Welcome to What I’ve Been Reading Lately, a feature where I’ll be giving short reviews of what I’m currently reading:
All links lead to the StoryGraph listing.
The Examiner by Janice Hallett
Six students. One murder.
Your time starts now.
The students of Royal Hastings University’s new Multimedia Art course have been trouble from day one. Acclaimed artist Alyson wants the department to revolve around her. Ludya struggles to balance her family and the workload. Jonathan has management experience but zero talent for art. Lovely Patrick can barely operate his mobile phone, let alone professional design software. Meanwhile blustering Cameron tries to juggle the course with his job in the City and does neither very well. Then there’s Jem. A gifted young sculptor, she’s a promising student… but cross her at your peril.
The year-long course is blighted by accusations of theft, students setting fire to one another’s artwork, a rumoured extra-marital affair and a disastrous road trip. But finally they are given their last assignment: to build an interactive art installation for a local manufacturer. With six students who have nothing in common except their clashing personal agendas, what could possibly go wrong?
The answer is: murder. When the external examiner arrives to assess the students’ essays and coursework, he becomes convinced that a student was killed on the course and that the others covered it up. But is he right? And if so, who is dead, why were they killed, and who is the murderer? Only a close examination of the evidence will reveal the truth. Your time starts now…(Credit: Viper)
As always, I’m never disappointed with a Janice Hallett novel and this puzzler has me guessing and trying to catch the clues “The Examiner” caught on. All I know is that I am all in for this twisty mystery and I can wait for th epic conclusion to be revealed.
Charlotte Grote: Solver by John Allison
Since winning the prestigious Teen Detective of the Year award, nothing has gone right for Charlotte Grote. Like many child stars, she peaked too soon, failed to deliver on her promise, and quit the game with no roadmap for what to do next. Now, post-school, she is drifting like a pro.
So it falls to best friend, Claire Little, and increasingly involved freelance careers adviser, Glenn Durgan, to steady the ship. Together, they must find a suitable use for Charlotte’s formidable mystery-solving brain, before her directionless meddling gets her in all sorts of trouble. (Credit: Bad Machinery)
Another one of my favorite authors, I always love to mix warmth and humor if one of my current reads is dark and mysterious. And John Allison always delivers the humor and warmth, along with going back to the illustrious adventures of Charlotte Grote, one of the funny detectives from Bad Machinery!
Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates
Imagine a world in which a vast network of incels and other misogynists are able to operate, virtually undetected. These extremists commit deliberate terrorist acts against women. Vulnerable teenage boys are groomed and radicalised. You don’t have to imagine that world. You already live in it. Perhaps you didn’t know, because we don’t like to talk about it. But it’s time we start. In this urgent and groundbreaking book, Laura Bates, bestselling author and founder of The Everyday Sexism Project, goes undercover to expose vast misogynist networks and communities. It’s a deep dive into the worldwide extremism nobody talks about. Interviews with former members of these groups and the people fighting against them gives unique insights on how this movement operates. Ideas are spread from the darkest corners of the internet — via trolls, media and celebrities — to schools, workplaces and the corridors of power, becoming a part of our collective consciousness. Uncensored, and sometimes both shocking and terrifying — this is the uncomfortable truth about the world we live in. And what we must do to change it. (Credit: Simon & Schuster UK)
This book has been getting a lot of attention since the November election and now, with the attention on the critically acclaimed Netflix series, Adolescence, this book is receiving increased attention. So I thought I would take the reread this much necessary read.
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Pray, pray be composed,” cried Elinor, “and do not betray what you feel to every body present. Perhaps he has not observed you yet.”
For Elinor Dashwood, sensible and sensitive, and her romantic, impetuous younger sister Marianne, the prospect of marrying the men they love appears remote. In a world ruled by money and self-interest, the Dashwood sisters have neither fortune nor connections. Concerned for others and for social proprieties, Elinor is ill-equipped to compete with self-centred fortune-hunters like Lucy Steele, whilst Marianne’s unswerving belief in the truth of her own feelings makes her more dangerously susceptible to the designs of unscrupulous men.
Through her heroines’ parallel experiences of love, loss, and hope, Jane Austen offers a powerful analysis of the ways in which women’s lives were shaped by the claustrophobic society in which they had to survive. (Credit: Oxford University Press)
Rereading this beloved classic for the The Great Jane Austen Read-Along! Hopefully, you are reading along as well!
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams
From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.
Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.”
Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us. (Credit: Flatiron Books0
Another book getting a lot of attention and wih my reading goal of trying to read more nonfiction, I thought this would be an interesting read to dive in. But I also think it would facilitate the necessary conversations around social media platforms.
What I Plan to Read Next:
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney
Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.
But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels. (Credit: S&S/Marysue Rucci Books)
Burn After Reading by Catherine Ryan Howard
The night Jack Smyth ran into flames in a desperate attempt to save his wife from their burning home, he was, tragically, too late – but hailed a hero. Until it emerged that Kate was dead long before the fire began.
Suspicion has stalked him ever since. After all, there’s no smoke without fire.
A year on, he’s signed a book deal. He wants to tell his side of the story, to prove his own innocence in print. He just needs someone to help him write it.
Emily has never ghostwritten anything before, but she knows what it’s like to live with a guilty secret. And she’s about to learn that there are some stories that should never be told . . . (Credit: Penguin Ireland)
Austen At Sea by Natalie Jenner
In Boston, 1865, Charlotte and Henrietta Stevenson, daughters of a Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice, have accomplished as much as women are allowed in those days. Chafing against those restrictions and inspired by the works of Jane Austen, they start a secret correspondence with Sir Francis Austen, her last surviving brother, now in his nineties. He sends them an original letter from his sister and invites them to come visit him in England.
In Philadelphia, Nicholas & Haslett Nelson—bachelor brothers, veterans of the recent Civil War, and rare book dealers—are also in correspondence with Sir Francis Austen, who lures them, too, to England, with the promise of a never-before-seen, rare Austen artifact to be evaluated.
The Stevenson sisters sneak away without a chaperone to sail to England. On their ship are the Nelson brothers, writer Louisa May Alcott, Sara-Beth Gleason—wealthy daughter of a Pennsylvania state senator with her eye on the Nelsons—and, a would-be last-minute chaperone to the Stevenson sisters, Justice Thomas Nash.
It’s a voyage and trip that will dramatically change each of their lives in ways that are unforeseen, with the transformative spirit of the love of literature and that of Jane Austen herself. (Credit: St. Martin’s Press)
In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space by Irvin Weathersby Jr.
Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.
Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation’s true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely. (Credit: Viking)
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