Thanks @MaterMoribund for a positive review of ONS - I was starting to feel a bit apprehensive about it but it sounds like a good read. And @ÚlldemoShúl what a fab review of BUTB - will move that one up my TBR. I loved Wolf Hall but after a very long and dispiriting reading slump, I have to admit being a bit scared to take on such a Big Book again. It sounds like such a good read for the darker evenings (and I am looking forward to seeing what else makes it onto your spooky reading list).
63 Love Marriage, Monica Ali
This opens with a culture-clash Meet the Parents set-up that seems painfully stereotyped. Anxious newly-engaged Yasmin is introducing her Bengali immigrant parents to her future mother-in-law, the feminist "activist, artist and intellectual" Harriet. You can tick off the expected features: here's Yasmin's mum arriving with an embarrassing shopping bag full of tupperware after cooking all afternoon, here's Yasmin's dad with a shiny ill-fitting suit and over formal English, here's the formidable Harriet cool and elegant in her expensive silk shirt, wafting around her Primrose Hill kitchen.
Ali, however, proceeds to prove that no-one is a stereotype and that everyone has hidden stories and unexpected depths. This is a story about race, class, and attitudes to sex, written with warmth and gentleness. Too much gentleness, if I am honest - although the book does go to some quite dramatic places, it moves at a serene pace which threatens (too frequently) to become boring.
A sweet book, readable but not riveting.
64 Remarkable Creatures, Tracy Chevalier
Fictional re-telling of the real life friendship between Mary Anning, the fossil finder, and Elizabeth Philpot, an amateur paleontologist who also lived in Lyme Regis (a Lyme Regis klaxon for you @Benvenuto )
This book does a great job of bringing Anning's story to life - her expertise not just in finding fossils but understanding the significance of what she had found; the lack of recognition given to her because of her sex and her class (she was working class and mostly self-educated ). What I hadn't understood was that Anning was born several years before Darwin, and her finds (she found the first correctly identified icthyosaur when she was just 12) contributed to a controversial scientific debate around whether species might have existed that were now extinct, and if so, how that would fit with the story of creation as told in the bible. The emerging sciences of geology and palaeontology opened up new questions around the history of the earth and the evolution of species.
I remain uncomfortable with fictional books about real people. While this is a readable and engrossing story, there's a lot here which is simply made up - conversations, private thoughts, a whole subplot involving disappointed love and sexual affairs. And not just about Anning and Philpot - almost every character in the book is a real person. I know it's a well-deserved convention in fiction writing but I still don't feel comfortable with an author suggesting that a real person did, said or felt things, based on zero evidence and (in many cases) knowing full well that it is entirely imaginary.
65 I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy
McCurdy was a child star and famous for being on various Nickelodeon kids shows in the early 2000s. This is her memoir, about the ordeals of being a child star, and about her life with her narcissistic and abusive mother.
I've avoided reading this because misery memoirs are not my thing, but I have to say, it's well-written, interesting (if horrifying), ballsy and strong. I don't really get the cultural impact that this book had, because I wasn't familiar with McCurdy or her fellow Nickelodeon stars - my kids were more cartoon watchers. But as an account of a set of human experiences, I found this to be well-told, frank without being lurid, and very readable. I wish McCurdy all the best.
66 It's Not You, It's the World, Joanna Cheek
Have to admit I skim-read a lot of this as it's very wordy - it was a Borrowbox request which arrived at the wrong time.
Essentially a self-help book based on the premise that distress and overwhelm are appropriate responses to the mess that the world is currently in. And that trying to approach our problems with a focus on self-improvement is likely to make things worse as we ignore or shut out the actual causes of our suffering: war, social injustice, climate change, capitalism and all those other lovely things that make up our current world.
I think there's a lot in this idea and wish I had got more from the book. I will admit to getting a bit weary of Cheek's right-on tone, probably because she can be a bit lecture-y, listing theories rather than giving examples which would help to humanise her message. When she does give examples (she talks, for example, about the response to the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida), the writing came to life and made a lot more sense.
Ultimately, while the questions are different, the answers seem to be the same as those suggested by others. Be mindful. Pay attention. Don't get caught up in over-thinking, or live in your head too much. Concentrate on what is happening and be conscious and deliberate in your response.