Some quick thoughts on holiday reading

 

As I said in my last post I read an awful lot of books while we were in Greece (when my attention wasn't on some of the cute cats in the area - like this little one who was very interesting in my fish dinner but not brave enough to come down!).

Some of the books have really stayed with me so here are few thoughts on them:

Love, After All by Ewald Arenz, and translated by Rachel Ward (Orenda Book) - I've loved the previous books by Arenz that have been translated by Ward but this one was really special. It is love story but one featuring older characters at complicated times of their lives. It really got under my skin and I'm recommending it (and the other 2 books) to everyone.

Whistler by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury) - another quiet book in many ways but again it was the writing and characters that really made an impression on me. Another book featuring older characters, although Patchett writes children exceedingly well too.

Miss Buncle's Book by D E Stevenson (Persephone) - this is a book set in the inter war period where Miss Buncle has fallen on hard times and decides to write a novel in order to make some money. She doesn't think she has much imagination and so fictionalises the people and village where she lives to very amusing results. I really like the Mrs Tim books by the same author and will look for the sequels to this one.

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (4th Estate) - this book is one of the most hyped of the first half of 2026 and I was interested to see what it was all about. I quite liked the idea of seeing how (some) influencers actually manage to work, and it was interesting to see how the Trad Wives/Conspiracy Theorists come about but apart from that I wasn't sold on the book - even with the ending.

The Calamity Club by Katherine Stockett (Figtree) - I really liked Stockett's The Help when it came out, despite some of the backlash and criticism that came later, so I was looking forward to this one. On the whole I enjoyed it but I did find the middle section a little baggy and the ending a bit quick but I hope that Stockett does write more going forward.

Seven Lives and One Great Love by Lena Divani, and translated by Konstantine Matsoukas (Europa Editions) - as we were in Greece I wanted to read a book by a Greek author rather than a book just set in Greece by an anglophone. I found this one an interesting read - mainly because I find it funny how 'cat literature' whether in English, translated from the Japanese, or translated from the Greek, all feels very similar. It was quite a cute read but I think I need to find some other Greek authors to try as this one really could have been set anywhere in the world and very little 'Greekness' to it!

June Round Up

 

Another month gone and just under two weeks of this were spent on a Greek island doing nothing but read, rest, eat, and swim. It also means that it was a good month for books - although I did focus on reading my NetGalley backlog rather than focussing too hard on the Read the World project.

Countries I visited by book this month were Greece (a translated title and an English book), Denmark, Germany, America, Cuba, India, Cameroon, and Korea. Cuba and Cameroon were new to me.

In America I visited New York City (& State), Rhode Island, Mississippi, Massachusetts, Idaho, and Ohio so a few more states are crossed off!

While away I read 18 books which is a bit crazy. Most of them were enjoyable with only one that I wanted to throw across the room in despair at its triteness. 

My favourites from the month are:

• Love, After All by Ewald Arenz (translated from the German by Rachel Ward), Orenda
• Whistler, A Novel by Ann Patchett, Bloomsbury
• Miss Buncle's Book by D.E. Stevenson, 

I was also lucky enough to get an advance reading copy of the new Victoria Hislop book which is out in September and I *loved* it but I'll save my thoughts for that until then!

Now to avoid this new heatwave and find a cool spot where I can catch up on my project reading before the deadline...

May Round Up

 

Another month gone - and thanks to the unseasonable heatwave we spent a lot of time outside. When not out and about in nature it was often a bit too hot for reading anything too deep or complex.

June's Read the World group met earlier this week and we visited India this time -  even the weather joined in with a mini monsoon storm in the middle of the meeting! As ever we all picked different books and authors but even so we found some common themes and had a great time talking about them and the books. Very few of the books this month were actually in translation which was interesting too. Our next meeting is on Bastille Day and so we're reading France for that!

In my own journey around the world, apart from Paraguay, the only new countries I visited were Burundi and Jordan but other locations included Japan, Korea (North & South), and Russia.

Looking back at the books I did read very few novels were stand outs but I did enjoy If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation by Daniel Hahn and Wild Pavements: Exploring Britain's Cities with an Urban Naturalist by Amanda Tuke. 

