February reads

1. I was persuaded to read Cold Comfort Farm after its mention in How To Be A Heroine and subsequent comments here and on Twitter in support of it.  I suppose that led me to expect too much, as I didn't totally love it: I found the small futuristic touches bizarre and the mock-pastoral language a bit of a grind to get through.  That being said, there's no doubt that Flora is a very good heroine.

2. Oh my gosh, I loved Fangirl so much. I'm a sap for a hapy ending and the reason I love a lot of YA fiction is because, although (like Fangirl) it often deals in tough realities like mental illness, it tends to also work towards an uplifting finish.  I fell hard for all the characters, who are so well realised that they felt like friends by the end of the book, but especially heroine Cath, a writer of fan fiction who is trying to navigate her first year at college without her identical twin sister.

3. The Rosie Project is my latest book group choice and I raced through it. I'd read so many glowing reviews on the blogosphere and was happy to learn that they were all completely accurate.  When genetics professor Don decides, at the age of 39, to embark upon a hunt for a wife (he has, up to this point, been chronically single largely due to - the reader realises, although Don doesn't - undiagnosed Autistic Spectrum Disorder), he comes up against a most unsuitable match, the Rosie of the title.  Although in many ways this is a predictable boy-meets-girl romance, it is also laugh out loud funny and very sweet and true.  I loved the character of Don and found his journey towards understanding how love and relationships work very moving. 

4. I'm a massive fan of American YA writer David Levithan, so when I saw his new novel, Every Day, in the Waterstones buy-2-get-1-half-price offer I was pretty excited.  This is the story of A, who wakes every morning in a different sixteen year-old body, takes over that person's life for a day, and moves on the following night.  My favourite element of the novel was A's musings about body and belonging, which is heightened when he lands in the body of a transgender teen, and his various misadventures as he tries to get to grips with a new life every day.

5. I wrote a full review of How To Be A Heroine a week or two ago, because I loved it so much.  See here for my thoughts (which the author of the book, Samantha Ellis, only fricking well retweeted!).

6. At the time of writing I haven't quite finished Be Awesome, a collection of pieces by Guardian writer Hadley Freeman.  So far, though, I've enjoyed the chapters about film and culture but found her brand of feminism to be annoyingly heterosexist: there is no recognition here that a woman might have sex with anyone other than a cis man.

7. How England Made The English was an interesting read - I think I annoyed The Boy by constantly interrupting his own reading to tell him fascinating facts - about how the geology, geography and architecture of England have shaped its inhabitants.