I drifted away from reading last summer, and haven't written a 'what I'm reading' post since early May. Sometimes, when my head is too full of what-if and things-to-do, there isn't room to take on anything else, and I stop reading books altogether. 

Daft really, as I know with a book I can lose myself in someone else's world for a while and forget about my own lists. 

Anyway, Peter bought me a couple of books over Christmas, and that set me to reading again, especially as in the first one (Born a Crime by Trevor Noah), the author said that we can find ourselves scrolling through endless Twitter threads and newspaper articles, and get to the end of the year having read many thousands of words, but not a single book. Ouch. 

I didn't keep a proper list, so this is in no particular order, but this is vaguely what I've been reading since Christmas. 

Born a Crime (Trevor Noah)
This was a Christmas present, and the book that got me reading again. I was vaguely familiar with Trevor Noah but didn't know much about his past, and this was an interesting read. I always love tales of people's ordinary lives, and this gave fascinating and at times painful insights into everyday lives in and after apartheid in South Africa. Not always cheerful, but certainly uplifting overall. 

How to be a Victorian (Ruth Goodman)
I found this in a charity shop. I loved the Victorian Farm series, and watch it over and over whenever it's repeated on the tv. This book goes into far more detail about the everyday lives of Victorians, both rich and poor, and covers things like making breakfast, making and washing clothes, education, work, and bringing up children. There's quite a bit about the political situation at the time too, and contemporary campaigns around women and children working in mines and the introduction of compulsory education. 

Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature (Chris Yates)
I loved this. I've always been a little bit scared of being outside at night (although it doesn't always stop me), and this was a beautiful account of the author's nocturnal ramblings which made me want to stride out in the moonlight. Utterly charming. 

A Gleaming Landscape: 100 Years of the Guardian's Country Diary (Martin Wainright)
​Another charity shop find, and another in my ever-growing stash of books about the coutryside. This is a collection of Country Diary columns from the Guardian newspaper over the last 100 years, one from each year. The columns themselves are short, and there's a bit of context about the political and social history of the time at the start of each chapter - the war years were especially interesting. It did feel a little disjointed with columns from so many different authors, but it was quite fascinating to see the changes through the years. 

Health (Peter Aggleton)
I picked this up to read for work, but it was so interesting that I actually read most of it sitting in a cafe on Saturday morning. It's old now (written in 1990), but gives a really clear, straightforward account of the social and structural issues surrounding health and how we understand what it means to be healthy and ill. Not exactly fun, but really interesting.

The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein)
I read Naomi Klein's first book No Logo​ when I was at university many years ago now, and it had a profound effect on me and what I went on to do. I'm a few years behind with this one, and have got it out of the library several times and taken it back without reading it. It's a weighty tome (650 ish pages), dense with detail and facts, and really not fun at all. It charts the rise of what the author calls 'disaster capitalism' - the exploitation of countries that are experiencing disaster (whether natural or human-made) by large corporations for profit-making purposes. It's not exactly an easy read, but I'm making myself read the whole lot, because I think it's important to try to get a grasp on how things come to be the way they are. I've not quite finished it yet - it's definitely not a read-as-you're-dozing-off book...

So there we are. A fairly random assortment, and I'm pretty sure I've missed at least one out. I'm so very much looking forward to having my books back out of boxes when we move, I'm sure there are plenty that I haven't read at all yet... 

After my slow start to the year on the reading front, things have picked up over the last couple of months, partly because I've been on holiday, and one of my favourite things to do on holiday is to head straight to a charity shop and pick up a large pile of books. So here goes - what I've been reading in March and April. 

Running Free: A Runner's Journey Back to Nature (Richard Askwith)
This book sat on my shelf for a good while as the opening chapter irritated me and I couldn't get past it. I thought it was going to be all 'isn't it terrible that people wear GPS watches', and I quite like my GPS watch, and didn't want to feel told off. However, I'm glad I got past that as the rest of the book was actually quite charmingly enthusiastic about running in fields and listening to the birds. Made me want to run a bit more.

Purple Hibiscus (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
I found this via a friend, who suggested this Ted Talk about the dangers of telling a single story about a place and the people who live there (for example 'Africa = famine'). Do go and listen to it. I took on board what the speaker said, and decided to start with her own first novel, and got her second out of the library at the same time as I know what I'm like for finding an author and reading everything they've ever written. This is an evocative story of a young Nigerian girl who ends up living in her aunt's house, much poorer but free from her abusive father. In places it's quite disturbing, but overall positive. This is the book she refers to in the talk, which someone told her wasn't 'authentically African'.

Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
This is the author's second, much more involved novel, and tells the story of the outbreak of war in Nigeria in the late 1960s. This is a place and period of history I knew nothing about, and I always learn about historical events better through novels and the stories of individual people. This gives a vivid picture of the lives of people both before and during the war and the famine that followed. Highly recommended. 

Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (Laura Thompson)
I don't quite know how I ended up with this book, which is a brief biography of the six upper class Mitford sisters in the 1920s and beyond. Fascinating, disturbing, and rather odd. 

The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (Sue Townsend)
I'm still not sure what I thought of this. Rather daft, although I confess I identified with the desire to just stop doing things and take to my bed at the start. Increasingly sad and disturbing (and quite ridiculous) towards the end. 

Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (Maya Angelou)
This is the kind of book you can't really write until you get into your sixties I don't think - full of tales and advice and snippets of wisdom acquired over a long eventful life. I read the first volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography at school, and read the other six volumes since - but I've just discovered all manner of other things I didn't know about her in this wikipedia entry. Incidentally, she was good friends with one of the Mitford sisters.

Fruit of the Lemon (Andrea Levy)
Another holiday charity shop find, and continuing my theme of reading in detail about individual lives, whether real or fictional. This one is fictional, but is about a young woman being sent from London to Jamaica to learn about her family and background. 

So a fairly random assortment, as usual. I'm not much of a literary critic... but it's proving interesting to keep track of what I'm reading over the months and it's making me more aware of finding new authors I think, and encouraging me to put aside more time to read, which can only be a good thing. 
​

Hmm, it seems I've not updated my list of reading since November. I haven't stopped reading, although I do seem to have slowed down a bit after my initial flush of enthusiasm. 

It's a bit of an odd (and not very long) list this time, a combination of Christmas presents, a library book, and a charity shop find. I've not felt that inspired by any of them really, for different reasons, and I think I need a good long trip to the main city library to shake me up a bit. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow. So, what I've been reading since November... 

The Year of Living Danishly (Helen Russell) 
This was a Christmas present, and a fairly jolly quick read, although I did get quite irritated by the author's magaziney style, emphasising how odd everything was (when really it wasn't). It did make me think a lot about being outdoors more . Not one to add to my list of favourites though. 

Flight Behaviour (Barbara Kingsolver)
Another Christmas present, and one I already have a copy of, although it's buried deep in the cellar and has been for some time. I love reading the same books over and over, and this is on my list of favourites (although not as much as some of her other books). I love losing myself in the story of someone else's life, and this is a vivid portrait of stuckness and spreading of wings that pulls me in every time. 

Jazz (Toni Morrison) 
This I found in a charity shop for 50p, and it's sat on a shelf for several months before migrating to the side of the bed. I read a paragraph or two then fall asleep with my face in the pages. It's not gripping me - I do want to get to the end but I have to keep going back to the beginning to make sense of what happened as I was falling asleep. 

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey)
I wasn't sure whether to include this on the list as it doesn't really feel like the type of book you put on a list of books you've read... But it's a book, and I've read it, so here it is. As it happens, I've read it before, possibly more than once. I love the idea of being 'highly effective' (whatever that means), and one of my shameful secrets is this type of 'do this and your life will be great' book. There's a bit too much of an air of smugness about this for my liking, but there are some good suggestions - being proactive, differentiating between what is urgent and what is important (and making sure you do more of the important stuff), and 'sharpening the saw' (taking time to step back and renew your strength, whether physically or emotionally). It's not a read-in-bed book, but it's a good one for the bathroom shelf I think. 

So there we are. Two I've read before, one I didn't enjoy very much and another I'm struggling to get past the first chapter of. I don't think I'm going to turn literary critic any time soon... 

I'm really pleased to have fallen back into the habit of reading. I shared back in August that I'd not read anything for months, and then in September I chose a particularly gloomy set of books. My October and November selection has been rather more varied, and fortunately a bit more cheerful. 

I started October with a trip to the library, which yielded a few nature-themed books, and November saw our trip to Scarborough which, as with all our holidays, found me rummaging through charity shop bookshelves and buying things I probably wouldn't normally buy. 

It's been a few weeks of easy reading - nothing particularly challenging, not like last month. There have been some thought provoking moments though, and I'd recommend quite a few of the books I've read this time round. 

So, here goes... 

The perfumier and the stinkhorn (Richard Mabey) 
This is a short book, a collection of essays about the senses and the natural world. I'd not come across Richard Mabey before, but it turns out he's actually pretty well known as a nature writer, and famed for blending scientific knowledge and a romantic appreciation of the natural world. I do love a collection of essays, and I was really rather taken with this one. 

A brush with nature: 25 years of personal reflections on the natural world (Richard Mabey)
I picked this up in the library at the same time as the one above, and it's equally charming, although much longer. It's a collection of selected newspaper articles spanning 25 years (another format I'm fond of), and I really like the way it blends descriptions of the natural world with how they relate to world events and smaller things happening in the writer's personal life. I've not actually finished reading it yet. 

How to be free (Tom Hodgkinson)
This is the third book I've read by Tom Hodgkinson, and I think my least favourite. How to be idle (you can access it from the link above) was much more charming, and was more of a ramble through literary accounts of idleness and how marvellous it is. How to be free seems like more of a personal rant, and I spent much of the time I was reading it feeling like I was being told off. Having said that, I suspect a few years ago I would have loved it, and that right now I'm just being a bit defensive because I'm working full time and about to take out a mortgage to buy a bigger house - all things that Tom says you shouldn't be doing if you want to be truly free (I confess I do agree with him in part, but I'm going to do them anyway...). Most thought-provoking, and a reminder of how we often DO have options, even if we've forgotten about them. 

A shepherd's life: a tale of the lake district (James Rebanks)
I loved this. I've followed this guy on Twitter for years, and always enjoyed his pictures of his sheep. This is an account of his life as an upland farmer in the lake district, and covers all manner of things from farming traditions to family, including a surprise stint in Oxford getting a degree in history. I'm quite a fan of detailed accounts of people's lives, and this was no exception. It's really quite beautiful and I'd highly recommend it. 

Elizabeth is missing (Emma Healey)
This is one of those books that I'd ignored because so many other people were reading it, but I spotted it in a charity shop and it's actually quite moving. It's a novel, a touching account told from the perspective of a woman with dementia, but told in such a way that you can see the impact it's having on her daughter too. She's searching for her friend, but nobody will take her seriously. I confess I enjoyed this far more than I was expecting (although I'm not sure 'enjoyed' is quite the right word). It was nice to see a lot of detail about experiences of people with dementia too. Another one I'd recommend. 

Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
I had a vague feeling reading this that I'd read it before. I wasn't that sure about it. It's about a man who finds out his old college professor is dying, and they rekindle their relationship. The chapters are organised as a series of conversations about different aspects of life, and woven through is also the professor's experience of losing various bodily functions and becoming increasingly reliant on others to care for him. That part of it is interesting, but I'm afraid the rest felt a bit trite for me. It seems it was made into a film, but I can't say I'll be rushing out to watch it. 

