Month: April 2021

Book of the Week, new releases, romance, romantic comedy

Book of the Week: He’s Not My Boyfriend

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I said yesterday that I was having trouble picking and I did. There were a few options for today. But the Deanna Raybourn is the sixth in a series – and I’ve written about Veronica before. The Grand Sophy was a reread via audiobook and that book is the very definition of a problematic favourite. I’ve written about several Lumberjanes before (including the novelisations) as well. And when I came to write up my reading list I realised that although I’ve read eight of Jackie Lau’s books and novellas over the last year, I haven’t made one of them a BotW yet. So that made my mind up for me.

Cover of He's Not My Boyfriend

Iris Chin likes her independence. She’s a successful structural engineer and a bit of a party girl and life would be pretty much perfect if her family didn’t keep setting up up with men to try and get her married off. But her job and her home life collide when she discovers that Alex Kwong, the one night-stand she snuck out on the next morning, is the man she’s going to have to work with on a new project for work. On top of that she’s moved in with her nosy, meddling grandma and you’ve got a recipe for a disaster…

This makes for a really fun read. Alex and Iris are both convinced that they don’t want to be in relationships – Iris, because she thinks her parents and grandparents relationships weren’t successful, and Alex because his mum has died and left his family broken hearted and he doesn’t want to go through that pain again. But they have great chemistry together, and Iris introduces Alex to her family to help him with some of the female family he’s missing without his mum. Watch them work out their relationship is really good, but Iris’s grandmother nearly steels the show. She’s a 90-something ball of energy – who has learnt English since her husband died, taken a string of cookery courses to fill time and has started reading Harlequin romance novels. She’s brilliant, and I would read a whole series of her setting up her hapless relatives on blind dates!

So this is a couple of years old and the second in a series – I haven’t read the first, but the couple from that do pop up in this. The running theme in the Jackie Lau books that I’ve read are delicious food, meddling families and heroines who know what they want from life and aren’t afraid to go out and get it. So if that is your thing – and you don’t mind feeling hungry while reading, then definitely check this out. Her first book with Berkeley is out at in November and I’m really looking forward to reading it.

I bought my copy of He’s Not My Boyfriend on Kindle but it’s also available on Kobo – and it’s 99p on both of those at the moment. It’s also showing as available to order in paperback, but I can’t work out how easy it actually will be to get hold of.

Happy Reading!

Authors I love, books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: April 19 – April 25

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Another interesting week in reading – and I have no idea what I’m going to be picking for my Book of the Week yet. Eeep. But there are several options – I guess it’s just going to depend which of them I feel like I can write the most about. Wish me luck….

Read:

The Moor by Laurie R King

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

An Unexpected Peril by Deanna Raybourn

He’s Not My Boyfriend by Jackie Lau

Lumberjanes Vol 17 by Shannon Watters et al

The Lying Witch in the Wardrobe by Duncan MacMaster

Die Noon by Elise Sax

Three Bedrooms, Two Baths, One Very Dead Corpse by David James

Started:

The Devil Comes Courting by Courtney Milan**

Still reading:

Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny*

Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q Sutano*

Bonus photo: A photo from my stroll around a local nature reserve last week. I think Spring may finally have sprung and stuck!

Lagoon-y lake-y thing at a nature reserve

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley

Surviving the 'Rona

Surviving Coronavirus: Podcast edition

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Welcome to the latest in my occasional series of things that have been helping me through the Quarantimes. I listen to a lot of podcasts, even in normal times, because I do a lot of walking as part of my commute and I like to have something to listen to. But they’re mostly topical news and politics podcasts, and you don’t need my recommendations for that. I’ve always had some podcasts that I *only* listen to while I’m running – because it gives me an incentive to run to hear the next part – but during the various lockdowns, this has expanded so I have some podcasts that I’m only allowed to listen to while I’m out walking and getting some exercise. And now, even though lockdowns are easing, I’ve moved jobs so I’m working from home rather than in the office, so having a reason to go out and exercise is really useful! So that’s the list I’ve drawn these recommendations from – stuff that’s so good that it’s worth leaving the house to listen to! All of these are available to listen to for free – and although there are premium options available for some, the series are all complete so there’s no waiting to binge.

