I always like a reading memoir and I follow Daisy on substack. Clearly, I was going to want this book.
Here’s the blurb …
Daisy Buchanan doesn’t have the answer – but she’s found something to soothe her incessant questioning. When Daisy first felt worry consume her as a child, she turned to the wonder of reading. Somehow, as a grown-up (or a person trying to be one) she turned to food, alcohol and online shopping instead, but these momentary highs made her feel lower still. Eventually diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder, she returned to reading and soon discovered that losing herself in a good book helped her find so much her confidence through characters, her sexuality through racy romps and more and more peace with every page.
In READ YOURSELF HAPPY, Daisy Buchanan – writer, broadcaster and host of the You’re Booked podcast – combines her own journey, the wisdom of the characters, writers and literary worlds she has loved and the advice of experts to help you read yourself calmer, read yourself romantic, read yourself free from addiction and so much more. This book will help you form one of the healthiest habits you already have at your fingertips.
This was a really personal journey about reading and how books can heal us and help us in a myriad of ways – show us different ways of living and being.
This was long listed for the Women’s Prize for non-fiction in 2024. I promptly bought it and I have just finished it.
Here’s the blurb …
The gripping story of three young women who came of age and into power in a world dominated by men.
Orphaned from infancy, Catherine de’Medici endured a tumultuous childhood. Married to King Henry II of France, she was widowed by forty, only to become the power behind the throne during a period of intense civil strife. In 1546 Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, who would become Queen of Spain. Two years later Catherine welcomed to her nursery the beguiling young Mary, Queen of Scots, who would become her daughter-in-law.
These years at the French court bound Catherine, Elisabeth and Mary to one another through blood and marriage, alliance and friendship, love and filial piety – bonds that were tested when they were forced to part and take on new roles in different kingdoms. As queens, they lived through the sea changes that transformed sixteenth century Europe; a time of expanding empires, religious discord and popular revolt. They would learn that to rule was to wage a constant war against the deeply entrenched attitudes of their time. A crown could exalt a young women equally it could destroy her.
This was fascinating. I already knew a bit about Mary, Queen of Scots, having read Embroidering Her Truth by Clare Hunter, and I had heard of Catherine de’Medici (and I have watched a bit of The Serpent Queen), but I had never even heard of Elizabeth de Valois.
This book has a nice easy style (conversational almost), not burdened by jargon. The writing is good and the events so compelling, and sometimes exciting, it’s like reading an historical fiction novel.
Sarah Perry mentioned reading this book and I was intrigued. I studied physics (as part of my Maths degree), but I am not in any way an expert.
Here’s the blurb …
This playful, entertaining, and mind-bending introduction to modern physics briskly explains Einstein’s general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role humans play in this weird and wonderful world. Carlo Rovelli, a renowned theoretical physicist, is a delightfully poetic and philosophical scientific guide. He takes us to the frontiers of our knowledge: to the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, back to the origins of the cosmos, and into the workings of our minds. The book celebrates the joy of discovery. “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world,” Rovelli writes. “And it’s breathtaking.”
There are seven chapters, lessons,
The Most Beautiful of Theories
Quanta
The Architecture of the Cosmos
Particles
Grains of Space
Probability, Time and Heat of Black Holes
Ourselves
It’s beautifully written and I think easy to understand even if you don’t have a science background. If you have ever wondered about the nature of time, Einstein’s theories, space or atoms, then this book will fascinate you. Rovelli manages to translate complicated physics ideas into simple understandable language.
I bought this book pretty much as soon as it was published, and then in languished in my pile (pile of death my daughter calls it), but my random number generator selected it, and do I read it. Of the 60 books I have read so far this year, only 22 have been from the pile – I would like it to be half.
Here’s the blurb …
I like this London life . . . the street-sauntering and square-haunting.Virginia Woolf, diary, 1925
Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of interwar Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and writer and publisher Virginia Woolf. They each alighted there seeking a space where they could live, love and, above all, work independently. Francesca Wade’s spellbinding group biography explores how these trailblazing women pushed the boundaries of literature, scholarship, and social norms, forging careers that would have been impossible without these rooms of their own.
Of the five women I knew two, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy L Sayers. I haven’t read any of Sayer’s work, but I have just started listening to Whose Body?, which I am very much enjoying.
