Oh gosh, I am so, so behind that it seems I have missed a whole thread. I'm not sure where to start - with my list, or reviews, or to try to comment on bits that I have missed from the last thread.
Actually I think the starting point is huge congratulations to @granniemainland as I did see news of your new arrival on the last thread.
I did manage to catch up with Les Mis, briefly, but have fallen behind on that too.
24 Mind over Money: The Psychology of Money and How to Use It Better, Claudia Hammond
Looks at the assumptions that we make about money and how unconscious biases and misunderstandings of how things work can make us behave in irrational ways. Cites many, many psychology experiments covering things like which forms of money feel more valuable or make us feel wealthier (why does spending cash always feel different to spending on a card?), how we negotiate, how we behave when we feel financially at risk etc.
Interesting but very general. I am still looking for something that might explain the weird quirks that we have as individuals around money.
25 The Last Hundred Days, Patrick Mcguinness
Well-written thriller set in the final months of the Ceaușescu regime in Romania. Fairly standard set-up - an adventurous but naive young British man arrives in Bucharest with no real idea of how things work. As he starts to make friends and fall in love, he is increasingly drawn into circles of secrecy, surveillance and corruption, with no idea of who he can trust and who is playing who.
I spent some time in Romania in the 90s and have friends there. This felt like a really vivid portrait of how it felt there at the time.
26 Christmas in Austin, Benjamin Markowits
Do you like books about wealthy white families where nothing really happens? Well, boy, do I have the book for you!
Apparently this is the second in a series about the Essinger family, the first being A Weekend in New York. I may have got more out of this if I'd read that first one. This book centres on a Christmas get-together at the home of the Essinger parents, with their adult children, spouses (and in one case, ex-girlfriend) and grandchildren. It's cosy (because Christmas, and also lots of food being described), and very human - you can understand and identify with many of the shifts in the emotional landscape as people come together in different combinations, talking about one another behind their backs - arguing, worrying about each other, forming alliances as siblings and extended families tend to do. But seriously, really NOTHING happens.
It was certainly readable but I won't rush to read his others. I seem to recall people saying that the Booker nominated one is similar - a bit of a nothing burger?
27 Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi (RWYO)
My bad, I thought this would be an Iranian version of the potato peel pie book - a cosy women's reading circle against a background of Big Events. It's actually a memoir covering Nafisi's years teaching literature (she mostly concentrates here on her experiences with American writers such as Nabokov and Scott Fitzgerald, as well as Austen) in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran.
There are two main strands here - her writing about day-to-day life in Tehran, which is fascinating and made the book worth reading on its own, and her thoughts about the works of literature that she is teaching, and how they land with young people in a country very far from where they were written. I think I would have appreciated the latter if I knew the works in question better -she does dig quite a bit into literary analysis and I felt at a disadvantage, not having read all of the works in question.
I also found her writing style quite distracting. She tells you both way too little about her characters (presumably because, while they are apparently based on real people, she's trying to protect identities by obfuscating, so she doesn't really explain who people are, what their situations are) but also way too much (she enters the room, she's wearing a scarf which she takes off and folds into the chair, meanwhile two of the other girls are giggling in the corner etc etc etc). I had to switch off from trying to remember who was who amongst her students and just follow the background narrative, the one about societal change and the strange courage that it takes to live in a country with such a strict, unfair and often horrifically brutal regime.
28 Heart the Lover, Lily King
Many of you have read this recently. I liked Writers and Lovers a lot but can't remember much about the plot, so I can't comment on if or how this fitted together with the earlier book.
It's a book about a love affair that ends. Then, years later, the lovers meet again under circumstances that are different and awful for them both. I couldn't understand how this second act was supposed to reflect back on the first, if indeed it was supposed to (surely, having our two protagonists meet again, older and wiser, is there to balance or redefine or connect in some way to the earlier story, right?). By putting them back together and making sure that neither of them is really very present, that there are other people there almost constantly and limited chance to say anything of meaning - I am sure all of this is deliberate on King's part but I can't quite work out why she decided to structure the story this way. Apologies, trying not to be too massively spoiler-y.
My overriding impression - please Lord, save me from clever young men who can't say sorry but instead send an obscure literary quotation then insist that they have apologised.
There are more but I am running out of steam and I want to see what everyone else has been reading!