The Susan Effect

Read 16/09/2018-25/09/2018

Rating: 5 stars

Read for the Reader’s Room European Backpacking Challenge.

Years ago my friend Sharon lent me Peter Høeg’s novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. I loved it.

I read Borderliners as well. I didn’t love it as much as Miss Smilla but it was still good.

I haven’t read anything by Peter Høeg since then. I needed a book set in Denmark or written by someone Danish for the reading challenge I’ve been doing this summer. Looking around online I discovered that Høeg’s latest book was out in paperback. I read the blurb and it sounded like fun.

A Closed and Common Orbit

Read 08/09/2018-16/09/2018

Rating: 4 stars

My friend Dip lent me this book, as she did the first in the series. She’s just read the third installment which reminded me that I needed to crack on with this one.

A Closed and Common Orbit picks up one of the story arcs from the end of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Ship’s AI Lovelace has been reset and its box fresh operating files installed into a Human kit body. Lovey is in a shuttle with Pepper, the tech expert and merchant, leaving the Wayfarer behind, and is now an illegal entity learning a new way of living.

Random Thoughts: On Serena Williams

I read this article in the Washington Post this morning and it made me think about Serena Williams and what she represents in women’s tennis.

I’ve loved tennis from the moment I saw Bjorn Borg beat Jimmy Connors to win Wimbledon in 1977.

The Girl Who Played with Fire

Read 11/08/2018-08/09/2018

Rating: 4 stars

Read for the Reader’s Room European Backpacking Challenge

The Girl Who Played with Fire is the second book in the Millennium Trilogy (shut up, that ghost written fourth book and its followup is not part of the series) by Stieg Larsson. After my forays into Yrsa Sigurdardóttir’s and Jo Nesbø’s writing, it was a relief to be back in Larsson’s safe hands.

Black and British

Read 27/05/2018-02/09/2018 (with breaks!)

Rating: 4 stars

It took me a while to read this history of Black people in Britain, mainly because it’s an in-depth piece of research that warranted a slow read to absorb the multi-layered stories, but also because the majority of those stories are necessarily hard going. I needed to take a number of breaks to read books that were lighter in tone or pure fiction.

I watched David Olusoga’s BBC TV show Black and British last year and have been meaning to read the accompanying book for a while. I enjoyed his presenting style and the way he made a difficult subject accessible without diluting the message of white culpability in the enslavement and continued denigration of people of colour that is central to this history.