Unfinished: Short Creek

The second series of Witness Doc’s Unfinished podcast focused on the town of Short Creek, on the Arizona/Utah border, which is also divided by religion. It was the epicentre of the branch of the fundamentalist Mormon sect led by Warren Jeffs and the residents are a mix of FLS members – and ex-members. It’s the story of how the current situation came about – the history of the group and the circumstances surrounding Jeffs’ conviction and imprisonment for sex crimes but it’s also an examination of Freedom of Religion and freedom from religion. There are 10 parts available (and a bonus AMA) available without a premium subscription, and I found it fascinating. And not just because I read a lot of early Mommy bloggers who were Mormon and have watched a fair few episodes of Sister Wives. You may have seen Under The Banner of Heaven on my reading list the other week  – and Short Creek features in that too, but that book has a different focus – and is also more than a decade old now. But if you’ve read that – you’ll probably like this. More info about Unfinished here. And if you like this and enjoy it, then my next stop was Heaven’s Gate – another series about a cult, this time one that ended in a mass suicide. And just this week, Wondery have dropped a trailer for a new series about Jerry Falwell Jr called In God We Lust which is going to be next on my list to listen to.

Wind of Change

From Crooked Media (a group of ex-Obama staffers who started a media company, you may know them from Pod Save America) and Pineapple Street Studios (the company who produced Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill podcast), this is an investigation into whether the CIA had a hand in writing the Scorpions’ song ‘Wind of Change’ which became an anthem across Eastern Europe just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s got music history and spying but it also says a lot about how America used its culture to spread power, and how Western culture got behind the Iron Curtain. If you like spy thrillers and John Le Carre, this should be on your playlist. I listened to most of this podcast while plodding around my local park in 30+ degree heat back in summer 2020, which feels like so long ago now, but it says a lot about how engrossed I was in it that I was prepared to turn out for a run in a heatwave so that I could keep listening to it! And it’s just been nominated for a Webby Award as well. More info here.

Boom/Bust  

Logo of Boom/Bust

This one is firmly in the spectacular business failures section of my wheelhouse – see also Bad Blood and Billion Dollar Loser – Boom/Bust, as the logo suggests covers what on earth happened to HQ Trivia which was briefly the hottest thing in mobile gaming and allegedly the future of TV. If you didn’t come across it at the time, it was a live trivia game with big money prizes. For a few weeks (maybe months) here in the UK I’d see some of my coworkers on the late shift logging on to their phones to try and win some money. But as quickly as it started, it was over and this podcast from the Ringer looks at what happened and why. The story is actually somewhat longer than I expected – because it was around for longer in the US – but it’s another story of The Next Great Idea – where it got massively popular without a sense of how to sustain it long term. Find out more here.

Bunga Bunga

Logo of Bunga Bunga

So if you’re my sort of age, Silvio Berlusconi was a fixture of European and world political life for a long time. In fact, my first foreign trip was to Italy to see relatives right at the time his first successful election campaign was in its closing stages – I remember seeing the Forza Italia song on the evening news while we were there. And I knew it had been a hell of a story since that 1994 election win through to the Bunga Bunga party scandal that saw him eventually banned from holding public office. But as Wondery’s Bunga Bunga  demonstrates, it’s actually even wilder than you could imagine. Even if you’re not that into politics, the story of how the child of a middle class bank employee and a housewife became first a media mogul and then one of the most important figures in modern Italian politics is a fascinating one even before the many controversies and scandals that came along the way. You can find more info (and a trailer) here.