So there we have it - another motley assortment of books. I'm enjoying keeping track of them here. My library books had to go back (some of them, not mentioned here, I hadn't even started), but I've got a few holiday charity shop purchases waiting in a pile. 

I'd love to know what you've been reading - anything you'd recommend? 

Since I last shared what I'd been reading, I've been on a bit of a mission. I've made a new rule that there is to be No DIY On Weeknights After Work, and therefore I've found myself with hours each night stretching ahead of me. 

(Yes, there are good arguments for filling those hours back up with DIY. Or housework. Or cooking fancy meals. And occasionally I do those things. But, temporarily at least, sanity dictated a break). 

Anyway, back to reading. I've been eating my tea, sometimes doing the washing up (and sometimes leaving it to the morning, when I curse myself for not doing it the night before), and then curling up on the sofa with a book. Autumn evenings do that to me sometimes - I think I'm trying to avoid thinking too hard about the nights drawing in, and outdoor adventures after tea being a thing of the past for the next few months. 

So, this month, I've been reading... 

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Barbara Ehrenreich) 
This book was published in 2002 so is getting on a bit now, and I picked it up second hand (I'm not even sure why I'm telling you that - it's very rare for me to buy a book new). The author is a journalist, and this is her account of trying to find out how people actually manage to survive in low paid jobs in America. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that they barely do - people often need two jobs and even then end up in all kinds of inadequate living situations with nothing left over for the smallest emergency. Depressing. 

Hard Work: Life in Low Pay Britain (Polly Toynbee)
I picked this book up at the same time as the last one, and it's equally depressing. Published a year later, in 2003, it's another journalist's account of living on one of the worst council estates in Britain, and taking whatever minimum wage job she could get. It doesn't contain anything surprising if you've ever done a minimum wage job yourself, but I think what distressed me the most was the sheer disregard for people's time. The author regularly turned up for interviews for jobs that didn't exist, or had meetings cancelled right at the last minute, forms needed to be taking by hand, during the day, right across town, for jobs which then turned out to be 'speculative'. The most basic equipment (like latex gloves in a care home) was often missing, making a difficult job even harder, often for the sake of someone higher up being miserly over a small amount of money. You can read the first chapter here. 

If This Is A Man, and The Truce (Primo Levi)
Continuing this month's non-deliberate gloomy theme, I made a start on this account of the author's year in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and his months-long journey home after it was liberated in 1945. Primo Levi is one of those writers I'd heard of, but never read anything by, although I always had a niggling sense that I should have done. A few weeks ago I caught a few episodes of The Periodic Table (another one of his books) when it was serialised on Radio 4, and I was intrigued by mentions of his experiences, so when I spotted this in a charity shop, I picked it up. It's compelling, all the more so for the lack of too much emotion. It's just an account of the day to day life inside a concentration camp, with details that had never even occured to me - how he learned where to stand in the queue so as not to get the watery soup from the top of the pan, but not be so far back that it ran out before he reached the front. How a complex system of bartering sprung up between the prisoners (and occasional civilian outsiders). What it feels like to be slowly starved, and how to retain a sense of who you are, almost impossible in such a place. The vexation of having to do hours of hard labour in mismatched shoes. It's well written and both easy and very difficult to read, and I'd highly recommend it. 

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Rebecca Solnit)
Slightly more cheerful this time - this is a book I started way back in August and have yet to finish. In some ways it's an fairly interesting account of different forms of walking (pilgrimage, trekking across the wilderness, wandering through the city) - a topic which I'm predisposed to be interested in - but I confess it's just not capturing my imagination, and the only time I'm still reading it is when I've left my other book downstairs and it's the only thing left by the bed. 

