Charlotte’s Web – by E.B. White

25 04 2026

I never read this as a kid, and found it at a book fair in a 3 for £1 deal, so thought I’d give it a go! Other than know it was about a girl, a pig and a spider, I had zero idea of the plot!

The opening is brutal, given it’s a children’s book – “Where’s Papa going with that axe?” it turns out, he’s off to kill the runt of a litter of pigs born last night. What a start! Well Fern (the girl on the front cover) begs him not to, and raises the pig, Wilbur, on a bottle. Other than this bit at the start, I’d argue Fern is made a bit too much of, the bulk of the story is about Wilbur, Charlotte the spider, and the other animals in the barn, while Fern just starts to take an interest in boys. I’m not sure she deserves to be on the front cover!

One thing I struggled with (and I’m aware this sounds stupid) is that while I was very happy to suspend my disbelief insofar as animals talking is fine, but when, a few times in the book, Wilbur did a backflip, occasionally with a half twist, that seemed a bit ridiculous to me. Yes, I heard myself, ridiculous double standards!

Towards the end of the book there is a very sad moment, *spoiler alert* where Charlotte sadly passes away. There’s a line that’s a proper punch in the stomach as the chapter closes – “No one was with her when she died.” But it’s a children’s book, so it still finishes on a positive and we all end happily.


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All the Light We Cannot See – by Anthony Doerr

16 04 2026

I was leant this book by a friend who loved it. I’d heard the title around for a long time and always meant to get around to reading it somewhen.

Marie-Laure is a French girl who became blind as a child, her father is the locksmith for a massive museum in Paris. When the Naxis invade, they flee to his Uncle’s in Saint Malo, keeping safe something from the museum.
Werner is a German orphan, brought up in a mining area with his sister, but he teaches himself to repair radios and transmitters, and ends up in a school for elite military training.

The book alternates between their two stories throughout, as well as jumping from before the war to late in the war and back again. I don’t mind a parallel storyline, and I enjoy a dual perspective, but following both was occasionally a bit much, especially when an occasional third perspective came in!

It’s extremely readable and engaging, you really get a feel for the horrors of the time, especially the stuff in August 1944 during the siege of Saint Malo. There were a handful of Americanisms in the text, which sort of pulled you out of the story for a second, but it wasn’t too often. The only other thing that bothered me was the tiny romance storyline, which to me felt a little shoehorned in, but overall I really enjoyed it.

Next stop will be watching the Netflix adaptation.


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The Christmas Tree that Loved to Dance – by Miranda Hart

28 12 2025

And beautifully illustrated by Lucy Claire Dunbar, this short story (or “tall tale”) is a very sweet little story about Joan and her dog Jessie, who see men stealing discarded Christmas trees in January from the side of the road, and want to rescue them!

If you’re not familiar with Miranda, some of the phrasing might seem slightly peculiar, but if you are, it’s just some of her intonations and ways of speaking that are so clear in how she writes!

Slightly wacky in places, but I suppose that’s what you expect from a Tall Tale!


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Into the Storm – by Cecelia Ahern

2 11 2025

My annual Cecelia Ahern read! I’ve found she tends to write two kinds of books, all fiction, but either with or without an element of magical realism, so whenever I start a new one, it’s interesting to see which it will be! In this case, it’s just general fiction, but a story I really got invested in.

Enya is a GP, and driving home from a call out during awful weather on the shortest day of the year she comes across the scene of an accident, a teenager in the road, and a man who says he just drove up and found him there. She obviously stops to help, but where she’d been struggling mentally with approaching the age her mother died, and following this trauma, she decides it’s time for a big change.

The story continues both with her adapting to her new life, while also dealing with the fall out from that night, and gradually finding out more about what happened, so that by the end of the book, we have the full story.

The book is broken into different times of the astronomical year, her mother had an interest in pagan ideas, and there’s a rag tree involved in the story – I was a bit concerned at one point about how pagan-y it might get, but it really wasn’t much at all in the end.

I enjoyed seeing how Enya’s relationships with her son, her sister, and others she meets along the way change and develop through the book, and particularly with the woman who lives above her surgery who is going through her own struggles.


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Jane Eyre – by Charlotte Brontë

19 10 2025

For my annual read of a classic, I went for Jane Eyre. The last six years I’ve read the main six Austens, so thought it was time for my first Brontë (Charlotte). I’d watched the Ruth Wilson adaptation before, and had a rewatch for a refresher before I got going.

In my head, I didn’t think it wouldn’t be that much different to an Austen, the books are within a few decades of each other, but it’s definitely darker and grittier, and less about society. Another massive difference is that it’s told in the first person, from Jane’s perspective, and so is much more emotive and engaging in its narrative.

The book follows Jane’s story from orphaned child living with family that don’t want her, through boarding school, to working as a governess in a house with a secret, and the fall out from that.

I was grateful that my edition had notes in the back, they were helpful to explain a few terms we no longer use, as well as when the girl she was governess for chattered away in French, it kindly gave a translation! One thing I found utterly bizarre though, is that any large place name was anonymised! So you’d get references to -shire, etc. I googled and this seems to be a thing from the time, as if the fact it’s been anonymised makes it sound like they’re real people, but it took some getting used to. Also, the number of times that a door or a box or anything was “unclosed” instead of opened – I wonder when that changed! I really enjoyed when at one point she said “thither I bent my steps” – so similar to the line in ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ which has always tickled me!