What am I listening to next? Well I’ve already mentioned In God We Lust, but that only has the trailer out so far, so I’ll have to wait for that. I’m also looking at Spy Affair (about Maria Butina) and The Lazarus Heist (about North Korean hacking) but again neither of those series are complete yet so I’m still looking for my next series binge. If you have any recommendations please put them in the comments – nothing too violent though please. In the mean time there are a few new episodes of Real Dictators that have been dropping over the last few weeks- but I’m not sure I’m in the right headspace to listen to five (so far) episodes about Hitler. I’ve listened to previous episodes while running and find that the awfulness makes me run faster – I think I’m trying to get away from it (this also happened when I tried listening to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography of the Romanovs. So much death, so much torture, so very gruesome). I’m also a few episodes behind in Greg Jenner‘s latest series of You’re Dead to Me but laughing while running is not the best idea for me.

And as a final note, my original “only listen to it while you’re running” podcast was Hit Parade from Slate – which is a examination of Billboard chart music trends. It looks at why some songs become mega hits and how some artists (or music types) came to dominate the airwaves. Early in the pandemic they moved the whole podcast behind the Slate plus paywall and I love it so much that I joined up just so I could keep listening to it. As the situation with coronavirus has changed, it’s rememerged slightly – so there is one full episode every month which everyone can get (although non-subscribers get it as two parts with a couple of week gap in between) and a bonus episode for Slate plus subscribers. The latest episode is about Taylor Swift – although with the news in the last 24 hours about the death of Jim Steinman their October episode is all about his career in music and would make a great listen instead of reading an obit, but it’s one of those podcasts where you can go back to the beginning (an episode about the Beatles) and just work the whole way through. I did. It might change your views on some groups (I’m a lot more pro BeeGees than I used to be) or it might not (I still hate hair metal, but so does the host so it’s fine) but you’ll learn a tonne of stuff.  

Happy Listening!

Book of the Week, new releases, romance

Book of the Week: Rosie Danan

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Ok, so a bit of a cheaty pick this week – because I’m picking two books by the same author, one of which I read the week before – and would have been last week’s pick if it wasn’t for the fact that I really needed to talk about how pleased I was that Enjoy the View really paid off on the promise of the previous books. Anyway, here I am to talk about the latest novel from Rosie Danan – and its predecessor. Because what we need right now is fun, sex positive romance novels. And holidays. But as we can’t have holidays, lets take good books instead!

Cover of The Roommate

In the Roommate we meet Clara. Her family is notorious on the East Coast for their scandals. But Clara’s not like them – she’s the well behaved sensible one – except when it comes to her childhood crush. So when he invites her to move cross country, she ups sticks and goes. But when she gets there, her crush is not – he’s going on tour with a band he manages and has let out the other room in the house to another guy. Josh is charming and handsome – and an adult film star. The chemistry between the two of them is insane – but it would make Clara her family’s biggest scandal yet. But soon the two of them are working on a new idea – to tackle the stigma around female desire and help women get better sex. But when will Clara realise that Josh is worth taking a chance on?

The Intimacy Experience centres on Naomi. The sex-positive start up she works for (yes, but that’s only part of the link to the first book!) is a success and she’s trying to extend her work to live lecturing. But she’s struggling to get hired by educational institutions until she meets Ethan. Ethan has just been named one of LA’s hottest bachelors, but the handsome rabbi is more interested in finding a way to bring more people into his synagogue.  His congregation is aging and the shul is low on funds. Naomi’s course about modern intimacy seems like the perfect solution to both of their problems – she gets to deliver her seminar series and he gets to try and attract some millennials to the faith. Except as the two of them work together, their growing attraction becomes more and more obvious – as does the disapproval of the board running the synagogue.

Cover of The Intimacy Experiment

I’m writing about the two books together because they’re related but they do different things. And I read them in the wrong order – because of course I did – so I’m going to take The Intimacy Experiment first. The romance in it is great – but it’s also a really wonderful examination of community and service and whether religion and sex positivity can coexist. Now that makes it sound less exciting than it is – and it is actually really quite steamy. Now if you’ve read the Roommate first, you’re probably going to find this a little lower on the heat scale – but hello, the hero is a rabbi and the actual plot doesn’t centre around sex in the same way that The Roommate does – it’s examining intimacy and relationships and what they look like in the modern world.