June should be a book filled month - the next round of one of my reading projects starts and I have a beach holiday to look forward to!

April Round Up

 

April, like every other month so far this year, passed in a flash and May seems to have sped up faster still hence my round up being so late.

While there were some nice weather days in April when we got out and about I also spent a lot of time reading - either for one of my on going projects, for the Read the World Book Group or just trying to keep up with my library reservations! I also got a new camera and so I've been trying to get to grips that!

April's book group featured books from North Africa and between us all we read right across the continent, and again we all found something different to read, although two us did pick the same author.

This was the theme in May too with our look at South American literature - while 5 of us read the same authors we all picked different titles and so could trace the development of a writer's career. None of us were huge fans of magical realism with the genre being likened to a pastrami and custard sandwich - both elements are nice on their own but they just shouldn't be mixed!

In my own on going project to read the world I read books from: Egypt, Tunisia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Algeria, Angola, Antigua, Hungary, Iran, Denmark, Brazil, South Korea, and Japan. Those in italics were countries new to me.

I think my favourite books for the month (that I can talk about - there were lots of secret advance copies in April) were the novel The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai (tr. Lara Vergnaud) and the children's/teen historical novel The Blitz Sisters by Judith Eagle. 

The only non fiction I read were autobiographies and while they were enjoyable nothing stuck out as unmissable. So far in 2026 I've read far fewer non fiction books than normal - possibly because I am trying to read books by authors from various countries and less travel writing about these countries than in past years?

March Round Up

 

March seems to have passed in a flash this year but it was another good reading month - this time helped by two days of travel and also being trapped in Iceland for an extra day thanks to a late winter storm shutting everything down!

Before it all got complicated and we had to try to rebook flights and hotels etc we'd had a lovely time in Iceland - we saw the Northern Lights, tried the food (including the infamous fermented shark!), got to see the most amazing scenery on a sunny day, and also spent hours lounging in the Blue Lagoon!

I did also find the theatre and a couple of bookshops so all was well in the world 😉. I am even more at a loss to explain the proliferation of dark crime novels set in Iceland. One of our tour guides talked about the incredibly low crime rate on the island and also said that the total prison population is only around 80. Sadly it is the case that the majority of prisoners are foreigners, and the guide postulated that this was because Iceland is so small that every local knows everyone else making crime hard to get away with!

Before we went away it was the third Reading Around the World book group meeting where we talked all things Japanese. There was very little duplication in titles read this time although books by Murakami did crop up a few times. For April we're reading from North Africa...

In my own project I read books from China, the Australian state of Victoria, Oregon, Malaysia, Morocco, Mongolia, Japan, Venice, Mali, South Korea, Albania, Denmark, and Taiwan. Only those in italics  were new locations to me and my map of the world doesn't look too different this month. 

My top reads of the month were the International Booker shortlisted Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated by Lin King) along with Cecile Pin's second novel Celestial Lights.

I didn't read a lot of non fiction this month and while Alan Bennett's new volume of diaries started well by the end the title, Enough Said, felt very apt. 

February Round Up

 

Well February was a quick month, and a busy one - two day trips to London gave me a bonus 8 hours reading time too (the WiFi on Greater Anglia services seems to flip between patch and non existent so far less time idly scrolling).

The weather has been really mixed too, especially at weekends. There were a few nice days when I got out with my camera - once to see the seal moult at Horsey and once to the snowdrop fields at Oxburgh Hall, but apart from that there was a lot of rain and some unexpected snow too.

One of my trips to London was to take part in a Bookshop Craw event - a Treasures Tour at the British Library. I've been to the library many times but this tour was great and be prepared that if you visit the Library with me at any point I will be sharing some of the things we were shown! I did also make visits to a few bookshops and blew all of my saved book tokens in Daunts where the selection of books to help my reading the world project is amazing.

Talking of Reading the World - we had the 2nd meeting of the library book group and it was great. As well as all of the people from January coming back we had lots of new people join us and the discussion of Nordic books was really wide ranging - and not all Nordic Noir. Japan was picked as the theme for the next session so although this isn't a new country for me or my project I've read some really varied books in preparation.

