Allegiant – by Veronica Roth

21 06 2025

This finishes the initial trilogy – there’s a separate fourth book that ties in, which I’ll get to at some point.

I was less keen on this when it started, as while the first two books are told from the perspective of the female protagonist, this one alternates between her and the male protagonist as the narrator, which was quite off putting initially, took a lot of concentration and flicking back to check who was talking to begin with.

In this book we go outside the city that’s been the setting for the first two, and there are shocking revelations about the origin of the city that’s been their home. There’s an awful lot going on with plot, which occasionally got a little confusing, but generally just kept attention, with the second half of the book being really gripping.

The only thing that annoyed me a bit about it was the relationship between the 2 main characters in that so many times it seemed if one of them was upset, it would just be resolved with a passionate kiss – there was a lot about the impact of the kissing, it was a bit grating after a while.

But it’s a trilogy I’ve enjoyed, and I’ll read Four at some point, which, I think, is a series of stories from our male lead’s perspective.

I watched the first 2 films as I reread, but having finished this, it seems the films have now disappeared from iPlayer, which is a shame. Plus this book was meant to be split into two films, but they never made the second, so it’d be left open anyway!


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The Correct Order of Biscuits – by Adam Sharp

11 06 2025

I have zero recollection where I discovered this book, I’d have guessed it was on twitter, but I realised yesterday that I wasn’t even following the author, so who knows, but either way, a book of lists can only be a good thing!

I don’t think this was quite everything it could have been, some of the lists got a bit same-y (eg. there were a lot of lists of literal translations of idioms from other languages), but not in a way that stopped it being enjoyable.

A few lists got confusing where they definitely started as lists of things that were real, but then some were clearly made up, but it wasn’t abundantly clear when that changed. I think when I see a list, I like it to be all real or all made up, but not a mixture.

Anyway, overall it was good fun, and here is a list of some of my favourite lists:

  • A list of unnecessary, needless, and gratuitous tautologies
    • eg. “Nodded her head (what else would she nod?)” and “Past experience”
  • A list of contemporary curses for your worst enemy
    • eg. “May you forever put your USB in upside down” and “May all your snacks be really healthy”
  • A list of fun alternatives for existing words
    • eg. “Food library (fridge)” and “Milk racist (lactose intolerant)”
  • A list of proposed to meanings for existing words
    • eg. “The word flattery should mean flat battery in a car (because it gets you nowhere)”
  • A list of the worst types of list
    • Most of these were things like “click bait lists”, and “to-do lists”, but also, “colonialists”
  • A bonus list of the single best title for a research paper ever
    • “In March 2006 Professor Daniel M. Oppenheimer published a paper that argued writers seem more intelligent when using simple words than fancy ones. His paper was titled ‘Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity'”

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Wonderful – by Harry Baker

9 06 2025

I’ve loved Harry Baker’s stuff on socials for a long time, and really wanted to get one of his books. My brother kindly got me this for my birthday, and I read it in 2 days.

Harry’s interests are based around maths, dinosaurs and German, but he’s also a Christian – while not a perfect overlap, it’s pretty close all things considered!

Now, this IS a poetry book, and as a general rule, I am NOT into poetry. I hated studying it at school, and often find it’s just a bit too fancy. But when I do like it, is when it’s fun, and a lot of these are! A handful are more meaningful, but still in his style and so not too much for me to handle, and I really appreciated them too.

I would say my favourites from this book were: “20 Achievable New Year’s Resolutions”, “An Ode to Postcodes”, “Things I Learnt from Interrailling”, and “Trying”, but I loved nearly all of them, and really had to try hard to not list over half the book in picking favourites!

Big fun, big feelings, loved it. Can’t wait to get his other books.


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Insurgent – by Veronica Roth

6 06 2025

Getting on for a decade ago, I read Divergent, and fully intended on finishing the trilogy…. fast forward and I’m finally getting around to it. I couldn’t remember much at all of the first book, so after a quick re-read of that to refresh my memory, it was time to read book two!

Picking up where the first book left off, in the wake of a vicious attack on one of the factions, where all those attacking were being controlled by a simulation, the city is no longer at peace.

Where the first book had more of a focus on Abnegation and Dauntless factions, this one spent time in the Amity, Candor and Erudite factions, so we got to know each of them a bit more, and in my mind, made them a bit easier to distinguish from each other.

It’s an easy read, and very engaging, more gripping towards the end, and left on a pretty big cliffhanger!

