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What I'm Reading...
Like most booksellers, I read LOADS of new fiction and non-fiction. I only review books I've both finished and enjoyed (life's too short to comment on those I didn't, plus I'm from the Midwest and we are pathologically nice.) Here's some recent faves...
Funny, filthy, caustic, clever: Nussaibah Younis’ debut is an eye-opening journey into the world of ISIS brides, white saviours, dysfunctional aid organisations and complicit regimes. When a British academic is recruited to travel to Iraq as part of a UN effort to ‘rehabilitate’ ISIS brides, she quickly finds herself mired in bureaucratic lunacy and compromised in every possible way. A high-speed read with important things to say about intolerance of every stripe: generational, religious, moral, political, emotional. FUNDAMENTALLY lays bare the uncomfortable truth that in order to help others, some times we must first help ourselves.
Astonishing, damning and highly entertaining (if it weren’t so utterly depressing) kiss-and-tell memoir about Facebook’s senior leadership from 2011-2017, written by a former insider. Wynn-Williams confirms everything you ever thought about Mark Zuckerberg: a geeky narcissistic man-child who operates in a near-total moral vacuum; and Sheryl Sandberg: a calculating, work-obsessed bully with anger management issues (whose book Lean In should really have been called Lean On.) CARELESS PEOPLE exposes with terrifying clarity just how powerful a political tool Facebook has become (and how it will continue to wreak havoc unless we manage to rein it in); and chronicles the misogyny, entitlement, casual indifference and ‘lethal carelessness’ at the heart of one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world. Required reading.
Weidenfeld & Nicholson’s beautifully packaged reissue of Laurie Colwin’s 1978 comic novel HAPPY ALL THE TIME: four young people in New York meet, fall in love, become friends and at some point discover that a life lived with love & friendship is far better than one lived without. Clever, funny, eccentric: like a mashup of Sally Rooney, Nora Ephron and Elizabeth Von Arnim, set half a century ago. With an introduction by the fabulous Katherine Heiny.
Poignant tale of fathers and sons and male friendship which demonstrates that out of tragedy and loss can bloom care, compassion and selflessness. Tom Lamont's GOING HOME is a beautifully captured portrait of evolved male humanity which proves that love reaches across both generations and blood ties and binds us to each other. Perfect chaps' book club fodder.
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