Elkiedee Reads, Reviews and Rants in 2025

I'm Luci. I live in London, England, with my partner and two teenagers. I joined LT and this group towards the end of 2009 and started cataloguing my books, though there are still some I've never got round to entering, and after the first few years I haven't kept up with my acquisitions very well either. and started a thread in 2010 - for the first few years I posted a lot and I finished a lot of books.

I don't really distinguish TBR and books I've read very clearly -. If I last read a book at 8 or 15, I might remember enjoying it then but my experience is going to be quite different at 55, and I've realised recently that I can forget even books I enjoyed and reviewed in 10 years or so, probably sooner.

My main reading aim for this year is to review more of the books I read and do it sooner, especially ones from Netgalley. I'm not going to stop buying, borrowing or requesting from Netgalley more books than I'm realistically likely to read.... I have far too many books out of the library already but that probably won't change.

Happy 2025, Luci.

PAGES READ IN JANUARY 2025

01.01.25: 152
02.01.25: 158
03.01.25: 154
04.01.25: 208
05.01.25: 167
06.01.25: 83
07.01.25: 167
08.01.25: 250
09.01.25: 202
10.01.25: 215
11.01.25: 171
12.01.25: 193
13.01.25: 201
14.01.25: 161
15.01.25: 124
16.01.25: 216
17.01.25: 219
18.01.25: 270
19.01.25: 296
20.01.25: 143
21.01.25: 180
22.01.25: 185
23.01.25: 63
24.01.25: 335
25.01.25: 518
26.01.25: 219
27.01.25: 281
28.01.25: 207
29.01.25: 131
30.01.25: 175
31.01.25: 132

January: 6186 pages, 19 books, 4 reviews
2025: 6186 pages, 19 books, 4 reviews

February: >22 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 1 JANUARY 2025, 10 am

READ

Jenny Colgan, The Christmas Book Hunt - novella - finished 01.01.25

CURRENT

Elly Griffiths, The Frozen People
Abi Daré, And So I Roar - finished 03.01.25
Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman - finished 04.01.25
Isabella Hammad, The Parisian
Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour
Lily King, Writers & Lovers
Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man
Mary Cadogan, Mary Carries On
Jo Bloom, Ridley Road
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Clare Mallory, Leith and Friends
Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories
Maud Cairnes, Strange Journey
Leslie Brody, Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford
Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance

COMING UP

Rumaan Alam, Entitlement - started 02.01.25
Lyndall Gordon, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter - started 02.01.25
Fredrik Backman, The Answer is No - short story

READING 2025, PART 1

01. 01.01.25 Jenny Colgan, The Christmas Book Hunt - novella 4.1 reviewed 01.01.25 >6 elkiedee:
02. 03.01.25 Abi Daré, And So I Roar 4.2
03. 04.01.25 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman 4.2 reviewed 04.02.25 >24 elkiedee:
04. 08.01.25 Elly Griffiths, The Frozen People 4.2
05. 09.01.25 Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters 4.0
06. 10.01.25 Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour 3.8
07. 13.01.25 Georgina Clarke, The Corpse Played Dead 4.1
08. 14.01.25 Isabella Hammad, The Parisian 4.2
09. 15.01.25 Lily King, Writers & Lovers 4.2
10. 17.01.25 Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man 4.2
11. 17.01.25 Mary Cadogan, Mary Carries On 4.2
12. 23.01.25 Fredrik Backman, The Answer is No 4.0
13. 25.01.25 Joseph O'Connor, The Ghosts of Rome 4.1
14. 25.01.25 Amor Towles (Editor), The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Winners 4.4
15. 26.01.25 Jane Lovering, Happily Ever After 4.1

PART 2 >13 elkiedee:

2025 #1
Jenny Colgan, The Christmas Book Hunt - novella
Read 12.11.24 to 01.01.25, reviewed 02.01.25
124 pages

Mirren's beloved great-aunt Violet is dying of cancer, and she asks Mirren for help finding a book from her childhood - not just any copy of A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, but one with hand-drawn plates. Mirren rushes off to visit secondhand and antiquarian books in London and then travels to Wales and Scotland in search of the book. Along the way she meets Theo, a knowledgeable young bookseller, but is he a new friend and possible boyfriend or does he have other motives for chatting up Mirren?

This is a fun story with lots of descriptions of bookshops and a variety of characters who work in them, including travel round the country to visit famous bookselling areas, and this was more interesting than the rom-com part of the story.

It is an Amazon Original, billed as a short story but at just over 120 pages in 32 short chapters, I would describe it as a novella.

Rating: 3.8

Welcome back, Luci!

Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six, died on 30 December 2024 aged 80. Paddy Hill was one of six Irish men falsely accused of committing the IRA pub bombings in the 1970s and imprisoned for more than 16 years before they were found not to be the people responsible, cleared and released.

https://belfastmedia.com/tributes-paid-to-birmingham-six-member-paddy-hill-80

This is a song by the London-Irish band the Pogues about the case written and released while they were still in prison, written by Shane McGowan (who himself died in 2023)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlmOliCPMZ8

Hope 2025 brings you lots of great reads!

David Lodge, novelist, academic and literary theorist, has died on 1 January aged 89. I've read quite a lot of his novels - my favourites are the trilogy of campus novels set at the University of Rummidge (which might be based on the University of Rummidge: Small World, Changing Places and Nice Work. Last year, I read the first volume of his memoirs, Quite a Good Time to be Born, which had been on my library TBR for absolutely ages - it was really interesting but I did find the writing a little clunky - I think his memoirs (3 volumes) were among his last books, written in his 80s.

Happy New Year, Luci!

READING AS OF 5 JANUARY 2025, 10 am

JANUARY READS

Jenny Colgan, The Christmas Book Hunt - novella - finished 01.01.25
Abi Daré, And So I Roar - finished 03.01.25
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman - finished 04.01.25

CURRENT

Elly Griffiths, The Frozen People - finished 08.01.25
Georgina Clarke, The Corpse Played Dead - started 08.01.25
Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters - finished 09.01.25
Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour - finished 10.01.25
Isabella Hammad, The Parisian
Lily King, Writers & Lovers
Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man
Mary Cadogan, Mary Carries On
Jo Bloom, Ridley Road
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories
Clare Mallory, Leith and Friends
Maud Cairnes, Strange Journey
Rumaan Alam, Entitlement - started 02.01.25
Leslie Brody, Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford
Lyndall Gordon, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter - started 02.01.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance

COMING UP

Simon Brett, A Comedian Dies - started 07.01.25
Fredrik Backman, The Answer is No - short story - started 07.01.25
Helena Janeczek, The Girl With the Leica - started 08.01.25
Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red
Mary Costello, The River Capture

READING 2025, PART 2

PART 1 >5 elkiedee:

16. 26.01.25 Monica Felton, To All the Living 4.2 - reviewed 01.02.25 >25 elkiedee:
17. 27.01.25 Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories 4.0
18. 27.01.25 Jo Bloom, Ridley Road 4.0
19. 30.01.25 Rumaan Alam, Entitlement 4.0
20. 02.02.25 Lyndall Gordon, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter 4.2 - reviewed 06.06.25
21. 02.02.25 Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities 3.25
22. 02.02.25 Simon Brett, A Comedian Dies 3.6
23. 05.02.25 Helena Janeczek, The Girl with the Leica 4.1
24. 07.02.25 Lauren Connolly, PS: I Hate You 4.2
25. 07.02.25 Clare Mallory, Leith and Friends 4.1
26. 07.02.25 Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red 4.6
27. 08.02.25 Mary Costello, The River Capture 4.0 - reviewed 19.05.25 >109 elkiedee:
28. 08.02.25 Maud Cairnes, Strange Journey 4.0
29. 08.02.25 Elaine Garvey, The Wardrobe Department 4.2
30. 10.02.25 Leslie Brody, Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford 4.7

PART 3: >28 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 12 JANUARY 2025, 10 am

I've read a little more today but haven't yet finished or started anything new.

JANUARY READS

FINISHED

Jenny Colgan, The Christmas Book Hunt - novella - finished 01.01.25
Abi Daré, And So I Roar - finished 03.01.25
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman - finished 04.01.25
Elly Griffiths, The Frozen People - finished 08.01.25
Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters - finished 09.01.25
Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour - finished 10.01.25

CURRENT

Georgina Clarke, The Corpse Played Dead - finished 13.01.25
Joseph O'Connor, The Ghosts of Rome - started 13.01.25
Isabella Hammad, The Parisian - finished 14.01.25
Lily King, Writers & Lovers - finished 15.01.25
Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man - finished 17.01.25
Mary Cadogan, Mary Carries On - finished 17.01.25
Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories
Jo Bloom, Ridley Road
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Rumaan Alam, Entitlement - started 02.01.25
Clare Mallory, Leith and Friends
Lyndall Gordon, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter - started 02.01.25
Maud Cairnes, Strange Journey
Simon Brett, A Comedian Dies - started 07.01.25
Leslie Brody, Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford
Helena Janeczek, The Girl With the Leica - started 08.01.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance
Fredrik Backman, The Answer is No - short story - started 07.01.25

COMING UP

Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red - started 13.01.25
Mary Costello, The River Capture - started 13.01.25
Harriet Harman, A Woman's Work - started 18.01.25
Anne Marsella, The Baby of Belleville
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading
Amor Towles (editor), The Best Short Stories 2024
Monica Felton, To All the Living

6 books finished
1994 pages read

READING AS OF 19 JANUARY 2025, 10 am

JANUARY READS

FINISHED

Jenny Colgan, The Christmas Book Hunt - novella - finished 01.01.25
Abi Daré, And So I Roar - finished 03.01.25
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman - finished 04.01.25
Elly Griffiths, The Frozen People - finished 08.01.25
Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters - finished 09.01.25
Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour - finished 10.01.25
Georgina Clarke, The Corpse Played Dead - finished 13.01.25
Isabella Hammad, The Parisian - finished 14.01.25
Lily King, Writers & Lovers - finished 15.01.25
Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man - finished 17.01.25
Mary Cadogan, Mary Carries On - finished 17.01.25

CURRENT

Joseph O'Connor, The Ghosts of Rome - finished 25.01.25
Jane Lovering, Happily Ever After - finished 26.01.25
Lauren Connolly, PS: I Hate You - started 26.01.25
Monica Felton, To All the Living - started 18.01.25
Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories
Jo Bloom, Ridley Road
Rumaan Alam, Entitlement - started 02.01.25
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Lyndall Gordon, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter - started 02.01.25
Clare Mallory, Leith and Friends
Simon Brett, A Comedian Dies - started 07.01.25
Maud Cairnes, Strange Journey
Helena Janeczek, The Girl With the Leica - 08.01.25
Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red - started 13.01.25
Leslie Brody, Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford
Mary Costello, The River Capture - started 13.01.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance
Fredrik Backman, The Answer is No - short story - finished 23.01.25
Harriet Harman, A Woman's Work - started 18.01.25

COMING UP

Anne Marsella, The Baby of Belleville - started 24.01.25
Amor Towles (editor), The Best Short Stories 2024 - read 24.01.25 - 25.01.25
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading - started 24.01.25

NEXT

Zakiya Dalila Harris, His Happy Place
Kit de Waal, Supporting Cast

11 books finished
3379 pages read

READING AS OF 26 JANUARY 2025, 3 pm

JANUARY READS

FINISHED

Jenny Colgan, The Christmas Book Hunt - novella - finished 01.01.25
Abi Daré, And So I Roar - finished 03.01.25
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman - finished 04.01.25
Elly Griffiths, The Frozen People - finished 08.01.25
Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters - finished 09.01.25
Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour - finished 10.01.25
Georgina Clarke, The Corpse Played Dead - finished 13.01.25
Isabella Hammad, The Parisian - finished 14.01.25
Lily King, Writers & Lovers - finished 15.01.25
Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man - finished 17.01.25
Mary Cadogan, Mary Carries On - finished 17.01.25
Fredrik Backman, The Answer is No - short story - finished 23.01.25
Joseph O'Connor, The Ghosts of Rome - finished 25.01.25
Amor Towles (editor), The Best Short Stories 2024 - finished 25.01.25
Jane Lovering, Happily Ever After - finished 26.01.25

CURRENT

Lauren Connolly, PS: I Hate You - started 26.01.25
Monica Felton, To All the Living - finished 26.01.25
Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories - finished 27.01.25
Jo Bloom, Ridley Road - finished 27.01.25
Rumaan Alam, Entitlement - finished 30.01.25
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities - finished 02.02.25
Lyndall Gordon, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter - finished 02.02.25
Clare Mallory, Leith and Friends
Simon Brett, A Comedian Dies - started 07.01.25
Maud Cairnes, Strange Journey
Helena Janeczek, The Girl With the Leica - started 08.01.25
Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red - started 13.01.25
Leslie Brody, Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford
Mary Costello, The River Capture - started 13.01.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance
Harriet Harman, A Woman's Work - started 18.01.25
Anne Marsella, The Baby of Belleville - started 24.01.25
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading - started 24.01.25

NEXT

Zakiya Dalila Harris, His Happy Place - started 31.01.25
Kit de Waal, Supporting Cast - started 31.01.25
Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser - started 01.02.25
Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art - started 31.01.25

15 books finished
5186 pages read

Sad to hear that Marianne Faithfull has died at 78. I went to see her at the Roundhouse in Camden in 2016, as I was worried that I wouldn't get another chance. Although she lived almost 9 years after that, and survived the pandemic, I'm not sure that she toured again on the same scale.

Broken English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHrsv0NVa6k

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jan/30/marianne-faithfull-towering-arti...

>17 elkiedee: She certainly had a presence, Luci. Like her long time love, I am not sure about her signing ability but she made a huge impact as one of the faces of the Swinging Sixties.

>18 PaulCranswick: I find it really sad when a woman with a performance and recording career of more than sixty years, a large and varied body of work, with lots of development and change, is reduced to the description of Sixties icon.

>19 elkiedee: I don't think that it is a reduction to say that she made a huge impact. David Bailey, Terence Stamp, Mary Quant and others are "Sixties Icons" as you put it, but that in no way reduces them or the things that they achieved. I have half a dozen of her CDs in my collection and, though I don't think she was a great singer, as I said above she had a presence and a way of making a song her own.
My favourite album of hers is "Strange Weather" from 1987.

But for some people Marianne Faithfull is only remembered as the Sixties icon, the beautiful teenage singer who Andrew Loog Oldham wanted to market as a pop star, the girlfriend, then the addict. And she wrote or cowrote songs too (including Broken English) as well as recording and interpreting a huge variety of work.

For some reason I didn't hear Strange Weather or know it existed until 1991, when a friend from university gave me it for my birthday. I'm wondering why I believed it was a new release at that time and why I'd not come across it in record shops before that (1987 was the year I took my A levels and started university).

January 2025: 6186 pages, 19 books, 4 reviews >3 elkiedee:

PAGES READ IN FEBRUARY 2025

01.02.25: 247
02.02.25: 238
03.02.25: 177
04.02.25: 254
05.02.25: 110
06.02.25: 216
07.02.25: 407
08.02.25: 312
09.02.25: 179
10.02.25: 251
11.02.25: 284
12.02.25: 72
13.02.25: 196
14.02.25: 249
15.02.25: 454
16.02.25: 236
17.02.25: 221
18.02.25: 174
19.02.25: 194
20.02.25: 300
21.02.25: 129
22.02.25: 235
23.02.25: 349
24.02.25: 245
25.02.25: 154
26.02.25: 208
27.02.25: 153
28.02.25: 258

February: 6,504 pages, 22 books, 3 reviews
2025: 12,690 pages, 41 books, 7 reviews

March 2025: >38 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 2 FEBRUARY 2025, 5 pm

JANUARY READS

Jenny Colgan, The Christmas Book Hunt - novella - finished and reviewed 01.01.25
Abi Daré, And So I Roar - finished 03.01.25
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman - finished 04.01.25, reviewed 05.02.25
Elly Griffiths, The Frozen People - finished 08.01.25
Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters - finished 09.01.25
Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour - finished 10.01.25
Georgina Clarke, The Corpse Played Dead - finished 13.01.25
Isabella Hammad, The Parisian - finished 14.01.25
Lily King, Writers & Lovers - finished 15.01.25
Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man - finished 17.01.25
Mary Cadogan, Mary Carries On - finished 17.01.25
Fredrik Backman, The Answer is No - short story - finished 23.01.25
Joseph O'Connor, The Ghosts of Rome - finished 25.01.25
Amor Towles (editor), The Best Short Stories 2024 - finished 25.01.25
Jane Lovering, Happily Ever After - finished 26.01.25
Monica Felton, To All the Living - finished 26.01.25, reviewed 31.01.25
Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories - finished 27.01.25
Jo Bloom, Ridley Road - finished 27.01.25
Rumaan Alam, Entitlement - finished 30.01.25

FEBRUARY READS

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities - finished 02.02.25
Lyndall Gordon, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter - finished 02.02.25

CURRENT

Lauren Connolly, PS: I Hate You - finished 07.02.25
Elaine Garvey, The Wardrobe Department - finished 08.02.25
Phoebe MacLeod, Hook, Line and Single - started 08.02.25
Simon Brett, A Comedian Dies - finished 02.02.25
Helena Janeczek, The Girl With the Leica - finished 05.02.25
Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red - finished 07.02.25
Clare Mallory, Leith and Friends - finished 07.02.25
Mary Costello, The River Capture - finished 08.02.25
Maud Cairnes, Strange Journey - finished 08.02.25
Leslie Brody, Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford
Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance
Harriet Harman, A Woman's Work - started 18.01.25
Zakiya Dalila Harris, His Happy Place - started 31.01.25
Kit de Waal, Supporting Cast - started 31.01.25
Anne Marsella, The Baby of Belleville - started 24.01.25
Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art - started 31.01.25
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading - started 24.01.25
Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser - started 01.02.25

NEXT

Molly McCloskey, Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother - started 06.02.25
Jeannette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping - started 06.02.25
Sara Paretsky, Overboard - started 06.02.25
Roisin Maguire, Night Swimmers - started 06.02.25
Willy Vlautin, The Horse
Robin Stevens, A Spoonful of Murder
Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down
Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting
Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983

21 books finished
6633 pages read
5 reviews

2025 #3
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
Read 24.11.24 to 04.01.25, reviewed 04.02.25

I had a memory of reading and enjoying this novel many years ago, perhaps in my teens, but discovered that I remembered very little about it.

I was expecting a straightforward historical novel, a story set entirely in a very different time from when it was it was written. Actually this is a very 20th century novel, with a 1960s author-narrator telling a story set in 1867. He continually interrupts his story to comment on and discuss his characters, their actions, attitudes and values, and those of the Victorian society they live in.

Charles is an educated gentleman, preparing to meet social expectations of a man of his class, planning to marry Ernestina, daughter of a wealthy businessman. He becomes curious about Sarah, a servant and former governess with a mysterious but probably scandalous back story, nicknamed "the French lieutenant's woman", and a habit of walking along the cliffs in Lyme Regis, looking out to sea.

I am quite intrigued that Fowles claimed to be a feminist and that it was debated as a feminist novel. There is a lot for feminists to discuss here but all female characters (and nearly all characters) are seen through the eyes of the author-narrator whose story is in turn filtered through the view of his gentleman protagonist Charles.

The novel is packed with Victorian cultural and literary references, including Charles Darwin (whose theories of evolution were considered quite shocking in his time), Thomas Hardy, William Thackeray, Matthew Arnold and Gabriel Dante Rossetti.

This is not quite the Victorian love story that I expected, but something enjoyably odd and thought provoking, with many digressions and rabbit holes, including alternative storylines presented by the narrator.

A film was made of this novel in 1981, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, and my Vintage Classics copy includes the writer's afterword on the difficulties of adaptation.

2025 #16
Monica Felton, To All the Living
Read 17.01.25 to 26.01.25, reviewed 31.01.25

This novel is about women and men working in a wartime munitions factory, Blimpton. It is set in 1941, a difficult and frightening time during WWWII, the year of the London Blitz, and a time when Germany has occupied much of Europe and is invading the Soviet Union. It was first published in 1945, at or just after the end of the war, and is one of a number of books from that time reissued in the Imperial War Museum's Wartime Classics series.

