Lessons in Chemistry – by Bonnie Garmus

29 10 2023

Another of the books that I’d seen everywhere, people seemed to rave about, it was on the shelf in the supermarket, so I grabbed it to try, and I’m glad I did!

It’s the 1950s and Elizabeth Zott is a scientist, specifically a chemist. It’s not an easy time to be a woman in science. She meets a man, a few things happen, which I won’t spoil, though he does get her into rowing, and then a few years later we find her as a single mother and unemployed. She ends up hosting a cooking show on TV, (because of course, cooking is just chemistry), but goes a lot more science-y and a lot less girly than her producers would like! There is so much more to it than this, but I don’t want to give too much away.

Her dog, “six thirty” is one of my favourite things about the book, she decides she’s going to teach him words, hundreds by the end of it, which sounds ridiculous, but it somehow seems reasonable, because after all, dogs are clever creatures! Sometimes the book tells things from the dogs perspective, and somehow it’s just the most heart warming parts of the book!

I really enjoyed this, have already passed it on for my mum to read!

One of my measures of writing I’ve enjoyed is when I’ve turned down a load of page corners, which I did with this, so here are some of my favourite lines:

“She certainly didn’t like favours. Favours smacked of cheating.”

“She continued to believe that all it took to get through life was grit. Sure grit was critical, but it also took luck, and if luck wasn’t available, then help. Everyone needed help.”

“People were always insisting they knew what [fiction] meant, even if the writer hadn’t meant that at all, and even if what they thought it meant had no actual meaning.”

“Not that there was anything wrong with being unattractive. She was unattractive and she knew it. […] But none of them were – or would ever be – ugly. Only [he] was ugly, and that was because he was unattractive on the inside.”

“As you well know, humans are biologically programmed to sleep twice a day – a siesta in the afternoon, then eight hours of sleep at night.”

“‘Sure as death and taxes.’
‘Everybody dies. […] But not everyone pays their taxes.'”

“‘I think we both know, […] that God is just a bit different from Yahtzee.'”

“‘All dogs have the ability to bite. […] Just as all humans have the ability to cause harm. The trick is to act in a reasonable way so that harm becomes unnecessary.'”

“The unrelenting burden of misunderstanding” – this sums up so much of the book, give it a go and you’ll see!


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Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, The Original Screenplay – by J.K. Rowling

14 08 2023

More books like this and I might actually have a hope of reaching my reading goal this year – I’m currently vastly behind! It was a three day read, mostly because it’s just the script for a 2 hour film so doesn’t take long at all.

Like last time, it was hard to keep track of the characters because you’ve had no description of them, and no face to remember. I didn’t feel like I cared about the plot too much, I guess partly because of this, mostly just read it because it was easy to read and is part of the Harry Potter universe. It was fine, I’ll put it on the shelf with the rest.

We start in New York from last time, and travel via London to Paris, including a visit to Hogwarts, so there’s a bit more of the magical world to see, and a familiar face from the original series is back, just a lot lot younger – Professor Dumbledore!

I’m currently watching the film on a streaming service – they’ve just got to Hogwarts and that familiar refrain started playing, which was lovely.

Overall it’s fine, but maybe these prequels have just struggled by not having the depth of full novels behind them like the original books? They definitely don’t feel like they’ve been the same roaring success…. of course, that doesn’t mean I won’t read the next one eventually.


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Daisy Jones & the Six

11 08 2023

Anyone who read this book seemed to rave about it, so I wanted to give it a try, and they weren’t wrong!

It’s written in a really unusual style – the book is about the [fictional] rise and fall of the band The Six, and the singer Daisy Jones, but is written as interviews with everyone looking back on that time. It reads like one of those documentaries with a load of talking heads that tell the story with a very occasional narrator, really clever.

Because the interviews with the author are done separately, you sometimes get little bits of the story that contradict from person to person, which makes it more realistic really when they’re remembering that far back.

The story they tell itself is gripping, the life of rock stars in the 1970s, with all you would expect to come with that – I flew through the book.

The only slight downside for me (and slight spoiler warning here) was a little twist at the end that was somewhat reminiscent of How I Met Your Mother, which I had never really liked. But I’d only knock off maybe a quarter of a star off for that, as the rest was so good.


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The Bullet That Missed – by Richard Osman

31 07 2023

The Thursday Murder Club are back for book three!

This time they’re looking into a cold case of a young local news presenter who’d been killed a decade previously – and while they’re looking into this, Elizabeth starts receiving anonymous threatening messages…

It’s so weird how a murder mystery can be such a cosy read, but the characters are so warm and real (special mention for Joyce and her dog, Alan), and you can just feel Osman’s sense of humour and enjoyment of British idiosyncrasies throughout.

