@StitchesInTime - that does sound entertaining, at the very least. Sex while riding a horse - the mind boggles, having done both but never at the same time.
20 Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor
I picked this up in the library on a whim, so wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I have never been to India, but am drawn to works of fiction set there. This is about extreme wealth and corruption among India’s elite, and tells the story of Ajay, a faithful retainer to the Wadhia family empire, Sunny, the playboy heir, and Neda who is a journalist caught up in Sunny’s orbit. There’s a lot going on and no one emerges with much credit. Some of it is really shocking – the reviews describe it as “binge-worthy entertainment” which I would challenge. It was not entertaining and it’s more literary than blockbuster, despite the glitz and froth of Sunny’s life. There was a lot of plot, and it probably required slightly more attention than I was able to give it but I would (cautiously) recommend it.
21 Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World’s Most Secretive Industry by Matthew Campbell
I read a great book about container ships a few years ago by Rose George (Deep Sea and Foreign Going) and it did really make me think about the massive importance of shipping in our lives, which goes largely unremarked. I didn’t quite release how murky the world was until I read this book which a friend recommended to me – turns out we Brits are quite the facilitators of a massive web of shell companies, untraceable owners and general borderline criminal (or actually criminal) behaviour via Lloyds of London. This doesn’t really try to unpick that side of things – though I could see a lot of parallels with the systems and structures that Oliver Bullough writes about in Butler to the World (essentially, how as our hold on places via the Empire diminished we built up soft power through our legal and economic systems that we exported to other countries). This focuses more on one particular incident, when an oil tanker sank off the coast of Yemen, supposedly as a result of a pirate attack. It’s an unsettling read – the human cost is significant, and the levels of fraud and lack of accountability in a system that is almost impossible to regulate properly is made very clear.
22 Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey
This was really good, actually. I really needed something light and frothy and distracting though given life events, perhaps it wasn’t the ideal subject matter. Maggie is a newly divorced 20 something going through breakup hell while navigating social media, precarious housing and a group of friends who are growing tired of her angst. I found this entirely charming – Maggie is deeply likeable and self aware, and the ending was not too neat and tidy. The breaks in the narrative that share Maggie’s Google searches to illustrate her state of mind were terrific – I’m a lot older than Maggie but there was a lot there I could empathise with.