Tuesday 1 November 2022

6 recent books I'd recommend

'Men Who Hate Women' by Laura Bates

Laura Bates has to be one of my favourite writers. I love how she writes on women issues yet still includes men in a positive way into the conversation.

This book really opened my eyes up to the vast community of men out there who take hating women to the next level. I learnt more about men who troll women online, 'incels' - communities of men who meet in online forums, the pick-up artist community, the 'manospere', extremism and terrorism and more.

It's another great book by Laura and I would highly recommend it if you want something different to the usual feminism books.


Holiday SOS by Ben Macfarlane

This was a really good book with moments where you had to double take remembering that what you're listening/reading actually did happen.

I'd never given much thought to the medical career field of repatriating unwell Brits to the UK. I quite like my medical doctor's stories books and I'd happy re-listen to this book. It was full of really interesting medical cases with the twist of getting the unwell and/or injured person on a flight back to the UK and it wouldn't be a good book if there no hiccups along the way.

This book really made me think of what a fab side of medicine career wise this job would be.


'Weird things people say in bookstores' by Jen Campbell

This was a book I actually read, I actually found out about this book from a review from Hannah below. 

It was a good easy to read book with some great illustrations to support the hilarity of what I was reading at times wondering how a person can actually ask such a thing in a bookstore or indeed anywhere. 

It was sectioned into a few different UK bookstores and then the last section opened out to things said in various bookstores worldwide.

If you want something easy, different and extremely funny to read this is your book!


'163 Days' by Hannah Hodgson 

Hannah is one of my favourite writers and YouTubers. I love her channel and have found many good books from her book reviews as well as her openness and honesty about living with life limiting illnesses.

I've read a few of Hannah's poetry pamphlets (Hannah introduced me to poetry) but this is her first book.

In 163 Days it's spilt into three sections.

The first section is the main book itself and I love the really different format in which Hannah wrote. 163 days is centred around Hannah's longest hospital stay which lasted 163 days and there is an entry for each day. The format for each day's entry took a medical entry for that day and Hannah's entry for the day. This made reading the book quite nice and easy.

Hannah also included a collection of poems which I want to return to an re-read to better grasp what she is writing and communicating as I've enjoyed much of Hannah's other poems and it was Hannah that got me back into poetry.


When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi *

*Spoiler alert

I really enjoyed this book. It's about a neurosurgeon who's at the top of his game who he's diagnosed with lung cancer. He writes about his career, his treatment and family life.

It's beautifully written and it would have been nice for there to have been an equally beautiful written ending to his book. Instead it just stops but then that's the nature of terminal illness, you never know when the full stop will come. However his wife did write a beautiful ending to the book for him.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

This was quite a different book for me as I don't usually listen/read novels.

The storyline wasn't what I fully expected from the book description despite this however I still got into the story and I really enjoyed the book.

The book follow two twins who are both into fan-fiction of a particular fiction book series. When they start at college they drift apart and the book particularly follows the life of Cath and her first year of college with the typical family and friend dramas as well as her classmates and classes and of course her fanfic.