I think these books could have been way more successful if they weren’t coming out in the shadow of The Hunger Games trilogy, but they are good, even if they are another YA dystopian future trilogy, the premise is very different, and I’m not at all sure where the third book will go onto, so I’m starting that with anticipation!


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The Boleyn Inheritance – by Philippa Gregory

13 05 2025

Continuing my read through the Tudor and Plantagenet series of Philippa Gregory books, this year’s read covers wives 4 and 5 of Henry VIII. It’s told by three narrators:

  • Anne of Cleves (wife #4, chosen by Henry as his next wife from a drawing, but then he doesn’t like her when she arrives)
  • Katherine Howard (wife #5, bratty, spoilt, stupid, fifteen year old girl – but Henry, while old enough to nearly be her grandfather, is besotted)
  • Jane Boleyn (sister-in-law of Anne Boleyn, and lady-in-waiting to most of Henry’s wives over the years, also related in some way to Katherine Howard)

I really liked Anne, I felt sorry for her, she was just in an awful situation. Katherine, as you may have gathered from my description above, was just irritating. Jane, comes across as likeable, but is so tied up in the Boleyn/Howard world. And yes, of course, loads of people are related to each other.

That’s one thing this book really lacked, that others of hers have had, and that’s a family tree, to help understand how various families are related, and within the families too, I kept wanting to flick back to check things, but there was nowhere to flick back to. The end of the book says there’s one on the website, but it doesn’t seem to be there anymore sadly, plus what good is telling me at the end?!

By this stage Henry is around 50 years old and has a permanent infection in his leg leaving him in constant pain, but he is accruing more and more power to do whatever he wants, however he wants, to change laws at whim, etc. One thing that struck me was how Trumpian some of Henry’s rants sounded, for example: “No-one could beat me, Ever. Not one knight. I was the greatest jouster in England, perhaps in the world. I was unbeatable and I could ride all day and dance all night, and be up the next day at dawn to go hunting. […] There was none like me! I was the greatest knight since those of the round table! I was a legend.” Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but you could hear Trump saying it couldn’t you? That said, Katherine makes similarly arrogant comments about her looks throughout, and constantly lists how many dresses and jewels she has – maybe they weren’t that dissimilar in some ways.

While reading this, I heard that Philippa Gregory is publishing another book called the Boleyn Traitor, which I understand will be fully about Jane, but be set before this one, so I might have to jump backwards a step next year!


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The Official History of Britain: Our story in numbers as told by the Office for National Statistics – by Boris Starling

19 04 2025

This book was so much fun – I know you don’t get that from the title, in fact, it sounds *incredibly* dry, but I assure you, it’s a fun read! All sorts of cynical comments and random tangents make it a really easy read, all while being really interesting! There were jokes at the expense of Tottenham fans and the population of East Anglia, as well as random bits of trivia and at times, just following his train of thought wherever it went!

The book is split into 5 sections:

  • The first three look at how things have changed over the last 200 years that regular censuses have been taken (Who we are, what we do, where we are)
  • The fourth is a focus on the 1921 census, which was just after the Spanish Flu, and given this was written in 2020 in the depths of the pandemic, a lot of comparisons are drawn.
  • And then finally an imaginative look ahead to what the 2121 census might look like, both in results, and how it’s achieved.

I really wanted to give this 5 stars, but there were just a few mistakes that meant I couldn’t do that: Categories mislabeled on a graph key, black and white diagrams with shades of grey too similar to decipher, and tables which didn’t show units, making them confusing to interpret. as well as one instance of talking about a value decreasing and then showing it increasing….. other than that, brilliant!

I’d be really interested in reading a re-issue of this now that we’re out of COVID (for the most part), with a bonus chapter or two looking at how it affected things as a lot was made of what effect it might have, but at the time of writing, it was too soon to tell.

As it is, it was bookended with this quote from Lord Kelvin: “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it”


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The Wake-Up Call – by Beth O’Leary

11 04 2025

My annual Beth O’Leary read, this time it’s based around two staff members at a hotel who get on so badly that they intentionally never put them on the same shift. You already know what’s going to happen, classic enemies to lovers.

I enjoyed the non-romantic parts of the storyline, the hotel in trouble, trying to find owners of 5 rings in lost property, coping when friends move away, but the romance side of it felt quite drawn out, even though I read the book in 4 days! It got steamier than I remember some of her other books getting too, but managed to avoid anything too graphic. I think my issue comes down to the fact that there was just a bit too much yearning…. that said, I still gave it 4 stars on goodreads, because I liked the rest of it!