Vinland (George Mackay Brown)
I love George Mackay Brown. I was first introduced to him by my auntie (introducer of many good books), who bought me a copy of his autobiography one year. That book was the reason I first went to Orkney, and his other books contributed to me falling head over heels for the place and going back year after year after year. This book isn't my favourite (although now I say that, I don't know what is), but I came across three of his books in a charity shop this week and acquired a couple of them for my auntie (she already had the other one). I already have a copy, but it's packed away in a box in the cellar, and not been read for a good long time, so it was a pleasure to lose myself in this one for a while. I don't know what it is about these books, I'm really not that interested in Vikings and sea voyages on the whole, but there's just something about the writing that gets me every time. I'll have to sneakily read the second book before I pass it on. 

So there we are. A motley, not-awfully-cheerful month of reading. I really must try for something more upbeat next month. It's funny, I've never really taken people's recommendations for books to read as I'm an odd mix between 'quite fussy/hard to please' and 'I'll read anything that's in front of me'. Mostly I read whatever takes my fancy in a charity shop or the library on any given day, which is why sometimes I have a bit of a theme for a while, and sometimes I dot about all over the place. 

It's been good to keep track over these last few weeks - wonder what I'll end up with next? 

This is quite ridiculous. I had to go all the way back to March to find a photograph with a book in - and this is one I didn't even get past the first chapter of! I used to read all the time (apparently as a child I once fell down the stairs because I had my nose in a book), but lately I've found myself wandering around the internet on my phone instead. 

Of course, that has its merits too, but it's really just not the same. 

So I'm trying to get back to reading. I got a book out of the library - and then had to renew it after three weeks because I hadn't started it, and then had to renew it again after another three weeks because I'd only read the first chapter. Not a good start. Only holiday I bought four books in charity shops, and even read one of them (as well as the library book!) but it seems I didn't take a single picture. 

I love reading, but I've never been much of a one for book clubs or talking about books. I never feel I can say the 'right' things, whatever they are. I want to sound intelligent, but often can't get past 'but I really liked it!' This feeling has always put me off talking about reading here until it dawned on me this week that I don't have to say anything at all! What a revelation! I can just tell you what I've been reading, I don't have to provide intelligent analysis and witty commentary. 

So here goes - what I've been reading in August:

Simon Garfield - A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt
A friend bought me this for my birthday. I do love a good diary, especially one set during wartime. I love reading people's accounts of everyday life (which may explain my enthusiasm for reading other people's blogs), although I've never been particularly good at keeping a diary of my own. I confess I didn't really warm to Jean Lucey Pratt at first - she's obsessed with whether she'll be successful, whether she'll find a husband, whether she's doing the right thing or should be doing something else, and her diary contains (I'll be quite honest here) the kind of thing I write when I do try to keep a diary - inner anxieties and vanities and things that are best left unread. However, it seems that Jean did intend her diaries to be read (she mentions it quite frequently...), and, since they start when she is a young teenager and run through until a few weeks before she died sixty years later, by the end I'd become rather fond of her. It made me start thinking about keeping a diary of my own again, but, needless to say, that idea stopped as soon as it started. 

Toni Morrison - A Mercy 
The only other Toni Morrison book I've read is Beloved, which at times I found distressing and quite hard to follow. This was more straightforward, and marginally less distressing, although it's still definitely not a cheerful read. 

Bill Bryson - The Road to Little Dribbling 
I read this with some trepidation - in his previous book about Britain he visited a place a mile from where I grew up and was not very complimentary. However, if he did say anything about my current city I obviously wasn't offended by it as I have no memory of him saying anything at all.

Albert B Robillard - Meaning of a Disability: the Lived Experience of Paralysis 
I started reading this for work, but rapidly found myself drawn in. This is a true account of the author's experience of developing motor-neuron disease, becoming paralysed and losing his speech. The first few chapters deal with his frustrations at medical professionals and acquaintances refusing to communicate with him, which is both distressing and a good lesson for the rest of us. Again, not a particularly cheerful read. 

There, that wasn't so hard, was it? I'd love to hear what you've been reading if you're willing to share.