The Roommate is a really good forced proximity, opposites attract romance – with a really high level of steam – as you might expect from a book centring on female pleasure and the adult entertainment industry. Clara and Josh together make a really fun pair who want to change the world – and who only later realise that they can’t really live without each other. To be fair, Josh realises much sooner than Clara does, but he’s a real noble gent about it!

Of the two, I preferred the Intimacy Experiment – I think because I really enjoyed the setting at the synagogue. I’ve read a bunch of books with Christian priests of various types (or their spouses) involved (like the Max Tudor series) but this is the first book I’ve read set in a synagogue and its community (if you know more, hit me up in the comments) and I loved the sense of community and how much Ethan cares about his people and trying to make the shul thrive.

I’m fairly sure I’ll be recommending both of these – but probably to people looking for slightly different things. If you’ve read The Roommate first, the Intimacy Experiment might disappoint a little on the heat front, but the level of heat in The Roommate is not for everyone – or at least not straight out of the box! My copy of the Intimacy Experiment came from Netgalley, but it’s out now. I bought The Roommate for myself. The Intimacy Experiment came out at the start of the month and is available on Kindle and Kobo, as is The Roommate. The shops may be starting to open up here now, but I still haven’t been into a bookshop, so I have no idea how easy they are to get hold of in physical copies, but Foyles reckons it can dispatch The Intimacy Experiment in a couple of days, and The Roommate within a week, so you never know.

Happy Reading!

 

Authors I love, books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: April 12 – April 18

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How many times have I watched the BBC Pride and Prejudice in the last two week? Three, maybe four. Why? I don’t know, but something about it suits my mood at the moment. Debate is raging in my WhatsApp groups (at my instigation of course) about who smoulders better – Darcy or Captain von Trapp, so I’ve watched the Sound of Music again too. What can I say. I’m a creature of habit. Meanwhile, the great Amelia Peabody project hit a snag last week – when we reached the point where Audible (in the UK at least) doesn’t have the audiobooks available, so while I’m working out a solution to that we’ve gone back to the start. I look forward to hearing Him Indoors thoughts as we go through a second time – so far the headline is “Evelyn is much more annoying the second time”.

Read:

The Roommate by Rosie Danan

Christmas at Sandcastle Cottage by Christina Jones

Venetia by Georgette Heyer

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters

What Were We Thinking by Carlos Lozada

America Dreamer by Adriana Herrera

Love is a Rogue by Leonora Bell

Started:

Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny*

Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q Sutano*

He’s Not My Boyfriend by Jackie Lau

Still reading:

The Moor by Laurie R King

Bonus photo: Our local excitement on Thursday night – as the electricity substation went up in flames.  We had a power outage for a bit on the night – but more of a problem the next day when something else got overloaded and we were without power for 6 hours. Luckily the advantage of a daytime power cut is that you can read a book in it, which is much harder work if it’s candle light!

Fire at an electricity substation

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley

Best of..., Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Novelised Real Lives

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The latest instalment of my intermittent Recommendsday series, is a post about a trio of books that feature fictional versions of real life people. It’s a part of literature that I’ve read quite a lot of over the years – and quite enjoy. I date it back to my A-Levels when I derived a lot of enjoyment when studying the Literature of the First World War and reading Pat Barker’s Regeneration and then in spotting all the various poets popping up in all in various other pieces of fiction about the era – and then deciphering who was meant to be who in Siegfried Sasson’s Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man.  The books in this have been read over some considerable time – and I could have held off on publishing this for ages as I have more of these on my to-read pile. But after not enjoying one of the potentials to be added the other week, I got a bit of a bee in my bonnet and wanted to get it out there.  These three fall into some of my preferred areas of reading too – Hollywood’s Golden Age and what I’m going to call the extended post first world war period…

