I got a cheapy Kindle cover from Ebay which I love, it's very pretty and has pockets on the inside cover (like a phone case) which are great for tucking in train tickets, plane tickets or even a room key if you're in a hotel (I mainly use my Kindle when away from home).
I know I've mentioned it before but if anyone wants a good long classic in audiobook form, there are some for free on the BBC website and app: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06w4v4x
28. Slow Horses, Mick Herron
Thanks to the 50 Book-ers for this recommendation. As you probably all know by now, this is a modern-day Spooks-style thriller, but set not in the glamorous head offices of MI5 but instead a dowdy backwater where people are sent when they've messed up but are too complicated to throw out of the service. A good, fast-moving and genuinely intelligent thriller whose twists and turns were believable but kept you on your toes as a reader. Contains a funny and extremely thinly disguised Boris Johnson figure.
29. Dracula, Bram Stoker
If you read this as a document reflecting social concerns and changes - advances in science and medicine, the changing role of women, attitudes to sexuality and the unconscious, and the uncertainty of Britain's relationship with powerful foreign leaders - it's fascinating. As a vampire story, it's bizarrely dull.
The first few chapters, in which Jonathon Harker visits Transylvania and meets the count, are exciting and were apparently based on an erotic dream that Stoker had about a male acquaintance (the travel writing is good, too, if you have ever been to Romania). However, the scene then moves to England and the structure of the book from there onwards is less story-telling and more long scientific experiment. We observe, in minute and repetitive detail, some bizarre behaviour by a young sleepwalking woman and a man in a psychiatric hospital (this being Victorian England it is, of course, a "lunatic asylum). Very, very slowly, the characters reach an understanding of what this all means. They then make a plan of what to do, which involves more long waiting around, watching, writing about everything they notice in minute detail until the book reaches its surprisingly simple conclusion. To make it additionally uninteresting, Stoker only has two types of character: extremely virtuous and very dull, or evil and sexy. I kept waiting for one of the good characters to have a fatal flaw which would liven things up and introduce some ambivalence but, sadly, in vain.
30. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
I am probably the last person in the world to have read this so I won't go into a long review. I found it a bit of a slow burn, unconvinced initially by the short-stories-about-interconnected-people-making-up-a-novel format but it grew on me and I thought it was very skilfully done. Complicated, subtle, human relationships portrayed in a complicated and subtle way.
31. Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People, Julia Boyd
Another recommendation from here - thank you. This was a fascinating book which started in a rather whimsical mood but was genuinely informative, moving and frightening the further you read. It draws on many letters and diary entries giving contemporary accounts of people from outside Germany who visited or lived there between 1918 and 1945.
Interwar Germany was seen by many British and American visitors as an attractive destination for tourism or work - historic, beautiful and full of culture. It's surprising with the benefit of hindsight to see how many people continued to think of it this way even as Hitler came to power and Nazi atrocities were there in plain sight - people may not have known of the death camps but they witnessed book burnings, attacks on Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues, and changes in the law restricting the rights and freedoms of Jews and other minority groups. Boyd does an excellent job of suggesting reasons why the penny took so long to drop for some, and why other visitors, who were not full-on Nazi sympathisers, saw more positive than negative aspects of the regime (admiring the patriotism, strong leadership, cleanliness and orderliness of public areas etc). Very thought-provoking to read this at the same time as comments on Facebook (and, dare I mention it, Mumsnet) calling on Boris to give us more lock-down rules - you can genuinely see how a country at a time of crisis could respond enthusiastically to a strong, charismatic leader even as they knew, somewhere deep down, that the laws being passed were going to hurt some of their fellow citizens. The chapter on WW2 when it finally arrived was sad and frightening, truly bringing you into the minds of people in a dreadful situation.