• Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost? by Paul Johnson
• Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry
• Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within by Rory Stewart
• Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger
• A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney
• The Xmas Files: The Philosophy of Christmas by Stephen Law
• How to Resist Amazon and Why by Danny Caine
• Free For All: Why The NHS Is Worth Saving by Gavin Francis
• The Known Unknowns: The Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos by Lawrence M. Krauss
• Nightwalking: Four Journeys Into Britain After Dark by John Lewis-Stempel
• A Death in the Family (My Struggle) by Karl Ove Knausgaard
• I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
• How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
• The God Desire by David Baddiel

Lots to love here. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is obviously poignant given Perry’s death and Delaney’s A Heart That Works did, of course, reduce me to tears on multiple occasions. There is nothing earth-shattering in Schwarzenegger’s self-help effort but it is enjoyable enough. It is easy to see what Politics on the Edge has done so well and Stewart is very likeable and self-aware - though, even then, I was left with a perpetual discomfort as his privilege seeps out continually.

I had coffee with a friend recently and he mentioned Knausgaard. (I looked up how to pronounce it.) I had vaguely heard of him - slightly embarrassingly when he is described by one source as “one of the 21st century’s greatest literary sensations”.1 Ahem. I read the first book in his series of autobiographical novels. I’ll certainly be getting along to the next one soon.

I went looking for this reference as it is quoted in Wikipedia. The Wikipedia links to a Guardian article° that references the Wall Street Journal. The original seems to be a long article in the WSJ magazine° from 2015.↩︎

Monthly Reading List books

Previous post October 2023 reading list Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament and How To Do It The Race That Changed The World: The Inside Story of UTMB by Doug Mayer We Can’t Next post December 2023 reading list Book of the month - brutal but brilliant The final list: Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant Hiking with Nietzsche: