March reads

1. As far as thrillers go, Black-Eyed Susans is one of my favourites of recent months. Tessa was abducted and left for dead at the age of 17, and her testimony helped to put a man behind bars. But now, almost 20 years later, she's beginning to suspect that he wasn't responsible after all. Well written, pacy and with plenty of tension, my only criticism is that I felt somewhat let down by the anti-climactic ending.

2. So far, the Austen Project books have been a mixed bag: I loved Joanne Trollope's Sense & Sensibility but couldn't even finish Val McDermid's Northanger Abbey. So, prior to the much-anticipated release of Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld's version of Pride & Prejudice, Emma was going to act as the tie-break. And, sadly, it was more Northanger than Sense. In fact, once again I couldn't actually finish it. McCall Smith's book had all the depth of a puddle and the wit of a cracker joke, exchanging the intelligent romantic comedy of the original for something light and fluffy, with all the substance of a marshmallow.

3. I'd seen The Year Of Living Danishly on a number of different blogs recently and was intrigued. The story of journo Helen Russell's relocation to rural Jutland - after her husband is offered a job with Lego - it's a fairly lightweight but also thought-provoking analysis of what exactly contributes to happiness, backed up with stacks of statistics and amusing anecdotes.

4. Top of my list on any visit to South Africa is always checking whether Jonny Steinberg has published a new book (they are published in the UK but it's become a bit of a ritual for me to get them there). So I was super excited to pick up a copy of A Man Of Good Hope from the lovely Clarke Books in Cape Town. This book follows Asad from Mogadishu - where, aged eight, he saw his mother shot dead - to Cape Town, via Kenya, Ethiopia, and a dangerous journey across Eastern Africa to reach South Africa. It's an astonishing story; at times reading like a thriller, full of twists and turns, tragic events and sudden deaths. But it's not a thriller nor even a novel, but the true story of one refugee among millions, and I cannot recommend it enough at this time of tabloid hand-wringing over the refugee crisis.

5. The Lie Tree was published to huge acclaim, winning not just the Costa Children's prize 2015 but the overall book award too. liked it, atmospheric, enjoyed the feminist overtones of the story. Book of the year? not so sure.

6. Lips Touch is a collection of three short stories by Laini Taylor, who also wrote the extremely wonderful Daughter Of Smoke & Bone trilogy (which you must all read immediately: it's amazing). I'm not usually an enormous fan of the short story format when it comes to fantasy - I prefer sprawling volumes of world-building - but I liked two of the three a great deal. The first story, Goblin Fruit, had a great Southern Gothic, Poppy Z Brite vibe about it, and the final one, Hatchling, was fantastic, of novella length and so given enough space to develop.

7. Night Of Cake & Puppets is a short story set in the Daughter Of Smoke & Bone universe, taking place during a break in the narrative towards the end of the first book in the series and following Karou's best friend - 'rabid fairy' and puppet-maker Zuzana - as she attempts to ask violinist Mik out on a date. It's no spoiler to say that they do get together (he becomes a prominent character in the later books), but to find out exactly how they get together takes the reader on a magical ride through a snowy Prague night. I loved having one more tiny glimpse into this world.

8. Stargirl* is a classic YA novel, first published in 2000 and now being re-released for a new generation. It's narrated by Leo, an average guy attending an average high school, which is shaken by the arrival of the previously home-schooled Stargirl, who wears flowers in her hair, sings happy birthday to people in the cafeteria, and carries a rat on one shoulder and a ukulele on the other. Seen entirely through Leo's eyes, Stargirl comes across as little more than the manic pixie dream girl archetype writ large: we only see her as a vessel for other people's reactions and feelings. It's a book I wish I'd read when I was 15 or so, when I would have really appreciated its messages of non-conformity and being yourself. Coming to it as an adult, however, just made me want to break Stargirl's stupid ukulele over her stupid head.

9. The Plain Janes is a great graphic novel about a girl relocating to the suburbs after being caught up in a terrorist attack. Bored and resenting her parents for moving, she teams up with a group of misfits (all called Jane or variations thereof) to carry out attacks of her own: art attacks. The art pranks cause her new community to react in a variety of ways, adults hysterically comparing public sculpture to terrorism, her fellow students enjoying the anarchic spirit in which the attacks are intended.

10. The Infinite Moment Of Us should have been amazing but wasn't. Teenager Wren is preparing to leave for college, but can she break free of her loving but overbearing parents? Meanwhile Charlie, a boy with a troubled past but a heart of gold, has been watching her from afar (not in a creepy way - this isn't Twilight). So far so cliche, right? I enjoyed the start of this novel but around about the time Wren's difficulties with her wealthy parents started being given more credence than Charlie's hideous history of abuse and time in the foster care system, I lost patience. It's difficult to sympathise with such a special little snowflake, even when the author is encouraging you to.

11. I spend quite a bit of time immersed in the #Bookstagram world thanks to work (and there's a whole other post in how weird that scene is). Mayer's Lunar Chronicles, of which Cinder is the first in the series, are afforded god-like status amongst Bookstagrammers so I thought I'd give it a try. Whelp, big mistake. Some YA novels work fantastically well for adult readers (see above) but some don't. and this is one. The titular Cinder is a great invention, a teenage cyborg - part-human, part-machine - and orphan, working as a mechanic in a futuristic China and with a fun android buddy for comic relief. Unfortunately the world building wasn't there for me, the 'twists' were pretty predictable, and most of the supporting characters felt cliched, particularly the love interest.

12. Another title I've seen all over the blogosphere lately is The Trouble With Goats & Sheep*. It's set in the summer of 1976 and follows Grace and Tilly, ten years old and trying to solve the mystery of the disappearance of Mrs Creasy from across the road. Grace and Tilly are absolute gems of characters, with a believable naivety and ironic humour, and the sun-soaked summer days of the heatwave are captured perfectly.

13. Her sister stolen, her grandfather murdered, and her home burned to the ground. Megan is sixteen years old, pregnant, and alone in the world. True Fire starts with a bang but quickly falls apart. Meehan wants very much for Megan to be a kick-ass heroine in the style of Katniss Everdeen (although True Fire is set in a proto-medieval world rather than a dystopian future), and kick ass she does. However, he's overlooked the important fact that Katniss had excellent reason to be handy with a bow and arrow and fit enough to fight: she'd been hunting to support her family for years. Megan, meanwhile, after an education with monks followed by working in her family's mill, is somehow able to pick up a sword and fight with it; able to climb a treacherous waterfall, ride on horseback, walk for mile... and all while pregnant? It just didn't work for me, and nor did the Python-esque humour courtesy of sidekick Damon. It's safe to say I won't be finishing the series.

14. It's important to note that I am emphatically not the target audience for the Geek Girl series: that would be my younger students at school, who I am sure love Harriet Manners and her comic exploits. But I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Head Over Heels*, especially as it's the 5th in the series and I haven't read any of the others. Harriet is a winning narrator, completely obsessed with facts and figures and keen to organise everyone around her, but with a Georgia Nicholson-esque talent for getting into scrapes.

* These books were kindly provided for review by the publishers via Net Galley, but all opinions are my own.

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February Reads

1. Willowdean, known as Dumplin' to her mom, is sixteen years old, living in small-town Texas and grieving the loss of her beloved aunt when she meets Bo - tall, dark, handsome Bo - while working at local fast food joint Harpy's. She's not surprised to find herself attracted to him, but she is surprised that he seems to like her back. I adored Dumplin', loved it with the fire of a thousand suns. Willowdean's relationship with best friend Ellen, her conflicted relationship with her beauty pageant obsessed-mother, her confidence in herself and love for her fat body, and her reactions when that confidence suddenly seems eroded, are finely and tenderly drawn. What I liked most of all was the time the author gives her story to develop. I'm so used to YA novels which race breathlessly through events, whereas Dumplin gave time for the reader to get to know - and love - Willowdean. And my gosh, there are passages that if I were 16 I'd be underlining furiously in pencil, scribbling "so true!" in the margins*, My read of 2016 so far.

* I can neither confirm nor deny the rumour that my copy of Catcher In The Rye is similarly marked by banal teenage scribblings

2. I wanted to love The Art Of Being Normal, I really, truly did. After all, it's one of the first YA novels about transgender kids that's been genuinely best-selling (albeit that it's written by a cis gender author). And for the first 150 pages or so, I did love it: I loved the relationship between David and his two best friends; I loved the pitch perfect scenes in the school. I honestly, truly was on this book's side. And then it went to shit. You see, one of the main characters, Leo (who I thought was a great character in himself) lives on an estate. Or should that be An Estate, one full of broken glass, hooded gangs, smashed windows and - horror of horrors - messy gardens. The ludicrous middle class stereotyping of a council estate and its inhabitants would have been funny if it hadn't been so horribly offensive, and it made me take against the rest of the book. It's almost more frustrating when a book comes so close to being great than when it never gets anywhere near.

3. Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl is just great, everything I wanted and expected from Carrie Brownstein's (of Sleater-Kinney and Portlandia fame) memoirs.  Brownstein isn't afraid to expose her shortcomings to the reader whilst also holding back personal details which she, quite reasonably, doesn't want to share (for example, anyone hoping for salacious gossip about her various celebrity romances - with Corin Tucker and St Vincent, amongst others - will be disappointed). She's best when reflecting on the nature of music fandom or, like another great musical memoir - Beth Ditto's Coals To Diamonds - the weird insularity of the Olympia music scene in the 90s.

4. Claire has quit her marketing job in order to discover her true vocation, only to find herself spending her days aimlessly surfing the internet and her nights drinking too much wine. I've seen Not Working* compared to Bridget Jones' Diary, and they do have in common an incisive wit which gets to the heart of modern life. But it manages to be so much more than that: I felt genuinely involved and invested in Claire's 'journey' (for want of a better and less wanky word). Highly recommended.

5. Hesketh Locke is a behavioural expert employed to trouble-shoot in cases of industrial sabotage. Investigating the sabotage and then suicide of a timber worker from Taiwan, Hesketh doesn't at first connect it - and subsequent similar events in Sweden and Dubai - with a series of bizarre and violent attacks by children around the globe. The Uninvited  is part-sci-fi dystopia, part-thriller and - apart from a weird quirk of the author's by which we are meant to see Venn diagrams as a) bizarre and b) worthy of explanation - extremely readable. 

6. I was intrigued by the premise of Your Heart Is A Muscle The Size Of Your Fist. Billed as a 'heart-stopping debut about protest and riot', it's set during the 1999 World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle. Full disclosure - at the time of writing I haven't finished it, and have struggled to engage with the central character of Victor. However, the quality of the writing is superb and it's definitely a book I'll persevere with or return to when I'm in the mood for something with narrative meat.

7. I just love the cartoons of Sarah Andersen, so jumped at the chance to read her new book, Adulthood Is A Myth*. There wasn't a page in this that didn't either make me laugh like a drain or wince in recognition, usually both. It's one of the rare titles I've had from Netgalley that I will also definitely buy a 'real' book of, too.

8. The Big Feminist Butt: Comics About Women, Men & The Ifs, Ands & Buts of Feminism did what it said on the tin: a good collection to dip in and out of. Often funny, frequently thought-provoking, occasionally infuriating.

