What are you reading right now?

So do I IShould. She says this one is her last novel.

(I am frequently seized with the urge to thump some MNers over the head with it. And not just on political threads.)

I love Anne Tyler, Seneca

"How Not to be Wrong: The Hidden Math of Everyday Life" by Jordan Ellenberg.

Very, very enjoyable so far. How not to have the wool pulled over your eyes by abusers of statistics and general bullshitters.

Well written, accessible and mathematically correct.

Quite political, too, though the examples are mostly American, eg Mitt Romney's campaign innumerately trying to claim the Obama administration must be worst ever for women's employment.

I'm reading A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler.

'Thud' by Terry Pratchett - I'm making my way through the books about the night watch. Not terribly feminist I'm afraid.

I'm open to recommendations - I'm going on holiday in a week and a half

"Ms Marvel: No Normal". Bought it when I was still pregnant; DD is now 4.5 months old and it's a comic ffs, no excuse for taking this long to read it. It is excellent though.

No Surrender by Constance Maud www.persephonebooks.co.uk/no-surrender.html

TBH I'm taking a while to read it. It's not brilliantly written and has lots of annoying dialect. But the pace is picking up a bit, it seems to be very accurate historically and I am a massive fan of Persephone books.

Re Mrs Jellyby in "Bleak House", remember that at the end of the book it says: "She has been disappointed in Borrioboola-Gha, which turned out a failure in consequence of the king of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody who survived the climate for rum, but she has taken up with the rights of women to sit in Parliament, and Caddy [her daughter] tells me it is a mission involving more correspondence than the old one."

So you see, she took up a useful cause in the end. But did Dickens intend it to look less foolish than the previous one?

Most recent book "The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins. It's nothing like the same story, but it reminded me of "Bridget Jones". Only this woman is a full-blown alcoholic, who's lost her marriage and her job and yet, she's still able to think. And she goes from boozy imaginings to realizing that someone near her is a murderer.

Yeah absolutely. I'd say read the book, film adaptations are usually disappointing!

I'm currently reading Game of Thrones so not particularly feminist! But I have just finished reading "From Outrage to Courage" by Anna Firth Murray, which details the plight of women in the third world - very compelling reading

Naomi Klein "This changes everything"

This has been made into a film, releasing Oct 20th. I knew about the book but didn't download it untill I heared about the people's pilgrimage from Rome to Paris, calling for action ahead of the climate conference in Paris.

Not especially "feminist" (but female author!).

My position is that society's patriarchal design stems from and is greatly rewarded by unfettered capitalism, with it's inevitable vast divide in wealth, power and destruction of the environment.

Equality leads to liberation.