There is talk throughout the book of how Jane is not attractive, both from her and others saying it about her, and the same is said of Mr Rochester, they say it to each other, it’s really quite refreshing, and made the characters feel a lot more relateable. I also love when her refers to her as Janet, I never thought of it as a pet name for Jane, but maybe it is?!

As per usual, a few bits that made me turn down page corners:

  • “Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words.”
  • “It is not violence that best overcomes hate – nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.”
  • “We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.”
  • “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
  • “As she grew up, a sound English education corrected in a great measure her French defects.”

In summary: Reader, I loved it.


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A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering – by Andrew Hunter Murray

23 08 2025

Very different from his first novel (and I haven’t read his second!) – the premise of this book sounded so much fun: a guy who house sits for rich people, except they don’t know it. You might call him a squatter, he calls himself an interloper. He stays in wealthy people’s second homes when he knows they’re away, and leaves no trace – fun, yes?!

I thought the whole book was going to be based around this, and in a way it is, but really it’s more that that’s the set up for the story, which is sort of a murder mystery while on the run as suspects. I don’t think that gives too much away as it’s on the back of the book! It’s even narrated from the information suite in his prison…

I really enjoyed it, there’s a good amount of fun among the drama, and a few niche British references that would make Richard Osman proud! (eg: “I wonder fleetingly whether the police and the Bake Off crew get their marquees from the same firm.”).

There was also a wonderful anecdote about Ann Hicks, who sold apples in Hyde Park in the 1830s, built a tiny shack to sell from, gradually added to it, windows, doors, extended upwards, until she had a two storey house and a shop front in the middle of Hyde Park. Due to patchy records, she ended up being paid a weekly allowance by the Duke of Wellington to leave so they could build a bit crystal palace – a brilliant story, and clearly Hunter Murray’s QI-elf-ness hasn’t completely left him!

I think what I’d really like is a prequel, maybe a series of short stories of his escapades before this whole incident kicked off, of life as an interloper. It’s fun in this book to learn of his series of rules of interloping, but there must be stories from where some of them came from that could be a good premise.

A couple of excellent lines:

  • “I have a faint memory that impersonating a police officer is a crime that comes with an especially long sentence. The police don’t like it when you do impressions of them. (I find this particularly unfair, because apparently they’re allowed to do impressions of normal people and that’s just ‘undercover work’.)”
  • “You may have noticed that I’ve also changed Qumar’s name, from a country you will be familiar with to a fake country they use in The West Wing when they needed somewhere for President Bartlet to bomb. If Aaron Sorkin objects to me lifting the name, he can sue me. I’m literally writing this from prison and have no fear of copyright infringement.”
  • “I do look up the price of ferry tickets, then a few property portals to see how much the average mountain chalet sets you back these days (a lot, it turns out; these ski people must be made of money and still they choose to go somewhere cold? Insane)”

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Four – by Veronica Roth

14 07 2025

So while the Divergent books were technically a trilogy, the author wrote a fourth book, giving a bit of backstory to the male lead (called Four), since the first two books of the trilogy were told purely from Tris’ perspective. It’s told as four short stories, and three mini chapters, though the short stories flow fairly well chronologically anyway. That said, I wouldn’t suggest reading this if you haven’t read the trilogy first, as there’s definitely some assumed knowledge! (And don’t think the films will be enough, I watched them recently and the plot seemed to veer right away from the books!)

I enjoyed the stories that were set before the trilogy starts, but once it got to those that overlap, I just felt like I was reading something I’d already read, I didn’t feel like his perspective added a tonne to it. If you’ve read the trilogy it’s worth a quick read through, but I wouldn’t rave about it.

One line though that I thought was worth sharing: “Dead people can be our heroes because they can’t disappoint us later; they only improve over time, as we forget more and more about them.”


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We Solve Murders – by Richard Osman

5 07 2025

I really enjoy the Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman, so when he wrote a book that wasn’t in that series, I was interested to see if it was as good – and I do think it was!

So the basic premise is that Amy is a close protection officer, currently looking after a world famous author Rosie on her private island, and Amy’s father-in-law Steve is a retired cop, living in the New Forest. But then various people who are trying to get other people killed get involved, there are influencers, money smugglers, all sorts of things.

And I think this is the only reason I didn’t give it 5 stars (I would have given it 4.5 if that was an option on goodreads) – there are a lot of fringe/secondary characters, and I don’t know if it was that they weren’t given enough intro to bed them into my brain, or if there were just one or two too many of them, but I did have to keep trying to remember who some of them were during the first half, and one of them even later on I was still struggling to place. But I don’t want to be too negative, that really was the only negative for me.

I think Richard Osman’s greatest strength is his characters, and their little eccentricities which really endear them to you. I particularly loved Steve and Rosie this time around, I related to Steve a lot in his desire to potter about somewhere he knows – and Rosie was just so extreme and extravagant in so many ways! The contrast between them was a lot of fun.

What was also enjoyable for me were the bits set in the New Forest, I grew up just outside the national park, and so it was fun to hear references to different places I knew!

As I often do, here are some of my favourite one liners

  • “Jeff looks over at Tony, ‘No offence.’
    ‘I never take offence,’ says Tony. ‘Saved me a lot of time over the years.'”
  • “Trouble [the cat] never stopped to ask [what flavour his dinner was]; he just loved food that he hadn’t had to catch or scavenge for himself.”
  • “What unfortunate timing. If she’d known she was going to die this morning, she would have ordered the pancakes.”
  • “‘And how did she score on your psychopath test?’
    ‘Ninety-six, same as me. That’s why she’s Head of HR'”

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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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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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