July reads

1. I read a glowing review of We Were Liars in The Guardian a couple of weeks and bought a copy straight away when it appeared as a cheap Kindle download.  Teenager Cadence Sinclair is a member of a moneyed family who summer each year on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts.  Cadence and her cousins are entirely believable and likeable, which makes the darkness that lurks within their family all the harder to bear.  It's a wonderful book, revealing its secrets slowly until a powerful and shocking ending.

2. After hating, and abandoning, the updated Northanger Abbey, I approached the first in Harper Collins' Austen Project with trepidation.  No need, because Sense & Sensibility as re-told by Joanna Trollope was brilliant.  Trollope was an inspired choice for what is essentially an Aga saga of the 19th century.  I loved her long-suffering Elinor and stroppy teen Margaret especially, and the supporting cast were also well done, with a Johnny Boden-esque Sir John Middleton raising laughs.

3. Mrs Hemingway was a beautifully written and evocative book about the four women who married Ernest Hemingway.  I particularly liked the way in which Hemingway himself became very much pushed into the background of the narrative, the focus very much resting on the wives themselves.  Wood's description of place was astounding: I felt as if I could see and smell every detail of a lush Florida Keys garden, the Antibes in the roaring twenties, and 1940s Paris at the end of the Occupation.

4. I've loved everything else Rainbow Rowell has written, so Landline had a lot to live up to and unfortunately didn't quite deliver.  Georgie is a 30-something TV writer in LA and her marriage is in trouble.  When husband Neal takes her daughters to Omaha for Christmas, Georgie discovers a way to communicate with him in the past.  Sound ridiculous, right?  It sort of is, and I found it fairly repetitive too: Georgie wakes up, goes to work where she fails to perform because she's basically having a breakdown, comes home and uses the landline to phone past-Neal and rehash details of their relationship problems, repeat ad infinitum.  Being Rowell, it's all very well written and full of nice detail (I particularly liked the romantic sub-plot involving her teenage sister) but I found the central storyline hard to empathise with.

5. Despite having an English degree and being a card-carrying feminist, somehow I'd never read Angela Carter's collection of updated fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber.  I have to admit, I did find some of the language overly flowery (I suppose that's to be expected when updating traditional stories that are themselves rather flowery) but I enjoyed a number of the stories.  The tale from which the book takes it's title is a sinister modern reworking of the Bluebeard story, and I also enjoyed The Company Of Wolves, a subversive version of Little Red Riding Hood.

6. I honestly didn't expect to enjoy Love, Nina much but, after reading glowing reviews, when I spied a copy in the library I decided to give it a try.  I'm so glad I did.  A collection of letters from the teenage Nina to her sister, written during the early 80s when Nina was working as a nanny for a North London family, the book is a joy to read.  Nina's naivety about London life and the literary world in which she finds herself (Alan Bennett pops round for dinner most nights, and Claire Tomalin is a close neighbour) is extremely funny, with echoes of Adrian Mole.

7. I worked in a Waterstones bookshop for two years in my early twenties, and can absolutely guarantee that not one strange, wacky or offensive thing contained within Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops was made up; as a bookseller, you get used to hearing utterly bizarre questions from customers every day.  This little collection was a fun read to fill a quiet hour.

8. When 60-something journalist and writer Nik Cohn fell in love first with New Orleans and then with hip-hop music, he embarked upon a project to become a rap mogul there. Triksta: Life & Death In New Orleans Rap is his account of the various successes and  - more frequent - failures during this journey.  I've always been a little bit obsessed with New Orleans and will happily devour anything about it, so I enjoyed the way in which Cohn evokes the strange atmosphere of the city.

9. Last month I read the first two of Ariel Schrag's high school diary/comics, and with Potential I completed the trilogy.  In Potential, Ariel attempts to lose her virginity before turning 17, dates a series of girls, and witnesses the disintegration of her parents' marriage.