9. How To Be Free  is somewhere between humour, political philosophy, history and memoir and deals with the knotty question of how we can be, well, free: from debt, from work, from suffering. It was an inspiration to me when I first read it in 2011 but returning to it now - after 4 years of learning a great deal more about radical and anarchist politics from Thomas - I found it all a bit eye rollingly middle class. For example, during the chapter about freeing yourself from the oppression of mortgages, Hodgkinson suggests (seemingly straight-faced) that instead the reader buy a small piece of land and build a house.

10. A Dark-Adapted Eye is touted as one of the crime novels you have to read but, sadly, I found it all a bit of a let-down. There was a wonderfully gloomy and sinister atmosphere, however the supposed twist was ludicrously easy to guess and upon finishing I was only left with a sense of wishing I hadn't bothered.

11. I felt conflicted about, but ultimately pleased that I'd read, David Mitchell's Bone Clocks, but Slade House (which shares some characters with Bone Clocks) wasn't nearly as interesting. A schlocky gothic ghost story about a house - and its two inhabitants - that appears every 14 years to claim a victim, the one positive I can say is it was a quick read.

12. I think Find Her* might mark the final Lisa Gardner thriller I bother reading. While Gardner knows just how to ratchet up the tension, her books are becoming formulaic to the point of parody - young female victim is subjected to graphic sexual  violence, lead detective does some victim-blaming, suspect ends up shot dead by lead detective because 'Murica - I find my taste for the formula has soured.

Overall, I think February's reading experiences can be best summed up by this cartoon. Pesky feminist politics, ruining books for me:

Note: I do not use affiliate links in this post, I just like to provide a non-Amazon source for all your book-buying needs!

* These books were kindly provided by the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

A Day In The Life

Since I began my new job at The Willoughby Book Club, a question I hear regularly is, "but what do you actually do?" The most common misconception is that I get to sit and read all day (I wish!). Another is that I must work from home. So I thought now might be an opportune moment for a quick peek at a day in my life...

6.30am
My alarm goes off and I drag myself - reluctantly - from bed. I had a vague hope that leaving teaching might mean an end to the early starts, but my office is full of early birds and I liked the idea of finishing work at 3.30, so I've joined them.

7.30am
Sitting at my desk with the first cuppa of the day. My first task at work is to catch up on any social media activity since yesterday afternoon: replying to messages, liking and commenting on new Instagram content and updating our Facebook page.

8.00am
That task out of the way, I start selecting. Our office is lined with thousands of books, arranged according to genre (and age, in the children's section). Each of the Book Selection Managers have a list of customers assigned to us: mine's currently around 700-strong. Unlike most other subscription box services, ours is totally personalised, so my job is to decide which of the thousands of books we stock might best suit each of my subscribers, based on information given at the time of order. In any half hour, I'll therefore be picking up a huge variety of books: from YA to classic novels, from science fiction to the latest literary prizewinners.

Our aim is simple: to send customers a book they haven't read, but that they will enjoy and that will be to their tastes. Sometimes that's an easy task, but in other cases we need to delve a little deeper, using online reviews (Amazon and Goodreads are essential weapons in our arsenal) and browsing our stock to ensure we can find something suitable. So while I don't sit and read all day, I do look closely at our books, perhaps reading an opening chapter here, a blurb there, while I'm selecting.

10.00am
I set aside time every morning for an online hunt for interesting book news and articles. Whether it's an article about diversity in YA from the Evening Standard, a fun Buzzfeed Books quiz, or a satirical piece on dystopian fiction in The Telegraph, as long as it's book-related I know our followers on social media will be interested. I spend time scheduling Tweets and Facebook posts to share what I find before turning my attention back to book selections.

1.00pm
Lunchtime, and because we're based on an industrial estate we all usually stay in the office during our break. I cannot tell you how good it feels to have a proper lunch break - one in which I sit on a sofa to eat my food and read a book in peace - after ten years of teaching lunch breaks which are more 'shove a sandwich in your gob while also marking books and supervising homework club."

1.30pm
Back to work. I often use this part of the day, when the light in our office is best, to take photographs for our Instagram feed. So out comes my box of tricks - from vintage book pages to lengths of fabric, to bookmarks - with which to accessorise my shots. I love this part of my role and have great fun getting creative (even if my colleagues must think it odd to see me perched on one leg, arched over a stack of books trying to get the perfect shot).

3.00pm
With the exception of Thursday and Friday - when I leave Willoughby at lunchtime and head off to my old school to run some Year 6 literacy intervention groups - I finish at 3.30pm. So, at 3 o'clock I do a final check of emails and social media notifications, then pile up the books I've selected ready for wrapping and packing, before heading home for a cup of tea, a sit down, and the blissful feeling of having no marking.

The other big question - along with, "What do you do?" - has been, "Are you enjoying it?" And ultimately, the answer is yes. It's an enormous change of pace for me: from the manic environment of a secondary school, and all the pressures teaching entails, to sitting in a peaceful office. As a result, I can find myself feeling... not bored, exactly, but under-stimulated compared to the crazy over-stimulation of teaching. But I relish this, and it seems to be just what I needed as the headaches, migraines and chronic jaw pain that have plagued me for the last two years have all but vanished. I also really enjoy the two afternoons I do spend at school, which have reminded me how much fun some bits of teaching can be. Who knows what the future may bring, but for now I feel pretty damn lucky to have had things work out so well.

January Reads

1. 2. & 3. On the one hand, Karou is a seventeen year-old art student living in Prague, drinking with friends and squabbling with her ex. On the other, she's an errand girl for a monstrous half-beast in the world she calls "Elsewhere", which she slips in and out of via portals hidden in doors around the world. Compared to both Pans Labyrinth and His Dark Materials (a comparison I don't think is entirely accurate), I quickly became completely caught up in and enamoured with the Daughter Of Smoke & Bone trilogy: with Karou herself, with her friends, with the world of seraphim and chimaera that Laini Taylor creates so perfectly. I loved all three books and, if  you like fantasy novels (or even if you don't - I'm not normally a fan) I would strongly recommend you read them soon.

4. 5. 6. Char very kindly sent me Stephanie Perkins' trilogy of loosely connected YA romances, Anna & The French Kiss, Lola & The Boy Next Door, and Isla & The Happy Ever After. I wanted to love them - I'm a sucker for a cheesy romance and each heroine is likeable and the books very readable - but (with the exception of the last one) I really didn't. Why? Both Anna... and Lola... contain some very dodgy relationship ethics at work. In the first, Anna falls for the hot guy at school and makes, if not a play for him then she certainly doesn't discourage him, despite her best friend being in love with him and him already having a (different) girlfriend (and no, I'm not saying that a man can be 'stolen' like a piece of property, but her behaviour is truly not very friend-like to the one girl who's made her welcome at school). In Lola..., the heroine is ridiculously blind to her own feelings, such that stretches credulity, and spends a lot of time messing with both her boyfriend and the guy who loves her. Neither plot line sat well with me, frankly. So I was glad that Isla... was a much less complicated love story, and all the better for it, with our titular heroine and her long-term crush, Josh, making a super cute couple. One thing I will say for all three books, though, is that they have a positive and healthy attitude to teen sexuality and a more diverse cast of characters (I especially liked Isla's best friend, who has autism, and Lola's overprotective gay dads) than most YA fiction.

7. Yuki Chan In Bronte Country* has one of the most beautiful cover designs I've seen in recent years. Sadly, the content doesn't come close to matching the jacket. A quasi-detective story, with the titular Yuki visiting Haworth in order to discover more about her mother's visit ten years earlier, I found it difficult to care about Yuki and the various scrapes she gets herself into; there's something detached about the prose that meant I didn't feel involved at any point.

8. Isabel lives a quiet life in Portland, working in a library, collecting old postcards, and daydreaming about her childhood in Alaska. Glaciers Isabel over the course of one day, as her calm existence is shaken by her attraction to a co-worker, and is a small but exquisitely written book, almost poetic in its use of language.  

9. This Is Where It Ends* takes place over the course of an hour in an American high school where, the principal having finished assembly, the students discover that they can't get out of auditorium. And then the shooting begins. I found this difficult to get into and, although it's well written, I never felt the characters were real and therefore had a hard time feeling engaged or invested in their fates.

10. The Moth Catcher was one of my favourite Vera mysteries in many ways: it's tightly plotted and the characters felt both real and sympathetic, with the central mystery - of how two men came to be murdered in the idyllic setting of Valley Farm - being satisfyingly knotty. However the classism and fat shaming is horrendous, exposing the author's own prejudices rather than adding anything to the plot or characterisation.

11. Julia is a successful musician, but when she buys an antique music score it sets in motion a chain of events which are both decidedly creepy and somewhat silly. Playing With Fire* is a departure from Tess Gerritsen's Rizzoli & Isles crime series, and is instead a thriller with hints of the supernatural. The vivid descriptions of the Venice settings were wonderful and I found myself turning the pages with increasing fervour, but it wasn't something I'd read again.

12. Looking for something to read on a train this weekend, I picked up a copy of A Pocket Full Of Rye for 50p in a secondhand bookshop. My only complaint with this mystery - which sees a successful London businessman poisoned in a manner suggestive of a nursery rhyme - was that Miss Marple's appearance was limited to a fairly fleeting visit towards the end. I do love Miss M, and the more of her the better, I feel.

13. Even Dogs In The Wild is the 20th outing for Rebus and all the essential ingredients are there: brooding and atmospheric Edinburgh settings, gangster Big Ger Cafferty, conspiracies and cover-ups, and, of course, the indomitable John Rebus himself, together with sidekicks Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox (the latter of whom seems to be becoming a series regular but, for me, strikes the only bum note of the book).

* These books were kindly provided by the publishers via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

So You Want To Read More?

Whenever I talk or write about books, a response I often get is, "Wow, you read so much! I'd love to read more." So, because I know that "read more" is a goal for many people as we start a new year, I thought now might be an opportune time to offer some advice.

For me, reading a lot is a clear choice I make. Reading is my main leisure activity, not something confined merely to the 15 minutes before sleep at night. I think nothing of spending a whole evening - or indeed a whole day - curled up reading, becoming completely lost in the world of a book. However, as with most pastimes, when it comes to reading the most important thing is to make it into a habit; something that becomes a natural part of your day. So here are 7 ideas to help you develop a reading habit.

1. Make time to read
This one sounds obvious, yet I lose count of the number of people who say to me, "I wish I could read more but I don't have the time," while they spend the nth hour that day thumbing through Twitter and Instagram. If you want to read more, you have to make time for it: simple as that. Prioritise reading over your other hobbies for just a week - cut down on the podcasts, put aside your sewing, turn off Netflix, and, most importantly, turn off your phone/tablet/laptop - and you'll be amazed at how much reading you can get done.