Now for my reading review of the month!

I read 10 books in translation and the new countries I visited were Micronesia (including Palau, the Marshall Islands & Kiribati), Oman, Belize, and Suriname.

My top fiction books of the month were The Shock of the Light by Lori Inglis Hall and A Far-Flung Light by M L Steadman.

For non-fiction I really enjoyed Life Changing: Cley & Salthouse Marshes by David North and also Air and Love by Or Rosenboim.

Truth in fictional tropes

 

Finds from the archives.

When I'm not at work, reading, or out taking photos I also volunteer at the Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum one morning a week and at the moment I'm helping to add items to the catalogue. The curator is learning not to give me too many books or documents to work on as I do end up reading it all and not actually adding the items to the system.

However over the last few weeks I've come across some real gems of items and they do tie into my love of historical fiction.

One of the tropes of fiction set in World War I is that a soldier survives an attack because the bullet hits an item in his pocket. I've certainly seen metal tobacco tins with dents in, and having seen the density of bibles that many soldiers carried I could certainly see one of them saving a life. I was always more skeptical of the books that see a life saved because of letters and/or a photo of a sweetheart being carried in a pocket.

However I now have to mentally apologise to all the authors whose books I've scoffed at as I have held proof that it could have happened.

An item I catalogued recently was a leather wallet which contained a selection of photos from home. The flap on the front of the pouch had a rip/hole in it, as did the front. Then the photos and cards in the pouch all had holes or rips - although these got smaller as I flipped through. Then I turned the pouch over and there was no hole at all - the letters had saved this soldier's life.

Four photos showing the damage to the item (the face of the sweetheart is obscsured)

Reading more information that came with this item it did say that the pouch protected the man from a piece of shrapnel rather than a bullet - which would explain the shape of the tear - and so I don't know if it would have stopped a bullet but some of the plot points in historical fiction no longer seem quite so unlikely.

The second recent find is a an actual book, and as someone who works in a library (and who frequents secondhand bookshops) it was something that was in such poor condition I wondered what was so significant about it that meant it needed saving and not binning...

And again the story that came with the item that revealed the importance

Three images of a very damaged book with rudimentary repairs

This is a copy of Kipling's Stalky & Co. and obviously well loved...in fact this book was owned by a Far East Prisoner of War during WWII. The book obviously didn't like the jungle conditions any more than the men did and the cover and pages are very fragile. 

The book was obviously important to its owner as he repaired it whilst in captivity using what looks like scraps of uniform and threads pulled from who knows where.

When you turn to the back of the book you can see why he was so keen to hold on to the book as he'd used it to record everywhere he'd travelled - either en-route to the Far East or while a prisoner - including the dates. This is fascinating reading as he lists every small movement he made where as so many records just list the big moves/locations men went through.

Diaries weren't encouraged by the Japanese and so keeping hold of his efforts to record everything was even more important, and risky. The more so when looking at the front of the book and seeing Japanese stamps in it - from which I assume that this was a book issued to him in one of the camps from a library or limited relief programme.

Again in fiction you often read of how Prisoners of War recorded their experiences and kept the information hidden and it can read as a bit far fetched but having held this book I will no longer be so skeptical.

I love having my assumptions challenged but so many in such a short space of time lead me to needing the last item I catalogued as it was all sending me mad and I really needed a guide...

A guide to the Deolali Camp - which is where we get the term Doolally from!

Where did January go?

How can a month that seemed to last about a 1000 days have passed in such a flash that I didn't manage to blog at all? Especially as somehow I read 27 books!

The first book I read this month is already one that I think will end up on my best of the year lists - it was recommended to me by a lot of people on BlueSky and they were absolutely right.

The Woman in Blue by Douglas Bruton (Fairlight Books) is a slender novel and all about one man visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam just to look at one Vermeer painting and then his response to it. It is also the imagined story of the woman in the painting (Woman Reading a Letter). A wonderful gem of a book to start the year on.

