Right, I'm going to deal with the backlog of reviews now and then promise to do better in future! These will be quite short reviews because I can't remember enough about the earlier books to say anything particularly insightful 
29. Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler
Lent to me by my mum and read out of duty. I think I'm finally old enough to appreciate books like this! It's a quiet but deadly book, written with such sharp observation. Rebecca, a 50-something widowed party planner with a rather ramshackle family, starts to wonder about the different turn her life could have taken if she hadn't married a divorced father while she was barely out of college. How did that shy, studious girl end up as an overbearingly jolly matriarch? Her efforts to find the "real" Rebecca takes her on an excruciating quest to rediscover her first love Will, and in the process she rubs up against various family members (whose self absorption and general awfulness are described in toe-curling detail). I wouldn't describe it as enjoyable, exactly, but it's definitely acutely observed and well written.
30. True Love by Posy Simmonds
Another book thrust on me by my ma! Posy doing what she does best - lethally skewering the literary world with her on point drawings and dialogue. Amazingly, it was published nearly 40 years ago - but, although the fashions have definitely changed, the sexist advertising execs definitely haven't. I was going to reacquaint myself with Mrs Weber's Diary next but lockdown (and an enforced separation from my lending library mum - no tatty Mills and Boon from her, thank goodness) has put paid to that plan.
31. Airhead by Emily Maitlis
I read this in short chunks, mostly at 2am when I couldn't sleep, so I'm not sure I quite did it justice. It's a most frustrating book: Maitlis is obviously so intelligent and thoughtful in her approach to her work, yet the book comes across as curiously anodyne. There's a certain frisson to be had from hearing behind-the-scenes gossip about Bill Clinton or the Dalai Lama or whoever but, although she claims to be writing an apologia for TV news journalists, it somehow doesn't hang together as a whole. It's a very entertaining series of anecdotes, though, with a few good points.
32. Grown Ups by Marian Keyes
This was a library audiobook, read by Herself. I'm not sure she did quite as good a job as a professional actor would have, but there was a lot of charm in hearing the author read her own work. This is exactly the kind of meaty family saga that I needed to immerse myself in during lockdown! Jessie Parnell, widow of Rory Kinsella, is now married to Johnny Casey, one of three brothers in a tight-knit family. Jessie runs her own chain of bougie food shops (this supplies quite an important plot point), and the relationships between Jessie and Johnny, and between Johnny and his brothers and their wives/partners supply all the rest of the drama. The cast of characters is large, and Marian Keyes makes no concessions at all, plunging us straight into a slightly bewildering family birthday party that goes disastrously wrong when Cara, who has earlier been concussed, starts to blurt out all the family's secrets. To add to the confusion, this prologue happens in September, but the story immediately rewinds to 6 months earlier, taking us through the events that led up to the birthday party over the next 95(!) chapters. I had to listen to the first 5 or so chapters about 4 times, to work out what the hell was going on, and try to remember who all these people were - but I persisted, and suddenly it all clicked and I was hooked on the story and desperate to know more. If you've read any Marian Keyes before, you'll know what to expect: lots of very funny dialogue, eccentric but well-drawn characters (including some precocious children who hovered just the right side of annoying), some gorgeous hunks and a ne'er-do-well, some sensitively-handled "issues" (eating disorders and asylum seekers in this one) and a fair amount of heartache among all the laughs (I was genuinely gutted about what happened to the two nicest characters, even while I could see that it was the right decision and that a happy ending would have meant an artistic cop-out). It does go on a bit - 656 pages! - and I found the whole asylum-seeker plot a bit cringeworthy (not to mention the slightly icky age-gap relationship between the too-good-to-be true hunk and one of the other characters at the end), but I ended up totally invested in the story and would happily read a sequel. Just what I needed in the early days of the lockdown!