2. Think about the books you're picking
If it's taken you eight months to struggle through half a book, maybe don't try to kick-start a reading habit with War & Peace. There is no - I repeat, no - shame in not reading so-called 'literary' books. If you enjoy romances, or crime novels, then read them! To kick-start a reading habit a well chosen Young Adult novel is ideal, being quick and easy to read yet still with enough narrative 'meat' to satisfy. I'd recommend Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, E Lockhart's We Were Liars, or Jenny Han's superior YA romances. Prefer a more thrilling read? Go for something with a pacy, fast-moving plot to get you turning the pages quickly. Crime fiction is ideal for this, with the recent preponderance of female-penned thrillers such as Gone Girl, Apple Tree Yard and The Girl On The Train all guaranteed to keep you reading. Finally, if you prefer a more literary approach, you can't go wrong with the novels of Sarah Waters - Fingersmith is atmospheric, beautifully written and packed with narrative twists and shocks.

3. Read little but often
In this world of 140-character tweets and 15-minute podcasts (and attention spans to match) settling down to read a novel with 70 page chapters can feel an impossible task. Instead, pick non-fiction with bite-sized chapters or short vignettes - perhaps Mindy Kaling's comic memoir Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, or How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran. Both have enough variety and humour to keep you engaged but with chapters short enough that you can finish them in the course of a bus journey.

4. Take a book with you...
... And think about the moments in your day when you'll have a chance to read. If you commute by public transport, use the time to read. Commute in your car? Try an audiobook rather than listening to the radio (and yes, audiobooks count as reading). I always have a book with me at work so I can read during my lunch break (hooray for no longer being a teacher and actually having a lunch break!) or while I'm waiting for appointments. Even dentists's waiting rooms seem less bleak when I've got my head buried in a book. And one fail-safe way you can ensure you always have a book with you is utilising e-readers and apps, which leads me neatly onto number 5...

5. Don't be afraid of technology
Yes, we can all agree that physical books are superior in almost every way to ebooks, but the sheer convenience of the latter cannot be understated. An e-reader - or even just an app installed on your phone or tablet - gives you instant access to hundreds of thousands of titles, meaning that wherever you are and whatever you feel like reading, you can.

6. Use external means to set deadlines & reading goals
For many people, having a goal helps to motivate them in their reading. Joining a book group is a good way to ensure you have a deadline for finishing a book, and if there's not a group near you then try online book challenges. Lots of bloggers run reading 'events' (for want of a better word). If you're into feminist reads, Tara has recently started a feminist book club on her blog, and Alex is always after people to take part in her Blogging Good Read series. Or simply set yourself a goal - a book a month? A book a week? Make sure your goal is realistically achievable, though, otherwise it's all too easy to become disheartened and give up entirely.

7. Join the library
Borrowing your books from the library rather than buying them will not only save you heaps of money (and support a valuable public service), it will also give you the freedom to discard books you don't enjoy. After shelling out the best part of a tenner on a new book, people will, understandably, usually persevere with something even if it's not for them. Borrowing from the library enables you to try and little bit of everything so you can find out which authors and genres make you eager to read, and which you can happily leave on the shelves.

December Reads

1. I loved Cloud Atlas and so approached The Bone Clocks with eager anticipation. The two books are not dissimilar in structure, both consisting of interlinked stories across different settings. However, The Bone Clocks focuses on one central character - Holly Sykes - first seen as a teenager in 1980s Kent and then glimpsed at intervals, through point-of-view chapters from different characters, until she is an elderly lady in a dystopian future Ireland. There was lots I enjoyed in this book, but lots I didn't, too: a tendency for the chapters to be given over to fairly tedious detail with no pressing narrative need to do so, and an irritating reliance on dumb cod-sci-fi-speak throughout being just two. Overall, I'm glad I persevered with The Bone Clocks, but it's not something I'd hurry to read again.

2. The story behind Carry On is a complex one. Rainbow Rowell wrote a book, Fangirl, about a teenage girl, Cath, who writes successful fan-fic based on a fictional series of books about a wizard (or mage) called Simon Snow, which are not-so-subtly based on Harry Potter. Although I really liked Fangirl, I wasn't keen on the Simon Snow parts (the action of the novel is interspersed with extracts from both the 'original' Simon Snow books and from Cath's fan fiction), so when I found out that Rowell's new novel was a Simon Snow book - basically a fan-fic of a series she herself had invented - I assumed it'd be terrible. Well, just goes to show you shouldn't make assumptions, because I LOVED Carry On. Simon and his roommate/nemesis Baz are both well realised, and Rowell did a superb job of capturing the cadence and rhythm of British teen speak. And yes, it is basically Harry/Draco slash-fic but it's entertaining as all get out and the central romance is gloriously sweet.

3. The Woman In Blue* is the latest in the series about Ruth Galloway, a forensic archeologist who, it seems, gets dragged into every murder investigation in North Norfolk. This one involves threatening letters to female priests, ghostly sightings, and the murder of a young model in the village of Walsingham. As Thomas and I spent a week there on holiday in October, I particularly enjoyed this book as the descriptions of the slightly eerie village are spot-on.

4. I've only read a couple of Sayers' famous Golden Age of Crime novels featuring Lord Peter Whimsey and, on the evidence of The Nine Tailors  I won't necessarily rush to read more.  It's not that I didn't enjoy it - I did, especially some very Christie-esque touches of humour - but it seemed to go on forever, with a tedious amount of detail about campanology that wasn't necessary for the plot.

5. A Boy Called Christmas is the story of a young boy, Nikolas, in 18th Century Finland and its entirely sentimental and emotionally manipulative, but enjoyable nevertheless. Kids will love it - exploding troll heads, cute mouse sidekicks, Father Christmas in-jokes and all - and this adult liked it a lot too.

