Which Books Should You Be Buying This Week?
Your round-up of the newspaper book reviews April 29/30
Hello, how are you enjoying your bank holiday weekend? I have spent it doing traditional bank holiday-ish things, like trips to the tip and painting garden fences, hence your round-up is hitting inboxes a little later than usual.
But I did get time to read the papers for you, so, here goes.
Sheena Patel, author of I’M A FAN (remember that book I have been raving about?) was in The Observer’s New Review this weekend raving about one of her favourite books. I USED TO LIVE HERE ONCE: THE HAUNTED LIFE OF JEAN RHYS by Miranda Seymour sounds amazing if Patel’s review is anything to go by.
“I read this biography like a blockbuster,” she said. “I was fighting sleep to read it. Rhys’ life was so intense and eventful: her work was misunderstood in her time, an she was presumed dead for a lot of it. Seymour writes so evocatively, you feel like you are in the room. Politically, I think Rhys and I would differ hugely, and I think she would have been a nightmare to be around, but WIDE SARGASSO SEA rearranged my brain when I read it. She was light years ahead of her generation.”
I can’t wait to read this. It came out in hardback last year, but the paperback is out on May 25, and if you would like to pre-order I USED TO LIVE HERE ONCE, you can do so here.
Next up, some non-fiction with a little fiction, or at least fantasy about it, Daniel Rachel has written THE LOST ALBUM OF THE BEATLES: WHAT IF THE BEATLES HADN’T SPLIT UP? which is well, exactly what it says on the tin, a walkthrough of what another album from the fab four might have looked like and it is spliced together with ‘painstaking detail and great stories’ which will appeal to any music fan.
“The group’s story remains the best in pop because it has a trajectory we retain in our heads. Their catalogue is perfect because they didn’t hang around to sully it,” writes David Hepworth reviewing for The Observer. “The reason the Beatles’ reputation stands head and shoulders above everybody else’s is precisely because they didn’t release the lost album.”
But sometimes it’s nice to dream, isn’t it?
THE LOST ALBUM OF THE BEATLES: WHAT IF THE BEATLES HADN’T SPLIT UP? is available to buy here. I love the cover, too.
Did you hear the news this week that Liz Truss is to pen her autobiography? Those of us facing mortgage hikes might prefer to use them in our woodburners next winter to keep warm, but she is not the only politician to have taken up column inches this week. JOHNSON AT 10: THE INSIDE STORY was reviewed in a couple of the weekend’s newspapers, with The Sunday Times asking in their headline: ‘Did we get the clown PM we deserved?’ That seems to be one wholly unqualified if the insider gossip packed into this book is anything to go by.
I did see glowing reviews for this book written by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell elsewhere (it was chose as a non-fiction highlight by both The Times and The Observer), but Robert Harris reviewing for The Sunday Times wasn’t backwards in coming forwards in his assessment of it.
“Fascinating but flawed, fundamentally incoherent and often erratic in judgment, it is, I suppose, a fitting testament to the personality of Boris Johnson.”
Let’s hope the authors intended it that way. If you’d like to make your own mind up, you can buy JOHNSON AT 10: THE INSIDE STORY here.
Some fiction now and The Sunday Times has picked this next title as April’s historical fiction book of the month. THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS by Aline Kiner sounds an incredible book, though sadly is has been translated post-humously.
“The author, who died in 2019, was a bestseller in her native France,” writes Nick Rennison reviewing. “Now translated into English, her novel is a remarkable evocation of hidden aspects of the medieval world. In 14th century Paris, the ‘beguinage’ is a community of independent women. Outside its walls, the city is in turmoil as Templars and heretics are burnt at the stake. Trouble comes to the beguinage when a young woman arrives at its gate, in flight from a forced marriage. Possession of a controversial manuscript, the work of a female mystic, adds to the dangers the beguines now face. Kiner blends unfamiliar history with a compelling account of women struggling in a society determined to shackle them.”
You can buy THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS here.
This next book Nigella Lawson wants to ‘press into everyone’s hands’, the Financial Times reviewer loved it too calling it ‘epic… and marvellously entertaining’, and I just love it for the beautiful cover.
THE STORY OF THE FOREST by Linda Grant is about myths and memory and how families adapt in order to survive. Grant does this by way of her protagonist, Mina, and her transformative journey from Latvia to Liverpool which becomes an epic family saga which spans the 20th century.
Apparently Grant’s own grandparents made the same journey which explains why Grant is such a brilliant chronicler of the British-Jewish diaspora. THE STORY OF THE FOREST “hums with the boisterousness of family and community life, it’s scandals… arranged unions of convenience and ennui; sex both endured and enjoyed – all generously poured out on the page with a gorgeous smattering of Yiddish words and idioms,” so says Catherine Taylor reviewing.
But wouldn’t you just love to have this gorgeous cover gracing your bookshelves? You can buy THE STORY OF THE FOREST here.
Finally, we’ll end back in the non-fiction department, and I just wanted to flag this book up to you as there was a great extract in The Guardian’s Saturday magazine. I am always trying to persuade myself off social media because let’s face it, all it does is wind us all up. Rafael Behr found after a heart attack he was forced to abandon social media and sit in his own thoughts which he found transformative, and he has written about it in POLITICS: A SURVIVOR'S GUIDE - HOW TO STAY ENGAGED WITHOUT GETTING ENRAGED.
Apparently the concept of the ‘attention economy’, the world’s biggest economy which many of us don’t even realise we’re trading in was coined pre-internet by computer scientist and psychologist, Herbert A Simon.
“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Behr found that putting away his iPhone helped him to heal after his heart attack.
“Once I stopped doom-scrolling, I became conscious of a change in mental tempo that comes when you no longer interrupt your own thought processes with a luminous screen,” writes Behr. “The search for news had rarely been the real reason for taking my phone out of my pocket. Nine times out of ten, there would be no particular thing I was looking for, no destination, just a vague itch to scratch.”
I think that’s something we might all learn from.
You can buy POLITICS: A SURVIVOR'S GUIDE - HOW TO STAY ENGAGED WITHOUT GETTING ENRAGED here.
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