After the very solid end to September, October started very slowly on the reading front – much like September did and this week’s list is mostly being held up by novellas. But that’s OK sometimes right? Especially as last month had none. I’ll just keep telling myself that. In my defense, the Brian Inglis is long and I am making good progress on it and I went to the theatre as well. Anyway, moving on. Onwards to next week…
Most read author: tough to tell – two Jill Churchill books, two Tom Mead, but also some quite long non-fiction which might be more than both!
Books read in 2025: 284
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 803
A pretty slow start to the month, but a solid month in reading in the end because of the holiday and more than four hours on the plane to Gran Canaria and back. I’m particularly pleased with the number of books from the NetGalley list this month – I’m still way behind, but it’s my best month in ages on that front, so I’m going to try and keep that going if I can, although the actual physical pile is worryingly huge at the moment so I need to try and get that down too!
Bonus picture: some more sunshine and palm trees from my reading spot on holiday!
*often includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – but not this month!
So as you saw on Saturday I’ve been on holiday, and so the list is appropriately holiday-y. My goal for the holiday was to read the same number of books from NetGalley as other books and across the week and a bit I basically did that (once you exclude the audiobooks) so I’m pretty pleased with that. Go me. For once a target I achieved!
Happy Tuesday everyone and today I have a non-fiction pick for you – and it’s a book that’s only come out in the last month or so, so I’m even timely for once!
Dan Wang is a Chinese-Canadian, who now works in academia in the US as a research fellow but who was previous a China analyst looking at the country’s technological capabilities while living and working in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. Breakneck is his attempt to put all of this work into one place and to look at the differences between China and the US. He sees the US and China as fundamentally similar in some ways – but that China is an engineering state and the US is a lawyerly one. He says this isn’t a grand theory to explain everything but a framework to put the recent past in and to help understand what might happen next.
I found this really fascinating and illuminating and really liked Wang’s framework as a lens to view China and its relationship with the US through. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about China and trying to understand the current geopolitical situation as part of my day job so on a macro level this is interesting to me. But on a micro level, my little sister and her now husband moved to China in the summer of 2019 and I was really looking forward to visiting them and seeing China – and then the pandemic happened and they were stuck where they were and we were stuck where we were. They came back in 2021 and a lot of the stories that they have told me from their time in Beijing fit in with what is being set out here.
This is a really thought provoking book that is also a glimpse at China beyond the big cities that people outside of China have heard of. I don’t know enough about China to be able to analyse this on a scholarly level (duh!) but as a casual reader and consumer of world news it made a lot of sense to me!
My copy of Breakneck came via NetGalley, but it’s out now and hopefully should be relatively easy to get hold of if you’re in a bookshop with a decent non-fiction section. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.
Well. That list is looking a bit more healthy. I was going to say it was looking better, but then I realised that not all the books on the list were better and revised my words. Because although there is some excellent stuff on there, there were also a few that were really not. But that happens every now and again, it just seems to have happened more than usual in the last couple of weeks. But on the bright side, another off the long runners list, so I can’t really complain can I?
A slightly more normal week in reading, despite a theatre trip and a day out at a car show and various other bits and bobs. It’s definitely starting to get a bit autumnal though, so perhaps the day trips and evenings out will start to turn into quiet cozy nights in in the next few weeks?!
I’m not actually sure what happened this week. To the reading list I mean. I know what I was doing, and I don’t think I had substantively less reading time than any other week, and I definitely wasn’t out in the evenings in the way that I sometimes am. But here we are. A shorter than usual list, and one where I have no idea what I’m doing for BotW tomorrow…
As I mentioned in June, we have just had a new TV series about the Mitford Sisters, and today I am back to report in on it! Firstly a reminder of the trailer though:
Outrageous is the story of the Mitford sisters in the 1930s. There were six sisters – who are often characterised as Nancy the author, Diana the Fascist, Unity the Nazi, Jessica the communist, Deborah the duchess and Pamela. Poor Pamela – and just for the sake of accuracy she was the second oldest with the lone brother Tom being born third ahead of Diana. This covers the 1930s and ends before the war starts, so is only part of the story and focuses mainly on Nancy, Diana, Unity and Decca.
We watched a bunch of these back to back because they’re just so watchable. Bessie Carter is great as Nancy, who has definitely been made less mean and more likable to the viewer in the adaptation, but Joanna Vanderham is brilliant as Diana because she manages to be loathsome because of her political views, but you also see why the non-fascists among her sisters might still want to be friends with her. And that’s tough to pull off. But really there is so much fascinating material in this. I watched it with Him Indoors who was constantly asking whether things really happened or what happened to them next.
And there is plenty of next because this finishes before the outbreak of the Second World War and there were plenty of things after that that were major and could form part of series two should U decide to make one. And I hope they do, although Unity shooting herself when war is declared isn’t exactly cheerful, but you would then also get to see Deborah and the Devonshires and the Kennedy-adjacency of it all. Fingers crossed it happens.
Now we have finished watching this it has finally got me reading the Mary S Lovell group biography that it’s based on so I can see how they’ve done it and where they have left things out. And I’m also filling in some of the gaps in my reading of Nancy’s books – I’ve read the obvious ones, but I realised while watching that I hadn’t read Wigs on the Green aka the book that Diana and Unity fall out with Nancy over, so I have already remedied that too. And as you know I love reading about the Bright Young Things and Bright-Young-Thing adjacent people so there may yet be more reading off the back of this one.
Outrageous was on U in the UK and is on BritBox in the US. And in the UK you can stream it for free if you go to U directly. And that is a great deal because it’s loads of fun. And the more people who watch it, the better chance we have of a series two…
Favourite book: probably The Mitford Girls, even though I haven’t written about it yet!
Books bought: possibly slightly better than last month, but still way too many
Most read author: T P Fielden of the new stuff, but Agatha Christie and Nancy Mitford if you’re including the re-reads
Books read in 2025: 251
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 808
Another fairly solid month in reading – especially considering that the Mary Lowell Mitford book is 700 pages long and that takes time, and there aren’t a lot of short stories on this month’s list.
Bonus picture: yarn bombing in Northampton for the rugby, courtesy of my mum!
*includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – including 1 this month!
I can’t believe it’s September already. I mean the weather last week was pretty autumnal so maybe I can believe it, but anyway, the end of the school holidays is basically here and I will try and find a silver lining in the fact that hopefully it means that Central London will be a little bit quieter soon. Any way a pretty solid week in reading given that there was a bank holiday, I went to a concert and had a night out with a friend.
