Athelstan by Tom Holland - Review

This was the May choice for my book club and I read it way back in mid April, so I was in plenty of time before book club. As I write this, we haven't yet met, so I don't know what everyone else thought, but I really enjoyed the book. It's non fiction, it's about the King called Athelstan who I had never heard of, although I'd heard of some of his relatives for sure. But that period of England is not something I know a lot about at all, so it was good to learn more. 

Athelstan is arguably the first King of England because he managed to unify the country more than anyone had done previously. There is apparently little documentary evidence about Athelstan himself, but what there is Tom Holland manages to pull together in a very readable and dramatic fashion. This is a short book so I raced through it, but it is also compelling. Also, presumably he's not THAT Tom Holland, haha. 

I also found it really interesting how Athelstan became king of all of England. When a different king died, others would rush in and fill the gap - what an absolutely mad way to do anything. So Athelstan managed to get a couple of places before anyone else, including some Irish kings, did. Wild. 

I really enjoyed this and would recommend it to anyone who would like to learn more about this period of history. I'm giving this four out of five. 

Spring by Michael Morpurgo - Review

After I read Winter by Val McDermid I knew I wanted to read the rest of the series. This one is the only one to have come out so far - Summer is expected this summer and I can't wait! I requested this one at the library and read it at the beginning of April when it really did feel like Spring had sprung but the weather was still a bit wild, as it ought to be. 

Michael's description of his Springs has a lot to do with his farm, which is in Devon, and from where he and his wife set up Farms for City Children, a charity where children come from the cities to work on farms to explore the living, etc. This still happens at Michael's home, apparently, and I liked the descriptions of the children with the pigs, mucking out the horses, and so on. I could imagine the farm well, including the birds that he and his wife Claire spend a lot of time looking at. Michael appreciates that he is no longer in the spring of his life, but he appreciates each new spring with the new life that comes and what that brings on a farm. 

He also talks a bit about how sometimes nature is cruel and things don't live, which I liked. In all this is a cute little book - not quite as punchy and immediate as Winter, but I liked it all the same. I'm giving it five out of five. 

Winter by Val McDermid - Review

I got this book with one of my Waterstones vouchers, I bought it not long after Christmas in my haul then, and I knew I wanted to read it before this winter was over. I kept meaning to pick it up and finally got round to it at the beginning of March. I don't know about you, but winter returned with a vengeance at the beginning of March - we had sleet, hail, and tons of wind! So it was perfect to read this book then. 

This is only a short book and apparently it's one of a series on each of the seasons, by different authors. I would really like to read the other ones so maybe I'll seek them out. My review won't be very long because it really is a short book, but I really enjoyed it, and recommend it. 

Apparently Val settles down each winter to write a new novel, so it's a time of creativity for her, a time to hunker down and work. I really liked knowing that about her writing structure, it was interesting as I've read a lot of her novels. She also writes a lot about her Scottish childhood and the brutality and beauty of a Scottish winter. I found her writing really evocative of the time and space and learnt a lot about Scotland in the 1950s and 60s. Did you know for example that the puritanical church didn't celebrate Christmas so it wasn't a bank holiday in Scotland until the mid 1960s, which explains why they celebrated New Year/Hogmanay so much more! So interesting. 

I lent the book to my friend Morag, who I go to craft club with, and who is only a couple of years old than Val. She is Scottish herself - obviously, with a name like Morag - and I thought she would find it really interesting and evocative of her own childhood too. 

I'm giving it five out of five and will definitely read it again!

Trans Like Me by C N Lester - Review

I've had this book absolutely forever and I think I followed the author on Twitter at one point way back in time and probably ordered this then. I picked this book up as part of my LGBTQ+ reading month in January. I am really glad I got round to it. I don't tend to read a lot of non fiction but enjoyed this. 

C N Lester is non binary and talks in this book about that and their experiences as a trans person, but alongside that are parts where they talk about sex and gender, break down myths about trans people, cite up to date research and so on about trans people. It is at once both personal and clinical, in a was that I really liked. There's no sugar coating reality for trans people, but equally there is a message of hope for the community. 