Mr Wilder and Me by Jonathan Coe*

Cover of Mr Wilder and Me

After a chance meeting with Billy Wilder while backpacking around the US in the 1970s, Calista finds herself on a Greek Island working as a translator on the set of Wilder’s latest film. Calista is barely out of her teens, young, naive and slightly without a direction in her life. Through the course of the summer, she watches a Hollywood great who is falling out of favour in the new world of Scorseses and Spielbergs, and learns about the sadness that haunts Wilder. I love a book about Old Hollywood and I also love novels that fictionalise real people, so even the blurb for this really, really appealed to me. And it didn’t disappoint. Mr Wilder and Me is incredibly readable – even if after you finish it you realise Calista herself is not a massively well developed character and exists mostly as a way of getting you into Wilder’s world. There is not a lot of drama here – but it doesn’t need it. It’s an examination of cinema, and fame and what you do and how you cope when people think your glory days are behind you but you don’t.

Love and Ruin by Paula McLain*

Cover of Love and Ruin

I really like what McLain does with fictionalising real people. Admittedly, so far she hasn’t done one on anyone who’s life I was already massively familiar with, but I’m not sure I care. Having tackled Hadley Richardson’s relationship with Ernest Hemingway in The Paris Wife, in Love and Ruin, McLain returns to Hemingway’s life – but this time through the eyes of his third wife, legendary war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. It’s a fascinating portrait of a relationship between two incredibly strong characters, neither of whom are prepared to let go of what they want to do (although Gellhorn definitely makes more compromises than Hemingway does). I would happily read another 100 pages of What Martha Did Next – and came away from this with even more respect for her than I already had. Really, really good – and very readable.

The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer*

Cover of The Age of Light

This is the story of Lee Miller – a model-turned-photographer, who was Man Ray’s assistant and then went on to work as a photographer in her own right and one of the first female war correspondents. I liked the idea of this – but ended up feeling distinctly mixed. I didn’t like any of the characters really – but that’s not a necessity. What is a necessity is feeling like there has been some resolution or outcome at the end of it all. And I didn’t get that. I felt like a spent a lot of time in the presence of someone very damaged, but I didn’t feel like I came away understanding her any better than at the start. Or at least not on any deeper level. – just not as good as the other books that I’ve read recently that have been telling fictionalised versions of real people’s lives (or portions of them).

If you want more fiction about real people, can I point you in the way of my post about the Happy Valley Set, Swan Song and also of some of Laurie Graham’s books like The Grand Duchess of Nowhere and Gone With the Windsors, the latter of which like Mr Wilder and Me inserts a fictional person into a real situation and remains one of my favourite books of all time.

Happy Reading!

*next to a name indicates that it came to me from NetGalley, probably some time ago!

Book of the Week, romance

Book of the Week: Enjoy the View

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So there were a couple of books in the market for book of the week this week, but in the end I’ve gone for Sarah Morgenthaler’s third book in the Moose Springs series for reasons that will be explained in a couple of paragraphs time.

River Lane is trying to reinvent herself. Her acting career seems to be on the wain, so she’s moving behind the camera and her first job is to make a film for the Alaska tourist board promoting the town of Moose Springs. But when she gets there, Moose Springs really doesn’t want to be promoted. She can’t get her filming permits, no one will go on camera and she and her crew end up sleeping in their truck after their accommodation chucks them out. Her last resort is trying to climb the Mount Veil. Their guide is Easton. Easton is not keen on the film crew – he got chewed out by River for ruining her shot, when he thought he was helping someone who was lost. But he loves the mountain and he’s a professional so he’s going to get them up and down safely. Except the weather and the mountain have other ideas…

I liked but didn’t love the first two books in this series and this book is why I have stuck with this series – because I knew there was a book as good and fun as this underneath it all. I feel vindicated! In the previous books there were flashes of snappy dialogue but not enough characterisation and they just generally didn’t sustain the momentum of the start. But this one has the snappy dialogue, the rounded characters, some proper peril and it has a marmot as comic relief. It’s a lot of fun.

