State of the TBR – April 2024

The piles have diminished! I have managed to get the first pile sitting normally on the shelf again with only a slightly smaller gap at the very bottom compared to last month. I took ten print books off the shelf and read them (three of them were Three Investigators Mysteries!), and I have started two more (one TBR project, one newer). I took the two oldest books off the TBR and read six more of my TBR Project books (23 read, 20 reviewed, 118 to go; will be reporting quarterly which means I should be reporting now and will do later!). The Liz and Emma Read Together books are in a separate pile (top shelf, to the left) because they don’t form part of the TBR project, and the books on the top left top are review books.

I completed 17 books in March (three with reviews to be published), reading 7 during a week’s holiday in Spain where we did little but sleep, eat, read and run / birdwatch. None of them were print review books and one was a book that I acquired in March. I am part-way through four more (including my current Reading With Emma Read and a read that will take all year). I read my remaining February NetGalley books and all of my March ones during March (I set one aside, “A Dirty Filthy Book” which was about Annie Besant – it was so long and detailed I had to skim it, and my NetGalley review percentage is at 91% due to all the books that came in (oops). I read one book for Reading Ireland Month and two for Reading Wales Month, one of which I bought during the month, undermining my own policy.

Incomings

I had a lot of lovely print incomings. Oh, this duvet cover has come around again rather than still being on, as I notice I photographed my books on it last month! Anyway, three from the Bookshop (two from an author event), two from a Bad Place, three from friends and two review copies for Shiny New Books

My best friend Emma read Sally Page’s “The Book of Beginnings” and enjoyed the story set in North London so sent me a copy. I was buying a Spanish phrasebook in a hurry to replace the one that has mysteriously disappeared and mistakenly thought I needed to buy more things to get faster delivery, so chose Darren Chetty et al. (eds) “Welsh (Plural)” (already read and reviewed) and Kenny Imafidion’s “That Peckham Boy”, never able to resist a story from the bit of South London I lived in for a bit in the 90s. Back to being Good at The Heath Bookshop, I went to a lovely event with Huma Qureshi and took the opportunity to pick up her memoir “How We Met” as well as her new novel, “Playing Games” (two sisters in London: one Emma might like, too). While I was there, I spotted Richard Askwith’s “The Race Against Time: Adventures in Late-Life Running” which I had to get really.

I was at Ali’s and she’d confusingly been sent this non-fiction book about Essex, “The Invention of Essex” by Tim Burrows – I had a hand in it so she happily passed it to me. While I was away, Steve Doswell popped a copy of his “Running: Me Running EU” running book through the letterbox – I edited this excellent memoir about his attempt to run in every EU country before Brexit was completed and we’re doing an event together at the Bookshop in June so I was thrilled to have a proper copy in my hand! Robert Ashton’s “Where are the Fellows Who Cut the Hay” is an Unbound book I subscribed to, looking at how old customs might be of use now.

Finally, two wonderful review copies for Shiny – Corinne Fowler’s “Our Island Stories” details country walks through colonial Britain (it will have a lovely cover which is why I’ve included the letter with it) and Zeinab Badawi’s “An African History of Africa” does what it says on the tin. Thank you to the publishers for those.

I have been incredibly unrestrained on NetGalley and all my ships came in at once. However their publishing dates are spread across a lot of months, fortunately.

I was offered Emily Kerr’s “The Typo” (published in May) by the publisher as I’d previously enjoyed three of her other books. Two strangers are brought together by a typo in an email address so I don’t even have to put my editor hat on while reading it! “Our Daughter Who Art In America” published by Mukana Press (April) is the publisher’s second anthology of African writing and I hope to find some new authors to read here. Thao Votang’s “Linh Ly is Doing Just Fine” (July) has such an enticing cover; it follows a Vietnamese American woman living in Texas as she gets perhaps too involved in her mother’s dating life.

Niigaan Sinclair is one of the country’s most influential thinkers on issues impacting Indigenous communities in Winnipeg and “Winipek: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre” (May) is a collection of his writings. I was offered Nikki May’s “This Motherless Land” (July) because I’d loved her “Wahala” – this one follows cousins who want different things from life between Lagos and England. I couldn’t resist the two sentences on Iqbal Hussain’s “Northern Boy” (June): “A Big Bollywood Dream. A Small-Town Chance.” It’s set in Blackburn, Pakistan and Australia. And I couldn’t resist the title of Damilare Kuku’s “Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow” (October) and the story of family secrets as its heroine comes of age and only wants a bottom enlargement is enticing, too. Ayaan Mohamud’s YA fiction “The Thread that Connects Us” has two young girls of Somali heritage hating each other at first sight when one moves to England as the other’s new stepsister, but will they need to work together?

