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!

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. 

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

Reading the World update

 

My scratch off map is becoming far more colourful and my reading life is really expanding.

While I am reading a lot of books in translation or from authors living in a country I am also counting some travel writing in my project.

Some of these been accounts of journeys made in locations (Sovietistan by Erika Fatland) and some of the books have been from people who've settled in an area and are writing about their new lives (In Arabian Nights by Tahir Shah) and while I do want to read in translation where possible my bank balance isn't bottomless and I don't want to narrow my borders as I am trying to explore them!

Because my map does mark all of the US states, Canadian provinces, and Australian states I have expanded my challenge to include a book from each of these  - but I do wish that India and China has also been split up as they are such diverse countries it feels wrong to just read one book from these places and cross off the whole country!

This mix of fiction/translation/non fiction is working well for me so far and it has to be said that as this is the way Daunt Books organise their travel sections I feel I am in good company with this approach.

Some of the top reads from the past 6 months have been:

• Sovietistan: A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan by Erika Flatland. Translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson
• Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Zanzibar and Tanzania) 
• Chopping Onions on My Heart by Samantha Ellis (Iraq)
• My Pen is the Wing of a Bird (Afghanistan) Translated from various languages by a variety of people.
• The Wager and the Bear by John Ironmonger (Greenland)
• Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts (California, Nevada, Arizona & Utah)
• That Librarian - Louisiana 
• Between Two Rivers - Moudhy Al-Rashid (Mesopotamia)

Not all my reading has been focussed on this project and my top six books so far this year are:

• Between Two Rivers by Moudhy Al-Rashid
• Mythica by Emily Hauser
• Florrie by Anna Trench
• When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
• The Eights by Joanna Miller
• The Wager and the Bear by John Ironside

Picking these books was great fun - I scanned down my book journal and picked the ones that have stayed with me the most for whatever reason and/or are the ones I've recommended to other people the most!

Oops

 

Well we all knew that the regular posts and reviews from the start of the year wouldn't last but I didn't mean to let nearly 2 months go past without posting!

I guess that the silence does sort of say it all in some ways - it has been a while since I read a book that I have wanted to tell everyone about instantly...

I've been reading lots still, and thanks to a couple of trips to the wonderful travel departments at Daunts Bookshops my reading the world project is really progressing - more updates about that at the end of the month where I'll take stock of where I am after half of 2025.

The Women's Prize for Fiction and Non Fiction winners are announced later this week, and while the fiction shortlist didn't inspire me to go on and read everything I did read the whole of the Non Fiction shortlist. 

I can honestly say that I wouldn't be upset if any of them won as I really enjoyed them all - even Neneh Cherry's autobiography was a good read. (Her song Seven Seconds was *everywhere* when I was doing my A Levels as and a result I've never been a fan but the book has made me go back and listen to some of her other stuff.)

Here's hoping that some excellent books cross my path soon - it can't be long until the Waterstone's Debut Prize list is announced and that sent some real gems my way...

Micro Reviews 15 and 16 (2025)

 

Agent Zo by Clare Mulley (Orion Publishing) & The CIA Book Club by Charlie English (HarperCollins)

Thanks to the Women's Prize for Non Fiction list I picked Agent Zo up from the library recently and was immersed in her (and Poland's) story of the Second World War and after. 

While we 'know' that Britain went to war in 1939 because of the Nazi invasion of Poland after this event very little made of Poland's war - a paragraph or two about the Warsaw Uprising maybe and possibly a mention of the horrific massacre at Katyn but that's about it. Once the Iron Curtain fell Poland disappears again until the rise of Solidarity and eventually the fall of Communism.

Agent Zo really fills in the gaps as well as adding so much more detail. In focussing on the work of the women's resistance movement we get a new view of war and perhaps a more honest look at the treatment of women in the SOE movement.

What was most shocking about this book was the way that Poland was treated towards the end of the war by 'Allies' and how this fed into the second half of the twentieth century and how Poland became one of the most repressive Communist states.

Which leads on nicely to English's The CIA Book Club which while it does cover some of the same history as Zo focuses far more heavily on the 1980s in Poland and how the CIA helped the resistance movement in Poland (and their supporters in the West) keep the dreams of freedom alive via the printed word.