My only real issues with it were one incredibly dumb decision from the heroine (but I sort of understood why she did it from a character point of view and from a drama one, I just think there might have been a better time to deploy that option) and that the ending wrapped up very quickly and I wanted more of a sense of what happened to the film in the end. But as we know I often think romances wrap up too quickly – so I try not to hold that against books too much! A warning though – a lot of this book is spent up a mountain in very cold and wintry conditions – so read it somewhere tucked up nice and warm!

My copy of Enjoy the View came from the library, but is available now on Kindle and Kobo as well as in paperback – although judging by Waterstones website, probably as a special order.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: April 5 – April 11

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As I’m sure you can imagine, it was a really quite unusual week in my day job, and the reading list reflects the fact that work has taken up quite a lot of my time.  I did however attend a bunch of sessions from Hist Fest 2021 on Saturday and Sunday evenings, which has given me some books I want to buy – and reminded me of some things I wanted to write about here!

Read:

Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual by Luvvie Ajayi-Jones*

Arabella by Georgette Heyer

The Ex Talk by Rachel Lynn Soloman

Enjoy the View by Sarah Morgenthaler

After the Flood by Alexis Hall

The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan*

Started:

Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

The Roommate by Rosie Danan

The Moor by Laurie R King

Still reading:

Love is a Rogue by Leonora Bell

A couple of books bought – ebooks rather than actual books – but as mentioned above, there’s a wish list off the back of Hist Fest now that I need to take a look at…

Bonus photo: snow in the park on Tuesday. British weather everyone.

Snowy grass and play equipment under a heavy grey sky

An * next to a book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: March 2021 Mini Reviews

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So we made it to the end of a year of the quarantimes. And despite the fact being back in March meant it felt like we’d never left March at all and the world had ground to a halt in 2020 and given us endless March, itwas actually quite a good month in my reading life. Here are a few books I enjoyed that I haven’t told you about yet.

Women vs Hollywood by Helen O’Hara

Hardback copy of Women vs Hollywood

Empire Magazine’s Helen O’Hara’s new book is an examination of pioneering women through Hollywood history and the ways in which they’ve been left out of the history of the silver screen. It also examines what could be done to help redress the balance and for films to tell some different stories from some different points of view. It’s impeccably researched and well argued and will left me wanting to go out and spend some money at the cinema on female-centric films. As the cinemas are still closed, I contented myself by watching Lady Bird and Emma. and a couple of Katherine Hepburn films.

The Consequences of Fear by Jacqueline Winspear

Cover of the Consequences of Fear

I’ve written about the Maisie Dobbs series here before. And this is another engrossing and twisty instalment in the series. With long running series it’s always a challenge writing a review that doesn’t give away too much of the plot – or spoil earlier books in the series. But what I can say is that now the books have reached World War Two, Jacqueline Winspear is consistently finding interesting aspects of the conflict to entangle Maisie in, and if a few liberties are taken with the timeline, they are minor and you forgive them because it’s so page-turning and engrossing. This also sees some really interesting developments in Maisie’s personal life too – so all around this is a really good read.

You’re History by Leslie Chow*

Cover of You're History

What’s not to love about a book with a cover as gorgeous as this and I did enjoy it, but that comes with a few caveats. I think I was missing some of the background on some of the songs to get the most out of it. Although the names listed in the blurb are all people you will have heard of – Kate Bush, Nikki Minaj,  Janet Jackson, Taylor Swift and TLC – in quite a lot of cases it’s actually taking quite a deep, in depth dive into their musical back catalogues. Really I think it needs to come with a playlist so you can listen to the songs that are being talked about as you read the book, because unless you’re really, really into music you may get lost here unless you’ve done some prep work. I used to work at radio stations as well as watching a fair few music documentaries both general and artist specific, so I consider myself fairly well across music, and I still had to do a fair bit of googling. I have a goal to try and read more books about music and musicians – because when I do I invariably enjoy that – and this fits in to that but it’s not my favourite of the genre.