This is a story of friendships and feuds and of workplace politics, focussing on a few characters, some working on the factory floor, others in management and personnel type roles. There is a lot of dialogue - meetings, formal and informal discussions, chance encounters, social events, workplace problems, references to politicians. Managers and Labour Officers are struggling to recruit and retain enough workers to meet production targets crucial to the war effort, but suggestions on finding more people, on accommodation and transport and improving working and living conditions for the women workers, are frequently dismissed or blocked.

Monica Felton was a very politically engaged writer, a socialist and feminist with experience of working in the war effort and civil service and in Parliament during the war, and her political sympathies are reflected here, sometimes with humour, sometimes through frustration, sadness and even a workplace tragedy. Through the discussions, she often shows how management views and decisions are all too often informed by sexism and class prejudice, while some of the more sympathetic characters express concern about women's working and living conditions, suggest that improvements here would help the factory running and production.

To All the Living is quite slow paced but I really came to care about the more sympathetic characters, and I was really interested in the social history aspects of the novel.

An in memoriam piece on someone I knew slightly.

Charlotte Raven has died.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jan/24/charlotte-raven-obituary

I feel quite sad about this - she was about the same age as me though she started at Manchester University a year or two later, and my memory of the student union elections in that year is slightly different from what is reported here. We spent a lot of time around the same table in the student union coffee bar though we didn't have that much to say to each other directly despite apparently both being interested in socialism, feminism and literature. I think she was studying English and American Literature, and I did courses in both as part of my degree. I also really disliked what I saw of Derek Draper. And I was hardly cool or stylish enough for Charlotte. Still, this is an interesting and thoughtful piece by her friend.

Both Derek Draper and Charlotte Raven died shockingly young and in very difficult circumstances. Derek almost died of COVID in spring 2020, and never really recovered, dying in January 2024. Charlotte was told that she had Huntingdon's disease - a hereditary neurological condition - in 2005 (in her mid 30s) and became seriously ill within less than 10 years, I think.

I read her memoir, Patient 1: Forgetting and Finding Myself, in 2022. She wrote about her diagnosis and the disease's increasingly difficult impact on her life, with an awkward, painful honesty. She also wrote about joining an experimental trial for treatment, and it is sad to read that this wasn't very successful, either for Charlotte herself or for finding something out that might help others with Huntingdon's disease.

READING AS OF 9 FEBRUARY 2025, 11 am

JANUARY READS

Jenny Colgan, The Christmas Book Hunt - novella - finished and reviewed 01.01.25
Abi Daré, And So I Roar - finished 03.01.25
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman - finished 04.01.25, reviewed 05.02.25
Elly Griffiths, The Frozen People - finished 08.01.25
Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters - finished 09.01.25
Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour - finished 10.01.25
Georgina Clarke, The Corpse Played Dead - finished 13.01.25
Isabella Hammad, The Parisian - finished 14.01.25
Lily King, Writers & Lovers - finished 15.01.25
Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man - finished 17.01.25
Mary Cadogan, Mary Carries On - finished 17.01.25
Fredrik Backman, The Answer is No - short story - finished 23.01.25
Joseph O'Connor, The Ghosts of Rome - finished 25.01.25
Amor Towles (editor), The Best Short Stories 2024 - finished 25.01.25
Jane Lovering, Happily Ever After - finished 26.01.25
Monica Felton, To All the Living - finished 26.01.25, reviewed 31.01.25
Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories - finished 27.01.25
Jo Bloom, Ridley Road - finished 27.01.25
Rumaan Alam, Entitlement - finished 30.01.25

FEBRUARY READS

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities - finished 02.02.25
Lyndall Gordon, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter - finished 02.02.25
Simon Brett, A Comedian Dies - finished 02.02.25
Helena Janeczek, The Girl With the Leica - finished 05.02.25
Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red - finished 07.02.25
Clare Mallory, Leith and Friends - finished 07.02.25
Lauren Connolly, PS: I Hate You - finished 07.02.25
Elaine Garvey, The Wardrobe Department - finished 08.02.25
Mary Costello, The River Capture - finished 08.02.25
Maud Cairnes, Strange Journey - finished 08.02.25

CURRENT

Phoebe MacLeod, Hook, Line and Single - finished 15.02.25
Emma Donoghue, The Paris Express - started 15.02.25
Leslie Brody, Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford - finished 10.02.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance
Zakiya Dalila Harris, His Happy Place - finished 10.02.25
Kit de Waal, Supporting Cast - finished 14.02.25
Harriet Harman, A Woman's Work - started 18.01.25
Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art - started 31.01.25
Anne Marsella, The Baby of Belleville - started 24.01.25
Molly McCloskey, Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother - started 06.02.25
Jeannette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping - started 06.02.25
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading - started 24.01.25
Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser - started 01.02.25
Roisin Maguire, Night Swimmers - started 06.02.25
Sara Paretsky, Overboard - started 06.02.25

NEXT

Willy Vlautin, The Horse - started 12.02.25
Robin Stevens, A Spoonful of Murder - started 12.02.25
Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down - started 13.02.25
Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 - started 13.02.25
Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting - started 13.02.25
John McGahern, Amongst Women - started 13.02.25
Jane Green, When We Were Friends - story - started 13.02.25

10 books finished in February
29 books finished in 2025
2031 pages read in February
8217 pages read in 2025
2 reviews in February
6 reviews in 2025

READING 2025, PART 3

PART 1 >5 elkiedee:
PART 2 >13 elkiedee:

31. 10.02.25 Zakiya Dalila Harris, His Happy Place - story 3.4
32. 14.02.25 Kit de Waal, Supporting Cast 3.5
33. 15.02.25 Phoebe MacLeod, Hook, Line and Single 4.1
34. 19.02.25 Emma Donoghue, The Paris Express 4.2
35. 20.02.25 Harriet Harman, A Woman's Work 3.7
36. 21.02.25 Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance 4.0
37. 23.02.25 Portia Macintosh, Wish You Weren't Here 4.1
38. 24.02.25 Molly McCloskey, Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother 4.0 - reviewed 21.07.25
39. 25.02.25 Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping 4.2
40. 28.02.25 Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art 4.7 - Reviewed 07.04.25 >81 elkiedee:
41. 28.02.25 Anne Marsella, The Baby of Belleville 3.0
42. 03.03.25 Willy Vlautin, The Horse 4.6
43. 04.03.25 Roisin Maguire, Night Swimmers 4.6
44. 04.03.25 Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair 4.2
45. 04.03.25 Kelly Oliver, The Case of the Christie Conspiracy 3.7

PART 4 >45 elkiedee:

The Women's Prize for Non-Fiction 2025 longlist has been announced today (the fiction longlist comes out on 4 March)

Longlisted books are:

Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Eleanor Barraclough - library ebook loan

The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV by Helen Castor

A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry - Kindle TBR - SHORTLIST

The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke - Kindle TBR - SHORTLIST

Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton - Kindle TBR - SHORTLIST

Ootlin by Jenni Fagan - library ebook loan/Kindle TBR

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller

Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka by Clare Mulley - library hardback, read - SHORTLIST

By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle - library ebook loan

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux

What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean by Helen Scales - SHORTLIST

The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale - Kindle TBR

Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men by Harriet Wistrich - Kindle TBR

Tracker by Alexis Wright - Kindle TBR

Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang - Library hardback, read April 2025 - SHORTLIST

Quite a few of these seem to be available as library ebooks but I think I need to catch up with some existing library non fiction, particularly two rather overdue books, first before I put holds on them. One library has lots of copies of Tracker available as an ebook.

I've borrowed a few from the longlist as library ebooks and two as hardbacks, which happen to be on the shortlist. I expect I'll have to return and borrow some again. I was also looking at last year's longlist - I own about half but I've still only read one - I think Doppelganger happened to be the winner but I'd heard about the book and was interested before the Women's Prize lists came out.

26.03.25: The shortlist is out - see >65 elkiedee:

I've bought two of these so far - presumably they were Kindle deals, and I'd forgotten about both. I'm quite surprised that only one other person has previously catalogued Sister in Law by campaigning lawyer Harriet Wistrich - apparently I bought it in June - and I only realised that I have a copy when I looked it up to add it to my wishlist. I also have Neneh Cherry's memoir.

I added Private Revolutions to my wishlist the other day - I hadn't realised that the author is now an MP.

Otherwise, I'm particularly interested in the memoirs, Agent Zo, the viking book and the books by Rachel Clarke and Kate Summerscale.

Looking up The Peepshow by Kate Summerscale, it's on offer at £1.99 (Kindle) so have just bought it.

READING AS OF 16 FEBRUARY 2025, 11.35 am

FEBRUARY READS

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities - finished 02.02.25
Lyndall Gordon, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter - finished 02.02.25
Simon Brett, A Comedian Dies - finished 02.02.25
Helena Janeczek, The Girl With the Leica - finished 05.02.25
Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red - finished 07.02.25
Clare Mallory, Leith and Friends - finished 07.02.25
Lauren Connolly, PS: I Hate You - finished 07.02.25
Elaine Garvey, The Wardrobe Department - finished 08.02.25
Mary Costello, The River Capture - finished 08.02.25
Maud Cairnes, Strange Journey - finished 08.02.25
Leslie Brody, Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford - finished 10.02.25
Zakiya Dalila Harris, His Happy Place - finished 10.02.25
Kit de Waal, Supporting Cast - finished 14.02.25
Phoebe MacLeod, Hook, Line and Single - finished 15.02.25

CURRENT

Kelly Oliver, The Case of the Christie Conspiracy - started 23.02.25
Emma Donoghue, The Paris Express - finished 19.02.25
Portia Macintosh, Wish You Weren't Here - finished 23.02.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance - finished 21.02.25
Harriet Harman, A Woman's Work - finished 20.02.25
Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art - started 31.01.25
Molly McCloskey, Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother - started 06.02.25
Jeannette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping - started 06.02.25
Anne Marsella, The Baby of Belleville - started 24.01.25
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading - started 24.01.25
Roisin Maguire, Night Swimmers - started 06.02.25
Willy Vlautin, The Horse - started 12.02.25
Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser - started 01.02.25
Sara Paretsky, Overboard - started 06.02.25
Robin Stevens, A Spoonful of Murder - started 12.02.25
Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 - started 13.02.25
Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down - started 13.02.25
Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting - started 13.02.25
John McGahern, Amongst Women - started 13.02.25
Jane Green, When We Were Friends - story - started 13.02.25

NEXT

Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 - started 19.02.25
Tessa Hadley, The Party
Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science

14 books finished in February
33 books finished in 2025
3722 pages read in February
9908 pages read in 2025
2 reviews in February
6 reviews in 2025

Sad to read that Rick Buckler of The Jam died yesterday, aged 69.

https://louderthanwar.com/rick-buckler-has-passed-away-aged-69/#google_vignette

From Susan (susanj67)

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction announced its 2025 longlist today, and it is here: https://www.walterscottprize.co.uk/the-2025-prize/the-2025-longlist/

The books are:

The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry - Kindle TBR
The Catchers by Xan Brooks - Netgalley TBR
Mother Naked by Glen James Brown
Clear by Carys Davies - Netgalley/library ebook TBR
The Mare by Angharad Hampshire
The Book of Days by Francesca Kay - library TBR
The First Friend by Malcolm Knox
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon - Kindle TBR
A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh - Netgalley TBR
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller - Kindle TBR
Munichs by David Peace
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden - Kindle TBR

Two of them have come up as Kindle daily deals this month

>32 elkiedee: Oh, I *am* sad ... I never got to see them, but The Jam's song "Start" totally changed my musical life in 1979-1980, turning me onto music in a way that really hadn't happened before. Still love the lyrics of so many of their songs ... thanks for sharing the news.

READING AS OF 23 FEBRUARY 2025, 3.30 PM

FEBRUARY READS

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities - finished 02.02.25
Lyndall Gordon, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter - finished 02.02.25
Simon Brett, A Comedian Dies - finished 02.02.25
Helena Janeczek, The Girl With the Leica - finished 05.02.25
Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red - finished 07.02.25
Clare Mallory, Leith and Friends - finished 07.02.25
Lauren Connolly, PS: I Hate You - finished 07.02.25
Elaine Garvey, The Wardrobe Department - finished 08.02.25
Mary Costello, The River Capture - finished 08.02.25
Maud Cairnes, Strange Journey - finished 08.02.25
Leslie Brody, Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford - finished 10.02.25
Zakiya Dalila Harris, His Happy Place - finished 10.02.25
Kit de Waal, Supporting Cast - finished 14.02.25
Phoebe MacLeod, Hook, Line and Single - finished 15.02.25
Emma Donoghue, The Paris Express - finished 19.02.25
Harriet Harman, A Woman's Work - finished 20.02.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance - finished 21.02.25
Portia Macintosh, Wish You Weren't Here - finished 23.02.25

CURRENT

Kelly Oliver, The Case of the Christie Conspiracy - started 23.02.25
Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art - finished 28.02.25
Molly McCloskey, Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother - finished 24.02.25
Jeannette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping - finished 25.02.25
Anne Marsella, The Baby of Belleville - finished 28.02.25
Roisin Maguire, Night Swimmers - started 06.02.25
Willy Vlautin, The Horse - started 12.02.25
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading - started 24.01.25
Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser - started 01.02.25
Sara Paretsky, Overboard - started 06.02.25
Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 - started 13.02.25
Robin Stevens, A Spoonful of Murder - started 12.02.25
Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down - started 13.02.25
Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting - started 13.02.25
Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 - started 19.02.25
John McGahern, Amongst Women - started 13.02.25
Jane Green, When We Were Friends - story - started 13.02.25

NEXT

Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science - started 27.02.25
Tessa Hadley, The Party - started 28.02.25
A L Kennedy, On Writing - started 28.02.25
Martin Edwards, Gallows Court
Jenny Colgan, Rules
Helen Simonson, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club

18 books finished in February
37 books finished in 2025
5,386 pages read in February
11,572 pages read in 2025
3 reviews in February
7 reviews in 2025

Sad to see that Rick Buckler has died. I adored the Jam back in the day and still follow and gobble up everything Paul Weller releases, but his ending of the group so abruptly was necessary for him but a little harsh on Bruce and Rick.

I haven't got anything on the Women's Prize non-fiction longlist but have read (and liked) Glorious Exploits from the Walter Scott list. I also have The Safe Keep and Clear about to be added to my collection when Hani returns to Malaysia on 4 March.

Sad to learn today that Jennifer Johnston died on 25 February, aged 95:

link to a blog post on Reading Matters:

https://readingmattersblog.com/2025/02/28/vale-jennifer-johnston/

From the English Guardian newspaper: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/26/jennifer-johnston-celebrated-irish...

January 2025: 6,186 pages, 19 books, 4 reviews
>3 elkiedee:
February 2025: 6,504 pages, 22 books, 3 reviews
>22 elkiedee:
Beginning of March 12,690 pages, 41 books, 7 reviews

PAGES READ IN MARCH 2025

01.03.25: 220
02.03.25: 203
03.03.25: 216
04.03.25: 166
05.03.25: 162
06.03.25: 231
07.03.25: 247
08.03.25: 197
09.03.25: 283
10.03.25: 414
11.03.25: 254
12.03.25: 219
13.03.25: 254
14.03.25: 95
15.03.25: 198
16.03.25: 352
17.03.25: 258
18.03.25: 146
19.03.25: 229
20.03.25: 174
21.03.25: 144
22.03.25: 283
23.03.25: 236
24.03.25: 300
25.03.25: 180
26.03.25: 101
27.03.25: 68
28.03.25: 97
29.03.25: 113
30.03.25: 221
31.03.25: 269

March: 6,530 pages, 20 books, 1 review
2025: 19,220 pages, 61 books, 8 reviews

April 2025: >69 elkiedee:

>37 elkiedee: I hadn't appreciated her age Luci. I have a couple of her novels near the top of my tbr mountain.

READING AS OF 2 MARCH 2025, 3.30 PM

FEBRUARY READS

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities - finished 02.02.25
Lyndall Gordon, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter - finished 02.02.25
Simon Brett, A Comedian Dies - finished 02.02.25
Helena Janeczek, The Girl With the Leica - finished 05.02.25
Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red - finished 07.02.25
Clare Mallory, Leith and Friends - finished 07.02.25
Lauren Connolly, PS: I Hate You - finished 07.02.25
Elaine Garvey, The Wardrobe Department - finished 08.02.25
Mary Costello, The River Capture - finished 08.02.25
Maud Cairnes, Strange Journey - finished 08.02.25
Leslie Brody, Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford - finished 10.02.25
Zakiya Dalila Harris, His Happy Place - finished 10.02.25
Kit de Waal, Supporting Cast - finished 14.02.25
Phoebe MacLeod, Hook, Line and Single - finished 15.02.25
Emma Donoghue, The Paris Express - finished 19.02.25
Harriet Harman, A Woman's Work - finished 20.02.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance - finished 21.02.25
Portia Macintosh, Wish You Weren't Here - finished 23.02.25
Molly McCloskey, Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother - finished 24.02.25
Jeannette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping - finished 25.02.25
Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art - finished 28.02.25
Anne Marsella, The Baby of Belleville - finished 28.02.25

CURRENT

Anthony Quinn, The Mouthless Dead - started 04.03.25
Roisin Maguire, Night Swimmers - finished 04.03.25
Willy Vlautin, The Horse - finished 03.03.25
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading - finished 04.03.25
Kelly Oliver, The Case of the Christie Conspiracy - finished 04.03.25
Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser - finished 08.03.25
Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 - finished 08.03.25
Sara Paretsky, Overboard - started 06.02.25
Robin Stevens, A Spoonful of Murder - started 12.02.25
Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down - started 13.02.25
Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 - started 19.02.25
Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting - started 13.02.25
John McGahern, Amongst Women - started 13.02.25
Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science - started 27.02.25
Tessa Hadley, The Party - started 28.02.25
A L Kennedy, On Writing - started 28.02.25
Jane Green, When We Were Friends - story - started 13.02.25

NEXT

Martin Edwards, Gallows Court - started 03.03.25
Helen Simonson, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club - started 04.03.25
Jenny Colgan, Rules - started 04.03.25
Jami Attenberg, A Reason to See You Again - started 08.03.25
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction - started 09.03.25
Roisin O'Donnell, Nesting - started 09.03.25
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count - started 09.03.25
Anne Tyler, Three Days in June - started 09.03.25
Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence - started 09.03.25
Ambrose Parry, The Art of Dying

22 books finished in February
41 books finished in 2025

6,504 pages read in February
371 pages read in March
13,061 pages read in 2025

3 reviews in February
7 reviews in 2025

On 24 February, the Authors’ Club announced the longlist for the annual Best First Novel Award, now in its 71st year.

The longlisted books are as follows:

Colin Barrett, Wild Houses (Jonathan Cape) - Kindle TBR

Mark Bowles, All My Precious Madness (Galley Beggar Press)

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (Sceptre) - Kindle TBR

Emily Howes, The Painter’s Daughters (Phoenix) - Kindle TBR

Tom Lamont, Going Home (Sceptre) - Kindle TBR

Ferdia Lennon, Glorious Exploits (Fig Tree) - Kindle TBR

Phoebe McIntosh, Dominoes (Chatto & Windus) - Kindle TBR

Tom Newlands, Only Here, Only Now (Phoenix) - Kindle TBR

Scott Preston, The Borrowed Hills (John Murray) - Kindle TBR

Varaidzo, Manny and the Baby (Scribe) - Library hardback TBR

Leo Vardiashvili, Hard by a Great Forest (Bloomsbury)

Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square (Swift Press) - Library ebook/hardback loan - currently reading

Quite surprised to find out that I've actually bought 7 of these in Kindle deals last year, as well as one this month.

ETA: Spotted Manny and the Baby at the library this afternoon - and I wasn't even looking for it.

Hello Luci, glad to have found you eventually! We are the same age, so I suspect will have many similar cultural references. I was really sad to hear of Rick Buckler's death. The Jam were always just 'there' in the background to growing up in the late 70s/early 80s.

