112. Yellowface, R F Kuang
When the narrator's "friend", a wildly successful Asian writer, dies unexpectedly, the narrator steals her manuscript, finishes it, and passes it off as her own, setting the scene for an enjoyable canter through modern publishing, with its fetishization of a select few writers of colour and the dread cancel culture. If you've read Babel, there's some additional fun to be had, as the successful author who dies sounds a lot like Kuang herself, and is duly criticized for books that are over-long and preachy about race. It's rather disarming to ventriloquize your critics like that.
113. A Walker's Alphabet: Adventures on the Long-Distance Footpaths of Great Britain, Anthony Linick
This is a self-published work by a non-professional author. I think he's in his eighties now, an American living in London, and he's been hitting the national trails and other paths in the UK and beyond for the last fifty years. He has an extensive blogsite giving a day-by-day account of each walk: the blisters, what sandwiches he had, the times he got lost and his companions were irritating and his piles were playing up. This book is a selection from the blogs. He's crotchety, a plain writer (although extra marks for the pun "Conker lovers all") and often quite rude about his walking partners, but I find his accounts to be oddly soothing, the stuff of real life. He gets lost, gets tired, gets rained on and it sounds like a terrible time, then at the end of the trip, he'll heave a deep sigh and tell you it was a wonderful week. He doesn't aim for great athletic feats - 12 miles is enough, with a hot meal and a comfortable bed at the end of it, which is pretty much my approach. I'd recommend his blog over this book, but I have a soft spot for him.
114. Lost in the Lakes, Tom Chessyre
More walking, although this author is a professional travel writer. Without particularly liking his writing, I have somehow read four books by him, with another one lined up. It might be because I have a fantasy career as a travel writer, and nothing he does is particularly out of reach (taking trains around Europe, walking in the UK) and nor is it wonderfully written - I have a pleasing sense of "I could do that". Here he walks around Lake District and has some predictable conversations with local people about second home-owners making it unaffordable for them to buy houses, which also means you can't get staff for local businesses. He refers a few times to his Polish girlfriend lending her flat in Poland to a mother and daughter from Ukraine who are waiting to travel to the UK, which didn't add anything to the book and made me wonder if he had their permission to tell their stories. I was vaguely irritated but will read more by him.
115. The Body in the Bookshop, by Helen Cox
Clunky crime fiction, which I read purely for the York setting. I won't be reading more in the series.
116. Where There's a Will, John Mortimer
Essays by the creator of Rumpole, published twenty years ago when the author must have been eighty. Bought for 10p in a charity shop in Amble, Northumberland, and the best 10p I've spent since the days of penny chews. He writes about the joys of a glass of champagne first thing in the morning, of al fresco sex, of bonfires, and the need for tolerance and contrarianism. Amused, civilized, full of joie de vivre. They are slight pieces, good reading for a commute, but underpinned by a lifetime of experience.