6. Hush Hush is a hugely enjoyable psychological thriller in the vein of Gone Girl. A mother drives to the river near her Baltimore home and sits under a tree to shelter from the boiling sun. Meanwhile, her two month old baby cooks inside her car. A decade later, she's back in town and financing a film about post-partum psychosis. And, as is par for the course, all is not what it seems: with the mother (Melisandre, which made me think, distractingly, of GoT) and her ex-husband coming across as nasty pieces of work, and their surviving daughters both having hidden agendas too. The character of Tess Monaghan, a PI who has been recruited to help with security arrangements for Melisandre and through whose eyes we view much of the action, was immediately likeable and I quite liked that some threads of the narrative were left unsolved, although others may find that irritating.

7. 8. & 9. was looking for something to read that wouldn't require me to think too hard, and ended up re-reading a load of YA romances: To All The Boys I've Loved Before (which I reviewed here), Fangirl (and what do you know? I actually quite liked the Simon sections this time!) and the very festive short story collection My True Love Gave To Me (reviewed last December).

10. And while I was rereading Fangirl, I decided to give Landline another try, which I hadn't entirely liked on my first read. Set at Christmas, it's an It's A Wonderful Life-esque tale of only knowing what you've got until you almost lose it, but I have to say it's still not my favourite Rowell.

2015: A Year In Books

I found my books round-up so easy to write last year: I'd read some inspirational feminist non-fiction and lots of great literary fiction. 

This year, I found it much harder to think of anything but genre fiction - crime, thrillers, YA novels - which I think says a lot about my energy levels in 2015. I really haven't had the time or the inclination to read much that is intellectually challenging. Which is not to say that I think genre fiction is somehow lesser than literary fiction, but I personally prefer a more balanced book diet than I was able to consume this year.

Anyway, on with the books! (All links take you to the original post in which I reviewed said book.)

Best Book You Read In 2015 (broken down by genre if necessary)
I always need to break this down because choosing just one book is impossible.
YA fiction
2015 was a year of great YA novels: I thoroughly enjoyed To All The Boys I Loved Before, Vivian Versus The Apocalypse, The Rest Of Us Just Live Here and plenty more. But easily the best was Simon Versus The Homo Sapiens Agenda, which is just a perfect example of YA writing at its best.
Crime fiction
So Much Pretty has haunted me since I read it in January. As I said in my review at the time, this novel is unique in terms of thrillers. Whereas most books of the genre use society's endemic violence against women for entertainment, So Much Pretty seeks to interrogate and criticise it. Not an easy read in many ways (its narrative structure is challenging, for one thing) but an important one.
Non-fiction
I read a shamefully small amount of non-fiction this year, but Stitched Up is nevertheless well deserving of its title. An anti-capitalist critique of the fashion industry, it was unexpectedly enjoyable and easy to read, and extremely thought-provoking.
Literary fiction
Bodies Of Light by Sarah Moss, without a doubt. It's a haunting and at times disturbing novel which touches on so many contemporary issues - the role of women, feminism, mental health, poverty and inequality - through the story of a Victorian girl growing up in Manchester with her artist father and activist mother.
Dystopian fiction
In 2015 I read a surprising amount of fiction that could be loosely termed sci-fi/fantasy (not my usual genre at all), almost all of it dystopian/post-apocalyptic. I especially loved Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, but I think The Girl With All The Gifts just edges it for me, especially the astonishing closing scenes.

Most Surprising (In A Good Way) Book of 2015
I don't read a lot of what might be termed popular fiction: it's always either genre stuff or literary fiction. But when I was part of the Curtis Brown Book Group, I was sent Letters To The Lost, a sort of romantic/ historic (WW2) saga novel: the kind of thing I'd turn my nose up at if I came across it in a bookstore. And it was lovely! Which goes to show you really shouldn't judge a book by its cover & blurb.

Book You Read In 2015 That You Recommended Most To Others
I enjoyed Simon Versus The Homo Sapiens Agenda so much that I bought a couple of copies to send to friends: luckily they loved it too.

Best Series You Discovered In 2015
I was going to say Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series, but have just realised I read the first one in 2014. So... I actually have no idea! I loved the first Enchantment Emporium book by Tanya Huff, but the follow-ups weren't as great. If two books can be called a series, then Jenny Han's To All The Boys I Loved Before and P.S. I Still Love You.

Favourite New Author You Discovered in 2015
Sad to say, but apart from Becky Albertelli, who wrote Simon Versus... there's no-one else I've read for the first time this year who I'd definitely seek out more by.

Book You Were Excited About & Thought You Were Going To Love But Didn't
I love everything Sarah Moss has written, non-fiction and fiction alike, and adored Bodies Of Light but the sequel - Signs For Lost Children - just didn't engage me like I thought it would.

Best Book That Was Out Of Your Comfort Zone Or Was A New Genre To You
Considering I don't tend to enjoy sci-fi/fantasy books, don't really know anything about computer gaming, and barely remember the 80s, Ready Player One was a tough sell. But I thought it was fantastic; exciting and with tons of fun retro references.

Book You Read In 2015 That You're Most Likely To Read Again In 2016
Despite hating the Simon Snow sections of Fangirl, I downloaded Carry On - Rainbow Rowell's novel which returns to the Harry Potter-esque character of Simon - and loved it. I'm certain I'll reread it next year.

Favourite Book You Read in 2015 From An Author You've Read Previously

I liked David Nicholls' One Day (devastating ending aside) but wasn't expecting to love his new novel, Us, quite as much as I did.

Best Book You Read In 2015 That You Read Based SOLELY On A Recommendation From Somebody Else

I'm not sure if this counts as a recommendation, but I read Alex by Pierre Lemaitre because we have a lot of copies in stock at work and, when a damaged copy turned up, my boss said I could take it. It's bleak as fuck but an excellent crime thriller, so I'm glad I did.