The Women's Prize for Fiction 2025 longlist is out

The full list in alphabetical order by author surname is:

Good Girl by Aria Aber (published by Bloomsbury) - Library hardback, read, Kindle purchase

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (published by Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton, Hachette) - Kindle TBR

Somewhere Else by Jenni Daiches (published by Scotland Street Press)

Amma by Saraid de Silva (published by Weatherglass Books)

Crooked Seeds by Karen Jennings (published by Holland House Books)

All Fours by Miranda July (published by Canongate Books) - Kindle TBR

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (published by Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury) - Library hardback, read, Kindle purchase

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji (published by 4th Estate, HarperCollins) - Kindle TBR

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (published by 4th Estate, HarperCollins) - READ (library)

Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell (published by Scribner, Simon & Schuster) - READ (Kindle)

A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike (published by Fig Tree, Penguin General, Penguin Random House) - Kindle TBR

Birding by Rose Ruane (published by Corsair, Little, Brown Book Group, Hachette) - Kindle TBR

The Artist by Lucy Steeds (published by John Murray, John Murray Press, Hachette) - Kindle TBR

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (published by Viking, Penguin General, Penguin Random House) - Kindle TBR

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (published by Viking, Penguin General, Penguin Random House) - Kindle TBR

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis (published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Publishing Group, Hachette) - Library hardback, read, Kindle purchase

>41 elkiedee: I hadn't seen that one, Luci. Read one and own another two.

>43 elkiedee: I have two of these and am currently reading Nesting.

READING 2025, PART 4

PART 1 >5 elkiedee:
PART 2 >13 elkiedee:
PART 3 >28 elkiedee:

46. 08.03.25 Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser 4.5
47. 08.03.25 Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike 4.7 - reviewed 16.07.25
48. 09.03.25 Anthony Quinn, The Mouthless Dead 3.9
49. 10.03.25 Sara Paretsky, Overboard 4.6
50. 13.03.25 Jane Green, When We Were Friends - story 4.0
51. 13.03.25 Robin Stevens, A Spoonful of Murder 4.2
52. 14.03.25 Lauren Westwood, The House of Light and Shadows 4.3
53. 15.03.25 Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down 4.2
54. 16.03.25 Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science 4.3
55. 16.03.25 Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting 4.2
56. 17.03.25 A L Kennedy, On Writing 4.1 - reviewed 13.05.25 >110 elkiedee:
57. 22.03.25 Karen Russell, The Antidote 4.5
58. 23.03.25 Martin Edwards, Gallows Court 4.1
59. 24.03.25 John McGahern, Amongst Women 4.3
60. 31.03.25 Georgina Clarke, Viper in the Nest 4.2

PART 5 >70 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 9 MARCH 2025, 6.30 PM

FINISHED IN MARCH

Roisin Maguire, Night Swimmers - finished 04.03.25
Willy Vlautin, The Horse - finished 03.03.25
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading - finished 04.03.25
Kelly Oliver, The Case of the Christie Conspiracy - finished 04.03.25
Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser - finished 08.03.25
Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 - finished 08.03.25

CURRENT

Anthony Quinn, The Mouthless Dead - finished 09.03.25
Sara Paretsky, Overboard - finished 10.03.25
Jane Green, When We Were Friends - story - finished 13.03.25
Robin Stevens, A Spoonful of Murder - finished 13.03.25
Lauren Westwood, The House of Light and Shadows - finished 14.03.25
Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down - finished 15.03.25
Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science - finished 16.03.25
Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting - finished 16.03.25

Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 - started 19.02.25 - paused 10.03.25

Karen Russell, The Antidote - started 14.03.25

John McGahern, Amongst Women - started 13.02.25
Tessa Hadley, The Party - started 28.02.25
A L Kennedy, On Writing - started 28.02.25
Martin Edwards, Gallows Court - started 03.03.25
Helen Simonson, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club - started 04.03.25
Jenny Colgan, Rules - started 04.03.25
Jami Attenberg, A Reason to See You Again - started 08.03.25
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction - started 09.03.25
Roisin O'Donnell, Nesting - started 09.03.25
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count - started 09.03.25
Anne Tyler, Three Days in June - started 09.03.25
Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence - started 09.03.25

* (paused 10.03.25 - library ebook loan expired and I have to wait for another turn)

NEXT

Leonora Brito, Dat's Love - started 13.03.25
Ambrose Parry, The Art of Dying - started 13.03.25
Cathy Cassidy, Dizzy - started 13.03.25
Lee Child, Eleven Numbers - short story
Rebecca Mascull, The Wild Air
Annie Gray, The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile
Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island

7 books finished in March
48 books finished in 2025

1,840 pages read in March
14,530 pages read in 2025

7 reviews in 2025

Your currently reading list (at least in size) looks familiar. I do like the Ambrose Parry books, hoping there will be a new one soon.

I admire you tracking your start dates, I've only just started using the newly rejigged "finished date" feature, liking it so far.

I like the way start and finish dates now show up more clearly on the work page.

2025 #4
Elly Griffiths, The Frozen People
Read 29.12.24 to 08.01.25, reviewed 14.03.25

Detective Ali Dawson works in the Department of Logistics, a police unit working on cold cases, crimes so old that they are almost "frozen", jokes a colleague. The dull name hides an exciting secret - they are pioneering the use of time travel in their work. Her previous cases have been 20th century, but now Ali is told she is to travel back 173 years to 1850, to investigate a suspected murderer. There are complications: this will be Ali's first visit to the 19th century. Can she expect to get there and return safely? Also, the unit has been asked to look into the case by a Conservative government minister, Isaac Templeton, whose great-grandfather Cain was a prime suspect, though there wasn't enough evidence to convict him. Isaac Templeton is the justice minister, and Ali's son Finn works in his office in Parliament.

I was a bit nervous about what to expect. I've devoured Elly Griffiths' previous novels, contemporary and historical, and the premise of this one requires a certain amount of setting up by the writer, and then a suspension of disbelief.

I did really enjoy it though. I liked the contrast of Ali's contemporary life - a middle aged woman with a son aged 22, who claims not be a Tory although he's working for one - with that she must fit in to in Victorian London. The contrasts and the problems of day to day life are described with a wry humour, but she is in a genuinely scary situation and the tension builds up. It is hard to explain the plot but, as with Elly Griffiths' other books, I really came to care about Ali Dawson, and am looking forward to the next book in this series.

I received a review ecopy of this book via Netgalley, and hope to buy a Kindle ebook version in due course, but am really drawn to the UK hardback cover design (credits Ghost Design/Shutterstock) showing a photograph of Parliament, Westminster Bridge and the Thames, appropriate for a novel set in London, present and past.

>26 elkiedee: Following on from my post about Charlotte Raven, who died earlier this year, I'm going to post a review of her memoir which I wrote a couple of years ago.

2022 #120
Charlotte Raven, Patient 1: Forgetting and Finding Myself
Read 18.10.22 to 31.10.22 reviewed 05.11.22

This is a short confessional memoir by a woman living with a hereditary degenerative disease. It feels like a very personal book, sometimes uncomfortably so.

Charlotte Raven was in her mid 30s, married with a one year old daughter, when she was told that her father had been diagnosed with Huntington's disease, and that although this is a rare condition, it is hereditary, and that there is currently no real cure or medications which impact on the disease's severity/progress and slow the effects, After long consideration, Raven was tested and found that she was carrying the gene. Her father Morph only became really ill in his 60s, but apparently normal onset is between 35 and 55, and Raven has indeed been unwell since her 40s.

The memoir doesn't actually contain a lot of the gory details of the humiliations of the illness and care needs, as much as the impact on Raven's behaviour and relationships, especially those with her (ex) husband and two children (now teenagers). It does include an account of seeking a place on a medical trial, one with far more people hoping to be included than spaces. And there is an afterword from the doctor who got her on to that trial and faced further difficult truths with her.

I knew Charlotte Raven slightly at university and had followed her career as a media person, including stints working on a literary journal, as a controversialist Guardian columnist and an attempt to relaunch a feminist magazine, Spare Rib, with curiosity. This also included some weird scandals. Wisely, though, Charlotte Raven has chosen not really to write about these people, and I think that may be for complicated diplomatic reasons, but also, the focus is about how she learns to live with the illness and its impact on all aspects of her life and the people who are really close to her. She is quite harsh on her former self, her behaviour and demands on those close to her.

Note: Since I read and reviewed this book, the medical trial was unsuccessful and Charlotte's condition sadly continued to deteriorate. With assistance, she wrote an article about the frustrations of her situation in the Guardian last year. She died in January at 55.

READING AS OF 16 MARCH 2025, 11.30 PM

FINISHED IN MARCH

Roisin Maguire, Night Swimmers - finished 04.03.25
Willy Vlautin, The Horse - finished 03.03.25
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading - finished 04.03.25
Kelly Oliver, The Case of the Christie Conspiracy - finished 04.03.25
Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser - finished 08.03.25
Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 - finished 08.03.25
Anthony Quinn, The Mouthless Dead - finished 09.03.25
Sara Paretsky, Overboard - finished 10.03.25
Jane Green, When We Were Friends - story - finished 13.03.25
Robin Stevens, A Spoonful of Murder - finished 13.03.25
Lauren Westwood, The House of Light and Shadows - finished 14.03.25
Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down - finished 15.03.25
Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science - finished 16.03.25
Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting - finished 16.03.25

CURRENT

Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 - started 19.02.25 - paused 10.03.25 - waiting to borrow the library ebook again

Karen Russell, The Antidote - finished 22.03.25
Georgina Clarke, Viper in the Nest - started 22.03.25

A L Kennedy, On Writing - finished 17.03.25
Martin Edwards, Gallows Court - started 03.03.25
Helen Simonson, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club - started 04.03.25
John McGahern, Amongst Women - started 13.02.25
Jami Attenberg, A Reason to See You Again - started 08.03.25
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction - started 09.03.25
Tessa Hadley, The Party - started 28.02.25
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count - started 09.03.25
Anne Tyler, Three Days in June - started 09.03.25
Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence - started 09.03.25
Jenny Colgan, Rules - started 04.03.25
Leonora Brito, Dat's Love - started 13.03.25
Roisin O'Donnell, Nesting - started 09.03.25
Ambrose Parry, The Art of Dying - started 13.03.25
Cathy Cassidy, Dizzy - started 13.03.25

NEXT

Lee Child, Eleven Numbers - short story - started 19.03.25
Annie Gray, The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street - started 19.03.25
Rebecca Mascull, The Wild Air - started 20.03.25
Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island - started 20.03.25
Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face - started 20.03.25
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile - started 20.03.25
Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives - started 21.03.25
Yuan Yang, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China - started 21.03.25
Fern Riddell, Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. - started 22.03.25
Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast

14 books finished in March
55 books finished in 2025

3,691 pages read in March
16,381 pages read in 2025

1 review in March
8 reviews in 2025

The 3 Jhalak Prize longlists are out

1. Prose list (for adults)
2. Children's and YA books list
3. Poetry prize (new this year)

Prose Award Longlist

Allow Me to Introduce Myself, Onyi Nwabineli (Magpie) - Kindle TBR

Determination, Tawseef Khan (Footnote)

Dispersals, Jessica J. Lee (Hamish Hamilton)

Everest, Ashani Lewis (Dialogue)

Manny and the Baby, Varaidzo (Scribe) - Library hardback TBR

My Friends, Hisham Matar (Penguin Viking) - read 2024, Kindle purchase

Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman, N.S. Nuseibeh (Canongate)

The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre) - Kindle TBR

The Strangers, Ekow Eshun (Hamish Hamilton)

The Rest of You, Maame Blue (Verve) - Kindle TBR

The Thirty Before Thirty List, Tasneem Abdur-Rashid (Zaffre) - library ebook loan

Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain, Aniefiok Ekpoudom (Faber)

Jhalak Children's and YA Award Longlist 2025

​
Bringing Back Kay-Kay, Dev Kothari (Walker)

Flower Block, Lanisha Butterfield & Hoang Giang (Puffin)

It's Time to Hush and Say Good Night, Chitra Soundar & Sandhya Prabhat (Walker)

King of Nothing, Nathanael Lessore (Hot Key)

Little Dinosaurs Big Feelings, Swapna Haddow & Yiting Lee (Magic Cat)

Mayowa and the Sea of Words, Chibundu Onuzo (Bloomsbury)

Red Sky at Night, Poet's Delight, Alex Wharton & Ian Morris (Firefly Press)

The Boy to Beat the Gods, Ashley Thorpe (Usborne)

The Gift, Jii Park Trepkas & Nikos Park Trepkas (Tate Publishing)

The Hidden Story of Estie Noor, Nadine Aisha Jassat & Sandhya Prabhat (Orion)

The Thread That Connects Us, Ayaan Mohamud (Usborne)

These Stolen Lives, Sharada Keats (Scholastic)

Jhalak Poetry Prize Longlist 2025 - new award

Self-Portrait with Family, Amaan Hyder (Nine Arches Press)

Signs, Music, Raymond Antrobus (Picador Poetry)

The Tattoo Collector, Tim Tim Cheng (Nine Arches Press)

Top Doll, Karen McCarthy Woolf (Dialogue Books)

​Adam, Gboyega Odubanjo (Faber)

Agimat, Romalyn Ante (Chatto & Windus)

amuk, Khairani Barokka (Nine Arches Press)

Boiled Owls, Azad Ashim Sharma (Out-Spoken Press)

Collected Poems, Mimi Khalvati (Carcanet)

Emotional Support Horse, Claudine Toutoungi (Carcanet)

Fantasia, Nisha Ramayya (Granta Poetry)

Horse, Rushika Wick (Broken Sleep Books)

Some work to do on touchstones!

It looks like someone already added this year's to the award page, but previous years could use some work: https://www.librarything.com/award/3725/Jhalak-Prize

Thanks, yes, I added the lists to the award page, now I've worked out how to do it. I don't think I've got everything, as some of the titles are difficult to find.

Some really interesting books on the prose/ adult list (I'm sure on the others too, I've just not had a chance to look at them.) Thanks for posting.

More sad news: Alex Wheatle has died of prostate cancer. He posted on FB a few months ago that he was seriously ill.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/20/alex-wheatle-novelist-and-brixton-...

>52 elkiedee: Surprisingly I only have the Matar on the shelves.

>54 elkiedee: Less surprisingly, given the difficulty of getting new poetry collections here, I don't have any of these yet but I am keen to get hold of Raymond Antrobus' latest. I admired his first two enormously.

>59 PaulCranswick: I think most of these books aren't that well known, which is as it should be I think, apart from The Ministry of Time, a debut novel that has garnered an incredible number of listings etc. I think it's good for awards to bring attention to new authors, rather than always going to the already famous ones. I've only read My Friends and I'd picked up two in Kindle offers in 2024 - Ministry and The Rest of You. I spotted Manny and the Baby at a library the other day and brought it home.

>60 elkiedee: I don't know about "as it should be" although I suppose it is the point of the prize to shine a light on writers of Black and Asian descent in the UK.

A lot of talent there for sure.

>61 PaulCranswick: I don't just think that about awards like the Jhalak Prize or even the Women's Prize - I like to see attention being brought, not just to new writers but to those who aren't well known, and challenging us all to widen our reading horizons.

>62 elkiedee: I couldn't agree more, Luci.

READING AS OF 23 MARCH 2025, 5 PM

FINISHED IN MARCH

Roisin Maguire, Night Swimmers - finished 04.03.25
Willy Vlautin, The Horse - finished 03.03.25
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading - finished 04.03.25
Kelly Oliver, The Case of the Christie Conspiracy - finished 04.03.25
Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser - finished 08.03.25
Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 - finished 08.03.25
Anthony Quinn, The Mouthless Dead - finished 09.03.25
Sara Paretsky, Overboard - finished 10.03.25
Jane Green, When We Were Friends - story - finished 13.03.25
Robin Stevens, A Spoonful of Murder - finished 13.03.25
Lauren Westwood, The House of Light and Shadows - finished 14.03.25
Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down - finished 15.03.25
Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science - finished 16.03.25
Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting - finished 16.03.25
A L Kennedy, On Writing - finished 17.03.25
Karen Russell, The Antidote - finished 22.03.25

CURRENT

Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 - started 19.02.25 - paused 10.03.25 - waiting to borrow the library ebook again

Georgina Clarke, Viper in the Nest - started 22.03.25

Martin Edwards, Gallows Court - finished 23.03.25
Helen Simonson, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club - started 04.03.25
John McGahern, Amongst Women - started 13.02.25
Jami Attenberg, A Reason to See You Again - started 08.03.25
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction - started 09.03.25
Tessa Hadley, The Party - started 28.02.25
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count - started 09.03.25
Anne Tyler, Three Days in June - started 09.03.25
Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence - started 09.03.25
Jenny Colgan, Rules - started 04.03.25
Leonora Brito, Dat's Love - started 13.03.25
Roisin O'Donnell, Nesting - started 09.03.25
Ambrose Parry, The Art of Dying - started 13.03.25
Cathy Cassidy, Dizzy - started 13.03.25
Lee Child, Eleven Numbers - short story - started 19.03.25
Annie Gray, The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street - started 19.03.25
Rebecca Mascull, The Wild Air - started 20.03.25
Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island - started 20.03.25
Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face - started 20.03.25
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile - started 20.03.25
Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives - started 21.03.25
Yuan Yang, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China - started 21.03.25
Fern Riddell, Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. - started 22.03.25

NEXT

Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast - started 30.03.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - started 30.03.25

16 books finished in March
57 books finished in 2025

4,991 pages read in March
17,681 pages read in 2025

1 review in March
8 reviews in 2025

The Women's Prize for Non Fiction Shortlist is out (see >29 elkiedee: for Longlist

A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry (published by Fern Press, Vintage, Penguin Random House) - Kindle TBR

The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke (published by Abacus, Little, Brown Book Group, Hachette) - Kindle TBR

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (published by Canongate Books) - Kindle TBR

Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Courageous WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka by Clare Mulley (published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Publishing Group, Hachette) READ (from library)

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

Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang (published by Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing) - READ (from library)

READING AS OF 31 MARCH 2025, 11 AM

FINISHED IN MARCH

Roisin Maguire, Night Swimmers - finished 04.03.25
Willy Vlautin, The Horse - finished 03.03.25
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading - finished 04.03.25
Kelly Oliver, The Case of the Christie Conspiracy - finished 04.03.25
Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser - finished 08.03.25
Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 - finished 08.03.25
Anthony Quinn, The Mouthless Dead - finished 09.03.25
Sara Paretsky, Overboard - finished 10.03.25
Jane Green, When We Were Friends - story - finished 13.03.25
Robin Stevens, A Spoonful of Murder - finished 13.03.25
Lauren Westwood, The House of Light and Shadows - finished 14.03.25
Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down - finished 15.03.25
Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science - finished 16.03.25
Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting - finished 16.03.25
A L Kennedy, On Writing - finished 17.03.25
Karen Russell, The Antidote - finished 22.03.25
Martin Edwards, Gallows Court - finished 23.03.25
John McGahern, Amongst Women - finished 24.03.25

CURRENT

Georgina Clarke, Viper in the Nest - finished 31.03.25
Alice Franklin, Life Hacks for Little Aliens - - finished 04.04.25
Helen Simonson, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club - finished 31.03.25
Jami Attenberg, A Reason to See You Again - finished 01.04.25
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction - finished 02.04.25
Anne Tyler, Three Days in June - finished 04.04.25
Tessa Hadley, The Party - finished 04.04.25
Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 - finished 05.04.25
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count - finished 05.04.25

Samantha Tonge, If You Could See Me Now - started 04.04.25
Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence - started 09.03.25
Leonora Brito, Dat's Love - started 13.03.25
Jenny Colgan, Rules - started 04.03.25
Roisin O'Donnell, Nesting - started 09.03.25
Ambrose Parry, The Art of Dying - started 13.03.25
Cathy Cassidy, Dizzy - started 13.03.25
Annie Gray, The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street - started 19.03.25
Lee Child, Eleven Numbers - short story - started 19.03.25
Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island - started 20.03.25
Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face - started 20.03.25
Rebecca Mascull, The Wild Air - started 20.03.25
Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives - started 21.03.25
Yuan Yang, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China - started 21.03.25
Fern Riddell, Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. - started 22.03.25
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile - started 20.03.25
Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast - started 30.03.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - started 30.03.25

18 books finished in March
59 books finished in 2025

6,279 pages read in March
18,969 pages read in 2025

1 review in March
8 reviews in 2025

>65 elkiedee: I've only read Agent Zo and Private Revolutions but thought they were both really strong reads.

