Books I’ve been reading

Like many other habits, my reading slowed down quite a bit while I was in the US. I’ve been making goals on Goodreads each year to finish 100 books and I’ve been behind on that for most of the year. But I am just about caught up now.

I recently read My Oxford Year by Julia Whelan and I immensely enjoyed it. At first, it seemed to be a contemporary romantic comedy but about a third of the way through I discovered it was not quite the light read I expected. Also, it wasn’t an original story but one based on a script for a movie, I think. This one is about a young woman who gets a Rhodes Scholarship and goes to Oxford for a year while also working on an election campaign back home in the US.

I read The Venice Train by Georges Simenon very recently for Netgalley. I know of Simenon for his series of Maigret detective stories although I haven’t read any of his work before. This one turned out to be a psychological thriller of sorts. It has such good pacing that it has you on the edge of your seat much of the time. It’s about a man who leaves his family’s holiday in Venice to return to Paris by train. On the way back a stranger requests a favor that upends his life in the most negative of ways.

A non-fiction book that was quite good is Secrets of Women’s Healthy Ageing: Living Better, Living Longer by Cassandra Szoeke. The author is part of a long-term research study on women’s health here in Australia that has been running for thirty years. There are a number of important takeaways but for me, the most important one was to keep moving. It seems keeping active will affect most areas of life positively, from blood sugar to bone health to mental health. There’s a lot of interesting information with regard to research into women’s health too.

Also non-fiction is the memoir by Hannah Gadsby. I first read this as an ebook and then it was available as an audiobook so I checked that out and listened and it was quite good. There’s some pretty tough material in the book and Hannah narrates in a similar way to her comedy and it worked really well for me. I had listened to another memoir from another Australian comedian and it just didn’t sound quite right. I think I would have enjoyed reading more than listening. This one is done beautifully.

Lastly, I am currently rereading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. My parents had this book on their shelves and I read it probably during my teenage years. It really left a big impression at the time which has remained with me since. I decided enough years have passed that it’s definitely worth a revisit and I started reading it on ebook. I’m only a couple of chapters in, but I will note the beautiful language used to start the book. I don’t suppose I appreciated this so much at the time I first read it but it is really well written.