says, is to persuade just enough people to step away to create a bit of space to reflect on the phenomenon from outside and maybe start coming up with a better business model that isn’t so exploitative. I won’t pretend for a second that it was the most cohesive book ever written, or that I understood everything in here – he’s like a tech Yoda, a cool godfather of Silicon Valley – but it definitely opened my eyes to the machinations underneath the glossy websites, and how they affect everything from public health to democracy. If you don’t fancy the book, I can highly recommend just YouTubing the guy anyway. He has a lot of knowledge and shares it openly and with kindness. Fascinating.

>143 elliepotten: Since I'm presently accidentally insolvent, Ellie, I better not had read that one!

Have a lovely weekend.

>146 PaulCranswick: Oh no! I know exactly what you mean, as someone on the almost exact opposite end of the financial scale it mostly just makes me angry and/or eyeroll my head clean off my body reading or watching some of the shenanigans in books and films like this. I suppose at least at this point in the story Zuckerberg was mostly just a nerdy teenage kid in a hoodie and flipflops... Have a lovely weekend yourself, and Merry Christmas!

36. A Head Full of Ghosts, by Paul Tremblay, read by Joy Osmanski (3.5*) - fiction

This was my first Paul Tremblay, and it definitely won't be my last. I read it as an audiobook, so as usual a lot of the finer details have already flitted away, oops. What is very clearly embedded in the reading experience, however, is the feeling of disturbed confusion and dread as I listened - which I think is exactly what I was supposed to feel - and the way my emotions were shattered into a million pieces by the end. I was full on sobbing for a while there.

It's a kind of clever modern twist on a number of classic horror stories. It centres on the Barrett family, and is told via youngest daughter Merry, who is now a grown woman reflecting on her childhood trauma. When she is eight years old, her sister Marjorie begins to act very strangely. Like, full-on Linda Blair strange. Is it a psychotic episode, a hoax, or a possession? With cameras called in for a reality show, and priests arriving at the door to perform an exorcism, is her sister being abused, abusive, or saved? Alongside the main narrative, a pop culture blogger looks back on the episodes of the show, breezily analysing them against the context of fictional horror films and stories, and pointing out the ways reality TV can manipulate vulnerable people and terrible situations in a search for ratings and a better story.

There were clear nods in here to everything from The Exorcist (obviously) to We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but the fact that other authors' and directors' works are literally referenced in the book stops it feeling like an attempt at a rip-off. In fact, it actually adds another layer to the mystery at the heart of the book - is Marjorie mimicking things she's seen, deliberately or otherwise? The audiobook worked really well, although Osmanski's dad/priest voices were quite unintentionally amusing (and sounded like they hurt a bit!). The blog posts were more like rapid-fire podcast excerpts on audio, which I think probably improved on the page version. I like that the reader is left to draw their own conclusions as to what really happened, and the fact that any of one of those conclusions is truly horrific in its own way.

Anyone got any recommendations for which of Tremblay's books I should try next?

Quotes:

- "There's no going back. This is the fallacy of the good old days: not only are they gone and never coming back, they never existed in the first place. That's the horror of existence. Change happens whether you want it to or not. Existence is by its very nature progressive. It continually asks, So now what? How are you going to live through this? How is anyone going to live through this?"

I might be the only person on the planet who doesn't have a Facebook account. Unfortunately, it hasn't made me any less crazy not having one. :P

37. Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas, by Adam Kay (4*) - non-fiction

Awww, I really enjoyed this! It has exactly the same tone and style as This is Going to Hurt - one of my favourite reads this time LAST year - but each chapter only runs from mid-December to early January of each year. Oh, and instead of Harry Potter-based pseudonyms he's opted for Home Alone this time, as a nod to the season, haha. Retaining the winning mixture of sadness, hilarity, insight and sheer exhaustion that made the previous book such a runaway success, Kay demonstrates all over again just how much frontline NHS staff give up, emotionally and physically, to make sure their patients are safe and happy over Christmas and the New Year - whether they're bringing a new life into the world, easing someone's way out of it or... y'know... dealing with the aftermath of some interesting but ill-advised festive sex choices. Small, compact and nicely published, it'd make a great little Christmas Eve read or last minute stocking filler!

Quotes:

- "Full marks to the anaesthetist wearing a badge that says: 'He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake'."

>149 Ape: Oooh, I dunno. I mean, not about the crazy thing, that's a given... takes one to know one :P ... but quite a lot of people our age have ditched Facebook I think. I got rid of it a few years ago and never looked back, then Twitter followed not long afterwards. Just Instagram left now, and I'm having a break even from that in January! I kinda can't wait.

>150 elliepotten: The quote cracked me up!

Hope you have a wonderful Christmas!

>149 Ape: I don't have FB anymore, though I'll admit it's sometimes a pain because many of my friends & family use it to host things and send out invitations and then have to remember to text me separately *shrug*

Glad to see you're continuing to get in some good reads, Ellie. Happy holidays & new year if I don't see you again before then :)

Thank you for keeping me company in 2019.......onward to 2020.

Merry Christmas everyone! And for anyone who has Boxing Day like we do - happy post-Christmas relaxing! Reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation and eating leftover trifle for me today... :D

>138 elliepotten: I love extra points. : )

Best wishes this holiday season!! Hope to see more of you in 2020!

Another resolution is to keep up in 2020 with all my friends on LT. Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone! Here's to another lovely year (and decade) of reading - and a whole lot more of all the things on that list! ↑ :)