August Round Up

 

Another month gone, and as I type this the weather also seems to have left summer behind and turned more autumnal, although more heatwaves or hot blips are being forecast. It has been an incredible summer however and I hope that there isn't the extreme cold to counter balance the extreme heat, although I don't mind the cooler temps it is just the ice I loathe!

August was another good month for me - the highlight being our extreme day trip to Valladolid in Spain to see the total eclipse. This was our fifth eclipse, making us true umbraphiles I think, and it was certainly special as it came shortly before sunset giving many new colours and experiences. Full photos of the experience can be found on my Flickr page and as Valladolid was the birth place of Cervantes I think that a forthcoming reading project should be for me to read Don Quixote.

Reading wise I did spend a lot of time reading for the excellent Women In Translation month and will round up my full thoughts in a separate post soon. I missed the Reading Around the World book group as I was eclipse chasing but by all accounts they all enjoyed visiting Scotland and at our September meeting we'll be visiting Italy.

As for me I visited 16 countries (if you include the UK and USA) by book and 7 were new for my map - Central African Republic, Mauretania, Bahrain, Gabon, DRC, Moldova, and Thailand. The books set in the USA were mainly ones for a reading project and so didn't add any new states to my list sadly.

Top reads of the month definitely Nicola Chester's Ghosts of the Farm, which I talked about earlier and The Man Who Read Books by Rachid Benzine (tr. Sam Taylor). Honourable mention to the Booker longlisted May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry which I found fun and also recognised myself in -  as when I start researching something I'm interested in I can easily fall down rabbit holes...

Thoughts on more of the translations soon!

July Round Up

 

Another month gone and we're well over half way through 2026 which doesn't seem possible.

July was a mixed month for reading - the end of our holiday and the post holiday slump hit hard, not helped by the heat and a selection of books for a project that I really struggled with.

Highlights were definitely the days I could get out and about with the camera, especially the day my nephew (Kentishbookboy for long term readers) and I had in London. He is about to start photography A level and had a summer project to work on, so we spent the morning in various buildings and locations around the city looking and light, shape, and form before heading to the beautifully airconditioned National Theatre to see War Horse. When the show was last on stage KBB was too young to see it so I was really pleased to see it back on in London, and on the stage it was initially written for. We were both blown away by it and hopefully this won't be the last day we have in London before he is too grown up to want a day out with his aunt...

Bookwise I got through a fair number of books and visited Greece, Japan, Finland, France (twice), Italy, Saudi Arabia, and Slovakia - the ones that were new to me being Slovakia and Saudi Arabia, I also got to tick off Idaho and Quebec as new States/Provinces.

Our Reading Around the World group met on Bastille Day to (appropriately) look at books in/from France. The choices and discussion was great, not least because several of us picked books by the same author - although all different titles - so we could look at how the writing styles change, common themes, and suggestions of other titles to try if the initial one didn't hit the mark!

I'll be missing the next session and my friend/sometime book group attendee is leading it - they'll be looking at Scottish books and the joke is that A chose this because she doesn't have a passport!

My top reads of the month were Victoria Hislop's The Wine-Dark Sea (not out until Sept so review/thoughts then), Louise Penny's Miss Wolcott's Ghost, and Annie Ernaux's A Man's Place. No real stinkers (that I can talk about) but a very average selection on the whole.

My Read the World Map as of end of July - it doesn't look hugely different as many of the books have been from smaller countries!

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!

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. 

Micro Review 17 (2025)

 

The Wager and the Bear by John Ironmonger (Fly On the Wall Press)

Greenland has been in the news a lot lately but not because of the polar bears or anything similar - just politics, and thanks to map projections it also features large on my map where I'm marking my reading journey so it was fortuitous that I saw lots of people talking about this book recently.

The Wager and the Bear starts gently with a slightly drunk student confronting his local MP in a Cornish pub regarding climate change. The MP is a real climate sceptic and Tom, the student, is more passionate about the planet especially when confronted with inaccurate statistics from the MP. The pair's conversation is being filmed and live streamed on social media however and what starts as a drunken bet becomes a bête noir for both characters as they spend the next 50 years crossing paths in the UK and Greenland as they try to persuade each other of their view points.

To say more about the book will spoil it for readers but I found it a very clever read, and far more effective at showing that climate change is real than a lot of other cli-fi novels and drier non fiction books. 

I recognise a lot of the arguments used in the book and having a time frame that does encompass a human life span (rather than generation spanning apocalyptic novels) really added an extra dimension to this book. While it starts in the here and then moves forward in time it always felt very real and not too fantastical or presenting of an unreal possible future.

There is a lot of humour in the book, as well as genuine peril and I found it a thoroughly absorbing read that I've already recommended to others.