The other three women were amazing, H. D (Hilda Doolittle), Jane Harrison, and Eileen Power were amazing and it’s appalling that they are so little known today. Eileen Power, in particular, was extremely prescient, discussing the East West divide and how dangerous it could be, and how divisive the dividing of the muslim countries by the allies after world was one would be.
These were liberated women trying to live independent lives – equal to men. They were interested in learning, and creating a better world, and believed that female involvement (collaboration and co-operation) was the way to do that.
I am not sure where I first heard about this? Maybe a JASNA newsletter?
My random number generator selected it. There has been a bit of a Jane Austen theme for me this year.
Here’s the blurb …
Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.
But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels.
I really enjoyed this – I promptly downloaded Evelina by Frances Burney, and I already have a copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho, and I will be sourcing the other authors as well.
Ms Romney has a lovely conversational style of writing. I always like a mixture of personal information and literary information, and her search for particular editions of novels was fascinating. How women authors have disappeared from the canon will make your blood boil.
A Short History of the World According to Sheep – Sally Coulthard
Using a random number generator to select my books is going well. I wanted to read this, but I suspect it would have languished in the pile.
Here’s the blurb …
‘This book deserves a place in your bookcase next to Harari’s Sapiens. It’s every bit as fascinating and is surely destined to be just as successful’ Julian Norton From the plains of ancient Mesopotamia to the vast sheep farms of modern-day Australia, sheep have been central to the human story. Since our our Neolithic ancestors’ first forays into sheep-rearing nearly 11,000 years ago, these remarkable animals have fed us, clothed us, changed our diet and language and financed the conquest of large swathes of the earth.Sally Coulthard weaves this fascinating story into a vivid and colourful tapestry of engaging anecdotes and extraordinary ovine facts, whose multiple strands celebrate just how pivotal these woolly animals are to almost every aspect of human society and culture.This title was published also in the United States under the title Follow the Flock.‘A snappy, stimulating book, and certainly not just for shepherds’ Mail on Sunday‘Full of fascinating social history’ Independent‘You won’t look at a sheep in the same way again’ Country Living.
I am a knitter and I am fascinated by sheep. I would like to know the source of my yarn (although that seems impossible in Australia), what type of sheep it came from, etc.
This book has 14 chapters with different aspects of sheep history and evolution (breeding), the way humans have used sheep, and the way sheep have been fundamental to human development. Also, what should happen now? In this world of climate change? Wool is a wonder material, which must have a part to play in the future.
I found this a bit icky
The only way to do this [domesticate a sheep] would be to take a lamb from its mother as soon as it was born and breastfeed it. And so, astonishingly, the history of sheep may indeed have started with a woman nursing a newborn lamb.
And I guess this is the lot of archaeologists
At the end of the 1990s, archaeologists had the rather unusual privilege of being allowed to sift through the remains of a seventeenth-century toilet at Dudley Castle in the West Midlands.
What Jane Austen’s Characters Read (and Why) – Susan Allen Ford
I must have read about this, or heard it on a podcast. I was very interested.
Here’s the blurb …
The first detailed account of Austen’s characters’ reading experience to date, this book explores both what her characters read and what their literary choices would have meant to Austen’s own readership, both at the time and today.
Jane Austen was a voracious and extensive reader, so it’s perhaps no surprise that many of her characters display a similar appetite for the written word, from Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice to Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Beginning by looking at Austen’s own reading as well as her interest in readers’ responses to her work, the book then focuses on each of her novels, looking at the particular works that her characters read and unpacking the multiple (and often surprising) ways in which these inform the reading of Austen’s works. In doing so, it uses Austen’s own love of reading to invite us to rethink the way in which she thought about her characters and their lives beyond the novels.
This was fascinating. There is a chapter on each Austen novel (Mansfield Park gets two!). And the author describes how Austen is using contemporary literature in her novels. Ideas that the readers of the time would appreciate, and which add nuance to the novels. For example, in the chapter on Pride and Prejudice, Allen Ford discusses Conduct Literature – Fordyce’s Sermons, among others.
It is extraordinary and if I could only bring myself to read these books, I would have a greater insight into Austen’s novels.
It was very easy to read, no academic jargon, and Allen Ford has a conversational style.
One of the women in my book club mentioned this book and as I thought I should be better informed about the Middle East, I decided to read it.
Here’s the blurb …
A stunning exploration of the Greater Middle East, where lasting stability has often seemed just out of reach but may hold the key to the shifting world order of the twenty-first century
The Greater Middle East, which Robert D. Kaplan defines as the vast region between the Mediterranean and China, encompassing much of the Arab world, parts of northern Africa, and Asia, existed for millennia as the crossroads of empire: Macedonian, Roman, Persian, Mongol, Ottoman, British, Soviet, American. But with the dissolution of empires in the twentieth century, postcolonial states have endeavored to maintain stability in the face of power struggles between factions, leadership vacuums, and the arbitrary borders drawn by exiting imperial rulers with little regard for geography or political groups on the ground. In the Loom of Time, Kaplan explores this broad, fraught space through reporting and travel writing to reveal deeper truths about the impacts of history on the present and how the requirements of stability over anarchy are often in conflict with the ideals of democratic governance.
In The Loom of Time, Kaplan makes the case for realism as an approach to the Greater Middle East. Just as Western attempts at democracy promotion across the Middle East have failed, a new form of economic imperialism is emerging today as China’s ambitions fall squarely within the region as the key link between Europe and East Asia. As in the past, the Greater Middle East will be a register of future great power struggles across the globe. And like in the past, thousands of years of imperial rule will continue to cast a long shadow on politics as it is practiced today.
To piece together the history of this remarkable place and what it suggests for the future, Kaplan weaves together classic texts, immersive travel writing, and a great variety of voices from every country that all compel the reader to look closely at the realities on the ground and to prioritize these facts over ideals on paper. The Loom of Time is a challenging, clear-eyed book that promises to reframe our vision of the global twenty-first century.
It is clear that Kaplan has spent a lot of time travelling in the Middle East (over a number of years), thinking about it and researching it. Although it was recently published, it was before Trump’s second presidency, which I think will have a profound impact on world politics.
I thought about anarchy and autocracy and how the latter might be preferred. There is information about the history – country by country – the revolutions, the ethnic groups, and the religions.
Anne of Green Gables, My Daughter & Me – Lorilee Craker
I am a super-fan of L. M. Montgomery. I have read all of the books (by her and about her), seen the various adaptations, completed a cross stitch, and visited Green Gables (and given that I live in Australia that is quite the journey). I also like a book memoir – for example this one, or this one, or this one. This book was perfect for me.
Here’s the blurb …
A charming and heartwarming true story for anyone who has ever longed for a place to belong.“Anne of Green Gables,” My Daughter, and Me is a witty romp through the classic novel; a visit to the magical shores of Prince Edward Island; and a poignant personal tale of love, faith, and loss.
And it all started with a simple question: “What’s an orphan?” The words from her adopted daughter, Phoebe, during a bedtime reading of Anne of Green Gables stopped Lorilee Craker in her tracks. How could Lorilee, who grew up not knowing her own birth parents, answer Phoebe’s question when she had wrestled all her life with feeling orphaned—and learned too well that not every story has a happy ending?
So Lorilee set off on a quest to find answers in the pages of the very book that started it all, determined to discover—and teach her daughter—what home, family, and belonging really mean. If you loved the poignancy of Orphan Train and the humor of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, you will be captivated by “Anne of Green Gables,” My Daughter, and Me. It’s a beautiful memoir that deftly braids three lost girls’ stories together, speaks straight to the heart of the orphan in us all, and shows us the way home at last.
This was beautifully written – very heartfelt. I enjoyed how the personal bits interleaved with the Anne of Green Gables bits. It’s about finding family (biological and chosen), and making peace with life’s difficulties.
A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson
I was looking for something to listen to in my husband’s audible library and came across this. I missed the bit about it being a rough guide to science. Which is not a problem – I have a science degree, so I still found it fascinating.
Here’s the blurb …
Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely at home he can’t contain his curiosity about the world around him. “A Short History of Nearly Everything” is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilisation – how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. The ultimate eye-opening journey through time and space, revealing the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.
This is very entertaining and informative – I enjoyed Bryson’s writing style. And I feel more informed on geology, chemistry, biology, anthropology, etc. Although, it seems the more we know the less we understand. I found the narrator to be annoying (and his Australian accent was terrible) not to mention the way her pronounces Himalayas.
It is probably a little bit dated after Covid and the current state of climate change.
