Book project update #8

As part of my ongoing project to be a more conscious reader (or at least to record what I read), here is my reading list for the last fortnight.

The take by Martina Cole

This fast-paced story about a family of criminals - stand-over men, drug-pushers, pimps and the women who love them - reads a little like a Guy Ritchie movie. I’m imagining Ray Winstone as the incarcerated crime boss.

Spilling the beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright

Before she was a “fat lady” hooning around the British countryside cooking for squires, choirs and clerics, Clarissa Dickson Wright was a barrister, international party girl and long-time alcoholic. She’s also not a bad writer, as this autobiography proves.

Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad: the true story of an unlikely friendship by Bee Rowlatt and May Hewitt

May is an Iraqi living in Baghdad, dodging bullets daily and teaching English literature to disinterested university students. Bee is a BBC world service journalist and mother of three, living in London. This book, told in a series of emails, is the story of their friendship and May’s eventual escape from Baghdad after learning her name was on an assassination hit-list.

The book of tomorrow by Cecelia Ahern

I can’t even be bothered writing a summary of this book other than to say I didn’t finish it.

Griffith Review 27: Food chain

This latest edition of the Griffith Review, from Griffith University, is a series of essays from academics, chef/restaurateurs and writers, about food production and sustainability issues. Fascinating stuff.

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino

Two young women at an elite school in Tokyo have a promising future ahead of them; 20 years later, both prostitutes, they are murdered. How did it all go wrong? This novel, translated from Japanese, is as much an exploration of women’s secret lives in contemporary Japan as a crime novel. It’s pretty sordid stuff but intriguing.