Reading round-up 📚

Everything I've read in January and February so far

Hello, how are you? I have a theory that February is a grimmer month than January. In January, you have the post Christmas glow, intentions, the sensation of a brand spanking new year stretched out ahead of you and then February arrives and is somehow colder than January (how?!) and you're like: ah, yes, it's a new year but it's still winter bleurgh!

Anyhow... I am in a strange liminal space waiting for something (v exciting, work-related, can't wait to tell you what) to begin and I am not good at waiting. I'm terrible at it, really. I always just want to plunge on, you know? So I'm feeling a bit dingy. You know when you potter about (wake up, cup of coffee, drifting through flat, going to yoga, popping into charity shops) and there's only so much pottering one can do until you're like: Good God, give me a purpose! Look, this is all very First World Problems so let's crack on with the books!

I am attempting to read more. I want to be a better writer, guys, and there's one sure-fire way to get there: read more. Plus, it's good for the soul, for the mind, for the spirit to read.

So, without further ado, here are the books I've read so far in 2025 and what I thought of them....

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

I wanted to read this after I saw a prominent book Substacker rave about it and, eek, I was a bit disappointed! I guess that goes to show how subjective book recommendations can be.

Thorpe's novel starts strong with Margo, 19, getting pregnant after having an affair with her college professor and deciding to keep the baby although all those around her (the professor, her mother, her best friend) warn her that this is going to "ruin" her life. And of course the baby kinda does "ruin" her life - because although she feels utter adoration for her baby boy Bodhi, she loses her job due to lack of childcare (duh), her roommates move out due to the noise of an infant (also duh) and she quickly learns how tough it is to be a single mother and so she turns to... Only Fans.

A big part of the plot is Margo working out how to purloin TikTok fame to make it big on Only Fans and, I don't know, I get enough of thinking about TikTok and (I guess) Only Fans in the real world without having that stuff in my fiction too.

Even though Thorpe is a good writer, and Margo is a character you can't help but root for, and Thorpe does something really interesting with 1st person and 3rd person narrative that I've never seen done before and that worked bloody brilliantly actually, I still couldn't really get that excited about Margo's TikTok videos and her dilemma over what to charge her Only Fan subscribers for the video revealing her private parts for the first time.

While reading the novel, I couldn't stop thinking: this would make quite a good Netflix show, to the point that I started to feel the 304-page book was a lengthy proposal for a series on the streamer. And sure enough, I just looked it up: Big Little Lies creator David E. Kelley is set to adapt the book as a TV show starring Nicole Kidman and Elle and Dakota Fanning.

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold

This book has a brilliant concept. Historian Rubenhold has deeply researched the five women who were murdered by Jack the Ripper and has written an account of each of their lives. The Five is a riposte to the overwhelming popularity of the true crime genre which so often places all the attention on the killer until the victims are merely footnotes in the murderer's story. It really is quite disgusting the macabre celebrity that Jack the Ripper has achieved since he went on his killing spree - revoltingly there are guided walks around Whitechapel where tourists can gawp at the spots where these women must have died in terrible pain and the most unimaginable fear.

It was fascinating learning about Mary Ann 'Polly' Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly and I really respected Rubenhold for telling their life stories - Mary Ann who fell on hard times after divorcing her husband, poor Annie who was quite prosperous but also an alcoholic who ended up in the slums of Whitechapel because she could not stop drinking, Elizabeth who was from Sweden and may well have been a fantasist - without going into any description of their deaths.

I also loved learning about London in the book. Living in this city, it's so very easy to forget the incredible history here. Case in point: I used to pass a large building called the Peabody Estate on the bus when I lived in Waterloo and I always thought to myself: Peabody is such a lovely name. So it was fascinating to learn that it had actually been set up by an American Banker, George Peabody, in 1862, who made a staggeringly generous philanthropic gift to his adoptive city by creating a number of low-cost dwellings for London's labouring families.

"Ultimately, George Peabody's gift of £150,000 grew to £500,000, a sum worth roughly £45.5 million today. His generosity humbled the British public, helped to heal a rift in Anglo-American relations, and prompted a personal letter of gratitude from Queen Victoria. It also came to assist over thirty thousand Londoners out of the slums."

What a man! Where is today's George Peabody? Sadly, I suspect he's pouring all his energies and funds into space travel.