This book wasn't quite as engaging as Agent Zo and at times read more like a thriller than an exploration of how powerful words are. However as some of the same people from Zo appear in this book it felt very much like a surprise sequel. It also rounded out the time covered in Mulley's book briefly - once Agent Zo had more or less retired - and showed how Communism in Poland was overthrown.

While both of these books cover the past there is a lot that the current world could learn from reading these - especially how carving up a nation without including that country in the negotiations - is a very bad idea with longer lasting repercussions than are even dreamt of.

If you only want to read one book about Polish history then I would have to say go for Agent Zo, but The CIA Book Club really does add to that story. 

Micro Review 13 & 14 (2025)

 

Books About Books - my kryptonite.

I love books about books - whether its the history of books and publishing, the history of printing, author biographies, collated book reviews, and of course books that fall under the broad 'bibliotherapy' heading.

2025 has started strongly in this field with the wonderful Just My Type that I reviewed a little while ago and then two splendid books about reading journeys.

The first was Read Yourself Happy by Daisy Buchanan (DK) - which is  an interesting more modern approach to a bibliotherapy book. Buchanan would pick an emotion and then share details of her life to explain the choice and talk about the books she read to help with these times. What made it more than a typical self help bibliotherapy book was the personalisation and also the inclusion of all sorts of books - there was no hint of  'good' or 'worthy' books being prioritised, just books from all genres and times that gave Buchanan solace and then some similar books that might also work.

It is a book that can be read from cover to cover like any non fiction book, but is also one that you can dip in and out of as and when the mood strikes.

The second book is Bookish by Lucy Mangan (Vintage) and this is a much more of a straightforward autobiography from the author but told via the books she was reading at each stage of her life. Very much like her previous book (Bookworm) I felt like I was looking in a mirror as I was reading (at least up to the last quarter anyhow). So many of Mangan's life choices and career moves match my own and we were definitely reading a lot of the same books through the late 1990s and in to the 2000s. In fact I'm pretty sure that at some points we must have been in the same second-hand bookshops around Norfolk fighting over the same titles!

Mangan's life has diverged from mine more now, and by the end of it I was moved to tears several times - and also green with envy at her home book-nook. I also have another huge stack of titles to revisit at some point.

Micro Review 11 (2025)

 

The Prosecutor by Jack Fairweather (Ebury Publishing)

While I have read a few books in the past couple of weeks most of them have been ok but nothing more, with one that needs a lot more thinking about before I write about it. There was also the awkward coincidence of me starting Pope Francis' autobiography on my tea break only to hear he'd been hospitalised by the time I had my lunch break...

However Jack Fairweather's The Prosecutor was a book that I found as gripping as any novel and one that taught me so much on a topic that I thought I'd possibly exhausted.

The book is all about Fritz Bauer, a gay Jewish German legal man who after surviving the Holocaust was horrified at the cursory way 'de-Nazification' took place in West Germany and how many prominent Nazis regained their positions in society - and government. He wasn't just horrified however - he decided to do something about it, including helping track down Eichmann and ensuring he faced justice. He also managed to challenge the specific wording of German Law so that he could actually put perpetrators of the horror on trial.

As well as Bauer's story we hear how former Nazis were reintegrated into the higher echelons of government, how they formed the backbone of West Germany and how the Western powers let this happen. It also covers the slow way that Germany was forced to face the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also shows how the seeds of denial (which are sadly growing once more) were sown.

I've read a lot about East Germany in the period 1945-1961 but this was the first book covering West Germany and once more it just shows how the victors get to rewrite history - I found the book chilling but fascinating and I really recommend it when it is published tomorrow.

Many thanks to Ebury for providing access to an advance copy of the book via NetGalley

Thoughts on the Women's Prize for Non Fiction Longlist 2025

 

With the way the world is going right now haunting news sites early in the morning doesn't seem to be the best way to start the day, however on Weds 12th I was doing just that as I waited for the Women's Prize to announce their non fiction longlist.