One thing I did think was, well this book was written a decade ago (it was published in 2017) and really I feel like we've gone back politically for trans people. With pressure groups barring trans women from using the loo in public and people like J K Rowling using their vast wealth to push their backward thinking viewpoints, it feels like we've gone backwards in that decade. I find that upsetting and as always I stand behind my trans siblings in the community. 

I don't have a lot to say about this - I just really liked reading it and am grateful that C N Lester laid their soul bare in such a way. I'm giving this five out of five. 

Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem - Review

This was the September choice for my book club, and it wasn't something I would have ever picked up but as always I will give it a go. It took me forever to read which really annoyed me, especially as it's not even that long of a book! But I persevered and we did have a good discussion about it at book club. 

Mudlarking is the act of scavenging stuff that turns up in the muddy banks of a river shore when the tide goes out. It mostly refers to the River Thames in London, which is tidal, and where in the 18th century poor people and their children scavenged for goods that they could resell and make a tiny living from. These days, anyone can go and search for stuff on the muddy banks, and Lara is one of those people. She did explain the difference between people who just search stuff that lays on the foreshore and those who actually go digging for stuff - which is illegal unless you're a member of the mudlarking society, apparently, which Lara is not so she was a bit scathing about it. 

Let me talk about the parts of the book that I found interesting: the history of London and how it shows up in what artefacts she founds - Roman pottery, Victorian pins, loads of other bits. Lara has to turn over all her finds to the Museum of London because they have first refusal on what's been found, which was also interesting. She talked about finding rings and jewellery and precious gems, and she throws back some of the engraved rings she finds as she just finds them too sad. There was an interesting part about a bag of garnets that fell off a ship or were nicked, and apparently it's quite easy to find them. I also found the parts about how climate change is changing the edges of the river and so on. So those bits were good.

But a lot of it was quite repetitive and some of the others in my book club said that too. There was way too much about the steps going down to the banks and just choosing different places to go and why, blah blah blah. Also a lot of her finds seems really similar which was annoying. Plus I found the ending quite odd, where she goes to one of the most easterly points where the river is more of a sea, and nearly gets caught by the tide. I just didn't really care enough about it. 

In all i'm giving this three out of five. There's a sequel but I don't think I'll bother!

Uncommon People by Miranda Sawyer - Audio Book Review

I had seen someone I follow reading this book and I thought it sounded interesting, so I found it on Spotify and started listening to it. I started in April and finished two months later. This is because I don't listen to audio books a lot - generally only when I'm in the car on the way to and from work once a week. But this was a good book to do that with, because I didn't need to remember much from previously as each chapter concentrated on a different song and band. It was good to dip in and out of. 

Miranda Sawyer is a journalist although I primarily know her as a talking head on different types of documentaries about music. She worked for Select magazine amongst others, and describes herself as more of a pop fan than anything else. But she was working for Select and Melody Maker in the mid nineties, when Britpop was at its height, and she met a lot of the bands involved. So she's the right person to tell this story for sure. 

At the beginning I felt like she wasn't used to reading things out loud because she sounded a bit stilted, but this improved as the book went on. She started with a brief explanation of 'Britpop' and how it came about. As she said, you don't realise you're living in a scene until it's almost over. She went a bit off piste with her choices towards the end, but I understood why and thought the choices that were made made a lot of sense. 

So, she chose one song from a bunch of bands and talked about that band in each chapter. For instance - Girls and Boys by Blur, Connection by Elastica, A Design for Life by the Manic Street Preachers. I was a fan (and occasionally still am) of a lot of the bands, and I knew most of the songs, so some of the information wasn't new to me. But I managed to learn a lot in each chapter - even the Manics chapter, and I was a huge Manics fan for most of my teenaged years. I really enjoyed learning even about the bands that I actively don't like, like The Verve. 

It was an engaging book and one that reminded me of my teens and made me want to listen to all that fun indie pop stuff of the mid nineties again. I might write a zine about the songs detailed, because I think they lend themselves to it and hey, someone already did the hard work for me. 

In all I'm giving it four out of five. Some of the diction did annoy me, and some parts became a bit repetitive simply because they talk about the same people. But I definitely recommend this whether you were there or not! 