Sandwich by Catherine Newman

I have a theory that sometimes you are just not in the right mindset to read a book; at another time that book could become a firm favourite but at this particular point, it was always doomed. And so it is with Sandwich by Catherine Newman which was recommended to me by Lucy Pearson who has a superb bookish Substack

The Literary Edit

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At the time I attempted to read this, I was crawling with anxiety, unable to focus and I just wasn't in the mood to read a book about a woman cracking up as she goes through the menopause. I also found the daughter in the book, Willa, completely unbearable - the kind of virtue-signalling, thought-police, member of the wokerati that I loathe!

The story takes place during a week that a family - Rachel, the mother, (known as Rocky, for some reason that annoyed me too), Nick her husband, Jamie her son, and the already mentioned irritating Willa - go to Cape Cod, to the little cottage they have holidayed at every single year for the last 20 or so. Cape Cod sounded absolutely gorgeous - beaches and lobster shacks and charming secondhand book shops - but even that annoyed me!

I didn't finish it, I'm afraid, guys - but I am quite clearly in the minority on this one, it is a favourite of lots of sensible people whose taste I respect and has plenty of great reviews online and I suspect I was just in a very bristly, prickly mood so I may try it again when I'm in a more amenable state.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki

I've already finished this one and this is, I think, the star of this round-up. It was also just what I needed to read after I gave up on Sandwich. I have a habit of reading a lot of books by white middle-class, upper-class women - "books about messy middle-class women" as Pandora Sykes memorably termed them - and this was just the tonic I needed. It was, first and foremost, fabulously foreign and a proper story with an almost surreal edge that offered true escapism.

Rika, a journalist, goes to visit a serial killer, Manako Kajii, in Tokyo Detention House, with the hope of securing an exclusive interview. Kajii has captured the public imagination after being convicted of murdering three businessmen who she is said to have seduced with her scrumptious home cooking. Kajii refuses to speak to Rika until Rika asks her for the recipe for her beef stew and then a tentative relationship begins that revolves around food.

I don't want to say anymore but it is a cracking read, it features mouth-watering descriptions of food and offers a real (and, to be honest, quite chilling) insight into the Japanese obsession with thinness as well as a woman's place in that society. Also, it's just a great thriller - Kajii is a terrifying character and there were shades of the Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling relationship in her interactions with Rika. I'm not saying it's great literature (I don't know that it is) but if you're after an escape by way of fiction, this is the book.

And there we have it! That's what I've been reading... please let me know if you've read any of these books and if you have any recommendations. I am determined to keep reading through 2025. Oh, and here are some recommendations:

John Sandoe Books

I thought I pretty much knew all the bookshops in London but I had never been to this one, in Chelsea, before my pal took me there on Friday and it was fabulous! So many books! (Why are all the bookshops near me so scant on stock? a bookshop is no place to embrace minimalism!) There are sliding shelves with books that slide away to reveal more books, there are tables piled high with books, you cannot move for books which is just how I like it.

Heaven

Apple Cider Vinegar

Ok, I binged all six episodes in one night and it is flipping fantastic! The show is based on Belle Gibson, the Australian influencer who claimed to have brain cancer that she had "cured" with organic food. Lead actress, Kaitlyn Deaver, is phenomenal.

Moths turned our £32m home into a scene from Aliens

Fantastic, fantastic story. The comments are griping, asking how is this newsworthy, but this - rich people finding moth larvae inside the walls of their £32m home - is EXACTLY the kind of story I want from my newspaper subscription.

If You Don't Like This I Will Die

My friend

Lee Tilghman

has written a book! Lee was one of the first "wellness influencers" on Instagram - as Lee From America - and she took a step back from that social media fame (and the money money money) after burning out… she explains better in the link below. She has written this memoir about that time. From the snatches she's told me - such as waking up at 5am to get the best light to photograph her smoothie bowls - this book will be a fascinating read, and the first memoir of its kind (I think) to reveal the dark underbelly of the influencer dream. I can't wait to read it! (UK folk can pre-order here.)

If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die: Pre-Order Now

I tried the internet’s toughest fitness challenge

Oop, just squeezing this in - I tried 75 Hard and wrote about it for the London Standard. TLDR: 75 Hard was a bit too hard for a softy like me.

That's it from me, guys, hope you are all well, thank you as ever for reading and I shall see you soon! x