33. The Porpoise by Mark Haddon
This kicked off my planned mythology-related reading - it's a retelling of the Pericles myth (or rather, of one of the Pericles/Apollonius myths, as there are several). A private plane crashes in France, killing the pilot, his son and his passenger (a beautiful Swedish film star) but not, miraculously, the baby girl with whom she is pregnant. Maddened by grief and fearful of losing her, the girl's father brings her up in luxurious seclusion, completely isolated from the world (although there are rumours about this mysterious beauty who is hidden away). The father's possessive love turns darker still and there are hints that their relationship has become incestuous - until a handsome young man comes to visit one day and completely disrupts their world. At this point, the story spins away across time and space and we begin a thrilling maritime saga about Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and his travels around the ancient Mediterranean - with interludes set in Elizabethan London and featuring the ghosts of William Shakespeare and John Wilkins (the co-author of Shakespeare's play Pericles). Throughout, parallels are drawn between the various characters, and it's not always entirely clear whether they are literally the same people or not - Haddon plays with ideas of reincarnation and rebirth and myth and fable until you're not quite sure what's real and what's not. But I just went with the flow and enjoyed the rollicking yarn. For me, the best bits by FAR were the parts set in the ancient world - Haddon is so good at evoking the sights, and smells, and sounds of this world (and he's clearly done his research and knows the difference between Ephesus and Pentapolis, between Tyre and Tarsus!). There was also some breathtaking descriptive writing in these parts - really arresting imagery. I loved these parts, but was rather less enthralled by the modern-day parallel story, in which Angelica tries to escape the clutches of her monstrous father and ends up wasting away, starving and mute. The incest sub-plot is genuinely shocking, and one of the themes that came through really strongly for me was female agency - how little agency women and girls have had throughout the ages, and how much they are at the mercy of men, especially when they are, or are responsible for, children. (There were rare reversals when Pericles realised how much he himself was in the hands of the gods, and when the myth of Diana and Actaeon was recounted - I was cheering on the hounds!) Another interestingly handled theme was that transformation: fittingly, this is something found in both ancient myths and also in Shakespeare (I'm thinking of the Winter's Tale here, but also The Tempest and the other plays in which redemption happens through transformation/revelation, like Measure for Measure). This novel includes a few key moments of transformation that seem genuinely miraculous and believable, such is the mythical quality of the world that he has created. This is a very odd book, part dreamlike fable, part breathless adventure, part bawdy historical realism. The ending was quite a disappointment, and I'm not sure that the melding of genres quite worked. I loved reading it, though, and it's completely unlike anything I've read for a very long time!
34. Annabel Scheme by Robin Sloan
I enjoyed Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore and (even more) Sourdough, so sought this out as it seems to be the only other longish work by Robin Sloan. It's a novella set in a futuristic, cyberpunk-y San Francisco which is dominated by a mega-corp search engine company called Grail (a thinly-disguised Google) and where demons exist, falafel vendors can get sucked into a MMORPG called World of Jesus (a fun touch, that one) and a private detective called Annabel Sloan solves mysteries with the aid of her virtual sidekick, a server called Hu Nineteen. All very weird and fun, but rather slight.
35. The Mystery of Three Quarters by Sophie Hannah
I haven't read any of Sophie Hannah's modern-day books, but thought I'd try one of the Poirot ones. This one started well, with Poirot besieged by angry people claiming that he has written to them, accusing them of murder - but then slows down considerably as Poirot works slowly but methodically through the evidence. I felt that the structural conceit (the book is divided into four quarters, each devoted to one of the letter receipients, and mirroring the four quarters of the slice of "windowpane cake" (Battenburg?!) that Poirot is served up in a cafe) was rather clunky and slowed the action down somewhat. Some of the characters (including Poirot himself!) were rather cardboard cutout, and the psychological analyses were a bit overheated (not unlike Agatha Christie's own writing, in fact). On the other hand, the plot was satisfyingly convoluted (there was a moment in about chapter 7 or 8 where I was convinced that I had seen through all the red herrings and was intensely disappointed - only to discover that Sophie Hannah was more cunning than I had given her credit for), and it was a reasonable pastiche of Christie.