Good Trouble by Forest Issac Jones - Spotlight and Blog Tour

Hello and welcome to my stop on the tour for Good Trouble by Forest Issac Jones. Thank you so much for having me along. Please do click around and look at some of my other posts. I was so intrigued by the premise of this book but I'm really sad that I ran out of time to read it before this post was due. I do still plan on reading it. The issue of civil rights and civil freedoms is something that I am really interested in, especially the history of Northern Ireland and associated fights. 

My partner and I visited Northern Ireland a couple of years ago and we went to the Museum of Free Derry. It is amazing and I highly recommend it if you're in the area. It is simultaneously one of the most depressing and one of the most uplifting places I've ever been. Depressing because of the sheer scale of human misery inflicted upon the Catholics of Northern Ireland - especially on Bloody Sunday, which features heavily and which was so interesting to learn a lot about - but uplifting because of the power of people. The people who will fight for their rights and who will come together to make a movement. There is mention in the museum of the Black Civil Rights Movement and how there was support on both sides. So this book was really ideal for me and I will most likely read it on holiday. 

Let me show some of my photos of Derry and some of the murals. When we were there we saw a lot of Free Palestine graffiti and Palestinian flags, which was amazing too. All these photos are copyrighted to me and may not be copied or used elsewhere. 

This is the blurb for this book: 

Good Trouble will show the strong connection between the Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the Catholic Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland – specifically the influence of the Montgomery to Selma march on the 1969 Belfast to Derry march through oral history, based on numerous interviews of events leading up to both marches and afterwards. This is close to the author’s heart as both of his parents marched to integrate lunch counters and movie theatres in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1963 as college students. His mother was at the 1963 March to Washington where Martin Luther King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

Award winning author Julieann Campbell (On Bloody Sunday) wrote the introduction for Good Trouble, looking back at her times growing up in Derry, in the heart of the Catholic Civil Rights Movement. Jones travelled to Dublin, Belfast and Derry to conduct interviews for the book. In all, he did fifteen interviews with people who were involved in the movement in Northern Ireland (including Billy McVeigh – featured in the BAFTA winning documentary, Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland) and in the United States (including Richard Smiley and Dr. Sheyann Webb-Christburg – both were at Bloody Sunday in Alabama and on the Selma to Montgomery march among others). Jones was also able to talk with Eamonn McCann (he took part in the Belfast to Derry march in 1969; he was the John Lewis of Northern Ireland).

Unlike most books on Northern Ireland, this goes into detail about the connection and the influence between the two movements. Also, most focus on Bloody Sunday and not the pivotal incidents at Burntollet Bridge and the Battle of the Bogside. Building off of unprecedented access and interviews with participants in both movements, Jones crafts a gripping and moving account of these pivotal years for both countries.

Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel - Review

We've been packing up some of my books recently and I came across this, Hilary Mantel's autobiography. Now I've never actually read any of her novels, Tudor or otherwise, but of course I know of her, and this must have intrigued me enough to pick it up in a charity shop or something. My interest was piqued again so I read it.

And it is marvellous! It is such a good memoir and I would recommend it whether you're a fan of hers or not. A lot of it is given over to her childhood in Hadfield in Derbyshire, a place that I sometimes drive through and know. I didn't realise she was northern! Her family was a bit complicated with aunts and grandparents nearby; the young Helen split her time between a few houses. Her mother started an affair with a man called Jack and he lived in their house with both parents still there. He eventually moved the family out to Cheshire and Hilary never saw her father again. 

There's also a lot given to her second home in Norfolk and how it was a place of refuge for her for quite a long time. She was married young, and later divorced and then remarried the same man. She talks about her university life and the poverty that she and her husband had to face while young and it was a very good portrayal of humdrum life in the 1970s. I liked the stuff around the second home. Hilary seemed to feel almost guilty that she had made enough money to be able to do this. 

But the part of the memoir that resonated the most for me was Hilary's telling of her struggle with endometriosis. It is something that I myself have suffered with and am only 'cured' now thanks to a hormonal IUD. Endo has left me in pain a lot and disabled by it, and it means I wasn't able to have kids. This was the same for Hilary. She talks about sub standard medical care and about being hospitalised in a maternity ward (which would be my idea of hell). It was written to beautifully and so tragically. If you have suffered with anything similar (adenomyosis [which I also have] is equally shit) I would really really recommend it. 