Have just started What the wild sea can be. It opens with a reflection on how there is still room for (some) optimism, which is a relief.

Very sad at the news that Irish crime writer Ken Bruen has died aged 74. I first heard him at an event in London and then met him a number of times at crime fiction conventions in the US.

https://connachttribune.ie/death-of-galway-crime-writer-ken-bruen/

January 2025: 6,186 pages, 19 books, 4 reviews
>3 elkiedee:
February 2025: 6,504 pages, 22 books, 3 reviews
>22 elkiedee:
March 2025: 6,530 pages, 20 books, 1 review
>38 elkiedee:

Beginning of April 19,220 pages, 61 books, 8 reviews

PAGES READ IN APRIL 2025

01.04.25: 120
02.04.25: 250
03.04.25: 359
04.04.25: 325
05.04.25: 295
06.04.25: 254
07.04.25: 117
08.04.25: 159
09.04.25: 138
10.04.25: 150
11.04.25: 258
12.04.25: 247
13.04.25: 286
14.04.25: 68
15.04.25: 138
16.04.25: 251
17.04.25: 222
18.04.25: 244
19.04.25: 215
20.04.25: 257
21.04.25: 597
22.04.25: 287
23.04.25: 151
24.04.25: 184
25.04.25: 204
26.04.25: 121
27.04.25: 171
28.04.25: 245
29.04.25: 205
30.04.25: 289

April: 6,807 pages (average 222.65 pages/day), 25 books, 3 reviews
2025: 26,007 pages (average 215.6 pages/day), 86 books, 11 reviews

READING 2025, PART 5

PART 1 >5 elkiedee:
PART 2 >13 elkiedee:
PART 3 >28 elkiedee:
PART 4 >45 elkiedee:

61. 31.03.25 Helen Simonson, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club 4.6
62. 01.04.25 Jami Attenberg, A Reason to See You Again 4.2 - reviewed 07.04.25 >82 elkiedee:
63. 02.04.25 Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction: The Secret Life of the Novel 4.0 - reviewed 13.05.25 >115 elkiedee:
64. 04.04.25 Anne Tyler, Three Days in June 4.3 - reviewed 12.04.25 >83 elkiedee:
65. 04.04.25 Tessa Hadley, The Party 4.2
66. 04.04.25 Alice Franklin, Life Hacks for a Little Alien 4.2
67. 05.04.25 Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 4.0
68. 05.04.25 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count 4.3
69. 10.04.25 Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence 4.3
70. 10.04.25 Leonora Brito, Dat's Love 4.0
71. 11.04.25 Jenny Colgan, Rules 4.1
72. 11.04.25 Samantha Tonge, If You Could See Me Now 4.2
73. 15.04.25 Lee Child, Eleven Numbers 3.9
74. 17.04.25 Megan Hunter, Days of Light 4.2
75. 18.04.25 Annie Gray, The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street 4.3

PART 6 >84 elkiedee:

Women's Prize shortlist announced - it doesn't include either of the books I'm currently reading, and I suspect there's going to be a lot of surprise/annoyance.

The 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist

Good Girl by Aria Aber

All Fours by Miranda July

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis

I'm reserving judgement simply because I haven't read any of these books. I bought All Fours last year and now have The Safekeep as it was a £1.99 Kindle Daily Deal yesterday, and I feel that I need to read or reread several of the author's previous books before the Elizabeth Strout.

15.10.25 update - I now have all of these on Kindle, and have read Good Girl and Fundamentally.

Just listened to Radio 4's obituaries programme and the name Marika Sherwood caught my attention - I read a book by her about Claudia Jones a couple of years ago. She was a historian, a teacher and campaigner, born in Hungary in 1987. She and her mother survived the Nazi occupation with forged "Christian" identity papers - they were Jewish, and she then grew up in Australia before coming to London in the 1960s. She was shocked by the racism in London schools where she started work, and by the lack of black history in the curriculum, and spent the rest of her life researching and campaigning for change there. Sounds like a fascinating woman.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/14/marika-sherwood-obituary

READING AS OF 6 APRIL 2025, 11 PM

FINISHED IN MARCH

Roisin Maguire, Night Swimmers - finished 04.03.25
Willy Vlautin, The Horse - finished 03.03.25
Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading - finished 04.03.25
Kelly Oliver, The Case of the Christie Conspiracy - finished 04.03.25
Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser - finished 08.03.25
Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 - finished 08.03.25
Anthony Quinn, The Mouthless Dead - finished 09.03.25
Sara Paretsky, Overboard - finished 10.03.25
Jane Green, When We Were Friends - story - finished 13.03.25
Robin Stevens, A Spoonful of Murder - finished 13.03.25
Lauren Westwood, The House of Light and Shadows - finished 14.03.25
Fiona McFarlane, The Sun Walks Down - finished 15.03.25
Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science - finished 16.03.25
Penelope Mortimer, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting - finished 16.03.25
A L Kennedy, On Writing - finished 17.03.25
Karen Russell, The Antidote - finished 22.03.25
Martin Edwards, Gallows Court - finished 23.03.25
John McGahern, Amongst Women - finished 24.03.25
Georgina Clarke, Viper in the Nest - finished 31.03.25
Helen Simonson, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club - finished 31.03.25

FINISHED IN APRIL

Jami Attenberg, A Reason to See You Again - finished 01.04.25
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction - finished 02.04.25
Alice Franklin, Life Hacks for Little Aliens - finished 04.04.25
Anne Tyler, Three Days in June - finished 04.04.25
Tessa Hadley, The Party - finished 04.04.25
Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 - finished 05.04.25
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count - finished 05.04.25

Ann Petry, 3 essays and a biographical chronology - read 12.04.25
- The Great Secret
- Harlem
- The Novel as Social Criticism

CURRENTLY READING

Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence - finished 10.04.25
Leonora Brito, Dat's Love - started 13.03.25 - finished 10.04.25
Jenny Colgan, Rules - finished 11.04.25
Samantha Tonge, If You Could See Me Now - finished 11.04.25

Megan Hunter, Days of Light started 11.04.25

Roisin O'Donnell, Nesting - started 09.03.25
Annie Gray, The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street - started 19.03.25
Ambrose Parry, The Art of Dying - started 13.03.25
Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island - started 20.03.25
Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face - started 20.03.25
Cathy Cassidy, Dizzy - started 13.03.25
Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives - started 21.03.25
Yuan Yang, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China - started 21.03.25
Fern Riddell, Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. - started 22.03.25
Lee Child, Eleven Numbers - short story - started 19.03.25
Rebecca Mascull, The Wild Air - started 20.03.25
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile - started 20.03.25
Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast - started 30.03.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - started 30.03.25

NEXT:

Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square - started 08.04.25
A L Kennedy, Alive in the Merciful Country - started 09.04.25
Rebecca O'Connor (editor), Scealta: Short Stories by Irish Women
Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote

1,586 pages finished in April
20,806 pages finished in 2025

7 books finished in April
68 books finished in 2025

8 reviews in 2025

Sad to read that Australian crime writer Kerry Greenwood has died aged 70. She was best known for her historical Phryne Fisher series, which has been adapted for TV. I still have to catch up with the series of books (I think I've read 2 and own 16 of the 22 novels, and there is also a collection of short stories) and the TV version is something I've been meaning to try and watch too, some time (if it's available).

>74 elkiedee: I hadn't seen that, Luci. Yes it is sad. I didn't get along so well with the first in her Phryne Fisher series but I know it was hugely popular.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1wd0qvx2gvo

Another musician whose work formed part of the soundtrack for 80s teenagers is gone - Clem Burke of Blondie (and briefly of the Ramones under the name Elvis Ramone) died on 6 April at the age of 70.

More sad news. Another author has gone - this one is the author of one of my favourite grumpy police detective series, the Peter Diamond books set in Bath, Peter Lovesey. I've been looking for my copy of one of his books for a couple of weeks, and had reserved a copy at the library. Not only have I just found it, it was in a rather obvious place.

https://doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.com/2025/04/peter-lovesey-rip.html

Anne Harper, aka Anne Scargill, trade unionist, campaigner, co-founder of Women Against Pit Closures, one of 4 women who took part in the Parkside Mine occupation to protest against it being shut down in 1992's round of pit closures, has died aged 83. I want to read Anne & Betty: United By the Struggle.

>78 elkiedee: Of course, being from a mining community in the West Riding, I have met Arthur Scargill and his wife Anne several times at fetes, community gathering and Labour functions. Always thought she was a lovely woman. I am sad at the news.

READING AS OF 13 APRIL 2025, 11 PM

FINISHED IN APRIL

Jami Attenberg, A Reason to See You Again - finished 01.04.25 - reviewed 06.04.25
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction - finished 02.04.25
Alice Franklin, Life Hacks for Little Aliens - finished 04.04.25
Anne Tyler, Three Days in June - finished 04.04.25 - reviewed 12.04.25
Tessa Hadley, The Party - finished 04.04.25
Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 - finished 05.04.25
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count - finished 05.04.25
Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence - finished 10.04.25
Leonora Brito, Dat's Love - started 13.03.25 - finished 10.04.25
Jenny Colgan, Rules - finished 11.04.25
Samantha Tonge, If You Could See Me Now - finished 11.04.25

Ann Petry, 3 essays and a biographical chronology - read 12.04.25
- The Great Secret
- Harlem
- The Novel as Social Criticism

CURRENTLY READING

Lee Child, Eleven Numbers - short story - finished 15.04.25
Megan Hunter, Days of Light - finished 17.04.25
Annie Gray, The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street - finished 19.04.25
Roisin O'Donnell, Nesting - finished 20.04.25

Rachel Seiffert, Once the Deed is Done - started 17.04.25

Ambrose Parry, The Art of Dying - started 13.03.25
Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island - started 20.03.25
Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face - started 20.03.25
Cathy Cassidy, Dizzy - started 13.03.25
Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives - started 21.03.25
Yuan Yang, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China - started 21.03.25
Fern Riddell, Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. - started 22.03.25
Rebecca Mascull, The Wild Air - started 20.03.25
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile - started 20.03.25
Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square - started 08.04.25
A L Kennedy, Alive in the Merciful Country - started 09.04.25
Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast - started 30.03.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - started 30.03.25

NEXT:

Rebecca O'Connor (editor), Scealta: Short Stories by Irish Women - started 16.04.25
Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight - started 16.04.25
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote - started 17.04.25
Elin Hildebrand, Natural Selection - short story
Clare Mulley, Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Courageous WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka

2,958 pages finished in April
22,178 pages finished in 2025

11 books finished in April
72 books finished in 2025

3 reviews in April
11 reviews in 2025

2025 #40
Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art
Read 31.01.25 to 28.02.25, reviewed 06.04.25

2025 #62
Jami Attenberg, A Reason to See You Again
Read 08.03.25 to 01.04.25, reviewed 06.04.25

2025 #64
Anne Tyler, Three Days in June
Read 09.03.25 to 04.04.25, reviewed 12.04.25

READING 2025, PART 6

PART 1 >5 elkiedee:
PART 2 >13 elkiedee:
PART 3 >28 elkiedee:
PART 4 >45 elkiedee:
PART 5 >70 elkiedee:

76. 20.04.25 Roisin O'Donnell, Nesting 4.6
77. 20.04.25 Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island 4.5
78. 21.04.25 Rachel Seiffert, Once the Deed is Done 4.4
79. 21.04.25 Ambrose Parry, The Art of Dying 4.3
80. 24.04.25 Cathy Cassidy, Dizzy 4.2
81. 24.04.25 Fern Riddell, Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. 4.3
82. 24.04.25 Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives 4.2 - reviewed 13.05.25 >114 elkiedee:
83. 25.04.25 Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face 4.3
84. 27.04.25 Yuan Yang, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China 4.4
85. 28.04.25 Lynn Knight, Miss Burnham and the Loose Thread 4.2
86. 30.04.25 Rebecca Mascull, The Wild Air 4.3
87. 30.04.25 John Sutherland, Last Drink to LA 4.0
88. 06.05.25 Charlotte Stein, My Big Fat Fake Marriage 3.6
89. 06.05.25 Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square 4.2 - reviewed 05.06.25 >135 elkiedee:
90. 07.05.25 Louise Hegarty, Fair Play 3.3

PART 8 >105 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 20 APRIL 2025, 7.30 PM

FINISHED IN APRIL

Jami Attenberg, A Reason to See You Again - finished 01.04.25 - reviewed 06.04.25
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction - finished 02.04.25
Alice Franklin, Life Hacks for Little Aliens - finished 04.04.25
Anne Tyler, Three Days in June - finished 04.04.25 - reviewed 12.04.25
Tessa Hadley, The Party - finished 04.04.25
Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 - finished 05.04.25
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count - finished 05.04.25
Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence - finished 10.04.25
Leonora Brito, Dat's Love - started 13.03.25 - finished 10.04.25
Jenny Colgan, Rules - finished 11.04.25
Samantha Tonge, If You Could See Me Now - finished 11.04.25
Lee Child, Eleven Numbers - short story - finished 15.04.25
Megan Hunter, Days of Light - finished 17.04.25
Annie Gray, The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street - finished 19.04.25
Roisin O'Donnell, Nesting - finished 20.04.25

Ann Petry, 3 essays and a biographical chronology - read 12.04.25
- The Great Secret
- Harlem
- The Novel as Social Criticism

CURRENTLY READING

Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island - finished 20.04.25
Rachel Seiffert, Once the Deed is Done - finished 21.04.25
Ambrose Parry, The Art of Dying - finished 21.04.25
Cathy Cassidy, Dizzy - finished 24.04.25
Fern Riddell, Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. - finished 24.04.25
Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives - finished 24.04.25
Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face - finished 25.04.25
Yuan Yang, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China - finished 27.04.25

Lynn Knight, Miss Burnham and the Loose Thread - started 21.04.25

Rebecca Mascull, The Wild Air - started 20.03.25
Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square - started 08.04.25
A L Kennedy, Alive in the Merciful Country - started 09.04.25
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile - started 20.03.25
Rebecca O'Connor (editor), Scealta: Short Stories by Irish Women - started 16.04.25
Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast - started 30.03.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - started 30.03.25
Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight - started 16.04.25
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote - started 17.04.25

NEXT:

Clare Mulley, Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka - started 25.04.25
Elin Hildebrand, Natural Selection - short story - started 25.04.25
Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain - started 26.04.25
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - started 26.04.25
Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts - started 26.04.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - started 27.04.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - started 27.04.25
Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - started 27.04.25
Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest - started 27.04.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - started 27.04.25


4,297 pages finished in April
23,517 pages finished in 2025

15 books finished in April
76 books finished in 2025

3 reviews in April
11 reviews in 2025

I have a bit of an obsession with "classics" reprints - I admit to collecting Virago Modern Classics and Persephone Books, but there are quite a few others to be tempted by and that I will look closely at if I come across them in a charity shop, and drool over displays in shops selling new books.

A few years ago, the Persephone Bookshop has moved to Bath, which makes it a bit harder to visit the shop to see/buy their new books in person than when it was within walking distance of work, and from several major London railway stations for meetups etc. But the.y still offer a kind of free (in the UK) magazine with lots of stuff about their publications - the Biannually has been replaced with The Persephone Pamphlet and I received a copy of this in the post this morning.

But I'm a bit baffled by this (and from a bookseller!) on page 1:

"We feel strongly that if a book has been on your TBR pile for a few months you are never going to read it and it should go to a charity shop; and then we can recommend something you do want to read."

I don't have a little TBR pile - I have shelves, boxes and tottering stacks of books I hope to get to, and a couple of Kindle Paperwhites - the "new" one is now 6 years old and was meant to replace the "old" one that is now 10 but it didn't quite work out like that.... but if I discarded books after a few months, I would miss out on reading so many, including quite a few from my Persephone collection. It might take me years or decades but that doesn't mean I don't want to read them at all. My main problem at the moment is losing the particular book I've decided I want to read among the chaos, and having to try to find a library or affordable secondhand copy until mine turns up!

I do still have lots of books that I'm hoping to give away to book friends and/or charity shops this year - bust most of them are duplicates.

READING AS OF 28 APRIL 2025, 11 AM

FINISHED IN APRIL

Jami Attenberg, A Reason to See You Again - finished 01.04.25 - reviewed 06.04.25
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction - finished 02.04.25
Alice Franklin, Life Hacks for Little Aliens - finished 04.04.25
Anne Tyler, Three Days in June - finished 04.04.25 - reviewed 12.04.25
Tessa Hadley, The Party - finished 04.04.25
Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 - finished 05.04.25
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count - finished 05.04.25
Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence - finished 10.04.25
Leonora Brito, Dat's Love - started 13.03.25 - finished 10.04.25
Jenny Colgan, Rules - finished 11.04.25
Samantha Tonge, If You Could See Me Now - finished 11.04.25
Lee Child, Eleven Numbers - short story - finished 15.04.25
Megan Hunter, Days of Light - finished 17.04.25
Annie Gray, The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street - finished 19.04.25
Roisin O'Donnell, Nesting - finished 20.04.25
Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island - finished 20.04.25
Rachel Seiffert, Once the Deed is Done - finished 21.04.25
Ambrose Parry, The Art of Dying - finished 21.04.25
Cathy Cassidy, Dizzy - finished 24.04.25
Fern Riddell, Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. - finished 24.04.25
Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives - finished 24.04.25
Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face - finished 25.04.25
Yuan Yang, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China - finished 27.04.25

Ann Petry, 3 essays and a biographical chronology - read 12.04.25
- The Great Secret
- Harlem
- The Novel as Social Criticism

CURRENTLY READING

Lynn Knight, Miss Burnham and the Loose Thread - finished 28.04.25
Rebecca Mascull, The Wild Air - finished 30.04.25
John Sutherland, Last Drink to LA - finished 30.04.25

Charlotte Stein, My Big Fat Fake Marriage - started 28.04.25
Linda Anderson and Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - started 30.04.25 - unfortunately this was a library ebook that has now been deleted from the library's collection. I've ordered a secondhand hardback online - it's a little cheaper than the Kindle edition and includes photographs.

Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square - started 08.04.25
A L Kennedy, Alive in the Merciful Country - started 09.04.25
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile - started 20.03.25
Rebecca O'Connor (editor), Scealta: Short Stories by Irish Women - started 16.04.25
Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast - started 30.03.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - started 30.03.25
Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight - started 16.04.25
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote - started 17.04.25
Clare Mulley, Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka - started 25.04.25
Elin Hildebrand, Natural Selection - short story - started 25.04.25
Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain - started 26.04.25
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - started 26.04.25
Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts - started 26.04.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - started 27.04.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - started 27.04.25
Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - started 27.04.25
Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest - started 27.04.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - started 27.04.25

NEXT

Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy - started 05.05.25

6,134 pages finished in April
25,354 pages pages finished in 2025

23 books finished in April
84 books finished in 2025

3 reviews in April
11 reviews in 2025

>86 elkiedee: I'm with you on this, Luci. I posted a picture of my Persephone collection in a Facebook group to much admiration! but I haven't read even half of them. These and Viragos (and several other publishers' outputs) are books that I like to have, and admire, on my shelves and, although I hope to read them eventually the fact that I haven't read them within a few months doesn't mean I won't and I certainly won't be getting rid of them. I have downsized my physical collection - I'm happy to read ebooks - but there are some paper copies that will stay with me to the end, even If I never read them again.

>86 elkiedee: I can get where they're coming from a little bit - I have a TBR "shortlist" where I put books I'm hoping to read soon and if I don't get to them within 6 months or so they get removed from the shortlist....but they're still on the full TBR list of course! It's an odd sentiment particularly from a publisher of collectible classics.

>86 elkiedee: I didn't know about the Persephone move. A lot of their books would be going to the charity bookshop on their premis Luci. I'm like you, thousands of books in the tbr mountain.