As with previous books, there’s not a lot I can say without giving spoilers, but I was up rather late last night as I read the last 50 pages or so, absolutely hooked!

My copy from Waterstones had a little bonus bit of content at the back, a little insight into Joyce’s side project in this book, which was a good bit of fun.

Some spoiler-free quotes from the book:

  • “The Thursday Murder Club? Sounds made up.” “Everything is made up, when you really think about it.”
  • “I just think that you can be very talented and have lovely hair. Perhaps I’m shallow, but both of those things are important to me. Claudia Winkleman is a good example.”
  • “Everyone wants to feel special but nobody wants to feel different.”
  • “If life ever seems too complicated, if you think no one can help, sometimes the right person to turn to is an eight-year-old.”

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The ABC Murders – by Agatha Christie

8 11 2022

I watched an adaptation of this on TV years ago, and yet couldn’t remember what happened, so I was able to go into this completely free of spoilers!

Poirot received a letter from “ABC” telling him a murder is going to be committed in Andover on a specific date, it happens, and the victims name begins with A. So when he receives a follow-up letter threatening a murder in Bexhill, it’s taken as more than a hoax! You can see the pattern forming for yourself…

Thought to be the work of a maniac, Poirot is still keen to find reason, he insists that even a maniac will have a perceived logic behind what he or she is doing. So even when an arrest is eventually made, for Poirot the mystery was not solved until he had discovered why.

Obviously it’s a mystery, so I’m not going to tell you much more. I was worried it was going to be a bit sedate when something was revealed relatively early on, but not to worry, it’s as clever as any of her others that I’ve read so far!


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Death on the Nile – by Agatha Christie

31 10 2021

My third Agatha Christie and my second Poirot!

I’m starting to notice a pattern now (unless it’s just coincidence with the ones I’ve read so far), which is why I’ve struggled to get into each one, and that’s that she opens the book by introducing an absolute shedload of characters with maybe a couple of pages each, and then the story properly starts, at which point my head is spinning, trying to work out who’s who.

That said, it then doesn’t seem to take long after that, and always gets better once a diagram is thrown in. This time it was a plan of the cabins on the boat with all the names of the occupants, though it didn’t appear until about halfway through the book.

The early character confusion aside, I really enjoyed the book, the further I got in, the faster I read, and the less I was able to put it down! Obviously, it’s a murder mystery, so I’m not going to give much away as that’s the fun of the book (if you can call books about murder “fun”, but given Christie’s insane success, I think it’s ok to enjoy it!), but it’s got all the twists and turns and red herrings you’d hope for, and Poirot’s brilliant lines, as well as a couple from Christie herself!

As I was borrowing my mum’s copy I didn’t turn down pages to remember the quotes I really liked, but it turns out that this was time wasted since I fell asleep on the book last weekend and totally creased the cover – what a fail!

Anyway, there’s a Kenneth Branagh film of this coming out next year, the cast includes Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Russell Brand and Adam Garcia, so naturally I’m intrigued and excited to see that! Trailer below:


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Emma – by Jane Austen

17 09 2021

I’ve watched so many adaptations of this book, but never got around to reading it (though I did read the Alexander McCall-Smith version for the Austen Project a few years ago). But under my new goal of reading one Austen a year (among other things), I chose this as it’s the one I knew best of the ones still unread, so it was the obvious choice!

For those unaware, Emma is about 20 and lives a life of comfort and ease to the point of being somewhat spoilt, with her hypochondriac father. She has a habit for matchmaking, though doesn’t intend on marrying herself. She’s not someone you’d like in real life, but goes on quite a journey throughout the book. It’s a story about class and relationships, and looks at several pairings of people as you work your way through.

I really enjoyed it, but for some reason it took me 10 weeks to read! I didn’t realise it was broken up into three volumes, but at nearly 500 pages, I guess that makes sense! The other thing that really surprised me was that for a book that’s only just over 200 years old, how different some of the spellings are, I tried to note some down as I went:

“stopt”, “chuse”, “shew”, “dropt”, “staid”, “Swisserland”, “Surry”, “surprized”, “every where”, “every thing”, “what ever”, “&c”.

I quite like some of those, but they’d all be seen as wrong these days!

It feels like a warm hug of a read, probably because it’s just such a familiar story to me, but then again, there’s a reason why it’s a classic!

I will leave you with trailers for three of my favourite Emma adaptations if you want to dip your toe in:

Firstly, the BBC version from 2009, this is a 4 part series so gets in a lot more detail. I think Romola Garai is my favourite Emma in an adaptation.
Then the film that came out a couple of years ago, I always like to have a film and a series version incase you don’t have time for a full series! Bill Nighy is excellent in this as Mr Woodhouse!
And finally, one of my favourite films of all time, Clueless – the story of Emma, but redone for a 90s US high school – and including the never-aging Paul Rudd.

