People of the blogosphere, dance with me: it’s pumpkin spice
season. Or autumn, we could just call it autumn if you’d like. Either way, it
is the season of joy and delight. The season of the Pumpkin Spice Latte (Starbucks
I love you *other coffee shops are available) and leaves underfoot; of conkers
and so many colours; of fingerless gloves and woolly jumpers and delightfulness.
The colours of autumn though, are they not just lush!? Last October my pal and
I walked through St James’s park and the colours were so stunning they took my
breath away a little bit. I went a bit snap happy because I am totally girl of
the instagram generation, today (for work related purposes I hasten to add) I photographed
my socks. Anyhow. That’s another story.
Autumn is my favourite I think, partly because of the PSL
which may well be the most delicious coffee related beverage in the history of
time. There’s a pumpkin spice Bailey’s this year, did you know? DID YOU KNOW? Oh,
but I am excited to get my little hands on a bottle of that. I also love autumn
because it’s perfect for reading. The nights start to draw in and you find that
you feel deliciously melancholy somehow and so you (and by ‘you’ I obviously
mean ‘I’ and I am so sorry for projecting) feel less guilty for curling up
under a blanket and shutting the world away. A blanket, a cozy spot, a cup of
coffee and a good book. Is there a pleasure in the world that is equal to that?
NO THERE IS NOT. It’s totes a cliché, but it’s a freaking excellent cliché and
I am all over it. LET ME BE THE GIRL IN THE OVERSIXED JUMPER WITH THE AUSTEN
NOVEL PLEASE.
& so because it’s autumn and it’s a time for reading and
because I have been awfully lax of late (my last post was in June and I hate
myself a little bit for that) here are some books I’ve read recently that I
feel like should be on reading lists everywhere right now, along with some
exciting looking autumnal releases.
What have I been reading, then; what do I think you should
all read now that it’s September?
The Ship by Antonia Honeywell is a book I was
super excited about because when it was released last year it was everywhere
and I was hearing All The Good Things. All of them. & I liked it. It starts of in dystopian London (I love me a good
dystopia. Everybody knows it) where everything is bad: Oxford Street burned for
week, people are homeless and desperate and squatting in the British Museum and
not having an identity card doesn’t only mean you don’t exist, it means you’ll
be shot. Lalla is 16, her dad is a (really creepy) visionary and thanks to him
she gains passage on The Ship which is kind of like Noah’s Ark for humans – 500
humans, one ship and no talk – ever- of a destination and nobody seems to think
that’s weird, except Lalla. It’s good, and interesting and a pretty unique
twist on the whole dystopia thing. I liked it. It’s also a pretty cool coming
of age story and you cannot get enough of those am I right? I’m right. Anyway,
it’s worth a read.
Robin Wasserman’s Girls on Fire is
good. It paints a terrifyingly accurate
picture of how crazy and passionate and intense female friendship can be. It’s
like, imagine your late teen self (some of us have to imagine that ok, for some
of us it was a while ago) and then exaggerate it by some and you have Hannah
and Dex and even though it’s really extreme you
kind of relate to it because it can be like that, female friendship more potent
and intense and under-your-skin emotional than any romance and this book gets
that. It’s also super pretty, which, I am always all about the pretty words,
and mindblowingly observant, there’s ordinary and also extraordinary all
tangled up as one and the same and ain;t that just how life goes sometimes? And
it’s set in the nineties. THE NINETIES. Fascinating, gripping, different. It’s messed
up and it’s addictive and full of fucked up characters and destructive
relationships and completely unreliable narrators. All those excellent things.
I read Sarah Pinborough’s The Death
House last year and adored it so I was ridic excited when I saw she’d
got a new book out there: Thirteen Minutes.
Totally different to The Death House
but still quite, quite excellent. AND SO DAMN CLEVER. So clever. Natasha is
pulled from a freezing river. She was dead for thirteen minutes. She has no
idea how she got there, what happened or why but the more she tries to figure
it out the more it looks like perhaps somebody tried to kill her, and perhaps
that somebody is a person she loves. Keep your friends close and your enemies
closer and all that, but what if you can’t tell them apart? Reading this made
me question why I don’t read more psychological thrillers because I do love
them so.
You should also look at Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours which I read last week and plan to come back
and review properly because I have feelings. It freaked me
out.
As far as new (and upcoming) releases go I feel like you should keep an eye
out for these babies. I haven’t read any of them, yet (although Today Will Be Different is next on my list) but I want to,
because they all sound marvellous.
Today Will Be Different – Maria
Semple who wrote Where’d You Go, Bernadette (which
I haven’t read but feel like I should) is about a day in the life of one woman,
about tackling the little things, and about life often gets in the way of doing
just that.
Holding Up the Universe from
Jennifer Niven who wrote All the Bright Places
because would I be me if I didn’t hit you with a YA rec? It sounds a little
Eleanor & Park.
Here I Am, the new novel from
Jonathan Safran Foer sounds interesting and relevant and rather excellent and I
really liked Extremely Loud so you know,
fingers crossed.
The Wonder is the latest from
Emma Donoghue which I shall likely read even though I am mad at her because I
watched Room recently and my heart broke a
little bit.
Ali Smith’s Autumn because
hello, it’s called Autumn.
And, GARY OLDMAN and Douglas Urbanski’s BloodRiders. GARY OLDMAN. COWBOYS. VAMPIRES. VAMPIRE COWBOYS. Do I need
to say more. It will either be incredible or awful. Or incredibly awful.
Frankly, I don’t even care.
So there you have it. I’m back, I think. I have Only Ever Yours to talk about, and I’ve been trying to get
my thoughts about The Cursed Child in order for
weeks so expect to see me talking about that at some point and I’m reading the
new Chris Cleave right now (and I love it, don’t wait for my review: read it
now) and my BFF’s baby is one now and is making me want to talk about picture
books so that might be a thing and I feel like I might be back to having Things
To Say. Hurrahs.
