Hello February, already a week old. Shall we dance through a bookish Six Degrees of Separation?
This month, the meme’s host Kate has chosen Flashlight by Susan Choi as our starting point. You can find out more about the meme at Books Are My Favourite and Best.
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Bonnie Garmus’s celebrity-endorsement-bedecked global number one and multi-million-copy bestseller Lessons in Chemistry was a Christmas gift in 2024. It’s a curious fish, part roustabout women’s lib comedy, part devastating document of just how abhorrently men can treat women in the workplace and the home, part sensitive examination of how tragedy shapes people’s lives and how love doesn’t always conquer all. There’s a workplace rape after 18 pages of light-hearted scene setting that pulled me up short, just as I was settling in for a less serious read than has been my habit of late. It sets out the stall of this exploration of the fight for equality in the workplace as seen through the life of one very particular woman.
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I treated myself recently to Grounding, the first imprint from Awen Press, which is based in Creetown, Scotland. It’s a new press, set up by Helen Moss, an artist and engraver who is venturing into letterpress printing. The story behind Awen Press is on the home page of the website.
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All Things Bright and Beautiful is the second omnibus edition of Alf Wight’s veterinary memoirs written under the pen name James Herriot. It brings together the stories told in Let Sleeping Vets Lie, carrying on from the chapters in All Creatures Great and Small, and Vet in Harness. The book begins in 1939, with James newly married to Helen and the threat of war on the horizon.
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An interstellar event that happened 30 years in the past is at the centre of Laura Lam’s Goldilocks. The novel begins with one of the people who was involved in the event and its consequences finally deciding to break her silence.
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It’s been a busy first weekend in November, which is why I’m a couple of days late for this month’s Six Degrees of Separation. This bookish meme, in which readers link together a chain of books, is hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.
November’s starting point is Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through.
I haven’t read this novel yet, but I have read Kate’s review of it, so I know what it’s about.
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Yesterday was the first Saturday of March and I really couldn’t think of how to get my Six Degrees of Separation chain started. This month, meme host Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best has chosen Phosphorescence by Julia Baird as our starting book.
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Read 27/07/2020-13/08/2020
Rating 3 stars
Book 9 in my 10 Books of Summer reading challenge, a substitution in the original list.
Unbowed is the memoir of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Muta Maathai. This remarkable Kenyan woman was a child during the period of the British war against the Kikuyu people. She became a scientist, educated in Kenya, the US and Germany. She joined the environmental movement and campaigned for the re-establishment of forest in Kenya and fairer representation of women in agricultural production. She was a powerful advocate for democracy in Kenya. Her ideologies put her in conflict with Daniel Arup Moi’s government, and placed her life in danger. She was the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This is what I gleaned from Maathai’s Wikipedia entry, after my best friend sent me a card printed by her sister, one in a series of inspirational women she had designed. Continue reading
It’s not only the first day of August, it’s the first Saturday in August. That means it’s time for this month’s Six Degrees of Separation. We’re starting with a book I’ve heard of this month – Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing. Continue reading
Read 12/07/2020-18/07/2020
Rating 5 stars
Book 6 in my 10 Books of Summer reading challenge.
I’d read a lot of praise for Deb Olin Unferth’s novel Barn 8 on social media and in the press and I finally decided to take the plunge.
It is as good as people say it is. This is my first encounter with Unferth, although this isn’t her first book. Continue reading
What I Think About When I Think About Reading 