Reading - January 2024

Quite by Claudia Winkleman (2020)

I think Claudia Winkleman is a great presenter - natural, funny and intelligent. She's developed a very distinctive style, and that style is carried through into this book - I can just hear her saying exactly what's written here. However, it doesn't translate perfectly to the medium of a book. While on TV and radio we tend to get small snippets of her, in Quite we get a lot, all at once, which turns out, unfortunately, to be a bit too much. I think the book might be designed to be read in small bursts. Still, entertaining and amusing and clearly not intended to be taken too seriously (apart from the bits that are).

The Sun Is Also A Star by Nicola Yoon (2016)

I've been badgering K to watch The Map of Tiny Perfect Things and Love at First Sight (both of which she'd love, I'm sure) and so she said she would if I read this first. Well, I've fulfilled my side of the bargain (although I'm not convinced she will hers, as she seems to regard it as a point of pride not to do something if I have asked her to ... teenagers!) and happy to have done so. The book covers less than 24 hours in which our two lovers meet and fall in love - classic YA material, and so really not aimed at me. I'm too old to fully immerse myself in the belief that you can meet and connect so fully and so quickly with someone and know it's "meant to be" - but then again, I'm not so old that I can't remember that urgency, of feeling like it should be possible. As a result, I can totally understand the appeal of the book while not being quite swept along with it. I enjoyed it though, and I liked the way Yoon managed to combine the requisite doomed love angle with a nice little happy ending. (side note: the actors in the film adaptation - which K assures me is terrible - look nothing like what the characters did in my head, they're both much too pretty and too old! And I just watched the trailer and the tone is all wrong)

Yes Man by Danny Wallace (2005)

Amusing, silly, sweet in places (particularly at the end) and a nice way to pass lunchtimes at work when I just felt like a quiet thirty minutes. Probably took me about six months to read that way! Now returned to work's book exchange.

Never Had It So Good by Dominic Sandbrook (2005)

Blimey, this was hard work! In a good way though - it's a history of Great Britain between the Suez Crisis (1956) and The Beatles (1963) and so full of detail that I found it hard to read in anything other than small instalments. I feel like I've absorbed less than 5% of it and still been mightily educated. I'm full of admiration for the way Sandbrook has managed to aggregate so much research and yet still make it readable - albeit so information-rich that I found it hard to digest, and it took me a few months to finish. Really good, though. There are at least three more books covering the rest of the 60s and 70s which I am simultaneously looking forward to and dreading at the same time.