I date when I purchase books, and a few years back read a biography that had been unread on the shelf for 32 years, it was a fine read, and will be reread. I know what I will like, it won't change just because it had to wait.

>86 elkiedee: Another agreeing with you! I think he's just trying to flog more books - he doesn't care if you buy one of his books and don't read it, he's already had the profit from it. He'd rather you bought another one and gave him even more money.

Finally Philip Pullman has announced that he's written the third novel in The Book of Dust trilogy - I heard enough of a radio adaptation of The Secret Commonwealth to be upset that everything was so up in the air at the end of the novel. The new book is to be called The Rose Field (touchstone doesn't yet work) and if he's definitely written it - it seems so and it's scheduled for publication in October, I might risk picking up La Belle Sauvage and The Secret Commonwealth.

>92 elkiedee: I wasn't expecting a third book and was very surprised (and cross!) when I reached the end of The Secret Commonwealth.

>93 CDVicarage: I didn't read the book but I did hear quite a lot including the last episode on Radio 4, and I was like, What? You can't leave the characters that way! And that was a few years ago, and all that's happened since....

One of the best books ever written about a girl who loves to read and hang out in the library, and who wants to be a writer, is A Long Way From Verona, set in the north east of England in the early 1940s. I read it when I was quite young, I'm not actually sure how old I was, in a Puffin Books edition (so a children's book). One of the most memorable parts of the book is about what girls should be allowed to read. But the copy now on my shelves is published by Abacus who became the publisher of her novels and short story collections for adults, and they also republished The Summer After the Funeral and Bilgewater. I agree with Amanda Craig who has posted that Jane Gardam never got the recognition she deserved. One of her later novels, Old Filth, introduced her to a wider audience

Jane Gardam died on 28 April at the age of 96. I am not surprised, but I am sad. As a decade baby (born at the end - as I was - or the beginning - of a decade), a 1970s child and a 1980s teenager, I'm conscious that I post quite regularly about the death of the writers and musicians whose work I grew up on, whose work fed my imagination.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/29/jane-gardam-author-of-old-filth-an...

>95 elkiedee: Sad for sure. I have read Old Filth and have a number of her books on the shelves. 96 is a very good age isn't it.

Being born in the middle of the same decade, I find that I read the obituary columns far more often than I used to do!

>86 elkiedee:
"We feel strongly that if a book has been on your TBR pile for a few months you are never going to read it and it should go to a charity shop; and then we can recommend something you do want to read."

Like you I am living proof that the above comment is horseshit!
My TBR exceeds 5,000 books and I regularly read books I bought more than a decade (sometimes three decades) ago.

>95 elkiedee: I have read and enjoyed several books by Jane Gardam and you have reminded me that A Long way From Verona is still unread on my TBR pile. I must look it out.

January 2025: 6,186 pages, 19 books, 4 reviews
>3 elkiedee: elkiedee:
February 2025: 6,504 pages, 22 books, 3 reviews
>22 elkiedee: elkiedee:
March 2025: 6,530 pages, 20 books, 1 review
>38 elkiedee: elkiedee:
April 2025: 6,807 pages, 26 books, 3 reviews
>69 elkiedee:

Beginning of May 26,007 pages, 87 books, 11 reviews

PAGES READ IN MAY 2025

01.05.25: 194
02.05.25: 269
03.05.25: 150
04.05.25: 165
05.05.25: 107
06.05.25: 341
07.05.25: 235
08.05.25: 185
09.05.25: 98
10.05.25: 180
11.05.25: 126
12.05.25: 95
13.05.25: 153
14.05.25: 217
15.05.25: 246
16.05.25: 170
17.05.25: 189
18.05.25: 137
19.05.25: 178
20.05.25: 84
21.05.25: 107
22.05.25: 189
23.05.25: 81
24.05.25: 154
25.05.25: 168
26.05.25: 244
27.05.25: 118
28.05.25: 96
29.05.25: 112
30.05.25: 137
31.05.25: 219

May 2025: 5,154 pages (av 166.25 pages/day), 10 books, 4 reviews
2025: 31,161 pages (av 206.36 pages/day), 98 books, 15 reviews

Books read
Part 6 >84 elkiedee:
Part 7 >105 elkiedee:

Pages read in June >132 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 5 MAY 2025, 10 PM

FINISHED IN APRIL

Jami Attenberg, A Reason to See You Again - finished 01.04.25 - reviewed 06.04.25
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction - finished 02.04.25
Alice Franklin, Life Hacks for Little Aliens - finished 04.04.25
Anne Tyler, Three Days in June - finished 04.04.25 - reviewed 12.04.25
Tessa Hadley, The Party - finished 04.04.25
Laura Furman (editor), The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 - finished 05.04.25
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count - finished 05.04.25
Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence - finished 10.04.25
Leonora Brito, Dat's Love - started 13.03.25 - finished 10.04.25
Jenny Colgan, Rules - finished 11.04.25
Samantha Tonge, If You Could See Me Now - finished 11.04.25
Lee Child, Eleven Numbers - short story - finished 15.04.25
Megan Hunter, Days of Light - finished 17.04.25
Annie Gray, The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street - finished 19.04.25
Roisin O'Donnell, Nesting - finished 20.04.25
Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island - finished 20.04.25
Rachel Seiffert, Once the Deed is Done - finished 21.04.25
Ambrose Parry, The Art of Dying - finished 21.04.25
Cathy Cassidy, Dizzy - finished 24.04.25
Fern Riddell, Death in Ten Minutes: Kitty Marion: Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette. - finished 24.04.25
Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives - finished 24.04.25
Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face - finished 25.04.25
Yuan Yang, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China - finished 27.04.25
Lynn Knight, Miss Burnham and the Loose Thread - finished 28.04.25
Rebecca Mascull, The Wild Air - finished 30.04.25
John Sutherland, Last Drink to LA - finished 30.04.25

Ann Petry, 3 essays and a biographical chronology - read 12.04.25
- The Great Secret
- Harlem
- The Novel as Social Criticism

CURRENTLY READING

Charlotte Stein, My Big Fat Fake Marriage - finished 06.05.25
Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square - finished 06.05.25
Louise Hegarty, Fair Play - finished 07.05.25
A L Kennedy, Alive in the Merciful Country - finished 11.05.25

Sofka Zinovieff, Stealing Dad - started 07.05.25

Rebecca O'Connor (editor), Scealta: Short Stories by Irish Women - started 16.04.25
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile - started 20.03.25
Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast - started 30.03.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - started 30.03.25
Clare Mulley, Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka - started 25.04.25
Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight - started 16.04.25
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote - started 17.04.25
Elin Hildebrand, Natural Selection - short story - started 25.04.25
Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts - started 26.04.25
Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain - started 26.04.25
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - started 26.04.25
Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - started 27.04.25
Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest - started 27.04.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - started 27.04.25
Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy - started 05.05.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - started 27.04.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - started 27.04.25
Linda Anderson and Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - started 28.04.25

NEXT

Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything - started 10.05.25
Jennifer Weiner, The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits - started 11.05.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - started 11.05.25

6,807 pages finished in April
885 pages finished in May
26,892 pages finished in 2025

26 books finished in April
87 books finished in 2025

3 reviews in April
11 reviews in 2025

I finished several books at the end of April. I've not yet finished reading any books this month but expect to finish at least two within the next three days.

Page count >99 elkiedee:
Books read Part 7 >105 elkiedee:

>100 elkiedee: 20 books being currently read is mind blowing, Luci. My most ever was 10 and that was 10 sets of short story collections

I'd missed that Jane Gardam had died, thank you for posting about her death. I came to her work via the Old Filth trilogy, and then went back and read some of her earlier books. I was struck by her changing depiction of colonial lives (a classic case of me going back into an author's backlist to try and being disappointed when I can't find the same book, I realise in retrospect!).

I'd love to read more about her writing / editing process, I will have to look out for more of her books / writing.

I love Rachel Seiffert but had missed this book completely (Once the Deed is Done). Have added this to the wishlist too! ETA With starting prices at £17 I don't think I'll get hold of this anytime soon!

Currently feeling very proud of myself for getting the 'currently reading' list down to twelve!

>102 charl08: Once the Deed is Done was only published on 6 March. I read a Netgalley version but noticed that Kentish Town Library (a Camden Libraries branch) already has a copy on the new book table (they actually had a huge number of tantalising new books). Maybe Lancashire Libraries have ordered copies, or will do so before the new political leadership shuts them all down.

>103 elkiedee: Yes. Tempting to move back over the border.

READING 2025, PART 7

PART 1 >5 elkiedee:
PART 2 >13 elkiedee:
PART 3 >28 elkiedee:
PART 4 >45 elkiedee:
PART 5 >70 elkiedee:
PART 6 >84 elkiedee:

91. 12.05.25 A L Kennedy, Alive in the Merciful Country 4.0
92. 14.05.25 Rebecca O'Connor, Scéalta: Short Stories by Irish Women 4.0
93. 14.05.25 Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse/A Certain Smile 4.2
94. 14.05.25 Sofka Zinovieff, Stealing Dad 4.7
95. 15.05.25 Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast 4.0
96. 24.05.25 Deryn Lake, Love Song of the Nightingale 3.3
97. 25.05.25 Clare Mulley, Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka 4.2
98. 27.05.25 Elin Hilderbrand, Natural Selection - story 4.0
99. 01.06.25 Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream 3.8 - reviewed 01.06.25 >133 elkiedee:
100. 02.06.25 Francesca Hornak, So Good to See You 4.0
101. 05.06.25 Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight 4.1
102. 06.06.25 Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts 4.4
103. 08.06.25 Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out 4.4
104. 12.06.25 Jennifer E Smith, Fun for the Whole Family 4.2
105. 13.06.25 Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest 4.0

PART 8: >144 elkiedee:

I searched for your thread as I see you are reading The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal> Iorded that from Blackwells books in the UK because I am eager to read. I hope you enjoy it.

READING AS OF 12 MAY 2025, 11.45 PM

FINISHED IN MAY

Charlotte Stein, My Big Fat Fake Marriage - finished 06.05.25
Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square - finished 06.05.25
Louise Hegarty, Fair Play - finished 07.05.25
A L Kennedy, Alive in the Merciful Country - finished 11.05.25

CURRENTLY READING

Rebecca O'Connor (editor), Scealta: Short Stories by Irish Women - finished 14.05.25
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile - finished 14.05.25
Sofka Zinovieff, Stealing Dad - finished 14.05.25
Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast - finished 15.05.25

Deryn Lake, Love Song of the Nightingale

Clare Mulley, Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka - started 25.04.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - started 30.03.25
Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight - started 16.04.25
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote - started 17.04.25
Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts - started 26.04.25
Elin Hildebrand, Natural Selection - short story - started 25.04.25
Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain - started 26.04.25
Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - started 27.04.25
Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest - started 27.04.25
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - started 26.04.25
Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy - started 05.05.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - started 27.04.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - started 27.04.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - started 27.04.25
Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything - started 10.05.25
Jennifer Weiner, The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits - started 11.05.25
Linda Anderson and Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - started 28.04.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - started 11.05.25

NEXT

Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel
Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God
Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians

2,175 pages finished in May
28,182 pages finished in 2025

4 books finished in May
91 books finished in 2025

11 reviews in 2025

READING AS OF 19 MAY 2025, 9.30 PM

FINISHED IN MAY

Charlotte Stein, My Big Fat Fake Marriage - finished 06.05.25
Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square - finished 06.05.25
Louise Hegarty, Fair Play - finished 07.05.25
A L Kennedy, Alive in the Merciful Country - finished 11.05.25
Rebecca O'Connor (editor), Scealta: Short Stories by Irish Women - finished 14.05.25
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile - finished 14.05.25
Sofka Zinovieff, Stealing Dad - finished 14.05.25
Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast - finished 15.05.25
Deryn Lake, Love Song of the Nightingale - finished 24.05.25
Clare Mulley, Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka - finished 25.05.25

CURRENTLY READING

Francesca Hornak, So Good to See You - started 24.05.25

Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - started 30.03.25
Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight - started 16.04.25
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote - started 17.04.25
Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts - started 26.04.25
Elin Hildebrand, Natural Selection - short story - started 25.04.25
Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain - started 26.04.25
Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - started 27.04.25
Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest - started 27.04.25
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - started 26.04.25
Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy - started 05.05.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - started 27.04.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - started 27.04.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - started 27.04.25
Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything - started 10.05.25
Jennifer Weiner, The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits - started 11.05.25
Linda Anderson & Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - started 28.04.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - started 11.05.25

NEXT

Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell - started 20.05.25
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel - started 20.05.25
Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me - started 20.05.25
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God - started 21.05.25
Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April - started 21.05.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - started 22.05.25
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians - started 22.05.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

3,267 pages finished in May
29,274 pages finished in 2025

8 books finished in May
95 books finished in 2025

14 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 7 >105 elkiedee:
Page Count May 2025 >99 elkiedee:

2025 #27
Mary Costello, The River Capture
Read 13.01.25 to 08.02.25, reviewed 19.05.25
Rating: 4.0

2025 #56
A L Kennedy, On Writing
Read 28.02.25 to 17.03.25, reviewed 13.05.25
Rating: 4.1

>109 elkiedee: I really enjoyed this one Luci. I need to read more of her.

>111 Caroline_McElwee: I read and really liked Academy Street a few years ago when it was first published (2015?) a novel about an Irish woman who emigrates to the US.. I still have Barcelona TBR.

>120 charl08: Actually I see I have and read Academy Street Luci. I gave it 4 stars. Memory lapse.

2025 #82
Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives
Read 2025-03-21 to 2025-04-24, reviewed 13.05.25
Rating: 4.1

2025 #63
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks on Fiction: The Secret Life of the Novel
Read 2025-03-09 to 2025-04-02, reviewed 13.05.25
Rating: 3.8

I'm feeling a bit sad this week. My mum's sister Brigid died on Wednesday night/Thursday morning. She was only 17 months younger than my mother, Delia and they remained very close. My mum and I lived with Brigid and Andy for a few months after I was born and my dad had left mum for another woman. Brigid was diagnosed many years ago with COPD (still referred to as emphysema at the time of diagnosis). Like all the family, she was a big reader - she married and had her two sons very young (in her teens) and she and Andy spent a couple of years in newly independent Zambia - their younger son was born in then-Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. They returned to London where she studied for an English degree and became a bookseller, and was an active trade unionist when bookshops were trying to deter staff from joining unions and banned women from wearing trousers at work. She worked at the LSE Bookshop and then Dillons but Robert Maxwell kept taking over the places where she worked. Later she and a couple of colleagues set up a specialist legal and medical bookshop - one of their neighbours on Store Street, London, was a specialist crime fiction shop, Crime in Store. They had a pub table outside the shop for after work drinks. We bought our house from one of my aunt's business customers, an academic librarian who was retiring to live in Norfolk.

I will miss her terribly for so many reasons but one is the times remembering my mother, who died of cancer in 2016. Brigid phoned me a few days before the anniversary of her death to suggest meeting for lunch, and I think we met up each year since except for 2020, usually with her husband Andy, their other living sister, and various other family members, including my younger sister with my mum (I also have siblings from my dad's second marriage), who also lives in London, their other sister and various cousins and sometimes my brother even came down from Leeds (making a weekend of it with London family).

Less personal but I'm also sad to hear that the broadcaster and TV boss Alan Yentob has died at 78.

>116 elkiedee: Sorry to hear about the death of your extraordinary aunt Luci.

Thanks Caroline.

>116 elkiedee: Oh I'm sorry for your loss. She sounds wonderful.

My aunt and late uncle were in Zambia and then Zimbabwe around then. I wonder if they came across each other!

I'm sorry for your loss. So many of the women of that era had extraordinary stories, but so many of the histories only tell of the men.

>116 elkiedee: That is sad news for you, Luci. What a remarkable family you have.

>120 charl08: This would have been in the mid 60s I think, at about the same time my parents went to China. (1963-1965). My mum was 19, Brigid would have been nearly or actually 18, their husbands a few years older. I think that they all met through the local committees (in Oxford) to organise the Aldermaston anti nuclear weapons marches. Andy and Bill were both at university there, whereas my mum and sisters grew up in Oxford. Their other sister, Anna, also married very young (and pregnant) to the son of family friends, and they went to newly independent Algeria. It must have been strange for my grandparents to have all their daughters go so far away at once, at the age that kids leave home to go to university. Brigid did A levels in Africa, with babies in tow, and they all went to university later.

I've just heard from two different people that another friend old died this morning - he was 72 - I saw his daughter last year and had heard that he was quite seriously ill already then so I am more saddened than shocked. Charli was a lifelong political activist with a love for interesting tshirts - one of his favourites - ideal when debating people you disagree with:

667 - the Neighbour of the Beast

READING AS OF 25 MAY 2025, 10.45 PM

FINISHED IN MAY

Charlotte Stein, My Big Fat Fake Marriage - finished 06.05.25
Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square - finished 06.05.25
Louise Hegarty, Fair Play - finished 07.05.25
A L Kennedy, Alive in the Merciful Country - finished 11.05.25
Rebecca O'Connor (editor), Scealta: Short Stories by Irish Women - finished 14.05.25
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile - finished 14.05.25
Sofka Zinovieff, Stealing Dad - finished 14.05.25
Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast - finished 15.05.25
Deryn Lake, Love Song of the Nightingale - finished 24.05.25
Clare Mulley, Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka - finished 25.05.25

FINISHED IN JUNE

Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - finished 01.06.25
Francesca Hornak, So Good to See You - finished 02.06.25

CURRENTLY READING

Jennifer E Smith, Fun for the Whole Family - started 02.06.25

Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight - started 16.04.25
Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts - started 26.04.25
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote - started 17.04.25
Elin Hildebrand, Natural Selection - short story - finished 27.05.25
Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - started 27.04.25
Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest - started 27.04.25
Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain - started 26.04.25
Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy - started 05.05.25
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - started 26.04.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - started 27.04.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - started 27.04.25
Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything - started 10.05.25
Jennifer Weiner, The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits - started 11.05.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - started 27.04.25
Linda Anderson & Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - started 28.04.25
Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell - started 20.05.25
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel - started 20.05.25
Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me - started 20.05.25
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God - started 21.05.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - started 11.05.25
Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April - started 21.05.25
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians - started 22.05.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - started 22.05.25

NEXT

Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - started 31.05.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - started 31.05.25
(if I start in the next few days I might have read a few chapters before my next book group meet up at the end of June!)
Abby Jimenez, The Fall Risk - story
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife

May 2025: 4,227 pages (av 173.13 pages/day), 10 books, 4 reviews
2025: 30,234 pages (av 209.97 pages/day), 97 books, 15 reviews

4,227 pages finished in May
30,234 pages finished in 2025

10 books finished in May
97 books finished in 2025

4 reviews in May
15 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 7 >105 elkiedee:
Page Count May 2025 >99 elkiedee:

>124 elkiedee: Love that shirt ha. I'd have liked your friend Luci. I think the Canadians might find a way to reinvent that!

>123 elkiedee: Sounds about right for my uncle's time frame. Interesting times.

I've just been reading a memoir by Natasha Walter that talks about her mother's membership of the Committee of 100. I'd never come across it, would like to read more - although as mentioned in >121 Jackie_K:, a history with the women left in!

>116 elkiedee: Aunts always hold a special place in our hearts. Glad you have wonderful memories of her.

>127 charl08: The Wikipedia entries for Aldermaston and the Committee of 100 include various references for further reading. My impression is that "100" just refers to initial signatories. My mum was involved in actions that meant being arrested. Natasha Walter's mother was quite a similar age.

I went to a protest outside a supermarket organised by Natasha Walter, probably about 15-20 years ago now - it was about asylum seeker aid being paid in supermarket vouchers rather than money, hence marking them out when shopping and stigmatising.

Interestingly, though my dad's father wouldn't grant permission for my dad to marry and they had to wait until he was 21 - my mum was still only 17 though! - apparently my mum's family were "too Irish" - her parents were both born in New Zealand - their fathers were born in Ireland, mothers in NZ but of Irish ancestry. However, by the late 1950s I would think mum's family were a fairly respectable middle class and highly educated family living in Oxford. But anyway, my dad's father was a vicar but very supportive of CND, and he paid/supported my mum's bail when she was arrested. Brigid told me that they were also very hospitable to her

>116 elkiedee: Brigid and your mom sound like amazing people, Luci. I'm so sorry for your loss.