My non fiction book of the month's reading was Frostlines by Neil Shea (Macmillan) which recounts his time spent with different communities living well above the Arctic Circle and how their societies have changed over the years thanks to cultural and environmental pressures. I am not a huge fan of the cold but he made me really want to see a lot of the places he visited before it is too late. 

A friend and I  also started our new Reading the World Book Club in January and at our first meeting just chatted about our favourite books in translation and related topics but for February we're going to be looking at all things Nordic. I've really enjoyed a lot of the books I've read from this region but I've never got to grips with the genre 'Nordic Noir' .

Having now tried one from Norway, one from Sweden and one from Denmark as well as ones written by women as well as men I can definitively say that they do not float my boat in anyway at all - however as I am not a crime/thriller fan in general perhaps I need to read some British/American ones from the genre too. 

February is #ReadIndie month where people are encouraged to read and support Independent Publishers - something I really enjoy doing so who knows perhaps there will be more reviewed in Feb!

2025 Round Up

 

Well my intention to blog consistently during 2025 didn't quite work - life got away from me a bit at the end of the year and while I kept reading I did become something of a hermit.

In book terms 2025 was a good year for me - somehow I managed to read a staggering 301 books, which I am almost embarrassed about. I think that the total is so high because I fell in love with the Penguin Archive books that were published for their 90th anniversary, and many of these are shorter reads. I've by no means read all 90 books but I've read and loved a lot of them. I've also liked how many new authors from all over the world that they've introduced me to.

I think that some of my increased reading total can be put down to some of the new reading habits I've started. These include no social media/doom scrolling/internet browsing when I go to bed in the evening - only physical or books on my kindle, and reading the books I get from NetGalley in order of publication and trying to read them just before they are published so that if any really appeal to me I can talk about them straight away without having to wait months for publication. Let's see if I can keep this up for 2026!

After realising that in 2024 while 8% of my reading was in translation I was shocked when I realised how few countries I was actually reading from so made it my goal to read from a lot more countries in 2025 with a reward map to keep me enthused.

On 1st January it looked like this:

By 1st January 2026 I can say that it looks significantly different as I have managed to read books from 90 countries around the world:

So before we get to my top books of the year here are my reading stats for 2025:

• 65% of books read were by women (33% were by men and 2% were by dual authors)
• 63% of books were fiction, including short stories & KidLit
• 37% of books were non fiction
• 28% of my reads have been in translation

Narrowing down to just 10 books from the 301 will be too hard so this year we have 25 for 25!

My top 10 fiction reads of the year are:

• The Wager and the Bear by John Ironmonger
• The Eights by Joanna Miller
• Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah
• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
• Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
• I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven
• The Country of Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
• Voting Day by Clare O'Dea
• Atmosphere by Taylor Reid Jenkins
• Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine West

My top 10 translated books of the year are:

• Small Memories by Jose Saramago (tr. Margaret Jull Costa)
• My Pen is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women (tr. various)
• When the Cranes Fly South by Liza Ridzen (tr. Alice Menzies)
• Just a Little Dinner by Cecile Tlili (tr. Katherine Gregor)
• How I Came to Know Fish by Oto Pavel (tr. Jindriska Badal & Robert McDowell)
• On the Calculation of Volume (books 1,2 &3) by Solvej Balle (tr. Barbara J Haveland, Sophia Hersi Smith, & Jennifer Russell)
• Barbara Isn't Dying Yet by Alina Bronsky (tr. Tim Mohr)
• Lowest Common Denominator by Pirkko Saisio (tr. Mia Spangenberg)
• Notes from the Ginzo Shihoda Stationert Shop by Kenji Ueda (tr. Emily Balistrieri)
• Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez (tr. Natasha Wimmer)

My top 5 non fictions reads of the year are:

• Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid
• That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America by Amanda Jones
• Mythica: A New History of Homer's World, Through The Women Written Out Of It by Emily Hauser
• Always Home, Always Homesick: A Love Letter to Iceland by Hannah Kent
• Burnt Eucalyptus Wood: On Origins, Language and Identity by Ennatu Domingo