Happy Singles Day by Ann Marie Walker

Cover of Happy Singles Day

This is a sweet, fluffy holiday (by which I mean vacation not Christmas!) romance set on an island off North Carolina, with a widowed hero with a B&B he can’t face running since the death of his wife and the professional organiser who visits for an out of season holiday. Lucas is focussed on raising his daughter and ignoring the bills that are coming due – so his sister relists the B7B without telling him – until Paige is booked and on the way. When Paige arrives, she finds that her accomodation doesn’t quite match the online brochure and decides to return home. But bad weather means the ferry isn’t running and she’s stuck on the island… Nothing revelatory or surprising, but a nice fun weekend read featuring a grumpy hero, a sunny heroine, a bit of forced proximity, a cute kid and some puppies.

Flake by Matthew Dooley

Hardback copy of Flake

So this is a really genuinely charming graphic novel about an ice cream seller and his van and the rivalries and challenges he faces. Low key but remarkably emotional. It had been sat on my shelf for a few months – my friendly local comic book shop had managed to get me a copy just before her last lockdown started again and I had been saving it for a treat. And I was right that it was a treat because it was really, really good.

In case you missed any of them, the Books of the Week posts in March were Wild Rain, Act Your Age, Eve Brown, Mrs Tim of the Regiment and Heroes are my Weakness. And here are the links to the mini reviews from January and February.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Billion Dollar Loser

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I was so spoilt for chose this week that I dithered over my choice for Book of the Week for quite some time before settling on Billion Dollar Loser. But it’s hard to resist a book about a spectacular business failure – you may remember how much I enjoyed Bad Blood last year and I was hoping this would do the same sort of thing.

Cover of Billion Dollar Loser

Reeves Wiedeman’s book examines the rise and fall of Adam Neumann and his company WeWork. Many people probably only heard of WeWork when its first attempt to float on the stock market imploded in spectacular style. Neumann grew up in Israel and the US, completed his compulsory military service and then moved to the US for college, determined to make his fortune. After a false start with a baby clothing company, he got into the co-working business – leasing empty office space from landlord and then renting it out to freelancers, small businesses, tech startups and the like. It wasn’t a new idea, but WeWork attracted billions of dollars from investors as it grew at breakneck speed and expanded around the world with a vision of “elevating the world’s consciousness”.

So this isn’t quite Bad Blood, and WeWork isn’t quite Theranos, but Billion Dollar Loser is an incredibly readable account of the rise and fall of a tech unicorn – a business that investors poured money into through years of losses in the hope that it would eventually make money and then be the next big thing when it finally floated in the stock exchange and they could cash out. Caught up in it all are the staff – many of whom stayed in jobs that didn’t pay very well because of the stock options they were promised and because they believed in Neumann’s vision. Like Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Neumann is a charismatic figure – who brought in spiritualism and created an almost cult like atmosphere inside the company. And his wife is Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin so there’s an added Goop-y layer to all of this that Theranos didn’t have.

Wiedemann has written a fast-paced page turner, that exposes the fundamental problems with WeWork’s business plan – including (but not limited to) the costs involved in real estate and the need for actual physical infrastructure in your offices and to keep your tenants happy! Like Bad Blood, it leaves you with a fair few questions, but the story of WeWork isn’t done yet – their valuation for their stock market floatation was published at the end of March (spoiler: it’s a lot less than it was the first time around) and Neumann is also reported to be planning a new venture. A Hulu documentary about WeWork came it last week and Cosmo have just published a profile of Rebekah Paltrow Neumann so this probably isn’t the last we’ve heard of WeWork – but as a starting point this is a really good one!

My copy of Billion Dollar Loser came from the library, but it’s available now from all the usual sources – like Kindle and Kobo and should be available to order from your bookshop of choice or bookshop.org.uk . It’s been so long now since bookshops were open for in person browsing that I have no idea if you’ll be able to pick it up in store without ordering!

Happy reading!