You are all posting so prolifically! Admittedly I've been very absent from the thread because life has been weird and unpleasant and it's taking all my bandwidth to make it through the day but I think this must be the fastest we've moved through threads in many years. So I will catch up properly after posting my backlog of reviews. While life sucks, my reading recently hasn't so there's that.
41 Time to Think by Nancy Klein
Reading for a course I’m doing on how to create a “thinking environment” where people can be their authentic selves and generate great ideas when someone listens fully and appreciatively. Like many such books it could have been a blog post but I’ll forgive her as there’s a lot of great insights in there which I’m already enjoying putting into action.
40 Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism by Kristen Ghodsee
Or perhaps “why unregulated capitalism is bad for women”. No issues with that statement or with her assertion that untrammelled market forces place a disproportionate burden on all aspects of women’s lives. Oddly enough the least convincing bit was her chapter on sex.
39 The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown
The internet tells me this is a “spellbinding debut that interwines magic, adventure and the profound influence of books”. I think I should have not fallen for Booktok’s propaganda because the signs were there. “Intricately plotted” is in fact code for “madly overcomplicated narrative where every problem is solved by a new book that appeared from nowhere and where characters behave in unfathomably odd ways”. I quite enjoyed the time travelling bit, though.
38 I’m Not With the Band by Sylvia Patterson
Patterson is a music journalist who came of age slightly before me, and therefore was quite literally “with the band” while I was an avid consumer of all types of music journalism – from Smash Hits as a younger teen to the NME and Melody Maker in the early nineties. Her stories are funny, sad and jaw dropping and she’s wildly indiscreet. Loved this.
37 Mood Music by Liz Pelly
This, as Taylor Swift would say, is why we can’t have nice things, because when we do, someone ruins them. This puts the knife into Spotify, which Pelly asserts is killing music by making us dumber and musicians poorer. I am a heavy Spotify user (I didn’t clock the irony of listening to this on Spotify until the end…) but I very rarely let it recommend music to me as I tend to go in search of what I want, and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never listened to one of its curated playlists or “ghost” artists. But I am complicit because I like paying £11.99 a month to have access to all the music ever made. And while I go to a lot of live gigs, I rarely buy music from musicians so am making an effort to change that.
36 Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke
I wept copiously reading this, and I don’t recall the last time I cried while reading a book. It was less the story of the two children at the heart of Clarke’s examination of organ donation, devastating though that was, and more the care and love and thought that the teams of doctors working with both children brought to their work and the extraordinary gift that is organ donation.
35 Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marissa Peshl
A young adult Secret History-adjacent novel with a side of humour and a style that grated a little initially but became less irritating as the book went one. Blue is the child of an itinerant political science professor who rocks up in a school where she finds, then falls out with, a tribe of interesting and aloof fellow students led by a charismatic teacher who is by turns bewitching and disturbing.
34 Lonely City by Olivia Laing
I thought this would be more of a memoir and while there were elements of this, it was more of a deep dive into the experience of the solitary way in which (almost exclusively) male artists in New York have navigated modernity and their relationship with the city. Laing is fascinated by queer artists and outsider art and the way in which they interact with urban environments. I would It was a curious hybrid of styles but worked rather well, though I’d have appreciated pictures in the book because I had to keep going and looking them up as without the visual prompts much of it didn’t make sense.
33 Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
Late to the party on this. It’s as fresh and weird as everyone says – I raced through it and was entirely invested in the staging of the play and its aftermath.
32 Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid
Perhaps the literary world has grown tired of the retelling of Greek myths from the perspective of women and moved on elsewhere because the display table at Waterstones had this plus one called Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid which I also bought but haven’t yet got round to (though a quick glance shows me that @Welshwabbit has done so!). This had a gothic witchiness to it which really appealed to me as well. I also appreciated the fact it didn’t try to take the Shakespeare version and tell it from her perspective but rather started again. Much, I suppose, as Shakespeare did with his plays.