I was offered “The World After Alice” by Lauren Aliza Green (August) and was tempted by the comparisons to Anne Tyler (the email said it was because I’d read Charmaine Wilkerson, too) in this book about a split family brought together for a wedding. I was also offered Christie Barlow’s “The Vintage Flower Van on Love Heart Lane” (May), 14th in the sweet series about a small Scottish town and of course a yes. And finally I won Nailah Blades Wylie’s “Joyful By Nature” which is about (American) women of colour embracing activities in nature, something I’m interested in supporting and promoting even if it’s US not UK-based. That’s out in May but I had a bit of trouble downloading it so I’m going to read it this month if I can!

So that was 17 read and 22 coming in in March, however I have read one of the print ones already and one I just need to reskim.

Currently reading

I’ve picked the next oldest book off the TBR, Remi Adekoya’s “Biracial Britain”, which was another Oxfam Books find published only a year or so ago – fascinating so far. And I decided to give myself an Easter Monday treat and start “Birmingham’s Public Art” (also, because it’s quite a wide book it was taking up two spaces on the bottom shelf of the TBR as it had to go through to the back!). I’m also still reading Hunter Davies on London parks with Emma and my literary quotes for the year with Ali.

Coming up

Ever since Christian Cooper’s “Better Living Through Birding” arrived from Cari (thank you!) I’ve wanted to pair it with British Patrick Hutchinson’s “Everyone Versus Racism”: two Black men who have used their moments of (unwanted) fame as a platform to promote understanding and unity. So I plan to read these two this month.

And I have eight NetGalley books published this month. “The Husbands” is a fantasy about a woman’s loft creating multiple husbands for her: which kind will she choose? “Sweetness in the Skin” has a young woman trying to leave Jamaica for France to join her aunt: will she succeed? “100 Words for Rain” and “Just Add Nature” are two National Trust publications with nice illustrations and fun text – I’ll probably review both alongside the Shells one from last month, and I’ve almost finished “Just Add Nature” already. “Our Daughter Who Art in America” will give me a good anthology of African writing. Libby Page’s “the Lifeline” is the sequel to “The Lido” which I read back in 2018! and Emily Henry’s “Funny Story” has an ex-partner-swap story which looks fun. Rachel Kong’s “Real Americans” is a Chinese American family epic (although I note it has YET another Rich White American Boy as the love interest).

I also have “The Milliner’s Hat Mystery” by Basil Thomson to read for Kaggsy and Simon’s 1937 Week which runs 15-21 April. With the ones I’m currently reading, that’s three books to finish (Emma and I have two weeks to go on the current read), two review books to read and review and eleven others to read at a minimum, which might happen!

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How was your March reading? What are you reading this month? Are you doing any book challenges for the year or the month?

Book review – Horatio Clare – “Down to the Sea in Ships”

Paul from HalfMan HalfBook kindly sent me this book – I’d already read and thoroughly enjoyed Clare’s “Icebreaker” a few years ago (I obviously enjoyed the envelope he sent it in too, recording it for posterity when I received the book). There it sat on my TBR until I happily realised that Clare, having been raised on a South Wales farm, counted for Book Jotter’s challenge, Reading Wales! Hooray! So I picked it off the shelves and did a double challenge with it as I acquired it before the end of 2023 so it falls into my own 2024 TBR project.

Horatio Clare – “Down to the Sea in Ships: Of Ageless Oceans and Modern Men”

(23 October 2023, gift)

Just beyond the horizon there is another world. It runs in parallel with ours but it obeys different laws, accords with a different time and is populated by a people who are like us, but wose lives are not like ours. Without them, what we call normality would not exist. Were it not for the labours of this race we coudl not work, rest, eat, dress, communicate, learn, play, live or even die as we do. For a little while, for some months over two years, it has been my privilege to explore the sea in the company of its people. (p. 2)

Clare made an arrangement with the huge shipping company Maersk to do voyages as a writer in residence on two of their boats, one south across the Pacfic with a huge, modern container ship, one north across the Atlantic in a smaller ship. I enjoyed the first voyage a little more than the second, as the second dwells a bit on the two world wars and the convoys, which had its interest but I preferred the day-to-day stuff.

The details of daily life were fascinating and Clare tried to get in everywhere and chat to everyone to see what was going on. He definitely covers the negatives (accidents, unfair pay, bullying) as well as the positives, and really gets the individual personalities across. I particularly liked the bizarre lists of what the containers contain – not told at the time to avoid theft, he got these from manifests months later and puts together narratives of where products are going around the world, making a point about global supply chains without labouring it, as he does about waste in the seas, too.

He talks about the kind of masculinity that’s engendered in the male workers (he encounters I think only one woman, who manages to create a sort of sisterliness for them): “Paradoxically, the isolation of seafarers from the fullness of the world, and the confines of the world they must fill, seem to make of them men in full” (p. 61). There’s a small update on some of the men at the end, when he’s back on land, his own life about to change dramatically.

You can read HalfMan HalfBook’s review here.

This was Book 2 for Reading Wales 2024.

This is Book 19 in my 2024 TBR project – 122 to go!