More about women who have died recently.

Our Bodies, Ourselves was a really pioneering reference book written by and for women, first published in 1970 and in many further editions. They also published a number of other books on women's health issues, although some of these would have been less relevant to women living in the UK at the time. Norma Meras Swenson, was born 1932 and died 15 May 2025. She was one of the activists in the Boston Women's Health Book Collective. My cousin, several friends and I had the the benefit of being daughters of feminists here and being able to look up information about our bodies and health in our mothers' copies.

From the Our Bodies, Ourselves organisation here:

https://ourbodiesourselves.org/the-latest/remembering-norma-meras-swenson

Susan Brownmiller was active in civil rights and anti war movements SNCC and CORE and became one of the women active in the Women's Liberation Movement. Her most famous book is Against Our Will: Women, Men and Rape. I have a copy of her memoir of second wave feminism In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution.

I think I've read some of her older writings but not sure what, as it was probably when I was a student 35+ years ago.

January 2025: 6,186 pages, 19 books, 4 reviews >3 elkiedee:
February 2025: 6,504 pages, 22 books, 3 reviews >22 elkiedee:
March 2025: 6,530 pages, 20 books, 1 review >38 elkiedee:
April 2025: 6,807 pages, 26 books, 3 reviews >69 elkiedee:
May 2025: 5,154 pages, 11 books, 4 reviews >99 elkiedee:

Beginning of June: 31,161 pages, 98 books, 15 reviews

PAGES READ IN JUNE 2025

01.06.25: 260
02.06.25: 164
03.06.25: 162
04.06.25: 166
05.06.25: 135
06.06.25: 135
07.06.25: 082
08.06.25: 266
09.06.25: 146
10.06.25: 070
11.06.25: 067
12.06.25: 177
13.06.25: 394
14.06.25: 179
15.06.25: 211
16.06.25: 103
17.06.25: 161
18.06.25: 108
19.06.25: 125
20.06.25: 180
21.06.25: 202
22.06.25: 460
23.06.25: 140
24.06.25: 216
25.06.25: 140
26.06.25: 187
27.06.25: 117
28.06.25: 209
29.06.25: 209
30.06.25: 155

June 2025: 5,326 pages (av 177.55 pages/day), 13 books, 4 reviews
2025: 36,487 pages (av 202.72 pages/day), 111 books, 19 reviews

Books read
Part 8 >144 elkiedee:

Pages read in July 2025 >149 elkiedee:

2025 #99
Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream
Read 30.03.25 to 01.06.25, reviewed 01.06.25
Rating: 3.8

READING AS OF 3 JUNE 2025, 4.15 PM

FINISHED IN MAY

Charlotte Stein, My Big Fat Fake Marriage - finished 06.05.25
Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square - finished 06.05.25
Louise Hegarty, Fair Play - finished 07.05.25
A L Kennedy, Alive in the Merciful Country - finished 11.05.25
Rebecca O'Connor (editor), Scéalta: Short Stories by Irish Women - finished 14.05.25
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour, Tristesse/A Certain Smile - finished 14.05.25
Sofka Zinovieff, Stealing Dad - finished 14.05.25
Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast - finished 15.05.25
Deryn Lake, Love Song of the Nightingale - finished 24.05.25
Clare Mulley, Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka - finished 25.05.25
Elin Hildebrand, Natural Selection - short story - finished 27.05.25

FINISHED IN JUNE

Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - finished 01.06.25
Francesca Hornak, So Good to See You - finished 02.06.25
Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight - finished 05.06.25
Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts - finished 06.06.25

CURRENTLY READING

Jennifer E Smith, Fun for the Whole Family - started 02.06.25

Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - started 27.04.25
Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest - started 27.04.25
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote - started 17.04.25
Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy - started 05.05.25
Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain - started 26.04.25
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - started 26.04.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - started 27.04.25
Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything - started 10.05.25
Jennifer Weiner, The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits - started 11.05.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - started 27.04.25
Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell - started 20.05.25
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel - started 20.05.25
Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me - started 20.05.25
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God - started 21.05.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - started 27.04.25
Linda Anderson & Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - started 28.04.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - started 11.05.25
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians - started 22.05.25
Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April - started 21.05.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - started 22.05.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - started 31.05.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - started 31.05.25

NEXT

Abby Jimenez, The Fall Risk - story
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism
Gina Rippon, The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women - and the New Research that's Changing the Story
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife
Ann Walmsley, The Prison Book Club
Anna Hope, Albion

5,154 pages finished in May
519 pages finished in June
31,673 pages finished in 2025

11 books finished in May
2 books finished in June
100 books finished in 2025

4 reviews in May
2 reviews in June
17 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 7 >105 elkiedee:
Page Count May 2025 >99 elkiedee:
Page Count June 2025 >132 elkiedee:

2025 #89
Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square
Read 08.04.25 to 06.05.25, reviewed 01.06.25
Rating: 4.2

2025 #20
Lyndall Gordon, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter
Read 25.01.25 to 25.02.25, reviewed 06.06.25
Rating: 4.3

READING AS OF 8 JUNE 2025, 4.30 PM

FINISHED IN JUNE

Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - finished 01.06.25
Francesca Hornak, So Good to See You - finished 02.06.25
Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight - finished 05.06.25
Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts - finished 06.06.25
Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - finished 08.06.25
Jennifer E Smith, Fun for the Whole Family - finished 12.06.25
Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest - finished 13.06.25

CURRENTLY READING

Meryl Wilsner, My Best Friend's Honeymoon - started 12.06.25

Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy - started 05.05.25
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote - started 17.04.25
Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain - started 26.04.25
Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything - started 10.05.25
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - started 26.04.25
Jennifer Weiner, The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits - started 11.05.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - started 27.04.25
Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell - started 20.05.25
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel - started 20.05.25
Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me - started 20.05.25
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God - started 21.05.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - started 27.04.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - started 27.04.25
Linda Anderson & Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - started 28.04.25
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians - started 22.05.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - started 11.05.25
Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April - started 21.05.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - started 22.05.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - started 31.05.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - started 31.05.25

NEXT

Abby Jimenez, The Fall Risk - story - started 09.06.25
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism - started 09.06.25
Gina Rippon, The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women - and the New Research that's Changing the Story - started 09.06.25
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - started 09.06.25
Ann Walmsley, The Prison Book Club - started 09.06.25
Anna Hope, Albion - started 10.06.25
Aria Aber, Good Girl
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work
Sally Carson, Crooked Cross

1,277 pages finished in June
31,673 pages finished in 2025

4 books finished in June
102 books finished in 2025

3 reviews in June
18 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 7 >105 elkiedee:
Page Count June 2025 >132 elkiedee:

June 2025: 1,277 pages (av 159.625 pages/day), 4 books, 3 reviews
2025: 32,438 pages (av 204.012 pages/day), 102 books, 18 reviews

Women's Prize Update

The winner of the prize is to be announced on 12 June, I believe. I've splashed out on a ticket for a Women's Prize event in central London. It cost quite a lot of money, but then I don't have to pay for accommodation and I only need to pay for local public transport costs (between £3.50 and nearly £10, depending on whether I get the bus or the bus and tube).

NON FICTION PRIZE

SHORTLIST

Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang - Library hardback, read April 2025, I thought this was quite interesting, still aiming to write a review. My response is also quite personal, as it's about women and work in China, which was a central subject for my mum's study/research - she did her PhD in the subject, which was published as a book in the 1970s. The author is a Chinese/British journalist, who used to work for the Financial Times and now a Labour MP. My favourite of the two books I've read, but there are others on both the shortlist and longlist I'd like to read, some of which I've bought on Kindle or borrowed from the library

Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka by Clare Mulley - - the story of a Polish woman who became involved in anti Nazi espionage, and who became a dissident in Communist Poland after the war. I was somewhat surprised to find the hardback on my local branch library's new book display and that I was able to renew it. I still need to write a review. I have two other books by Clare Mulley on Kindle TBR and have borrowed another from the library - about two female pilots who flew for the Nazis.

A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry - Kindle TBR

The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke - Kindle TBR

Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton - Kindle TBR

What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean by Helen Scales

LONGLIST

The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale - Kindle TBR

Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men by Harriet Wistrich - Kindle TBR

Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Eleanor Barraclough - library ebook loan

Ootlin by Jenni Fagan - library ebook loan

By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle - library ebook loan

The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV by Helen Castor

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux

Tracker by Alexis Wright - Kindle TBR

WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025

SHORTLIST

All Fours by Miranda July (published by Canongate Books) - Kindle TBR

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji (published by 4th Estate, HarperCollins) - Kindle TBR

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (published by Viking, Penguin General, Penguin Random House) - Kindle TBR

Good Girl by Aria Aber (published by Bloomsbury) - Currently reading from library

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis (published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Publishing Group, Hachette) - finally borrowed from library and have started reading

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (published by Viking, Penguin General, Penguin Random House) - I may not read this for a while yet, as it brings together characters from 7 other books, Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteredge and one of the Burgess Boys, so I'd like to reread/read some of her other work first

REST OF LONGLIST

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (published by 4th Estate, HarperCollins) - READ (library)

Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell (published by Scribner, Simon & Schuster) - READ (Kindle)

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (published by Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury) - READ (library book)

A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike (published by Fig Tree, Penguin General, Penguin Random House) - Kindle TBR

Birding by Rose Ruane (published by Corsair, Little, Brown Book Group, Hachette) - Kindle TBR

The Artist by Lucy Steeds (published by John Murray, John Murray Press, Hachette) - Kindle TBR

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (published by Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton, Hachette) - Kindle TBR

Amma by Saraid de Silva (published by Weatherglass Books) - library ebook TBR

Somewhere Else by Jenni Daiches (published by Scotland Street Press)

Crooked Seeds by Karen Jennings (published by Holland House Books)

>138 elkiedee: Ooh, exciting! I hope you have a good time

I did have a good time and I will try to post about it later, or tomorrow

First: Winners just announced

Non Fiction prize: Rachel Clarke, The Story of a Heart
Fiction prize, Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep

I haven't yet read either but own both in Kindle format. I know responses to The Safekeep have been very mixed but after hearing the author speak yesterday about some of the background to the story and her own experiences, I'm quite intrigued and looking forward to reading it.

Otherwise, I've read two of the non fiction shortlist and two of the fiction longlist - I have the winners TBR plus two other fiction shortlist titles TBR in Kindle format. I'm currently reading another longlist novel from the library and also have several other listed books out from the library.

Tonight Rachel Clarke took the opportunity to have a pop at government immigration policy - denying visas to healthcare workers. I'll just say, I agreed with her rant.

Yesterday, Yael van der Wouden talked about her complicated family history in relation to international wars and colonial conflicts.

READING AS OF 15 JUNE 2025, 10 PM

FINISHED IN JUNE

Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - finished 01.06.25
Francesca Hornak, So Good to See You - finished 02.06.25
Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight - finished 05.06.25
Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts - finished 06.06.25
Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - finished 08.06.25
Jennifer E Smith, Fun for the Whole Family - finished 12.06.25
Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest - finished 13.06.25
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote - started 16.06.25
Meryl Wilsner, My Best Friend's Honeymoon - finished 21.06.25
Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy - finished 21.06.25

CURRENTLY READING

Andrew Taylor, A Schooling in Murder - started 21.06.25

Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain - started 26.04.25
Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything - started 10.05.25
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - started 26.04.25
Jennifer Weiner, The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits - started 11.05.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - started 27.04.25
Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell - started 20.05.25
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel - started 20.05.25
Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me - started 20.05.25
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God - started 21.05.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - started 27.04.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - started 27.04.25
Linda Anderson & Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - started 28.04.25
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians - started 22.05.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - started 11.05.25
Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April - started 21.05.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - started 22.05.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - started 31.05.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - started 31.05.25
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism - started 09.06.25
Gina Rippon, The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women - and the New Research that's Changing the Story - started 09.06.25
Abby Jimenez, The Fall Risk - story - started 09.06.25
Ann Walmsley, The Prison Book Club - started 09.06.25
Anna Hope, Albion - started 10.06.25
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - started 09.06.25

NEXT

Sally Carson, Crooked Cross - started 19.06.25
Aria Aber, Good Girl - started 19.06.25
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work - started 19.06.25
Florence Knapp, The Names - started 20.06.25
Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello
Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue

2,582 pages finished in June
33,743 pages finished in 2025

7 books finished in June
105 books finished in 2025

3 reviews in June
18 reviews in 2025

READING 2025, PART 8

PART 1 >5 elkiedee:
PART 2 >13 elkiedee:
PART 3 >28 elkiedee:
PART 4 >45 elkiedee:
PART 5 >70 elkiedee:
PART 6 >84 elkiedee:
PART 7 >105 elkiedee:

106. 16.06.25 Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote 4.3
107. 21.06.25 Meryl Wilsner, My Best Friend's Honeymoon 3.7
108. 21.06.25 Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy 4.7
109. 23.06.25 Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain 4.1
110. 23.06.25 Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything 4.2 - reviewed 22.07.25
111. 30.06.25 Jennifer Weiner, The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits 4.2
112. 01.07.25 Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun 4.2
113. 02.07.25 Sally Carson, Crooked Cross 4.2
114. 03.07.25 Andrew Taylor, A Schooling in Murder 4.2
115. 04.07.25 Gráinne O'Hare, Thirst Trap 4.2
116. 05.07.25 Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell 4.3
117. 06.07.25 Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel 4.4
118. 11.07.25 Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me 4.2
119. 14.07.25 Jenny Colgan, Meet Me at the Seaside Cottages 4.1
120. 15.07.25 Claire Lynch, A Family Matter 4.2

PART 9 >152 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 22 JUNE 2025, 5.30 PM

FINISHED IN JUNE

Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - finished 01.06.25
Francesca Hornak, So Good to See You - finished 02.06.25
Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight - finished 05.06.25
Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts - finished 06.06.25
Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - finished 08.06.25
Jennifer E Smith, Fun for the Whole Family - finished 12.06.25
Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest - finished 13.06.25
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote - started 16.06.25
Meryl Wilsner, My Best Friend's Honeymoon - finished 21.06.25
Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy - finished 21.06.25
Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain - finished 23.06.25
Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything finished 23.06.25

CURRENTLY READING

Andrew Taylor, A Schooling in Murder - started 21.06.25

Jennifer Weiner, The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits - started 11.05.25
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - started 26.04.25
Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell - started 20.05.25
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel - started 20.05.25
Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me - started 20.05.25
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God - started 21.05.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - started 27.04.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - started 27.04.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - started 27.04.25
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians - started 22.05.25
Linda Anderson & Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - started 28.04.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - started 11.05.25
Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April - started 21.05.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - started 22.05.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - started 31.05.25
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism - started 09.06.25
Gina Rippon, The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women - and the New Research that's Changing the Story - started 09.06.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - started 31.05.25
Sally Carson, Crooked Cross - started 19.06.25
Ann Walmsley, The Prison Book Club - started 09.06.25
Anna Hope, Albion - started 10.06.25
Aria Aber, Good Girl - started 19.06.25
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work - started 19.06.25
Florence Knapp, The Names - started 20.06.25
Abby Jimenez, The Fall Risk - story - started 09.06.25
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - started 09.06.25

NEXT

Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello
Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue
Annabel Thorpe, The People We Were Before

3,672 pages finished in June
34,833 pages finished in 2025

10 books finished in June
108 books finished in 2025

4 reviews in June
19 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 8 >144 elkiedee:
Page Count June 2025 >132 elkiedee:

The event looked really good from the info they shared, would love to hear more.

I appreciate why they so often do events in London but I was glad they had the livestream option!

>145 elkiedee: Your list of current reads is become more cumbersome and more impressive, Luci.

I have a goodly number of those on the shelves but, so far, the only one I have read of your current reads is Every Man for Himself.

READING AS OF 29 JUNE 2025, 11.30 PM

FINISHED IN JUNE

Barbara Taylor Bradford, Hold the Dream - finished 01.06.25
Francesca Hornak, So Good to See You - finished 02.06.25
Peter Lovesey, Another One Goes Tonight - finished 05.06.25
Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts - finished 06.06.25
Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - finished 08.06.25
Jennifer E Smith, Fun for the Whole Family - finished 12.06.25
Jess Kidd, Murder at Gulls Nest - finished 13.06.25
Jane Thynne, The Words I Never Wrote - started 16.06.25
Meryl Wilsner, My Best Friend's Honeymoon - finished 21.06.25
Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy - finished 21.06.25
Lindsey Davis, Three Hands in the Fountain - finished 23.06.25
Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything - finished 23.06.25
Jennifer Weiner, The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits - finished 30.06.25

FINISHED IN JULY

Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - finished 01.07.25
Sally Carson, Crooked Cross - finished 01.07.25
Andrew Taylor, A Schooling in Murder - finished 03.07.25
Gráinne O'Hare, Thirst Trap - finished 04.07.25
Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell - finished 05.07.25
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel - finished 06.07.25

CURRENTLY READING

Jenny Colgan, Meet Me at the Seaside Cottages - started 04.07.25

Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me - started 20.05.25
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God - started 21.05.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - started 27.04.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - started 27.04.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - started 27.04.25
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians - started 22.05.25
Linda Anderson & Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - started 28.04.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - started 11.05.25
Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April - started 21.05.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - started 22.05.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - started 31.05.25
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism - started 09.06.25
Gina Rippon, The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women - and the New Research that's Changing the Story - started 09.06.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - started 31.05.25
Ann Walmsley, The Prison Book Club - started 09.06.25
Anna Hope, Albion - started 10.06.25
Aria Aber, Good Girl - started 19.06.25
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work - started 19.06.25
Florence Knapp, The Names - started 20.06.25
Abby Jimenez, The Fall Risk - story - started 09.06.25
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - started 09.06.25

NEXT

Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello - started 02.07.25
Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue - started 02.07.25
Annabel Thorpe, The People We Were Before
Sarah Moss, Ripeness
Alex Wheatle, Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head
Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Orla Mackey, Mouthing
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

5,149 pages finished in June
36,310 pages finished in 2025

12 books finished in June
110 books finished in 2025

4 reviews in June
19 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 8 >144 elkiedee:
Page Count June 2025 >132 elkiedee:

January 2025: 6,186 pages, 19 books, 4 reviews >3 elkiedee:
February 2025: 6,504 pages, 22 books, 3 reviews >22 elkiedee:
March 2025: 6,530 pages, 20 books, 1 review >38 elkiedee:
April 2025: 6,807 pages, 26 books, 3 reviews >69 elkiedee:
May 2025: 5,154 pages, 11 books, 4 reviews >99 elkiedee:
June 2025: 5,326 pages, 13 books, 4 reviews >132 elkiedee:

Beginning of July: 36,487 pages, 111 books, 19 reviews

PAGES READ IN JULY 2025

01.07.25: 102
02.07.25: 098
03.07.25: 214
04.07.25: 233
05.07.25: 371
06.07.25: 186
07.07.25: 262
08.07.25: 116
09.07.25: 202
10.07.25: 174
11.07.25: 204
12.07.25: 103
13.07.25: 081
14.07.25: 088
15.07.25: 196
16.07.25: 294
17.07.25: 422
18.07.25: 536
19.07.25: 357
20.07.25: 244
21.07.25: 162
22.07.25: 220
23.07.25: 143
24.07.25: 189
25.07.25: 290
26.07.25: 336
27.07.25: 495
28.07.25: 446
29.07.25: 411
30.07.25: 291
31.07.25: 285

July 2025: 7,551 pages (av 237.51 pages/day), 30 books, 5 reviews
2025: 44,038 pages (av 206.83 pages/day), 141 books, 24 reviews

Books read
Part 8 >144 elkiedee:
Part 9 >149 elkiedee:
Part 10 >161 elkiedee:

August 2025: >164 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 6 JULY 2025, 10.30 PM

FINISHED IN JULY

Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - finished 01.07.25
Sally Carson, Crooked Cross - finished 01.07.25
Andrew Taylor, A Schooling in Murder - finished 03.07.25
Gráinne O'Hare, Thirst Trap - finished 04.07.25
Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell - finished 05.07.25
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel - finished 06.07.25
Jenny Colgan, Meet Me at the Seaside Cottages - finished 14.07.25
Claire Lynch, A Family Matter - finished 15.07.25

CURRENTLY READING

Jennifer Trevelyan, A Beautiful Family - started 16.07.25

Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me - finished 11.07.25
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God - finished 16.07.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - finished 16.07.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - started 27.04.25
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians - started 22.05.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - started 27.04.25
Linda Anderson & Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - started 28.04.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - started 11.05.25
Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April - started 21.05.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - started 22.05.25
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism - started 09.06.25
Gina Rippon, The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women - and the New Research that's Changing the Story - started 09.06.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - started 31.05.25
Ann Walmsley, The Prison Book Club - started 09.06.25
Anna Hope, Albion - started 10.06.25
Aria Aber, Good Girl - started 19.06.25
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work - started 19.06.25
Florence Knapp, The Names - started 20.06.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - started 31.05.25
Abby Jimenez, The Fall Risk - story - started 09.06.25
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - started 09.06.25
Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue - started 02.07.25
Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello - started 02.07.25

NEXT

Sarah Moss, Ripeness - started 10.07.25
Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky - started 11.07.25
Alex Wheatle, Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head - started 11.07.25
Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time - started 11.07.25
Annabel Thorpe, The People We Were Before - started 11.07.25
Orla Mackey, Mouthing - started 11.07.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere - started 11.07.25
Jane Austen, Persuasion - started 12.07.25
Catriona McPherson, The Edinburgh Murders - started 12.07.25
Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally - started 12.07.25

5,149 pages finished in June
1,204 pages finished in July
37,691 pages finished in 2025

13 books finished in June
6 books finished in July
117 books finished in 2025

4 reviews in June
18 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 8 >144 elkiedee:
Page Count June 2025 >132 elkiedee:
Page Count July 2025 >149 elkiedee:

The Chingford skinhead has died.