I love life writing and whenever I read something like this it makes me want to write my own memoir for real. I'm giving it five out of five. 

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd - Review

Firstly I am so sorry that I haven't posted here for absolutely ages! I got to the end of my tether at the end of 2024 and stopped writing entirely. Life was just busy with Christmas stuff and family stuff - not all good - and I had written over 200,000 words in 2024 and frankly I thought that was enough. I decided to just not write any more and to keep all my blog posts to start afresh in 2025. So here I am with a bunch of reviews - which I'll space out, of course - and a big welcome to 2025. I really hope it's better than 2024 was. I did read a lot of books, though, which I'm glad about. I'll be back up to speed soon.

This book was the December choice for my book club, and it wasn't anything that I would have picked up by myself but I ended up really liking it. It's a short book and it's about the Cairngorm mountains in Scotland. Mary chose the book because she grew up near them in Aberdeen and knows the mountains quite well. She's read this before but wanted us all to read it too.

It's a short book and the different chapters focus on different facets of the mountains, from the nature, to the water, to the birds, to the people who live there. Nan records her own history with the mountains as well as describing herself walking over them. She doesn't romanticise them, though - she tells stories of those who died on the mountains and how the natural world can make them difficult to navigate. 

I found it a really lovely book and am glad I read it. I'm giving it four out of five. 

Fat Girl Best Friend by Sarah Grant - Review

I got this book in a swap recently. It had been on my wish list so I was excited to read it, but it didn't really meet up with my expectations. 

To be clear, I have been involved in the fat acceptance movement for well over a decade, and I love the non fiction writing that has cropped up over the last however many years so I was keen to read this too. But for me, it was just a bit old news. I have been here so long that I've heard all these critiques before. I mentioned this to two friends who are also fat and who are also in the movement, and they agreed that for us it's just not new, but that it may be for some people. And I agree, so if some people do need to read this book and would get a lot out of it, I can't really diss it too much. 

Basically, it looks at the 'fat girl best friend' in TV shows and films and explores the tropes that the fat side character endures. She's never the main character, she never gets to have her own wishes and wants, she is often either over sexualised or isn't allowed to be sexual at all, she is just the friend of the Thin Main Character. There are lots of examples given but the ones people are often more familiar with are Fat Monica in Friends and Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect. (And it's actually really problematic that both these women are nicknamed 'Fat', for god's sake). But as I say, there was a lot of new information for me. 

Things I did like were: the fact that some of the women who are depicted as 'fat' in Hollywood are actually just 'entertainment thin', and what that means, and I also really liked the look at Paula in Crazy Ex Girlfriend because generally that show does so well at representation and I liked Paula when I watched the show. 

I did find there were parts of it that weren't proofread properly which I found annoying, and there were some parts of it that were just plain wrong. For instance, it said that the film Frozen was released in 2019. No, it was not. I don't even like the film and I know that. This made me feel like not enough care was taken over the book, and that disappointed me. 

In all I'm giving this three out of five. I will donate it somewhere I think, and will hope that someone else will get more out of it that I did. 

The Book of Queer Prophets Edited by Ruth Hunt - Review

My next book for Pride Month was this non fiction book. I've had it a few years; it was a present from my friend Leanne for Christmas one year. I've been meaning to pick it up for ages and I finally got round to it and I'm really glad I did. 

I am really interested in faiths of all kind. My undergraduate degree was in Theology and Religious Studies and it's something I've kept up with throughout the years. I work for a faith based charity even though I'm not religious myself. I had some religious trauma growing up so I don't worship, but I find all faiths and none absolutely fascinating. So this book was right in my interest zone! 

I knew some of the names listed so I was really interested to read things by them. These included Amrou Al-Kadhi, Jeanette Winterson, Dustin Lance Black, Jay Hulme, Juno Dawson and of course Kate Bottley, who writes the afterword. I really enjoyed these pieces, especially Dustin Lance Black, whose history I had no idea about but it was fascinating to read. I liked Kate's afterword, too - she is straight and she talks about coming to a place of needing to fight for queer people within her faith. It's a really honest piece and I appreciate it. I also really liked Juno Dawson's - she no longer has a faith so that was interesting to read too. 