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The Girl Who Saved The King Of Sweden – by Jonas Jonasson

11 06 2021

When I read Jonasson’s books about Allan Karlsson and thoroughly enjoyed them, a friend sent me this one, and I finally got around to reading it!

For the first part of the book it follows two stories separately, starting in 1970s South Africa, and 1940s Sweden respectively. Nombeko lives in the slums of Soweto emptying latrines, but gets run over by a drunk engineer, and as her punishment is taken to work on his compound. Ingmar is completely obsessed with the Swedish royals and desperate to meet the king, but when he manages and is disappointed with what he finds, he takes on a life mission to end the Swedish monarchy either by himself, or any decendents he may have.

It took me a while to see how on other these stories would combine, but that they did! I don’t want to give too much away, but hopefully without context this is enough to whet your appetite: the rest of the book contains: twins registered as one person, a surplus atomic bomb, a pillow warehouse, and a potato farm. It’s maybe a tiny smidge less wacky than Jonasson’s other books, but not much!

Right at the start of the book I struggled a bit as characters got introduced and then disappeared from the plot completely, so it was hard to know who was worth “getting to know”, it happened a few times through the book, but it became easier to identify who these were, and just focus on the characters that stuck around. Once it got into a rhythm I really enjoyed it!


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Quite – by Claudia Winkleman

6 01 2021

I feel the best way to set the tone of this book is to put up the first and last pages:

When this book was first announced I assumed it was the standard celebrity Christmas autobiography given it was an autumn release. As a big fan of Claudia and the way she talks, that would be probably enough of a selling point for me. In actual fact it’s really just her sharing her thoughts on all sorts of things without really telling any of her story, but in doing so, you really feel like you know her better, she chats away (and you can literally hear her voice) and it’s like you’ve been hanging out.

The first chapter is all about napping (a subject very close to my heart!), how good it is for your brain, how to achieve a good nap, how she likes to nap even at Strictly, all sorts! From there the topics go all over the place, from her fringe to fine art to picnics. It’s definitely an eclectic mix, and much as a lot of it is excitable chatter, there’s a lot of depth in some areas too, how high expectations can be a killer, imposter syndrome can be a good thing, and how brilliant it can be to be wrong.

It was such a nice read, something easy to pick up on Boxing Day and, as I’ve said, just feel like you’re listening to a mate talking (I’m aware she’s not my mate, do not panic). If you like Claudia on TV, Radio or wherever, then I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy this!


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Turtles All The Way Down – by John Green

24 11 2020

I think this now means I’m up to speed with John Green’s books! He writes very readable books, so I got through this pretty quickly – same as nearly all his books. I knew I was onto a good thing when I’d folded down the first two page corners as something to come back to when I did my favourite quotes from the book!

I don’t know what it is lately with me picking up books not realising that the main character has significant mental health problems – Aza struggles with intrusive thoughts and thought spirals to a major degree that at times really limit her ability to function. It’s written so brilliantly. As someone who can get stuck in a bit of a loop of anxiety sometimes, some of it did resonate (though mine have never been this extreme!), and it felt like the person writing it really understood what it feels like. At one point there’s a two page monologue of a thought spiral, and I totally saw where she was coming from. Technically this is a sub-plot while she and her friend try to work out why a friend’s billionaire dad went missing, but I think it’s this sub-plot that stays with you afterwards.

I would say that if you are in the middle of struggling with your mental health, it may not be the most helpful book to read, but if you know someone who is, or are in a good place at the moment, you may well find it really helpful. There is also a page in the back with a list of websites to visit if you are affected by what you read, so it’s keeping an eye out for its readers, which is good.

Again, I fear I’ve made this sound miserable and heavy, and yes there is weight to it, but her relationship with her best friend Daisy is beautiful, their dining habit is hilarious, the support she has around her is uplifting, and there’s a lot to be said for a book that I read the majority of in just five days!

As is (fairly) normal, here are some of my favourite quotes from the book:

  • “I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.”
  • “To be honest, I find the whole process of masticating plants and animals and then shoving them down my oesophagus kind of disgusting, so I was trying not to think about the fact that I was eating, which is a form of thinking about it.”
  • “The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.”
  • “I don’t mind worriers, worrying is the correct world view. Life is worrisome.”
  • “I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.”
  • “The weather decides when you think about it, not the other way around.”
  • “It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it.”
  • “Those seat belts will hurt ya while saving your life.”
  • “The biggest, most important part of the body is the part that hurts.”
  • “The problem with happy endings, is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.”


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