 


Favourite Cover Of A Book In 2015
Not just the cover but the whole design - from dust jacket to page edges to chapter headings - of The Rest Of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness was just stunning. And the book was utterly incredible too, pulling off the delicate trick of being light-hearted and funny (the subtle digs at the Twilight franchise and at Sarah Palin are a particular joy) while also sympathetically addressing serious issues, particularly around mental health.

Book That Had The Greatest Impact On You In 2015
I still dwell on the fates of the characters from So Much Pretty almost a year after reading.

Book You Can't BELIEVE You Waited Until 2015 To Read
I don't understand how someone as in thrall to books as I had made it to the age of 37 without reading 84 Charing Cross Road. And it was amazing: funny and sweet and heart-warming.

Book That Had A Scene In It That Had You Reeling And Dying To Talk To Somebody About It? (a WTF moment, an epic revelation, a steamy kiss, etc.) Be careful of spoilers!

There's a key scene about mid-way through Apple Tree Yard that I found extremely difficult to read, and which completely changed the direction of the plot. It's something I've wanted to discuss ever since but it's such a massive spoiler that I can't mention it to anyone who hasn't read it.

Favourite Relationship From A Book You Read In 2015 (be it romantic, friendship, etc)

I'm a sucker for teenage boys in love, so probably Simon and Baz's love story in Carry On or another Simon and Blue's relationship in Simon Versus...

Most Memorable Character In A Book You Read In 2015

Melanie from The Girl With All The Gifts.

Genre You Read The Most From in 2015

I read 42 crime/thriller books in 2015, the most of any genre, but this was closely followed by YA fiction, with 40 books.

Best 2015 Debut

Simon Versus The Homo Sapiens Agenda again! What can I say? I really loved it.

Book That Was The Most Fun To Read in 2015

I loved Enchanted August, which is an uncomplicated yet very witty, well written romp and the perfect holiday read.

Book That Made You Cry Or Nearly Cry in 2015

I tear up at the drop of a hat, so there's probably loads, but Matt Haig's clever and sentimental A Boy Called Christmas got me teary eyed most recently.

 
Book You Read in 2015 That You Think Got Overlooked This Year Or When It Came Out

I really enjoyed Scarlett Thomas's 2015 release, The Seed Collectors, but haven't seen much of it in the press or in the blogosphere, which I think is a shame.

Total number of books read in 2015

At the time of writing (December 27th) I've read 151 books this year, an increase by 34 on 2014. My goal for 2016 is to have more variety in my reading - less crime and more non-fiction, particularly.
 

My Favourite Festive Reads

It's no great surprise that I love a festive read. After all, they combine my two great passions: books and Christmas. However, a book being Christmas-themed is no guarantee I'll like it; I recently tried one of Jenny Colgan's Rosie Hopkins books and it was the biggest pile of bollocks I've ever read. These books, though, are guaranteed to be good reads and festive as all get-out.

Let It Snow is a collection of three novellas by three YA authors, each one related to the other by location. It's romantic and funny and extremely festive without laying it on too thick.

“I’ve left some clues for you. If you want them, turn the page. If you don’t, put the book back on the shelf, please.” When Lily - egged on by her brother and his boyfriend - leaves a red notebook on the shelves of a Manhattan bookstore, it's picked up by cynical Dash, and they begin a correspondence that takes them on an adventure around a festive New York. You'd have to be as hard-hearted as The Grinch to dislike Dash & Lily's Book Of Dares.

I'm actually saving Matt Haig's new book, A Boy Called Christmas, for Christmas Eve, but it comes garlanded with amazing reviews so I have high hopes.

Moving away from children's and YA literature, Comfort & Joy follows main character Clara across three years worth of Christmas Days. Witty and, yes, comforting and joyous, I re-read this almost every Christmas.

My True Love Gave To Me is a lovely collection of YA short stories which, appealingly, doesn't limit itself to just Christmas but has stories for those who celebrate Hannukah or Solstice as well as New Year's Eve. It's also sumptuously designed: I have the fabulous pink-edged hardback but the paperback cover is lovely, too.

Landline isn't explicitly a Christmas novel, but taking place in December and having a somewhat It's A Wonderful Life-ness about its plot qualifies it as a festive read for me.

Finally, a number of novels are sort of accidentally festive: the final sections of two of my favourite YA novels, To All The Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han and Rainbow Rowell's Carry On, both take place over the festive season, and I always associate Bridget Jones's Diary with Christmas, as it both opens and closes in December.

Life Lately

Life lately has been busy. I'm almost at the end of the longest school term of the year, during which I've also been working 15 hours a week in my new job at The Willoughby Book Club on top of my usual teaching, planning and marking. And, of course, it's a hectic time of year anyway. So yeah, busy...

I'm feeling pretty festive, especially as we bedecked the house and put our tree up this weekend. But as well as festive, I'm also feeling exhausted and worn out and not a little grumpy. Poor Thomas, who bears the brunt of my irritability and mood swings, has found me crying from tiredness on more than one occasion.

I keep telling myself it's not for much longer, but that in itself is terrifying. It feels completely bizarre that two weeks from now, I won't be a teacher anymore. Over a decade of my life has been spent at this school and leaving is going to be extremely emotional. I finally told my classes this morning and it was awful: they were devastated and although in one sense it's nice to feel needed, I also felt so guilty about abandoning them.

And then there's the money issue... I've been starting to panic about the financial implications of my decision and am spending a lot of time faffing with spreadsheets and redoing our budget, trying to figure out just how skint we're going to be come the new year. So yeah, I guess you could say I'm stressed at the moment!

But before this becomes one long whinge, let me tell you about the good stuff.

Thomas and I have been making a real effort to have a date at least once a week: from Christmas markets, to mulled cider in our favorite pub, to chilling out together with pizza and Home Alone, it's something that's been keeping me sane.