The pieces are mostly written by Christian people or people who used to be Christians but are no longer. Amrou is Muslim but I think they were the only Muslim represented. There are a couple of Jewish people which I also really liked reading as Reform Judaism seems to really accept LGBTQ+ people and want them in the faith. Most of the Christians are still practicing and a lot have gone into ministry, which is really interesting to read about even if it's not something I would be interested in myself. I like hearing people's testimonies and this is basically what this book is in one way or another. 

I also liked to read about people's anger with their faith, whether they had gone back to it or not. There has been so much crap slung at queer people within all faiths, and I am so glad that these people were so honest about their walks with god or indeed not. 

I'm giving this five out of five and am wondering who I can pass it on to! 

Eating for England by Nigel Slater - Review

I picked this book up in a charity shop last year, I think. It's been down the side of the bed for ages. I've decided for June I'm just reading books by LGBTQ+ authors and/or about queer characters, so I knew this fitted as Nigel is not straight. I read Toast by him well over a decade ago, which is a brilliant autobiography told through food. So I thought I would like this, which is little vignettes about food, especially foods that are typically found in the United Kingdom. However, I'm not sure that it really worked too well. For one thing, Nigel seemed to conflate 'English' and 'British' and made it sound like all the people in the UK eat all exactly the same things. He really should have mentioned some Scottish and Welsh foods too. Plus he repeated himself quite a lot. There's a lot of stuff at the beginning about biscuits, like selection boxes of biscuits, and how pink wafers are terrible, and then there's the same thing at the end of the book too. Sadly I really can't give this more than three out of five. I'm sorry for the short review too, but I just really don't have more to say!

Night by Elie Wiesel - Review

I can't really believe that I've never read Night by Elie Wiesel before. I have probably said it before that I did Theology and Religious Studies at university and as part of that I studied a lot of world religions and Judaism was one of them. I read some Holocaust literature then and I've read a lot since. You can find other reviews that I've posted here on the subject under the tag 'Holocaust'. But for some reason I had never picked this up. I think I have an anthology of writings about the Holocaust which is huge and which I've never read, and I am pretty sure at least part of Night is in that. But I hadn't ever read this and I'm ashamed for that because it has got to be one of the most well known pieces of Holocaust writing, by a survivor. I am so glad I finally got to it. I'm not sure where I picked this up but I think it was in a charity shop recently - probably Skipton at the beginning of April. 

It's a small volume but gosh, the things that are contained within. I knew that Elie was a holocaust survivor, of course, but I didn't know that his family had almost escaped it. They weren't deported from their native Hungary until 1944. As a reader so many years later that just seems so drastically unfair - the war was almost over! Auschwitz was liberated at the end of January in 1945, just a few months later! But of course at the time Elie's family would have no way to have known that. 

Elie was the only son in a family with four children - two older daughters and his younger sister Tzipora, plus his mother and father. They weren't deported until after the Nazis invaded Hungary. First of all they were moved to a ghetto (please be aware that the word 'ghetto' refers originally to where Jews were forced to live in Venice in the 16th century) and Elie describes the first night there, a night which for him was to last years and years as he was first imprisoned in Auschwitz and Birkenau, and then Buchenwald when the Russians got too close to Auschwitz, and then post war. 

He details arriving at Birkenau. His mother and Tzipora were immediately sent to the death chambers; Elie never saw them again. His older sisters were sent to the women's section and they both survived the war, but it was obviously years before Elie saw them again. He mostly concerned himself with keeping his father, Shlomo, alive. The veteran inmates of the camp tell Elie and his father how lucky they are and also how to stay alive. 

Obviously, the details of the camp are horrific to read about. For that, I am not giving this book a rating and am just telling you to go and read it. It's a classic for a reason and something that everyone really should read in their lives, I think. I found it really interesting to read about inmates being moved from Auschwitz to Buchenwald (within Germany's borders) - it was a death march very close to the end of the war in Europe and many prisoners died on the way. This is a part of the holocaust and war in general that fascinates me - how does life go back to 'normal' afterwards? How do people move on? Many Jews spent time in Displaced Persons Camps when the war ended. 

