James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Maybe the ground-breaking style of this hasn't aged well - to me it didn’t seem anything special, but maybe it was the first 'warts and all' disguised autobiography that touched previous taboo subjects. I make it sound like Knausgaard, which I love - not sure why I didn't get this, but Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are presumably way beyond my comprehension!

Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King, Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World

A bit of a comfort read first, the 3rd or 4th time I've read it, I think. I still remember reading part II in a deckchair on the beach at Wittering (1997?) and enjoying it very much. Still very readable. 'Protestants' was read in Devon where we had a few days in a house in Bideford. Lovely holiday but very short and very cold.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Nothing at all to do with The Handmaid's Tale, which I'd always lazily assumed. An ageing preacher is writing a letter to his young son, who he suspects he will not see grow up. He means to impart his wisdom and experience. John Ames comes across as a fine,gentle, loving man who loves his family. I got a bit lost in the theological debates, but apparently it was Robinson's attempts to humanise Calvinism and puritanism, so often seen as cold, intolerant and, well, puritanical. When it wasn;t dealing with religion, but the relationships between fathers and sons (I guess the religious would argue that you can't separate that), it was very affecting. We've just booked a last minute holiday in Devon, so have ordered Westward Ho! and too many maps

Dan Jones, The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God's Holy Warriors, Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France, Philip Cowley & Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2017

Lovely reads, I've been waiting so long for the last one to come out. I took a day off to read it, but it didn't arrive in time. Freddie is doing a project on the Tour de France, so I've adopted the role of principal researcher. I need to remember it is his project though.  More important than books,  we have a new family member, Molly Sawyer being born on 4th October!

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, Gavin Maxwell, Lords of the Atlas: The Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua 1893-1956, Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem

Loved Fahrenheit 451, although some of the ideas went over my head a bit. But the whole idea of a future world where books are dangerous and subversive, and how this affects society was brilliantly imagined. Sadly, like so many dystopian visions, it seems apposite at the moment, in our era of celebrating ignorance and 'having had enough of experts'. Maxwell's book has been on my wishlist for over 12 years, since we went to the wonderful city of Marrakech. I'd love to go back, but our budget is now so tight it's just impossible. With 3 kids, we struggle to afford a caravan for a week in august - £1200! £1200!. I read 'Jerusalem' in one sitting, having given up on the chance of ever seeing Mark Rylance play Rooster

Gavin Fridell, Coffee, Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.

'Coffee' was about coffee statecraft, and was a very dry economic study that critiqued the 'free market' approach to coffee production and trade. TRATUE made me smile a lot, but all very familiar. A bit of a comfort read

L.G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox, Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

Here we go again, another Great American Novel that I struggled to wade through. It was just a slog. Augie, the 'born recruit' went from one job to another, never seemed to come alive to me as a character, and I just didn't care what happened to him. I'm obviously a philistine.

Fox surprised me - I know very little about him beyond the high regard he has among some politicians and historians. Reading his life, and his apparent dislike of active politics, I couldn't understand what it was that inspired such reverence. Was it just that in an era of conformity, he dared to be different by supporting the American and then the French Revolution? Neither seems to have cost him much as he relaxed in Chertsey, and nothing he did gave active support to either revolution from what I could glean.