As my reading round-up showed - last year 42% of my reads were non fiction.  I've looked at this list more closely I can say that 51% of these books were written by women so it was inevitable that I'd be waiting for this announcement quite closely.

There are 16 books on the long list and of these I've read just three - which shows that I probably missed a lot of good books in 2024! The ones I have read are in purple below.

Anne Applebaum – Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World – Allen Lane (PRH)

Eleanor Barraclough – Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age – (Profile Books)

Helen Castor – The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV – Allen Lane (PRH)

Neneh Cherry – A Thousand Threads  (Fern Press (PRH))

Rachel Clarke – The Story of a Heart – (Abacus (Hachette))

Chloe Dalton – Raising Hare  (Canongate Books)

Jenni Fagan – Ootlin  (Hutchinson Heinemann, Century, (PRH))

Lulu Miller – Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life  (ONE, Pushkin Press)

Clare Mulley – Agent Zo: The Untold Stories of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka  (Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Hachette))

Rebecca Nagle – By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land  (William Collins (HarperCollins))

Sue Prideaux – Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (Faber )

Helen Scales – What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean (Grove Press, Atlantic Books) 

Kate Summerscale – The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place  (Bloomsbury Circus (Bloomsbury))

Harriet Wistrich – Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men  (Torva, Transworld, (PRH))

Alexis Wright – Tracker  (And Other Stories)

Yuan Yang – Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China (Bloomsbury Circus (Bloomsbury))


Part of the reason why I have read so many non fiction books by women that aren't on this list is because I read indiscriminately - publication dates don't really matter to me, I just want to read books that appeal or that are recommended to me, so often new books do pass me by until they appear on lists like this!

From the longlist I've instantly reserved 4 books from the library, and added a couple of other ones to my 'might get round to some day' list - there are a few that just don't appeal at all but it might be that if they make the shortlist (announced in March) I am tempted to try them.

I don't think that I am even going to attempt to read the entire long (or short) list as a challenge but this is definitely a list that has added a lot of books to my TBR piles.




As an aside books published between 1st April 2024 and 31st March 2025 were eligible for the prize and here are a few of the books that I've read which fit this criteria and that I am sad didn't make the cut:

• Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Broken Threads by Mishal Husain (Fourth Estate)
• Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Katherine Hughes (Harper Collins)
• A Mudlarking Year: Finding Treasure in Every Season by Lara Maiklem (Bloomsbury)
• Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women by Hetta Howes (Bloomsbury)



 

Micro Review 10 (2025)

 

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid (Hodder and Stoughton)

After reading Elif Shafak's There Are Rivers in the Sky last autumn I realised that while I am very familiar with the Greek and Roman histories/origin stories and somewhat familiar with Ancient Egypt I knew nothing about Ancient Mesopotamia.

From reading the the first two volumes of Sapiens: A Graphic History from Yuval Noah Harari I came across some parts of Ancient Mesopotamian history thanks to his featuring Hammurabi and his laws but I was still in the dark...

Just as I started looking for recommendations by other classicists I saw Between Two Rivers being talked about online and then it appeared on NetGalley - hurrah!

I found this book to be a great introduction to the subject, Al-Rashid takes us right back to the beginning and explains where/who we are talking about and then using archaeological finds talks us through how this part of history has been decoded and the cuneiforms translated to give us our current understanding.

As ever when working with dates BCE it did take me a while to work out the 'when' was - especially when Al-Rashid just says in the 18th century BCE but that it just my poor grasp on time and not a fault with the book! I really liked the little insights into the author's life as they helped bring an unfamiliar world in to a context I could relate to, but there weren't so many of them that you felt it was an autobiography hung around a history book.

The one thing I would really have found useful is a timeline that matched the Mesopotamian events to happenings in the Greek/Egyptian/wider-world and it might be that this is something that is in the physical finished copy and just not reproduced in the electronic proof I read - I've got a copy of the book on order so when it comes out towards the end of the month I can check for this. If it isn't there I shall have to make my own!

Right I'm now off to find a translation of Gilgamesh and some more entry level history books as I'm now fascinated by this new period in history!

Many thanks to Hodder & Stoaghton for the advance copy via NetGalley

Micro Review 9 (2025)

 

Just My Type by Simon Garfield (Profile Books)

Last year I read two of Garfield's shorter books about specific fonts and found them fascinating and so I knew that I had to put his longer book about them on my Christmas list - thankfully Father Christmas let my parents know and Just My Type was under the tree for me in December!

This has been a brilliant book to dip in and out of during tea breaks as it is split into lots of short chapters about fonts, design and printing in general with these interspersed with event shorter chapters on specific fonts.

As the daughter of a printer, someone who used to be really into calligraphy, and an avid consumer of the printed word I can't understand why it has taken me over 10 years to discover this book but better late than never! I can also imagine the 'fun' that the typesetter had incorporating all of the different fonts (sometimes in the same sentence) in to the text and still managing to keep the book legible.

As with any book that goes into such detail there are going to be some bits that weren't quite so interesting but these were few and far apart in this one and I am now looking forward to a visit to the St Bride's Print Foundation that a friend and I have booked for late spring.

As an aside the BBC aired a wonderful programme recently all about how the modern printing process works and it made a brilliant companion watch to this book, and this is currently still available to watch on the BBC iPlayer

Microreviews 6 and 7 (2025)

 

Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 and some recently read books.

While I was poorly I made an effort to read some of the physical books that I had piled up around the house and with January 27th being the 80th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz it seemed fitting that two of the books were about the Holocaust.

Last year when I posted about the 20 books that had stayed with me the most since reading two of this list were books about the Holocaust and I did write my MA dissertation on the way that it is portrayed in children's literature so it should be no surprise at all that I had books waiting on my TBR that covered this topic.

The first one I read was Other People's Houses by Lore Segal (Sort of Books)

This is a fictionalised autobiography covering her life in Vienna pre-1938 and then her childhood in Britain after she was one of the children evacuated on the Kindertransport. It was a fascinating read because even though it was a novel it was so detailed and personal that it could be mistaken for autobiography.  Segal explains this choice in her afterword explaining that while what she writes feels like her truth she knows that this isn't the case as historical facts don't line up with her memories and so to avoid complaints writing it in a fictional way let her tell her story as she saw it.

Segal was lucky in that her parents did also manage to escape Vienna and come to the UK (although due to a quirk in the system they were not allowed to live with Lore) but the feelings and issues that this caused are also covered in the book. Segal doesn't always come across in the best light but again this adds to the accurate feel of the book.

I Seek a Kind Person by Julian Borger (John Murray)

Like Segal's book this also is about Jewish children who left Vienna in 1938/39 but rather than coming on the official Kidnertransport the children featured here came via adverts placed in the Manchester Guardian - desperate parents pleading with British people to foster their children.

The book is centred on Borger's father, who was one of these children and who sadly committed suicide in the 1980s - as Borger says, the reach of the Holocaust didn't end with the liberation of the Camps in 1945. We learn much more about life in Vienna before the war and then about the means and methods that people did escape Austria before war broke out.

This book is more scholarly and impersonal than Segal's account but they compliment each other perfectly and this one shows that even though Other People's Houses is all from memory Segal's memories were accurate and although each journey was different there were incredible similarities in all of the evacuees stories.

Neither book made easy reading, but there is (dark) humour in them both and even though I have read other books about Kindertransport experiences I learned new things from each book and in the challenging times we are currently living in it seems important to read and remember what happened 80 years ago in the hope that it can't happen again.

Books of the Year (and related thoughts) for 2024

 

2024 Reading Round Up.

Well another year passes and once more it has been book-filled with a mix of reading for projects and pleasure... while I have read about the same number of books as for the past few years fewer have leapt out at me as potential books of the year.

While I am still enjoying trying all of the Japanese and Korean books in translation that are breaking through to the UK market I might be reaching saturation point when it comes to ones set in cafes or restaurants with cats... I also noticed that lots of books set in the former East Germany (and covering reunification) crossed my reading path in 2024. I would like to read more nature writing/travel books by women so will be actively searching them out in 2025.

Before I share my reads of the year some statistics...

• 65% of books have been by women, or with women listed as the lead author.
• 58% of the books I've read have been fiction 
• 42% non fiction 
• 21% of my reads have been in translation
• 8% of the books were written with a children or YA audience in mind (probably the least I've ever read in this genre)

Narrowing the books down to a top 10 proved impossible and instead I have 24 books for 2024.

Fiction

El Hacho by Luis Carrasco (Epoque Press)

Berlin Duet by S W Perry (Atlantic Books)

The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable (Bloomsbury)

The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier (Harper Collins)

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Hodder and Stoughton)

Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou, tr. Lina Protopapa (Foundry Press)

The Silence in Between by Josie Ferguson (Transworld Press)

One Grand Summer by Ewald Arenz, tr. Rachel Ward (Orenda Books)

Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller (Harper Collins)

Le Fay by Sophie Keetch (Oneworld Publications)

There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak (Penguin Books)

Letters from the Ginza Shihodo Stationery Shop by Kenji Ueda, tr. Emily Balistrieri (Bonnier Books)

The Lover of No Fixed Abode by Carlo Fruttero & Franco Lucentini, tr. Gregory Dowling (Bitter Lemon Press)

Non Fiction

High Caucasus by Tom Parfitt (Headline Publishing Group)

The Vanished Collection by Pauline Baer de Perignon, tr Natasha Lehrer (Bloomsbury)

Alice's Book by Karina Urbach, tr. Jamie Bulloch (Quercus Publishing)

Broken Threads by Mishal Husain (Harper Collins)

Cull of the Wild by Hugh Warwick (Bloomsbury)

A Ride Across America by Simon Parker (Duckworth Books)

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks (Penguin Books)

What I Ate In Once Year by Stanley Tucci (Penguin Books)

A Cheesemonger's Tour de France by Ned Palmer (Profile Books)

Sapiens: A Graphic History vol. 1 by Yuval Noah Harari & David Vandermeulen, illus. Daniel Casanave (Vintage)

Slow Trains to Venice by Tom Chesshyre (Octopus Publishing Group)

I am slightly surprised that in the end that slightly more than half of my top reads are by men, when compared to the overall ratio but pleased that a quarter of my best books were in translation. I've also tried to read more from independent publishers this year and I think that this is reflected in my top reads too.

I think that my absolute favourite book of the year is Tracy Chevalier's The Glassmaker although if you ask me tomorrow this could change to The Silence in Between or The Place of Tides!

Non Fiction November

 

A monthly challenge that I can get behind!

I keep setting myself laudable reading goals/challenges and then failing miserably to keep to them but Nonfiction November is right up my reading alley!

It is supposed to be a month where you try something nonfiction if it isn't a genre you often read but for me it is an excuse to think about the non fiction books I've read all year, as well as the ones from November.

Keeping detailed reading journals through various apps (I'm paranoid that one might vanish and I'll lose all the data)* I can see that so far this year 42% of the books I've read have been nonfiction and so I really don't need a dedicated month to appreciate the genre so I looked a bit deeper in to the types of book I go for...

The majority are biographies or autobiographies, and within those nature and travel writing make up a large proportion, and following this come the books about books, but like most of my reading its really hard to pin down what is 'my type' of book as I'll try most things, except true crime!

In November standout non fiction so far has been:

What I Ate in One Year (and related thoughts) by Stanley Tucci - this was a wonderfully gossipy diary from Tucci, heavily focussed on food, drink and travel so just my thing. There were a fair number of recipes dotted through it too and I made note of several of them!

A Cheesemonger's Tour de France by Ned Palmer - I've often said that my 'last supper' would be really good quality French bread, butter and cheese and this book really helped me create the cheese board aspect of the meal. I also liked the pairing suggestions of what to drink with the cheese, and which areas of France I should add to my travel list so I can try the food in the setting it was made for. 

Sapiens: A Graphic History Volume 1 which is adapted from Yuval Noah Harari's book and illustrated by Daniel Casanave and David Vandermeulen. I'd tried Sapiens before and got a bit bogged down in it but this way of story telling really broke the big ideas down. I think Mr Norfolkbookworm got bored of just how often I was bringing up things I'd learned from it - however it did give us lots to talk about while we were our walking... I'm looking forward to reading the next two parts immensely.

There's still a third of the month left so I am sure I'll read more non fiction in November but it is good to stop and thinking about what I'm reading - it will help when it comes to writing those best of the year posts in a few weeks!

*this did happen to one app I really liked and while I have a paper reading journal too I've not always marked books by genre and so looking back at them I'm sometimes not sure what books were about!

Twenty books in twenty days (part two)

 

Books that have stayed with me.

As previously mentioned on Social Media I took part in a challenge to list a book that had stayed with me or influenced me each day for twenty days - it has been just the sort of icebreaker I can get behind.

However the challenge was just to post the book jacket with no reasons why you picked it and after picking my books I though I actually want a record of why it is these 20 books that feature.

Like online there's no order to these books, and while are some firm favourites and have been for decades some of the books that came to my mind really surprised me.

Invisible Women - while I knew that things weren't really equal for men and women despite laws and loud claims by men, this book really opened my eyes as to just how much of the world is set up for the default male and not most of the population.

Carrying the Fire - I don't think that this was the first biography/autobiography from the early era astronauts that I read but it certainly the best. A great mix of personal story and science and entirely readable, it is one of my great regrets that I never got to meet Collins as he comes across everywhere as such a nice person.

Black Beauty - I think my original copy of this one was once my dad's and despite being not a huge horsey person (and mildly allergic to them or their hay) I loved this book - even though it is quite bleak in places!

Diary of Anne Frank - I think that this was the first book about the Holocaust that I read, and it is one that I return to on an infrequent basis, along with other works - scholarly and biographical - related to Frank. 

Birds Without Wings - while Captain Corelli's Mandolin is the more famous book it was the epic sweep of this one that really blew me away, and I loved the way that de Bernieres mimics Homer in his turn of phrase.

Alanna: The First Adventure - I could have picked any of Pierce's books set in Tortall but this one was the first I read after (somewhat surprisingly) finding it on the shelf in my school library. I still buy Peirce's books as soon as I can and just hope that the one she's been talking about for a few years does see the light of day.

The Shell Seekers - this was another of the first 'grown up' books that I read in my teens, again I think it was a recommendation from my mum. It is a sweeping, multi generational family story with a strong WW2 setting and as well as this I think it also helped develop my appreciation of the Impressionist school of painting.

Rewild Yourself - after my brain haemorrhage we started spending a lot more time out in nature, and then with the pandemic limiting where we could go this book was ideal for focussing the mind on how just some small actions can keep you grounded while still expanding your connections with the natural world. While a lot of books in the nature writing genre are fascinating only this and Lev Pariakian's Light Rain Sometimes Falls have reinforced that you don't need to do big things/ take big trips to make the most of the world around you.

The Flowers of the Field - another sweeping, multi generational family story that I read and reread as a teen/ young adult, this time with a WW1 focus. The sequel, A Flower That's Free, is also good but if I shut my eyes I can still 'see' scenes from this one, and the main character (Thea) is one of my favourites in all the books I've read.

The Cut Out Girl - as I think can be seen from this list I do like to read books about the period in history from about 1900-1950, and when I  look through my full reading diaries for the past 20 years this becomes clearer. This book has stuck with me so much because thanks to The Diary of Anne Frank and other similar accounts from Holland during the Nazi occupation I had formed a fixed idea of this period of time and here Van Es presents a new point of view. I've since found other books and documentaries that add to this  and so it deserves its place on this list because it is always good to learn new things and have your opinions challenged and to remember that the victors/survivors write history.

Twenty books in twenty days (part one)

 

Books that have stayed with me.

As previously mentioned on Social Media I took part in a challenge to list a book that had stayed with me or influenced me each day for twenty days - it has been just the sort of icebreaker I can get behind.

However the challenge was just to post the book jacket with no reasons why you picked it and after picking my books I though I actually want a record of why it is these 20 books that feature.

Like online there's no order to these books, and while are some firm favourites and have been for decades some of the books that came to my mind really surprised me.

Vintage 1954 - It was hard to pick a single Antoine Laurain book as I've loved them all and eagerly await the translation of his new books. I surprised myself by picking this one and not An Astronomer in Love (which I liked so much a colleagues and I nominated it for the Dublin Literary Award), however when I shut my eyes it was this one that popped into mind and so on the list it went!

Testament of Youth - this book was so important to me as a late teenager and in to my early 20s and I think that it is the book that really started my love of autobiographies and also my interest into WW1 in a wider context. This was a case of not returning to a favourite however as when I reread it a few years ago it wasn't quite the profound book I remembered.

The Red Tent - I think that this was the first (feminist) retelling of a classic/Biblical tale that I read and again it is one that sparked my later interest in the genre.

The Song of Achilles - I felt bad picking this over the sublime books by Natalie Haynes but again this was the first book of its genre and the one that rekindled my love of Ancient Greek myths and legends.

To Serve The All My Days - I loved (and if I'm honest do still love) classic school stories and I think that this was the first 'grown up' book I came across that had this setting. It also has a strong WW1 and WW2 theme so event more boxes ticked! I'm not sure how I discovered this one - I know my parents introduced me to Delderfield's Diana & The Avenue books so it may be thanks to them...

Project Hail Mary - I really liked Weir's The Martian and didn't think that his Artemis was quite as bad as some say but this one was just on a different level - apparently it is about to be made into a film but I can't see how that would work as the pictures in my mind are so strong.

Shakespeare On Toast - after a visit as a tourist to Shakespeare's Globe I became more interested in the plays and Shakespeare himself and this book taught me so much - not least how to actually read the plays. It sparked such an interest that I ended up doing an MA in Shakespeare Studies!

Mossflower - it was a toss up between this one and Jacques' Redwall for this but I remember reading this one multiple times and loving the feel of it. Unusually this was a series that my sister also enjoyed and we used to swap books while we were on holiday. I have to confess that as a quick and constant reader I was probably initially drawn to these books because of their length - pre eReaders and with room in the family suitcase these books were ideal!

Little Women - and being in the UK this does mean only Little Women and not Good Wives too! I think the copy of this I had was my mum's and I know that even now it is a comfort read that I must have finished more than 30 times. I also know that some of my friends don't like it and find it out dated and sexist where as I read it as a fable and also as being quite empowering...

The Island - this book has a Greek setting and is historical so already pretty much had my name all over it, but when I did read it I discovered that it was set in a place we'd visited (and on our very first holiday together) it made the book event more appealing. I've enjoyed most of Hislop's books since this one but because it was about somewhere we'd been before it got 'famous' this one tips the scales as my favourite.

Time Flies

 

I really didn't mean for two months to go by without a blog post, this time my excuse is a travel adventure and then reading books in a very advance stage so that I can't talk about them yet!

Mr Norfolkbookworm and I had a wonderful time in Texas at the beginning of April when we went to see the total eclipse. Sadly the cloud rolled in with seconds to go and while we didn't get those fabulous views of totality we did experience the pitch darkness in the middle of the day *and* we were based on a vineyard in the heart of Texan Hill Country and got to try some of their wines while surrounded by swallowtail butterflies.

Since we got back I've been reading for a couple of projects and as these books aren't published for a while I can't really talk about them, however there are four that I really think every one should add to their readings lists:

• The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable (15th August)
• The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier (12th September)
• Berlin Duet by S W Perry (1st August)
• Broken Threads by Mishal Husain (6th June)

The first three are historical fiction, and the first two are set in Venice, and the final one is a biography of Husain's family and a tale of India pre/post partition.

All of them were brilliant reads and stand a good chance of being on my 'best of the year' lists in December.

Now I'm caught up with these I can concentrate on my library reservations and a few of the books I've bought recently so hopefully there will be some more reviews coming soon. But please don't hold your breath - there's so much to read that I forget to blog!

Why I loved those 20 books from 2023 - part one!

 

Why that Top 20?

It occurred to me yesterday that it was all well and good letting everyone know what my top reads were but perhaps I should say why I loved them...

Non Fiction:

One Hundred Saturdays  - this was a completely new to me story about both WW2 and Rhodes (an island that is always going to be very special to me) and it has made me really want to go back and to explore this new history. It also reminded me of Louis de Bernieres Birds without Wings in that there weren't as many differences between the Turks/Ottomans and Greeks as we think. Review for this book here.

Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad - another WW2 story but fascinating to read of the parallels between Hitler and Stalin's treatment of people. I knew some of the stories but again there was a lot of new information - and it tied in quite nicely with the novel The Half Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley which just missed out on being one of my top 10 fiction books of the year.

The Dictionary People - a recent read and a fascinating insight into how the OED was one of the first crowd sourced projects - review here.

All the Beauty in the World - this is the biography of a museum guard at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It combines personal history, history of art and quirky tales from the museum - including sock allowances!

Venice - after visiting Venice, and falling in love with the city, I've been reading lots of books about La Serenissima. Some have been histories and others personal reflections on the place but there was just something beautiful about this book of one man's visits to the city and the small things he notices while there.

The Six - not quite so many books about space crossed my path this year but this was a stand out as it is the story of the first six female astronauts picked at the start of the Space Shuttle era. It contained biographies of the women and details of their space flights and it was great to read of this era of space travel from a female perspective.

Femina - after reading For Thy Great Pain... at the end of 2022 I was keen to read more about women from further back in history and this book was wonderful to dip in and out of as women were put back into the narrative.

The Diary Keepers - after reading Bart van Es' The Cut Out Girl and learning more about the Netherland's less glorious WW2 history this was a fascinating collection of diary excerpts covering the whole political spectrum of life in occupied Holland. My thoughts from earlier in the year. 

Portable Magic - a book about the history of books by an author I really like, not much more to say really except that it really increased my list of books I want to read at some point!

Letter From New York - I've been a fan of Hanff for years but didn't know about this gem until it was republished this year. It is a more cosy, intimate, version of Letters from America by Alistair Cook and focusses very much on Hanff's life in New York before it was cleaned up. She has a unique writing style and I am sad that I have now read everything that she published in book form.

Books of the Year 2023 edition

 

My year in books.

Well it has been an abysmal year for blogging but despite this when I look back at my reading journal I can see that I read *lots* of books and that there were some real crackers in there.

Looking back through my journal I can also see the following stats...

• 66% of the books I read were by women
• 40 titles (14%) were books in translation
• 37 titles(13.5%)  fell under the nature or travel writing genre
• 29 titles  (10.5) were 'kidlit' 
• 12 (4%) were books about books

I thought about doing a 'Top 23 for 2023' but realised that this would get out of hand quite quickly as the decade progressed so here are my top 10 fiction and my top 10 non-fiction for the past year

Fiction

An Astronomer in Love by Antoine Laurain (tr. Louise Rogers LaLaurie & Megan Jones) Gallic Books

Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris, Duckworth Books

Morgan Is My Name by Sophie Keetch, Oneworld Publications

In Memoriam by Alice Winn, Penguin Books

What You Are Looking For Is In The Library by Michiko Aoyama (tr. Alison Watts), Transworld

Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa (tr, Alison Watts) Oneworld Publications

The Figurine by Victoria Hislop, Headline Publishing

The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai (tr, Jesse Kirkwood), Pan Macmillan

The Dallergut Dream Department Store by Miye Lee (tr. Sandy Joosun Lee), Headline Publishing

Four Seasons in Japan by Nick Bradley, Transworld

Non Fiction

One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank, Profile 

Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein, Harper Collins

The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie, Vintage

All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley, Vintage

Venice by Cees Nooteboom (tr. Laura Watkinson), Quercus

The Six by Loren Grush, Virago

Femina by Janina Ramirez, Ebury

The Diary Keepers by Nina Siegal, Harper Collins

Portable Magic by Emma Smith,  Penguin

Letter From New York by Helene Hanff, Manderley

Interesting to see how many translated books made the top 20 and also that the % of top books written by women is around the same as my overall yearly totals - and far higher if you count the female translators.

Anyhow here's hoping that 2024 is another good reading year - it has to be said the one I've started today has got off to a cracking start and taking me to a culture of stories I know nothing about...