I feel like all I do at the moment is drop off this thread, come back, apologise, dump a load of reviews and then disappear again! I will try harder as I love the discussion here and all the excellent suggestions that I have picked up.
This is the second instalment of the books that I managed to read on holiday:
68. The Farm, Joanne Ramos
This has had a bit of a mixed reception but I enjoyed it. It's not a dystopia (comparisons to The Handmaids Tale don't do it any favours IMHO) but a scary exaggeration of things that are already happening - a dark and almost true-to-life depiction of the world as it is. Ramos tells us about a "gestational retreat" - a surrogacy facility where the super-rich can pay for other women to gestate their babies. The surrogates are overwhelmingly poor and brown-skinned - they're exchanging their liberty and their bodies for a stay in a luxury facility, good food and a potentially life-changing pay-out. Some people have complained that the book is weak, that it fudges things and doesn't go the whole hog, but I appreciated Ramos's subtlety - neither the facility's (female, ambitious, second-generation immigrant) director nor the (absent) rich clients are painted as being monsters, and the surrogates have agency and choices. But she adds the convincing and devastating context - the limited choices available to the women, the precariousness of their employment, the tiny daily humiliations that they experience at the hands of their employers.
Lots to think about, a good book to read alongside Leila Slimani's Lullaby
69. Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile, Alice Jolly
Where to start to convince you all to read this one? Maybe with the arresting, Hardy-esque opening scene: a coach stops on a deserted country road and a small child is put down at the side of the road. Some of the passengers protest but the driver retorts that these were his instructions. The coach drives off, and the child is left alone on the dark road. This is Mary Ann.
The story of what happens to her is partly the story of a tumultuous time in English history (and one I wasn't familiar with, to my shame - the book isn't dense but I did find myself reaching for Wikipedia quite often to fill in gaps in my knowledge). The Napoleonic Wars are over (the children in the school yard play a game involving "Mr Bonny Part"), common land is being enclosed, tenants and craftsmen are losing their living and their homes and looking to jobs in the new mills and factories that start to spring up. Mary Ann is a servant - firstly on a small farm, then later in the house of a widowed gentleman and his sons - and she is an observer of, and participant in, much of this change. The book can be painfully beautiful describing the Gloucestershire countryside and the changes that happen to it during Mary Ann's life. It reminded me vividly of the poems of John Clare (which I haven't looked at since I did my degree but found myself going back to)
The style is challenging - the text is framed as a "found document" written by Mary Ann herself, and she writes in short lines like verse, using idiosyncratic grammar and local dialect - but it works, or at least it did for me. You really hear Mary Ann's voice in your head.
That the first time I see poetry writ down
It does all go from left to right
I see now it must
But not all the space is filld up
The words have their own pattern
Make a picture on the page
The space that is writ
Speak as loud as the space that is not
I cannot read them right but I like to see
The spaces and all that lie in them
Soon soon I will read them correct
I see the path ahead long and steep
Rising through many tight knit trees
Lit all the way with bright lanterns
So one may step on boldly
I must work and work
If this all sounds very challenging and worthy, and full of history and poetry, it is, but there's a good plot here too, about two brothers who are good men with flaws, who love each other but are rivals. While the writing is poetic and the book is long, the plot goes along at a good crack and keeps you reading till the end - the story has some good twists and turns to keep you reading.
I highly recommend this one, it was beautiful and left me with a cracking book hangover which meant that I struggled to pick up anything of any substance for a while after finishing it.
70. Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier was a silicon valley pioneer, and (according to his author bio anyway) one of the tech visionaries who was there when the internet as we know it today really started to take off. I read an interview with him last year in which he explained how the use of algorithms, which mindlessly make decisions on what content to show us on social media based on maximising engagement and time on the platform, are making our use of Facebook, Instagram etc increasingly negative and frustrating. People interact more with content that irritates or frustrates them, so bots keep showing us this stuff because it's how they have been programmed.
This book goes into this in more detail, looking at the ways in which social media is programmed and funded means that its influence on both individuals and society is often a negative one. An interesting exploration by someone who understands the tech and who is not instinctively anti-social media. Unfortunately Lanier is not a great writer and despite my interest in what he was saying, and the fact that this is a relatively short book, it wasn't an easy read.
71. Relative Fortunes, Marlowe Benn
Think this was a kindle monthly giveaway. Utterly silly though readable historic fiction about a beautiful, clever and well-connected woman in 1920s New York trying to solve a murder mystery and claim back her inheritance from her half-brother.
72. The Woman Who Met Her Match, Fiona Gibson
Another sunlounger read. I like Fiona Gibson and she makes me laugh even if all of her books have the same plot - tired, unconventionally attractive single mum (insert multiple references to unruly hair and greying knickers) almost has big Hollywood-style romance with handsome charmer before realising that her oldest male friend is actually the one for her and HAS BEEN UNDER HER NOSE THE WHOLE TIME (not literally, that would be weird).