I'm glad I read this. It is obviously brutal. Wiesel is a master with his words; I particularly liked the way he used 'we' to refer to what happened to people as a whole. He does this often and it really gets across the suffering that a mass of people went through. Read this now. 

Queerbook by Malcolm Mackenzie - Review

I got this book from Amazon recently because I had a goft voucher from my work for Christmas and hadn't spent it yet. I had seen the book while spending a different voucher in Waterstones, and was highly tempted, but went for other stuff instead. So I got this off Amazon and picked it up really soon after it arrived.

It's a book about LGBTQIA+ people, and is aimed at teenagers and young adults. It's all written in an accessible and fun way, with little boxes and diagrams and fun illustrations. I liked this because it made it really easy to read. There are many parts to the book, including sections on identity andterms, queer spaces, queer history, queer culture, and some helplines and so on. Each sup chapter within these sections are just a few pages long at most, meaning this is a brilliant book to dip in and out of. 

There's a lot of stuff about the 'first' queer people to do X, which was really interesting and which places us firmly in the culture which has borne us. There are mentions about historical people who may have been queer, and those who definitely were. I'm way past the intended audience of this book but it still taught me a lot of things about history, and it gave me some new to me media to check out, like films, TV programmes, and books. I need to write some lists actually to remind myself about some of these things!

I would recommend this to any teenager, queer or not, just so they can learn some things and hopefully make some connections. I'm giving this five out of five, it's a very good little book. 

Plus. who can resist an endorsement from Gillian Anderson?! 

Norfolk by Elly Griffiths - Review

My friend Sarah bought me this book for Christmas and I picked it up in the towards the beginning of March and kept it on the sofa to read it when I was eating tea or just chilling out. It was quick to read and I really liked it, plus it looks absolutely stunning. 

You may know that the Ruth Galloway books are set in Norfolk, where Ruth teaches at a fictional university and where she lives right on the edge of the salt marshes. Many things in the books happen in the wilds of the Norfolk countryside as well as in its towns. Elly has family history there, which I've heard her speak about before, and which she outlines in this book. 

She intersperses her own history alongside extracts from the Ruth books, set at places specifically mentioned, and also talks about her inspiration for some of her settings, writing, and words. It's obvious that Norfolk is a big part of what makes these books great, and Elly uses the settings to great effect to ramp up the menace a lot of the time. 

The photos are absolutely stunning too. Justin Minns is a very talented photographer. I've been to Norfolk but only a couple of times, but it was nice to recognise some of the places in the photos. I love photos of the seaside so it was nice to see Cromer, in particular. The book is divided into seasons, too, and the photos really show Norfolk in all its glory throughout the year. 

I really enjoyed dipping into this, it's a cute little book for the Elly fan in your life!

Charlotte Bronte Revisited by Sophie Franklin - Review

You may remember that I read the book about Emily Bronte in this series back in January, and I mentioned then that I had used a voucher to buy the books about Charlotte and Anne. They have been by the side of my bed ever since then but in mid October just after my holiday I picked up the one about Charlotte and read it quite quickly. I liked it a lot but I'm not sure if it told me much new information about Charlotte. As I said in my review of the book about Emily, I do know a bit about the Brontes already. 

However, there was some new information that I did like - such as Charlotte's politics. She was a Tory and believed passionately in a lot of things, informed by the papers that her father read daily in the parsonage. Jane Eyre is often said to be a proto-feminist book but this book makes the argument that it isn't really, because of Charlotte's politics. I found that really interesting. 

I also liked the part about Charlotte's looks and how she wasn't particularly pretty, and how even the picture on the front of the book has been colourised and 'prettified' and isn't thought to particularly resemble Charlotte. I thought this was interesting, especially given how she has been portrayed in films and TV for example. This book also mentions Branwell much less, which I'm glad about, but it did look in some depth at the years after he, Emily, and Anne all died, and what Charlotte did then. 

