I was really excited when I got an email from the publisher offering me the chance to read this collection of essays from The Pool, a refreshing platform for busy women which publishes honest and interesting articles with a feminist slant, founded by Sam Baker and Lauren Laverne which is transparent about its sponsors and which I’ve been reading for a while now when its articles crop up via social media.

So a quick review because without picking out millions of articles in detail, I can only talk about it in general terms, and I just urge you to go and look at the platform and/or the book, and then I’ll be sharing some magazine and book loveliness. Yes, more of it! Oops!

The Pool – “Life Honestly”

(16 August 2018, from NetGalley)

I really enjoyed this collection of essays and enjoyed its intersectional nature, featuring issues and writers from a range of communities, not just middle-class white women. Put into sections that feel sensible, with no essay or section so long it gets boring, these are great reads which I would press into the hands of any woman who doesn’t already read The Pool. I have to say that as an occasional reader with a photographic memory, I did recall having read some of the pieces already.

Covering major sections on gender politics and power, work, friendship, body, relationships, wombs, mind, money, parenting and style, there’s something to pique everyone’s interest, whether that’s centred on dealing with coercive control, womanning up about your finances, what kind of friends you should get rid of to how black women source and share information about wedding planning when the ‘mainstream’ media don’t feature them at all.

Thank you to Pan Macmillan for making the book available in return for an honest review, via NetGalley.

So, when we got home from our holiday, as well as the book I’ve highlighted already, I was excited to find in the post two of the magazines I now read, with another appearing in the week. Two of them had mentions of me in them!

The Iris Murdoch Review (No 9) is an A4 format journal which has a few essays on IM, often developed from conference papers, something about some primary texts (here, letters to her last PhD student), reviews and reports from conferences and events. I was a little nervous as I knew there was a review of my book, “Iris Murdoch and the Common Reader” (scroll down in the link to see the book and links onwards) by the ever-lovely Pamela Osborn: I knew she wouldn’t savage it, of course, but I do fear academic rigour and feel myself lacking in it (as, indeed, she pointed out, very kindly in the review). But it was a lovely review, and I was particularly happy that she appreciated my warm and friendly but still academic tone, as that’s something I strive for in all my writing.

Saga-Book, which is the journal of the Viking Society for Northern Research, has some really meaty essays on aspects of the sagas and other Old Norse literature. I rejoined the Society having been a student member 30 years ago, and don’t get to the meetings but do enjoy dipping into these publications and seeing familiar names from my student days still going strong.

The Persephone Biannually highlights the new publications from Persephone and also has short stories, reviews from the papers and Our Bloggers Write – the latter including an excerpt from my review of “Princes in the Land” by Joanna Cannan – how exciting!

Unseen: I still enjoy The New Statesman, especially for the reviews and for catching up with news in different parts of the world. I had mag-lag with that one, too, as one arrived just before our holiday and one during.

I’m proud to say I’m all caught up now, with only Saga-Book left to read!

And so to new books in.

Mr Liz (Matthew) and I are very keen readers of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels. I’ve been reading them since her first, slimmer works, and have loved her ever since, and we even “did” “The Poisonwood Bible“, which hadn’t appealed to me for years after it was published (we’ve still not read “The Lacuna”, as I have a strong dislike of the use of real people as central fictional characters in novels, but I bet we succumb some time, just because her writing is so excellent). Anyway, I was writhing in envy when a few bloggers I read had got hold of review copies of her new one, “Unsheltered” and so took the unusual for me step of getting hold of a hardback copy as soon as it came out. Matthew’s zooming ahead of me in the audio book (read by Kingsolver herself, which is always a treat as she does it so well, apparently) and I’m very much appreciating the clever zeitgeisty workings of the early part of the book (although the situation the modern characters are in feels like an Anne Tyler situation, which is confusing me a little!). More to follow on this one. Who will finish it first?

Another thing I don’t often do these days is put in for a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book as they all seem to be genre fiction (and the genres are sci fi or thrillers, which I’m not keen on) but I did go for “Mammoth” by Jill Baguchinsky and a nice paperback proof copy duly arrived. Blogging and palaeontology with a bit of light romance thrown in: it does look fun. I have to remember you’re supposed to read and review LTER books within the month, however, so it will have to go in after “Unsheltered”.

I have just finished Cathy Newman’s “Bloody Brilliant Women” which was well-done but I’m reviewing it for Shiny New Books so will share that in due course.

What new books have you let into the house recently? What magazines or journals do you read? Have you got mag-lag or do you assiduously read them as soon as they come in?