I feel like I’m coming off quite negative, but the side characters were a lot of fun, and I grew to like the main characters as the book went on, other than when they were fawning over each other (they alternate narrating each chapter between them).

It’s an incredibly easy read, as evidenced by my reading speed, and if you liked her other stuff, you’d like this too.

A couple of funny lines to finish:
“I’ve always been partial to an exclamation mark, Full stops just seem so… grown-up. When I stop wanting pick-and-mix for dinner, that’s when I’ll start using full stops. That’s real adulthood.”
“When I first moved to the New Forest, I was astonished to find myself caught in a traffic jam caused by a gaggle of unfazed ponies, but I’m used to them now. They roam wild around here – it’s no stranger than seeing a pigeon.”


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Chasing the Dragon – by Jackie Pullinger

8 04 2025

Like many books of this genre (is “missionary testimony” a genre? If not it should be), this managed to inspire and discourage me all in one (but don’t worry, I gave it 5 stars on goodreads!).

Jackie Pullinger was a missionary in Hong Kong (and from what I can tell having googled, still is – in her 80s!), she moved there in 1966, and this book shares her experience of sharing Jesus, particularly with drug addicts and gang members in the old Walled City.

Her stories are amazing, and her methods so direct, with so many folk she would immediate explain who Jesus is, what He did for them, how they could know Him, and she would invite them to accept Him then and there, often this was quickly followed by them praying in tongues.

And this is what I mean by inspiring and discouraging simultaneously – inspiring is obvious, but discouraging because, my goodness, I’ve never seen anything of the like, nor know anyone who has! I fully believe it did and can happen, but her faith is something special! God has the power to do amazing things, but we just don’t have the faith to ask

A couple of my favourite bits:

“[Jesus] was the one perfect man who ever lived; He only did good, healed people and raised them from the dead, but His enemies put Him on a Cross and killed Him. He died for my sake but He did not wait till I was good before He died for me. He never said He would die for me only if I changed. While I ignored Him He laid down His life for me and even as He was dying He still said He forgave me.”

“Jesus doesn’t expect us to follow Him in our own strength, so if you are prepared to tell Him that you are sorry and ask forgiveness then He will forgive you. You can start again and He will give you the power to help you follow Him. The power is His Holy Spirit.”


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Sunrise on the Reaping – by Suzanne Collins

27 03 2025

As a devoted fan of the Hunger Games, I grabbed this as soon as I had a chance, and devoured it in a week! (I know some people read multiple books in a week, but for me this is pretty much the fastest I go).

This prequel tells us the story of Haymitch, who was one of the mentors from the original trilogy. The book is set 24 years earlier, at the 50th Hunger Games, and twice as many children as normal are sent into the arena to mark the occasion – from District 12, one of the boys is 16 year old Haymitch.

I did wonder how much tension the book would have when we know from the original books that Haymitch a) survives, and b) wins, but there is so much going on, and it becomes about so much more than that, that there’s plenty to keep you engaged and guessing.

It’s so weird after you’ve been introduced to a character, to picture them a different age, when their personality was really quite different. But what it’s really doing is giving so much depth and background to the guy we later meet in his 40s. I want to go back to the first books now and reread them with this context!

If you liked the other books, this is definitely worth a read!


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How to Pray – by Pete Greig

20 03 2025

A couple of years ago we did The Prayer Course in our homegroups at church, and it was excellent. Soon afterwards, I picked up the book that tied in with it, and FINALLY I’ve got around to reading it!

It’s a really helpful book, looking at different types of prayer at a really accessible level, and with plenty of anecdotes and examples to help apply what’s being said. But bookending all that, he says that it’s most important to just: “Keep it simple, keep it real, keep it up”. I was glad he did that, because I sometimes think we overcomplicate prayer with splitting it up into all these different types and “how to” do each of them – we learn as a kid is that prayer is just talking with God, building a relationship with Him, so I was pleased he brought it back to this.

Prayer is definitely something I’m not great at, but this book didn’t make me feel bad about that, and was written in a way that didn’t feel too clever, fancy or intimidating – it was encouraging! It also comes with a load of recommended further reading and links to an online toolshed of resources, which I’m looking forward to delving into somewhen.

He shared the story of King George VI calling the country to a day of prayer before Dunkirk, which I had no idea about, and gave a great analogy using the boys who were rescued from the cave in Thailand, how there was a long wait for them between being found and being rescued, and how we can liken that to the now and not yet of our Salvation through Jesus.

Definitely a book I’ll be back to dip in and out of.


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