This is definitely a book for fans of the Brontes, but I think it's good and I'm looking forward to reading the one about Anne, too. I'm giving this four out of five. 

Don't Believe A Word by David Shariatmadari - Review

I came across this book when I was searching for something else on my local library system (I'm not even sure what, now) and it intrigued me, so I requested it and picked it up when it came in. I ended up taking it on holiday and finished it while I was on the plane to Mallorca, haha. 

So something you might not know about me is that I did English Language A level way back in 2002, and a big part of that was about child language acquisition and how that happens. I found it fascinating. I find language in general fascinating - as I said, I was in Mallorca and I don't speak any Spanish but liked looking at the signs to see what parts of words I did know (thank you French and Latin) and also looking at the differences between the Spanish and the Catalan. So this was a perfect book for me, and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in language and how it works, too. I also think it is written in a really accessible way and even if you haven't ever studied anything about this, you would still understand it all. 

Each chapter looks at a different myth about language and deconstructs it. I really liked how I didn't feel like the author was judging anyone, whatever their linguistic traits or otherwise. If there's one thing I felt was missing, it was that there wasn't a lot on dialect words which are a particular interest of mine being that I'm from Yorkshire. But in all I'm giving this four out of five and would recommend it!

Kerrang! Living Loud by Nick Ruskell - Review

So one thing you might not know about me is that I love music. I'm a big fan of indie music, punk music, Irish music, some metal, some pop, some country. I've been into music ever since I was a small child, and when I was thirteen I got really into Placebo and the Manic Street Preachers. I then got really into metal for a bit (while still loving the Manics) and then punk when I met Lee, and then I fell out of music for a bit until I got really into The Libertines when I was twenty one. Then I got into 3rd generation emo in my mid 20s, and the Gaslight Anthem, and now I just listen to what I want to and while I don't really keep an eye on music, I did see that this book came out and wanted to read it. I first of all read NME and Melody Maker, but when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I bought Kerrang religiously. I used to buy it from a newsagent on the way home from school, and the owner would keep a copy for me especially. I scoured every page of it weekly, looking for stuff about my favourite bands but reading all of it. I kept articles and stuff cut out from it for years. In fact, I probably still have them somewhere. There's definitely some issues of Kerrang hidden under my desk right now. I bought it again for a few years in my 20s, and I know it has remained important to some of my friends. 

The book is a pretty straightforward history of the magazine from its inception in 1981 to now, from when it was weekly in the 90s to the rise of its website and its own TV channel through to the present day when it's published quarterly. I learnt a lot about the history which was interesting, as well as the type of bands it would cover to those it wouldn't, and those it got criticised for covering (for example Muse). I will say that one of my only criticisms is that there is too much about the band Metallica, who were instrumental in the magazine's success I guess, but I really don't care about them and there was a LOT. I also think there's a lack of women (both in bands and in the writing team) featured, but metal music has always had that problem so it isn't surprising that the magazine reflected this. From my own memories I do remember them looking at some women, but often in a really sexualised way - and I do think they piled on the hate of Courtney Love in the years after Kurt Cobain's suicide. That's not a failing of this author or this book, of course, but it could maybe have been looked at. 

There are pages inserted throughout the book from different musicians that have feature a lot in the magazine and are particular faves, like Dani from Cradle of Filth, Muse, Ozzy Osbourne - a wide va\riety of people I think. I liked these and it really made me feel as a reader that the writers and the bands had had a lot of fun together and that there was a lot of mutual respect in most cases (although I utterly don't understand what the hell happened with Axl Rose...) I liked mentions of some of the high profile deaths that have happened, like Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, Kurt Cobain of course, and more recent deaths like those of Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington. 

It was a really nostalgic look for me at the past and at my teen years when I knew all the writers (and had my faves, of course) and the bands by glance if not more. I kept reading bits out to Lee and I really want him to read it. He is a secret Metallica fanboy so he'll probably love it! I am giving this four KKKKs out of five - thanks lads, for all the music. 

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn - Review

This was the March choice for our book club. I'm not sure who chose it, actually, but I do know I was a bit like, oh I'm not sure if that's my thing or not. But I bought a copy on eBay for a few quid and picked it up at the beginning of March. I ended up really liking it! It'll be interesting to see what everyone else thinks about it. 

