Can't get onto my laptop and can't remember what number I am up to. Somewhere in the 70s.
Brixton Hill, Lottie Moggach
Rob is an inmate at Brixton Prison, coming to the end of a 7 year stretch. Each weekday he leaves the prison on day release and walks down the hill to his job in a charity shop. His priority is to keep his head down and stay out of trouble as his release date approaches.
One morning he stops on the street to help a young woman who has fallen over. The next day he find himself looking out for her, and soon they have become acquainted. Who is she? And what does she want from Rob?
I like Lottie Moggach's books, they are original psychological thrillers which don't rely (too much) on the same old tropes. This one was a bit slow moving but satisfyingly unpredictable. I would have enjoyed the prison setting much more if I hadn't recently read Chris Atkins' A Bit of a Stretch - Moggach thanks Atkins in her acknowledgements and most of the prison detail repeated sections of his book. If I'd come to this book first, I think the descriptions of prison life would have seemed very fresh and unusual.
Distress Signals, Catherine Ryan Howard
Undemanding debut thriller (I picked up and put down about 10 books last week while the election stuff was going on, and this was the one which kept me reading). This concerns a slacker-ish Irish writer whose girlfriend fails to return from a business trip to Barcelona. Has she left him or has something happened to her? This main plot worked well as a lightweight thriller but there's a rather nasty subplot which I could have done without.
Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch
McCulloch is a linguist and an internet habituee, speaking fluent Lolcat. This is her look at how we use language online and why, examining the space in which we are communicating (comparing online posting, interestingly, to postcards - addressed to a specific person or persons but written with the knowledge that others will also be able to read it), and the factors that have influenced things like who uses capitalisation or who writes in short fragments.
This is a really interesting subject and there is lots of interesting information here. I would have liked more examples - the subject matter is lively and it was a shame to have long technical paragraphs which could have been broken up with funny or idiosyncratic examples of the linguistic techniques that she was describing (it would also have helped me understand exactly what she was describing at times).
While I am certainly interested in language, I realised that the parts of this that I enjoyed most were the less technical sections about the social reasons why people might write in a particular way, how this was affected by changes in technology at the time, or by the typical profile of a person using a particular website or online group. I think what I probably wanted to read was more of an anthropology book, about online tribes and identity - can anyone recommend something like that?