Lord Norman Tebbit was a Tory politician who represented Chingford, an Essex town on the edges of London, which became a London suburb and acquired an east London postcode at some point in the 20th century. He joined the Conservative Party as a teenager and was Chair of his local party in Ponders End at a young age. He then trained as an airline pilot - originally he was elected to Parliament while on strike as his trade union was engaged in an industrial dispute. On the right of the party, he was a close ally of Margaret Thatcher and became Home Secretary.

Some of his forthright expressions of his political views earned him the nickname the Chingford skinhead - apparently in later years on a late night journey by public transport, he encountered a group of aggressive looking right wing youths who recognised him and took his media nickname to mean that he was one of their own, so they were apparently very kind to him!

His wife was permanently disabled in the 1980s when the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Tory conference was taking place, and he became her carer.

I'm not a fan of the Tories, and definitely not of Tebbit, but footage of him on old documentaries, especially about the 1980s (the peak of his political career)

I've never read any of his books and probably don't want to, but he wrote two memoirs, a cookery book on preparing game, some political pamphlets and a novel about a boy and a dog called Ben's Story.

READING 2025, PART 9

PART 1 >5 elkiedee:
PART 2 >13 elkiedee:
PART 3 >28 elkiedee:
PART 4 >45 elkiedee:
PART 5 >70 elkiedee:
PART 6 >84 elkiedee:
PART 7 >105 elkiedee:
PART 8 >144 elkiedee:

121. 16.07.25 Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God 4.2
122. 16.07.25 Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight 4.2
123. 17.07.25 Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill 4.3
124. 18.07.25 Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees 4.1
125. 18.07.25 Linda Anderson and Dawn Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland 4.0
126. 18.07.25 Jennifer Trevelyan, A Beautiful Family 4.2
127. 18.07.25 Keisha N Abraham and John Woolf, Black Victorians: Hidden in History 4.2 - reviewed 22.07.25
128. 19.07.25 Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun 4.3
129. 20.07.25 Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April 4.2
130. 21.07.25 Abby Jimenez, The Fall Risk - story 4.0
131. 23.07.05 Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism 4.7
132. 24.07.05 Gina Rippon, The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women and the New Research That's Changing the Story 4.2
133. 26.07.25 Beth Reekles, The Layover 4.0
134. 27.07.25 Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo 4.2
135. 27.07.25 Ann Walmsley, The Prison Book Club 4.0

PART 10 >161 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 14 JULY 2025, 1 AM

I had a very busy weekend with one friend's memorial event on Saturday and another's birthday celebration on Sunday, and was also out on Monday evening. So I've chosen a point when I can work out what I'd read, although this does include the dates of books finished since that I add to each weekly update until the next one.

FINISHED IN JULY

Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - finished 01.07.25
Sally Carson, Crooked Cross - finished 01.07.25
Andrew Taylor, A Schooling in Murder - finished 03.07.25
Gráinne O'Hare, Thirst Trap - finished 04.07.25
Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell - finished 05.07.25
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel - finished 06.07.25
Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me - finished 11.07.25
Jenny Colgan, Meet Me at the Seaside Cottages - finished 14.07.25
Claire Lynch, A Family Matter - finished 15.07.25
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God - finished 16.07.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - finished 16.07.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - finished 17.07.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - finished 18.07.25
Linda Anderson & Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - finished 18.07.25
Jennifer Trevelyan, A Beautiful Family - finished 18.07.25
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians - finished 18.07.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - finished 19.07.25

CURRENTLY READING

Beth Reekles, The Layover - started 18.07.25

Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April - started 21.05.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - started 22.05.25
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism - started 09.06.25
Gina Rippon, The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women - and the New Research that's Changing the Story - started 09.06.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - started 31.05.25
Ann Walmsley, The Prison Book Club - started 09.06.25
Anna Hope, Albion - started 10.06.25
Aria Aber, Good Girl - started 19.06.25
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work - started 19.06.25
Florence Knapp, The Names - started 20.06.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - started 31.05.25
Abby Jimenez, The Fall Risk - story - started 09.06.25
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - started 09.06.25
Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue - started 02.07.25
Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello - started 02.07.25
Sarah Moss, Ripeness - started 10.07.25
Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky - started 11.07.25
Alex Wheatle, Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head - started 11.07.25
Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time - started 11.07.25
Annabel Thorpe, The People We Were Before - started 11.07.25
Orla Mackey, Mouthing - started 11.07.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere - started 11.07.25
Jane Austen, Persuasion - started 12.07.25
Catriona McPherson, The Edinburgh Murders - started 12.07.25
Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally - started 12.07.25

NEXT:

Cathy Cassidy, Driftwood - started 24.07.25
Angela Milne, One Year's Time - started 24.07.25

2,346 pages finished in July
39,833 pages finished in 2025

7 books finished in July
118 books finished in 2025

1 review in July
19 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 8 >144 elkiedee:
2025 Reading Part 9 >152 elkiedee:
Page Count July 2025 >149 elkiedee:

2025 #47
Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike
Read 13.02.25 to 08.03.25, reviewed 16.07.25
Rating: 4.7

READING AS OF 20 JULY 2025, 5.30 PM

FINISHED IN JULY

Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - finished 01.07.25
Sally Carson, Crooked Cross - finished 01.07.25
Andrew Taylor, A Schooling in Murder - finished 03.07.25
Gráinne O'Hare, Thirst Trap - finished 04.07.25
Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell - finished 05.07.25
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel - finished 06.07.25
Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me - finished 11.07.25
Jenny Colgan, Meet Me at the Seaside Cottages - finished 14.07.25
Claire Lynch, A Family Matter - finished 15.07.25
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God - finished 16.07.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - finished 16.07.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - finished 17.07.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - finished 18.07.25
Linda Anderson & Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - finished 18.07.25
Jennifer Trevelyan, A Beautiful Family - finished 18.07.25
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians - finished 18.07.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - finished 19.07.25
Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April - finished 20.07.25
Abby Jimenez, The Fall Risk - story - finished 21.07.25
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism - finished 23.07.25
Gina Rippon, The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women - and the New Research that's Changing the Story - finished 24.07.25
Beth Reekles, The Layover - finished 26.07.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - finished 27.07.25
Ann Walmsley, The Prison Book Club - finished 27.07.25

CURRENTLY READING

Emily Buchanan, Send Flowers - started 26.07.25

Anna Hope, Albion - started 10.06.25
Aria Aber, Good Girl - started 19.06.25
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work - started 19.06.25
Florence Knapp, The Names - started 20.06.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - started 31.05.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - started 31.05.25
Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue - started 02.07.25
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - started 09.06.25
Sarah Moss, Ripeness - started 10.07.25
Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello - started 02.07.25
Alex Wheatle, Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head - started 11.07.25
Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time - started 11.07.25
Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky - started 11.07.25
Orla Mackey, Mouthing - started 11.07.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere - started 11.07.25
Annabel Thorpe, The People We Were Before - started 11.07.25
Catriona McPherson, The Edinburgh Murders - started 12.07.25
Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally - started 12.07.25
Jane Austen, Persuasion - started 12.07.25
Cathy Cassidy, Driftwood - started 24.07.25
Angela Milne, One Year's Time - started 24.07.25
Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet - started 25.07.25
Wendy Erskine, The Benefactors - started 25.07.25

NEXT:

Sarah Penner, The Conjurer's Wife - story
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

4,376 pages finished in July
40,863 pages finished in 2025

17 books finished in July
128 books finished in 2025

2 reviews in July
20 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 8 >144 elkiedee:
2025 Reading Part 9 >152 elkiedee:
Page Count July 2025 >149 elkiedee:

2025 #38
Molly McCloskey, Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother
Read 06.02.25 to 24.02.25, reviewed 21.07.25
Rating: 3.8

This is ridiculous - I've finally reviewed a book that I actually read in October 2024 (I'm trying to write about some books before returning them to the library so I can borrow others....). But I really want to say something about a novel which deserves more attention.

2024 #175
Buchi Emecheta, Second-Class Citizen
Read 05.10.24 to 19.10.24, reviewed 21.07.25
Rating: 4.5

2025 #110
Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything
Read 10.05.25 to 23.06.25, reviewed 22.07.25
Rating: 4.2

2025 #127
Keshia N Abraham and John Woolf, Black Victorians: Hidden in History
Read 22.05.25 to 18.07.25, reviewed 22.07.25
Rating: 4.2

READING AS OF 27 JULY 2025, 7 PM

FINISHED IN JULY

Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - finished 01.07.25
Sally Carson, Crooked Cross - finished 01.07.25
Andrew Taylor, A Schooling in Murder - finished 03.07.25
Gráinne O'Hare, Thirst Trap - finished 04.07.25
Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell - finished 05.07.25
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel - finished 06.07.25
Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me - finished 11.07.25
Jenny Colgan, Meet Me at the Seaside Cottages - finished 14.07.25
Claire Lynch, A Family Matter - finished 15.07.25
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God - finished 16.07.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - finished 16.07.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - finished 17.07.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - finished 18.07.25
Linda Anderson & Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - finished 18.07.25
Jennifer Trevelyan, A Beautiful Family - finished 18.07.25
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians - finished 18.07.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - finished 19.07.25
Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April - finished 20.07.25
Abby Jimenez, The Fall Risk - story - finished 21.07.25
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism - finished 23.07.25
Gina Rippon, The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women - and the New Research that's Changing the Story - finished 24.07.25
Beth Reekles, The Layover - finished 26.07.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - finished 27.07.25
Ann Walmsley, The Prison Book Club - finished 27.07.25
Emily Buchanan, Send Flowers - finished 28.07.25
Aria Aber, Good Girl - finished 29.07.25
Anna Hope, Albion - finished 29.07.25
Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky - finished 30.07.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere - finished 30.07.25
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work - finished 31.07.25

FINISHED IN AUGUST

Florence Knapp, The Names - finished 03.08.25

CURRENTLY READING

Sarah Adler, Finders Keepers - started 28.07.25

Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - started 31.05.25
Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue - started 02.07.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - started 31.05.25
Sarah Moss, Ripeness - started 10.07.25
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - started 09.06.25
Alex Wheatle, Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head - started 11.07.25
Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time - started 11.07.25
Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello - started 02.07.25
Orla Mackey, Mouthing - started 11.07.25
Catriona McPherson, The Edinburgh Murders - started 12.07.25
Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally - started 12.07.25
Annabel Thorpe, The People We Were Before - started 11.07.25
Jane Austen, Persuasion - started 12.07.25
Cathy Cassidy, Driftwood - started 24.07.25
Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet - started 25.07.25
Wendy Erskine, The Benefactors - started 25.07.25
Angela Milne, One Year's Time - started 24.07.25

NEXT:

Sarah Penner, The Conjurer's Wife - story
Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Art of a Lie
Esther Freud, My Sister and Other Lovers
Natasha Brown, Universality
Ruth Jones, By Your Side
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones
Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously
Elaine Feeney, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way

Books read
6,125 pages finished in July
42,612 pages finished in 2025

24 books finished in July
135 books finished in 2025

5 reviews in July
24 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 9 >152 elkiedee:
2025 Reading Part 10 >161 elkiedee:
Page Count July 2025 >149 elkiedee:

READING 2025, PART 10

PART 1 >5 elkiedee:
PART 2 >13 elkiedee:
PART 3 >28 elkiedee:
PART 4 >45 elkiedee:
PART 5 >70 elkiedee:
PART 6 >84 elkiedee:
PART 7 >105 elkiedee:
PART 8 >144 elkiedee:
PART 9 >152 elkiedee:

136. 28.07.25 Emily Buchanan, Send Flowers 4.4
137. 29.07.25 Aria Aber, Good Girl 4.4
138. 29.07.25 Anna Hope, Albion 4.2
139. 30.07.25 Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky 4.5
140. 30.07.25 Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere 4.2 - reviewed 24.10.25
141. 31.07.25 Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work 4.0
142. 03.08.25 Florence Knapp, The Names 4.2
143. 05.08.25 Sarah Adler, Finders Keepers 3.8
144. 07.08.25 Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally 4.4
145. 07.08.25 Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea 4.1
146. 07.08.25 Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself 4.0
147. 08.08.25 Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue 3.8
148. 08.08.25 Elena Collins, The Cornish Witch 4.0
149. 08.08.25 Sarah Moss, Ripeness 4.5
150. 10.08.25 Alex Wheatle, Sufferah: The Memoir of a Brixton Regga-Head

PART 11 >167 elkiedee:

30 July

The Booker Prize longlist is out

I haven't yet read or started to read any of the longlisted books, although I was already thinking of starting to read one soon. So I have no views, yet, on what is on the longlist though there are other books I would have liked to see make the cut. I own two, have borrowed two from the library - one hardbook and one ebook - on loan from the library and have a Netgalley.

Update: 15 September

I've read two, one library hardback and one Netgalley, bought a 3rd on Kindle and joined several library reservation queues

Update: 8 October

Read 2 Universality - library hardback - and Endling - Netgalley
Reading Love Forms - library ebook
About to start The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and Flashlight
Own 3 on Kindle - The Land in Winter, Audition and The South
Will probably buy anything which comes up as a Kindle deal, but otherwise, I'll try to read the 3 I own, probably not all at once, and investigate library catalogues further/join queues for the remaining books when I finish the short or longlisted books I have on loan - I expect that to take several weeks. The remaining book I'm most interested in is probably Misinterpretation

Update: 15 October

Read 2 Universality - library hardback - and Endling - Netgalley
Reading Love Forms (library ebook), The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and Flashlight (both library hardbacks)


Now own 6 on Kindle, as 3 were in the daily deals on one day this week

already had The Land in Winter, Audition and The South
this week Endling, Love Forms and The Rest of Our Lives

Love Forms by Claire Adam (Faber) - READING library ebook, Kindle purchase

The South by Tash Aw (4th Estate) - Kindle TBR

Universality by Natasha Brown (Faber) - library hardback/ebook - READ

One Boat by Jonathan Buckley (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Flashlight by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape) - READING library hardback

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton) - READING library hardback

Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press) - Kindle TBR

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (Faber) - Kindle TBR

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (Sceptre) - Kindle TBR

Endling by Maria Reva (Virago) - Netgalley - READ Netgalley, Kindle purchase

Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape)

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking)

Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Daunt Books Originals)

>162 elkiedee: Most of the list was new to me, and I haven't read any of them. Will check back to see how you get on with the list. I'm hoping my library turns up trumps again.

January 2025: 6,186 pages, 19 books, 4 reviews >3 elkiedee:
February 2025: 6,504 pages, 22 books, 3 reviews >22 elkiedee:
March 2025: 6,530 pages, 20 books, 1 review >38 elkiedee:
April 2025: 6,807 pages, 26 books, 3 reviews >69 elkiedee:
May 2025: 5,154 pages, 11 books, 4 reviews >99 elkiedee:
June 2025: 5,326 pages, 13 books, 4 reviews >132 elkiedee:
July 2025: 7,551 pages, 30 books, 5 reviews >149 elkiedee:

Beginning of August: 44,038 pages, 141 books, 24 reviews

PAGES READ IN AUGUST 2025

01.08.25: 156
02.08.25: 270
03.08.25: 323
04.08.25: 228
05.08.25: 323
06.08.25: 259
07.08.25: 509
08.08.25: 444
09.08.25: 320
10.08.25: 251
11.08.25: 213
12.08.25: 242
13.08.25: 259
14.08.25: 424
15.08.25: 238
16.08.25: 148
17.08.25: 139
18.08.25: 218
19.08.25: 205
20.08.25: 259
21.08.25: 331
22.08.25: 222
23.08.25: 425
24.08.25: 256
25.08.25: 175
26.08.25: 135
27.08.25: 219
28.08.25: 196
29.08.25: 139
30.08.25: 252
31.08.25: 242

August 2025: 8,020 pages (av 258.7 pages/day), 25 books, 2 reviews
2025: 52,058 pages (av 214.23 pages/day), 166 books, 26 reviews

Pages read in September 2025 >174 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 3 AUGUST 2025, 7.45 PM

FINISHED IN JULY

Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman - finished 01.07.25
Sally Carson, Crooked Cross - finished 01.07.25
Andrew Taylor, A Schooling in Murder - finished 03.07.25
Gráinne O'Hare, Thirst Trap - finished 04.07.25
Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell - finished 05.07.25
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel - finished 06.07.25
Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me - finished 11.07.25
Jenny Colgan, Meet Me at the Seaside Cottages - finished 14.07.25
Claire Lynch, A Family Matter - finished 15.07.25
Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God - finished 16.07.25
Robin Stevens, Death in the Spotlight - finished 16.07.25
Lottie Moggach, Brixton Hill - finished 17.07.25
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees - finished 18.07.25
Linda Anderson & Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (editors), Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland - finished 18.07.25
Jennifer Trevelyan, A Beautiful Family - finished 18.07.25
Keshia N Abraham & John Woolf, Black Victorians - finished 18.07.25
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun - finished 19.07.25
Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April - finished 20.07.25
Abby Jimenez, The Fall Risk - story - finished 21.07.25
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism - finished 23.07.25
Gina Rippon, The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women - and the New Research that's Changing the Story - finished 24.07.25
Beth Reekles, The Layover - finished 26.07.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - finished 27.07.25
Ann Walmsley, The Prison Book Club - finished 27.07.25
Emily Buchanan, Send Flowers - finished 28.07.25
Aria Aber, Good Girl - finished 29.07.25
Anna Hope, Albion - finished 29.07.25
Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky - finished 30.07.25
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere - finished 30.07.25
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work - finished 31.07.25

FINISHED IN AUGUST

Florence Knapp, The Names - finished 03.08.25
Sarah Adler, Finders Keepers - finished 05.08.25
Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally - finished 07.08.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - finished 07.08.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - finished 07.08.25
Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue - finished 08.08.25
Elena Collins, The Cornish Witch - finished 08.08.25
Sarah Moss, Ripeness - finished 08.08.25
Alex Wheatle, Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head - finished 10.08.25
Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time - finished 12.08.25