It's the true story of Ray and Moth, who are fiftyish and have been a couple since their teens, through being students, having two kids, and buying a farm in Wales, where they've lived for twenty years. At the beginning of the book they lose the farm due to a bad investment, with bailiffs coming to reposess it to pay off debts. Then Moth gets a medical diagnosis of something called CBD, which is a degenerative brain disease. This happens literally two days after losing the farm. The couple are now homeless. Their kids are both students and they don't want to impinge on relatives or friends for a long time. So they decide to walk the South West Coast Path which goes from Minehead in Somerset all the way round through Devon, Cornwall, and into Dorset, where it ends in Poole. It's 630 miles of walking. Ray and Moth buy a guide book and a tent and many lightweight things, because Moth can't carry very much with the pain in his shoulder. 

They wild camp along the way, sleeping on the beach and on clifftops and in fields. They meed many people, most of whom are nice, but some of whom really aren't. They exist on a budget of £48 per week, buying rice and noodles and fudge bars. Sometimes they have nothing to eat - sometimes they can afford an ice cream each. They suffer through illness and cold and a lot weather and blisters. 

I have been to Cornwall twice in the past ten years so I recognised many of the places mentioned, so that was lovely to read about. I like camping but not wild camping, so I was really interested in stuff about that. As they walk Ray and Moth start to come to terms with their situation, having thought that they would live on the farm for the rest of their lives. Ray clearly struggles more with Moth's diagnosis, and is unsure how she'll cope without him. But the walk seems to improve his health, something neither of them quite believe at first. I don't know what I thought would happen at the end of the book but I was really intrigued to read what happened.

Ray and Moth both turned up on Rick Stein's Cornwall, the new series of which started quite recently. It was so nice to see them and catch up on their lives since the book and the walk, the start of which was a decade ago. 

I'm giving this four out of five, I really liked it and the beautiful nature writing.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou - Review

So this was my friend Ceri's choice for our book club in February. She works in tech and has a background in health, so actually this book was right up her street. I read the blurb and thought, well, okay, I'll give it a go. I wasn't thrilled by the prospect of it, but then I started reading it... 

I have heard of Elizabeth Holmes, but only because I knew she had just been convicted of something and was sentenced to a long stretch behind bars. Other than that I just knew nothing about her, so went into this totally blind. I didn't realise her conviction was related to the company she started up, which is documented in this book. I opened her Wikipedia page when I had just started this book and was shocked to find that she is only a couple of weeks younger than me! But then I shut the page because I didn't want to spoil myself for the book. Now I've finished it I'm reading things about her and I want to watch the miniseries that was made about her. 

So basically Holmes said that she had developed a blood testing system that could test for a whole battery of problems in patients using just a few drops of blood from a finger prick test, as opposed to a vial of blood drawn from a vein (eg in your elbow). She wanted to develop tiny devices that would do this that people could keep in their houses, she was obsessed with them being small like the sizes of iPods. She managed to secure millions and millions of dollars in investments for this, and she had people on her board like Henry Kissinger and George Schultz. But within the company, there were scientists and engineers and software developers who were worried about the technology and the overselling that Elizabeth was doing. She ruled the company with an iron fist and her much older boyfriend Sonny regularly fired people with no warning. Ex staff would be made to sign iron clad non disclosure agreements. 

But eventually people blew the whistle, and John got a tip off and started investigating. He wrote a blistering piece about the company. Elizabeth retaliated with legal stuff. And so on, until the company finally collapsed and Elizabeth was charged with fraud. It seemed to me throughout the whole thing that she never had an actual product to sell. She managed to sell something that sort of worked but was a warped version of something else. Lee, my partner, is a software developer and I kept reading things out to him because I understand a little bit about testing etc just from his job, and Theranos just did none of that. It is utterly bonkers. There's so many little bits where it's just boggling, and then there's the fact that she managed to get Walgreens and Safeway to buy into her scam, all the while that her data didn't stack up and she had bad results on her blood tests etc. 

I was compelled to keep reading and I can't wait to see what everyone else thought. I am giving this five out of five, I really found it fascinating!