And one really exciting element of my new job is that I'm now managing the Social Media for Willoughby. Yep, I literally get paid to look at books and mess about on Instagram: how perfect?! I'm thoroughly enjoying the challenge of developing that side of the business and it makes for some nice variation in my day. I can't wait to be working there almost-full time, instead of fitting in the hours where I can.

And, as befits the darker nights and my utter inability to get up off my sofa, I've been spending a lot of time hunkered under blankets reading. I devoured the new Rainbow Rowell book last week (highly recommended, even for those - me included - who hated the Simon Snow sections of Fangirl) and have just started Yuki Chan In Bronte Country, which has one of the most beautiful cover designs I've ever seen.

So that's my life lately. What have you been up to recently?

November Reads

1. The Rest Of Us Just Live Here is based on one of the most interesting concepts I've come across, certainly in YA literature. High school senior Mikey lives in small town America with his ambitious politician mother, alcoholic father, a sister in recovery from an eating disorder, and a best friend who just happens to be part-God. He's only interested in making it to prom and graduation, getting the girl he loves to notice him before she leaves for the summer, and hanging out with best friend Jared. Unfortunately, an invasion by Immortals is messing with these plans. The conceit of the book, which is brilliantly done, is that the Immortals are only bothering indie kids - the same group affected by the battle with the vampires a few years ago (cue some very funny digs at the Twilight franchise), the soul-eating ghosts a decade ago, etc etc - and so remain as a sub-plot dwelt on only briefly at the start of each chapter. As Mikey says, the indie kids "have always got some story going on that they're the heroes of. The rest of us just have to live here, hovering around the edges, left out of it all for the most part. Having said that, the indie kids do die a lot, which must suck." This is easily one of my books of the year: extremely witty, it deals with big issues - the mental health struggles of Mikey and his sister are a huge part of the plot - very well whilst remaining pacy and thrilling. If you read one book from this round-up, it needs to be this one.

2. 21 Proms was one of those YA books that I think are best left to, well, young adults themselves. A collection of short stories about prom, they were (perhaps inevitably, given the subject matter and restricted length) fairly shallow tales, almost none of which gripped my attention. The highlight for me was John Green's story, The Great American Morp, which had something of a great teen movie about it.

3. I'm afraid my love for David Levithan is quickly becoming sullied by one mediocre book after another. Another Day is the sequel to Every Day, which was the story of A, a teenage boy who wakes up every morning in a different body and who falls in love with the girlfriend of the boy in whose body he inhabits for one day. This is the girl - Rhiannon's - side of the story, but because it limits the narrative to exactly the period that was covered in the first book, we don't really learn anything new.

4. A woman is snatched from a Paris street, and Commandant Camille Verhoeven, haunted by the murder of his wife five years ago, is assigned the case. But solving it is going to be more complex than just discovering who her abductor was, and Alex is no ordinary victim. Alex is gory and gripping, packed with satisfying plot twists and very well written. I can well see why it won awards and accolades by the bucketload: very much recommended.

5. When Mr Shaitana, famous for his flamboyant parties, invites a group of detectives - a writer of crime thrillers, the head of Scotland Yard, an MI6 man, and Poirot himself -  to dinner, together with four more guests, he ends up dead. And so the detectives begin to look into the backgrounds of the other guests, about whom Shaitana had dropped hints regarding 'getting away with murder'. Cards On The Table was perfect for a dark autumn night, and marked the debut of one of my favourite Poirot characters, the crime writer Ariadne Oliver, based on Christie herself.

6. The Silent Wife has been compared to Gone Girl but it's nowhere near the quality of that book. Jodie & Todd have been a couple for 20 years when he betrays her with yet another affair. And so she decides to kill him. Written from both points of view in alternating third person present tense chapters, I just couldn't find it in me to care about either character, nor about their eventual fates.

7. I picked up Mystery In White from a secondhand bookshop recently, thinking it would be an appropriate inclusion for a Christmas gift swap parcel, and decided to give it a cheeky read first. A classic Golden Age crime novel with a ghost story element, it made for a nicely seasonal, undemanding read.

8. I've really enjoyed Sloane Crosley's non-fiction essays, so I jumped at the chance to read her first novel, The Clasp*. Three college friends now in their late 20s - Kezia, Nathaniel and Victor - are reunited at the wedding of a classmate, and Victor's encounter with the mother of the groom leads him to become obsessed with a legendary necklace. When, after losing his job, he disappears to search for the necklace, Kezia and Nathaniel team up to look for him. I have to say, The Clasp wasn't really for me; it's written in a self-consciously literary style and the plot took a long time to get going.

9. I read A Place Of Execution years ago and had luckily forgotten quite a bit about the plot. One of Val McDermid's only stand-alone crime novels, it tells the story of young and ambitious detective George Bennett, who one cold night in December 1963 is called to the isolated Derbyshire village of Scarsdale to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. The scenes in the dale are atmospheric and creepy, and it contains one of the very best 'reveals' in modern crime fiction.

10. I actually read Signs For Lost Children on holiday in October, but then forgot about it in my monthly round-up. Sarah Moss writes beautifully, imbuing her characters with real life, and I have adored every single one of her previous books. This, the sequel Bodies Of Light, finds Victorian-era doctor Ally beginning her married life to lighthouse designer Tom with a long period of separation, as she continues her challenging work in a Cornish asylum, where she is disrespected and distrusted by staff thanks to her sex, and her husband goes to Japan for more than a year to complete a commission. The descriptions of both Ally's descent into depression and of Tom's experiences in Japan - where the country is vividly rendered by Moss' use of language - are wonderful but I found it a less engaging read than any of her previous novels.