CURRENTLY READING

Emily Itani, Kakigori Summer - started 08.08.25

Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - started 09.06.25
Orla Mackey, Mouthing - started 11.07.25
Catriona McPherson, The Edinburgh Murders - started 12.07.25
Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello - started 02.07.25
Annabel Thorpe, The People We Were Before - started 11.07.25
Jane Austen, Persuasion - started 12.07.25
Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet - started 25.07.25
Wendy Erskine, The Benefactors - started 25.07.25
Cathy Cassidy, Driftwood - started 24.07.25
Angela Milne, One Year's Time - started 24.07.25
Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Art of a Lie - started 04.08.25
Esther Freud, My Sister and Other Lovers - started 04.08.25
Natasha Brown, Universality - started 04.08.25
Ruth Jones, By Your Side - started 04.08.25
Sarah Penner, The Conjurer's Wife - story - started 03.08.25
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones - started 04.08.25
Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life - started 05.08.25
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby - started 04.08.25
Elaine Feeney, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way - started 05.08.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, To Be the Best - started 05.08.25

NEXT

Kate Johnson, Hex and the City
Donna McLean, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police
Deirdre Madden (editor), All Over Ireland: New Irish Short Stories

7,551 pages finished in July
713 pages finished in August
44,751 pages finished in 2025

30 books finished in July
1 book finished in August
142 books finished in 2025

5 reviews in July
24 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 9 >152 elkiedee:
2025 Reading Part 10 >161 elkiedee:
Page Count July 2025 >149 elkiedee:
Page Count August 2025 >164 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 10 AUGUST 2025, 9.15 PM

FINISHED IN AUGUST

Florence Knapp, The Names - finished 03.08.25
Sarah Adler, Finders Keepers - finished 05.08.25
Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally - finished 07.08.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - finished 07.08.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - finished 07.08.25
Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue - finished 08.08.25
Elena Collins, The Cornish Witch - finished 08.08.25
Sarah Moss, Ripeness - finished 08.08.25
Alex Wheatle, Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head - finished 10.08.25
Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time - finished 12.08.25
Emily Itani, Kakigori Summer - finished 13.08.25
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - finished 14.08.25
Orla Mackey, Mouthing - finished 14.08.25
Catriona McPherson, The Edinburgh Murders - finished 16.08.25

CURRENTLY READING

Rebecca Wait, Havoc - started 13.08.25

Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello - started 02.07.25
Annabel Thorpe, The People We Were Before - started 11.07.25
Jane Austen, Persuasion - started 12.07.25
Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet - started 25.07.25
Wendy Erskine, The Benefactors - started 25.07.25
Cathy Cassidy, Driftwood - started 24.07.25
Angela Milne, One Year's Time - started 24.07.25
Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Art of a Lie - started 04.08.25
Esther Freud, My Sister and Other Lovers - started 04.08.25
Natasha Brown, Universality - started 04.08.25
Ruth Jones, By Your Side - started 04.08.25
Sarah Penner, The Conjurer's Wife - story - started 03.08.25
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones - started 04.08.25
Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life - started 05.08.25
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby - started 04.08.25
Elaine Feeney, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way - started 05.08.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, To Be the Best - started 05.08.25
Kate Johnson, Hex and the City - started 11.08.25
Donna McLean, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police - started 11.08.25

NEXT

Deirdre Madden (editor), All Over Ireland: New Irish Short Stories
Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life

August 2025: 3,065 pages (av 306.5 pages/day), 9 books, 0 reviews
2025: 47,103 pages (av 211.86 pages/day), 150 books, 24 reviews

3,065 pages finished in August
47,103 pages finished in 2025

9 books finished in August
150 books finished in 2025

24 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 10 >161 elkiedee:
Page Count August 2025 >164 elkiedee:

READING 2025, PART 11

PART 1 >5 elkiedee:
PART 2 >13 elkiedee:
PART 3 >28 elkiedee:
PART 4 >45 elkiedee:
PART 5 >70 elkiedee:
PART 6 >84 elkiedee:
PART 7 >105 elkiedee:
PART 8 >144 elkiedee:
PART 9 >152 elkiedee:
PART 10 >161 elkiedee:

151. 12.08.25 Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time 3.9
152. 13.08.25 Emily Itani, Kakigori Summer 4.4
153. 14.08.25 Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife 4.6
154. 14.08.25 Orla Mackey, Mouthing 4.3
155. 16.08.25 Catriona McPherson, The Edinburgh Murders 4.4
156. 21.08.25 Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello 4.2
157. 21.08.25 Rebecca Wait, Havoc 4.5
158. 21.08.25 Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet 4.4 - reviewed 29.08.25
159. 23.08.25 Wendy Erskine, The Benefactors 4.5 - reviewed 29.08.25
160. 23.08.25 Annabel Thorpe, The People We Were Before 4.2
161. 24.08.25 Jane Austen, Persuasion 3.8
162. 27.08.25 Maria Reva, Endling 4.2
163. 28.08.25 Esther Freud, My Sister and Other Lovers 4.4 - reviewed 03.10.25 >186 elkiedee:
164. 28.08.25 Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Art of a Lie 4.2
165. 30.08.25 Natasha Brown, Universality 4.0

READING AS OF 17 AUGUST 2025, 4.30 pm

FINISHED IN AUGUST

Florence Knapp, The Names - finished 03.08.25
Sarah Adler, Finders Keepers - finished 05.08.25
Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally - finished 07.08.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - finished 07.08.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - finished 07.08.25
Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue - finished 08.08.25
Elena Collins, The Cornish Witch - finished 08.08.25
Sarah Moss, Ripeness - finished 08.08.25
Alex Wheatle, Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head - finished 10.08.25
Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time - finished 12.08.25
Emily Itani, Kakigori Summer - finished 13.08.25
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - finished 14.08.25
Orla Mackey, Mouthing - finished 14.08.25
Catriona McPherson, The Edinburgh Murders - finished 16.08.25
Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello - finished 21.08.25
Rebecca Wait, Havoc - finished 21.08.25
Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet - finished 21.08.25
Wendy Erskine, The Benefactors - finished 23.08.25
Annabel Thorpe, The People We Were Before - finished 23.08.25
Jane Austen, Persuasion - finished 24.08.25

CURRENTLY READING

Maria Reva, Endling - started 21.08.25

Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Art of a Lie - started 04.08.25
Esther Freud, My Sister and Other Lovers - started 04.08.25
Natasha Brown, Universality - started 04.08.25
Ruth Jones, By Your Side - started 04.08.25
Cathy Cassidy, Driftwood - started 24.07.25
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones - started 04.08.25
Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life - started 05.08.25
Angela Milne, One Year's Time - started 24.07.25
Sarah Penner, The Conjurer's Wife - story - started 03.08.25
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby - started 04.08.25
Kate Johnson, Hex and the City - started 11.08.25
Donna McLean, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police - started 11.08.25
Deirdre Madden (editor), All Over Ireland: New Irish Short Stories - started 19.08.25
Elaine Feeney, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way - started 05.08.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, To Be the Best - started 05.08.25
Thornton Wilder, Our Town and Other Plays - started 20.08.25
Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life - started 20.08.25

NEXT UP

Rowan Coleman, Never Tear Us Apart
A J Pearce, Dear Miss Lake

4,746 pages finished in August
48,784 pages finished in 2025

14 books finished in August
155 books finished in 2025

24 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 10 >161 elkiedee:
2025 Reading Part 11 >167 elkiedee:
Page Count August 2025 >164 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 25 AUGUST 2025, 11 AM

FINISHED IN AUGUST

Florence Knapp, The Names - finished 03.08.25
Sarah Adler, Finders Keepers - finished 05.08.25
Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally - finished 07.08.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - finished 07.08.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - finished 07.08.25
Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue - finished 08.08.25
Elena Collins, The Cornish Witch - finished 08.08.25
Sarah Moss, Ripeness - finished 08.08.25
Alex Wheatle, Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head - finished 10.08.25
Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time - finished 12.08.25
Emily Itani, Kakigori Summer - finished 13.08.25
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - finished 14.08.25
Orla Mackey, Mouthing - finished 14.08.25
Catriona McPherson, The Edinburgh Murders - finished 16.08.25
Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello - finished 21.08.25
Rebecca Wait, Havoc - finished 21.08.25
Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet - finished 21.08.25
Wendy Erskine, The Benefactors - finished 23.08.25
Annabel Thorpe, The People We Were Before - finished 23.08.25
Jane Austen, Persuasion - finished 24.08.25
Maria Reva, Endling - finished 27.08.25
Esther Freud, My Sister and Other Lovers - finished 28.08.25
Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Art of a Lie - finished 28.08.25
Natasha Brown, Universality - finished 30.08.25
Sarah Penner, The Conjurer's Wife - story - finished 30.08.25

CURRENTLY READING

Steph McGovern, Deadline - started 27.08.25

Ruth Jones, By Your Side - started 04.08.25
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones - started 04.08.25
Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life - started 05.08.25
Cathy Cassidy, Driftwood - started 24.07.25
Angela Milne, One Year's Time - started 24.07.25
Kate Johnson, Hex and the City - started 11.08.25
Donna McLean, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police - started 11.08.25
Deirdre Madden (editor), All Over Ireland: New Irish Short Stories - started 19.08.25
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby - started 04.08.25
Elaine Feeney, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way - started 05.08.25
Thornton Wilder, Our Town and Other Plays - started 20.08.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, To Be the Best - started 05.08.25
Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life - started 20.08.25
A J Pearce, Dear Miss Lake - started 26.08.25
Rowan Coleman, Never Tear Us Apart - started 26.08.25

NEXT

Jenny Colgan, Lessons
Sara Paretsky, Pay Dirt
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice
Stephanie Land, The Shelter Within

6,726 pages finished in August
50,764 pages finished in 2025

20 books finished in August
161 books finished in 2025

24 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 11 >167 elkiedee:

2025 #158
Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet
Read 25.07.25 to 21.08.25, reviewed 29.08.25
Rating: 4.4

2025 #159
Wendy Erskine, The Benefactors
Read 25.07.25 to 23.08.25, reviewed 29.08.25
Rating: 4.5

READING 2025, PART 12

PART 1 >5 elkiedee:
PART 2 >13 elkiedee:
PART 3 >28 elkiedee:
PART 4 >45 elkiedee:
PART 5 >70 elkiedee:
PART 6 >84 elkiedee:
PART 7 >105 elkiedee:
PART 8 >144 elkiedee:
PART 9 >152 elkiedee:
PART 10 >161 elkiedee:
PART 11 >167 elkiedee:

166. 30.08.25 Sarah Penner, The Conjurer's Wife - story 4.0
167. 01.09.25 Cathy Cassidy, Driftwood 4.1
168. 05.09.25 Steph McGovern, Deadline 4.0
169. 06.09.25 Thornton Wilder, Our Town and Other Plays 3.7
170. 06.09.25 Ruth Jones, By Your Side 4.0
171. 07.09.25 Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones 4.0
172. 07.09.25 Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life 3.6
173. 14.09.25 Jane Thynne, Appointment in Paris 4.2
174. 16.09.25 Miriam Robinson, And Notre Dame is Burning 4.1
175. 16.09.25 Donna McLean, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police 4.2
176. 16.09.25 Kate Johnson, Hex and the City 4.1
177. 16.09.25 Angela Milne, One Year's Time 4.0
178. 17.09.25 Deirdre Madden (editor), All Over Ireland: New Irish Short Stories 4.1
179. 17.09.25 F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 4.0
180. 24.09.25 Elaine Feeney, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way 4.4

PART 13: >179 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 31 AUGUST 2025, 11.50 PM

FINISHED IN AUGUST

Florence Knapp, The Names - finished 03.08.25
Sarah Adler, Finders Keepers - finished 05.08.25
Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally - finished 07.08.25
Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea - finished 07.08.25
Beryl Bainbridge, Every Man For Himself - finished 07.08.25
Nancy Spain, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue - finished 08.08.25
Elena Collins, The Cornish Witch - finished 08.08.25
Sarah Moss, Ripeness - finished 08.08.25
Alex Wheatle, Sufferah: Memoir of a Brixton Reggae Head - finished 10.08.25
Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time - finished 12.08.25
Emily Itani, Kakigori Summer - finished 13.08.25
Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife - finished 14.08.25
Orla Mackey, Mouthing - finished 14.08.25
Catriona McPherson, The Edinburgh Murders - finished 16.08.25
Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me at Hello - finished 21.08.25
Rebecca Wait, Havoc - finished 21.08.25
Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet - finished 21.08.25
Wendy Erskine, The Benefactors - finished 23.08.25
Annabel Thorpe, The People We Were Before - finished 23.08.25
Jane Austen, Persuasion - finished 24.08.25
Maria Reva, Endling - finished 27.08.25
Esther Freud, My Sister and Other Lovers - finished 28.08.25
Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Art of a Lie - finished 28.08.25
Natasha Brown, Universality - finished 30.08.25
Sarah Penner, The Conjurer's Wife - story - finished 30.08.25

FINISHED IN SEPTEMBER

Cathy Cassidy, Driftwood - finished 01.09.25
Steph McGovern, Deadline - finished 05.09.25
Thornton Wilder, Our Town and Other Plays - finished 06.09.25
Ruth Jones, By Your Side - finished 06.09.25
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones - finished 07.09.25
Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life - finished 07.09.25

CURRENTLY READING

Jane Thynne, Appointment in Paris - started 05.09.25

Angela Milne, One Year's Time - started 24.07.25
Kate Johnson, Hex and the City - started 11.08.25
Donna McLean, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police - started 11.08.25
Deirdre Madden (editor), All Over Ireland: New Irish Short Stories - started 19.08.25
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby - started 04.08.25
Elaine Feeney, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way - started 05.08.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, To Be the Best - started 05.08.25
Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life - started 20.08.25
A J Pearce, Dear Miss Lake - started 26.08.25
Rowan Coleman, Never Tear Us Apart - started 26.08.25
Jenny Colgan, Lessons - started 02.09.25
Sara Paretsky, Pay Dirt - started 02.09.25
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia - started 03.09.25

NEXT

Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice
Stephanie Land, The Shelter Within
Robin Stevens, Top Marks for Murder
Reeta Chakrabarti, Finding Belle
Caitlin Davies, Queens of the Underworld: A Journey Into the Lives of Female Crooks
Phyllis Rose, The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading
Kate O'Brien, The Ante-Room

8,020 pages finished in August
52,058 pages finished in 2025

25 books finished in August
166 books finished in 2025

2 reviews in August
26 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 11 >167 elkiedee:

August 2025: 8,020 pages (av 258.7 pages/day), 25 books, 2 reviews
2022,058 pages (av 214.23 pages/day), 166 books, 26 reviews

January 2025: 6,186 pages, 19 books, 4 reviews >3 elkiedee:
February 2025: 6,504 pages, 22 books, 3 reviews >22 elkiedee:
March 2025: 6,530 pages, 20 books, 1 review >38 elkiedee:
April 2025: 6,807 pages, 26 books, 3 reviews >69 elkiedee:
May 2025: 5,154 pages, 11 books, 4 reviews >99 elkiedee:
June 2025: 5,326 pages, 13 books, 4 reviews >132 elkiedee:
July 2025: 7,551 pages, 30 books, 5 reviews >149 elkiedee:
August 2025: 8,020 pages, 25 books, 2 reviews >164 elkiedee:

Beginning of September: 53,058 pages, 166 books, 26 reviews

PAGES READ IN SEPTEMBER 2025

01.09.25: 092
02.09.25: 193
03.09.25: 089
04.09.25: 203
05.09.25: 216
06.09.25: 248
07.09.25: 194
08.09.25: 207
09.09.25: 194
10.09.25: 099
11.09.25: 092
12.09.25: 099
13.09.25: 086
14.09.25: 259
15.09.25: 156
16.09.25: 406
17.09.25: 131
18.09.25: 086
19.09.25: 018
20.09.25: 047
21.09.25: 075
22.09.25: 162
23.09.25: 175
24.09.25: 132
25.09.25: 170
26.09.25: 094
27.09.25: 281
28.09.25: 212
29.09.25: 104
30.09.25: 212

September 2025: 4,551 pages (av 151.7 pages/day), 17 books
2025: 57,609 pages (av 211.02 pages/day), 183 books, 26 reviews

Books read
Part 12 >172 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 8 SEPTEMBER 2025, 8.30 PM

FINISHED IN SEPTEMBER

Cathy Cassidy, Driftwood - finished 01.09.25
Steph McGovern, Deadline - finished 05.09.25
Thornton Wilder, Our Town and Other Plays - finished 06.09.25
Ruth Jones, By Your Side - finished 06.09.25
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones - finished 07.09.25
Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life - finished 07.09.25
Jane Thynne, Appointment in Paris - finished 14.09.25

CURRENTLY READING

Miriam Robinson, And Notre Dame is Burning - started 14.09.25

Kate Johnson, Hex and the City - started 11.08.25
Donna McLean, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police - started 11.08.25
Deirdre Madden (editor), All Over Ireland: New Irish Short Stories - started 19.08.25
Angela Milne, One Year's Time - started 24.07.25
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby - started 04.08.25
Elaine Feeney, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way - started 05.08.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, To Be the Best - started 05.08.25
A J Pearce, Dear Miss Lake - started 26.08.25
Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life - started 20.08.25
Rowan Coleman, Never Tear Us Apart - started 26.08.25
Sara Paretsky, Pay Dirt - started 02.09.25
Jenny Colgan, Lessons - started 02.09.25
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice - started 11.09.25
Stephanie Land, The Shelter Within - started 11.09.25
Reeta Chakrabarti, Finding Belle - started 12.09.25
Caitlin Davies, Queens of the Underworld: A Journey Into the Lives of Female Crooks - started 12.09.25
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia - started 03.09.25
Robin Stevens, Top Marks for Murder - started 13.09.25
Phyllis Rose, The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading - started 13.09.25
Kate O'Brien, The Ante-Room - started 14.09.25

1,442 pages finished in September
53,500 pages finished in 2025

6 books finished in September
172 books finished in 2025

26 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 12 >172 elkiedee:

READING AS OF 15 SEPTEMBER 2025, 9.30 PM

FINISHED IN SEPTEMBER

Cathy Cassidy, Driftwood - finished 01.09.25
Steph McGovern, Deadline - finished 05.09.25
Thornton Wilder, Our Town and Other Plays - finished 06.09.25
Ruth Jones, By Your Side - finished 06.09.25
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones - finished 07.09.25
Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life - finished 07.09.25
Jane Thynne, Appointment in Paris - finished 14.09.25
Miriam Robinson, And Notre Dame is Burning - finished 16.09.25
Donna McLean, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police - finished 16.09.25
Kate Johnson, Hex and the City - finished 16.09.25
Angela Milne, One Year's Time - finished 16.09.25
Deirdre Madden (editor), All Over Ireland: New Irish Short Stories - finished 17.09.25
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby - finished 17.09.25

CURRENTLY READING

Rachel Burton, The House at River's Edge - started 16.09.25

Elaine Feeney, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way - started 05.08.25
A J Pearce, Dear Miss Lake - started 26.08.25
Barbara Taylor Bradford, To Be the Best - started 05.08.25
Elizabeth Hay, His Whole Life - started 20.08.25
Sara Paretsky, Pay Dirt - started 02.09.25
Rowan Coleman, Never Tear Us Apart - started 26.08.25
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice - started 11.09.25
Stephanie Land, The Shelter Within - started 11.09.25
Reeta Chakrabarti, Finding Belle - started 12.09.25
Caitlin Davies, Queens of the Underworld: A Journey Into the Lives of Female Crooks - started 12.09.25
Jenny Colgan, Lessons - started 02.09.25
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia - started 03.09.25
Robin Stevens, Top Marks for Murder - started 13.09.25
Phyllis Rose, The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading - started 13.09.25
Danzy Senna, New People - started 17.09.25
Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big - started 18.09.25
Kate O'Brien, The Ante-Room - started 14.09.25

NEXT UP

Claire Adam, Love Forms
Charlotte Williams, Sugar and Slate
Sarah Hall, Helm
Colm Tóibín, A Long Winter
Athol Fugard, Tsotsi
Wendy Erskine, Sweet Home

September 2025: 2,427 pages (av 161.8 pages/day), 7 books
2025: 55,531 pages (av 215.62 pages/day), 173 books, 26 reviews

2,427 pages finished in September
55,531 pages finished in 2025

7 books finished in September
173 books finished in 2025

26 reviews in 2025

2025 Reading Part 12 >172 elkiedee: