So this is a strange one and more of an audiobook exclusive - from what I can gather, it isn’t available in print, just CD and mp3. I borrowed this from my library network on Libby and I chose it as something different and relaxing to listen to whilst running. Thich Nhat Hanh was not a name I recognised, and the title of the book was enough to get me to download and listen to it, but it turned out that he is actually a very famous Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist who was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr back in the 60s and was in exile from Vietnam from 1975 until 2005.

So this audiobook is actually two different excerpts recorded from instructional lectures about meditation and mindfulness. It’s not a long recording, but I found Hanh has a relaxing and soothing voice and coupled with these bite-sized lessons, made for easily digestible thinking, even while I was running!

I suppose I was technically cheating by running rather than sitting still, but I found I was eating up the pavement as I listened to this man talk about comparing ourselves to water and mountains and imagining what it is like to behave like a tree. I seriously enjoyed it and since running is usually my time for digesting the day’s thoughts and trying to relax, this was a nice addition with some different ideas to consider. My favourite section was when Hanh was talking about the passage of time in his sing-song voice. One of the things he said was:

“The present moment is the substance with which the future is made. Therefore, the best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. What else can you do?”

I have not seen this man in any video footage, but listening to this I always had the impression of a chilled out dude saying everything with a little bit of a shrug and a smile.

One potential downside is that the lecture sounded like it has been recorded onto vinyl, burned onto cassette tape and was then digitised at some point in the last 20 years - not the cleanest! I really like it and found it gave it an archaic, ‘found audio’ kind of feel, but I totally get it if listeners rolled their eyes and say the audio quality is rubbish!

The lectures also drop you in with little introduction and this man starts talking about his views on the world and how we can do certain things better, told through the metaphor of different things in the natural world. It’s not going to set the world on fire or blow people’s minds, but Hanh offers several different meditation techniques and their benefits. I am not a regular meditator, and I definitely wasn’t meditating while listening to this recording, but it gave me a small glimpse into this man’s views on the world. One thing I always enjoy is listening to someone far calmer, more experienced and incredibly knowledgeable talk about their specialist subject, and that was fascinating to hear, even if I had no idea who he was to begin with!

I would recommend listening to this recording, it’s only a couple of hours of your time, but it gives you things to think about and different mindfulness techniques to try if you’d like!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️★

Hillary Rodham Clinton needs little introduction and I felt some trepidation in reviewing her 2017 book What Happened, published the year after her second failed bid for the US Presidency to vitriol from both sides of the US political divide. However, when the audiobook became available, I thought I would give Hillary the chance to tell me, in her own words, What Happened. So here we are, with her post-action report about what went wrong, who messed it up for her and what could have been done better.

Hearing Clinton tell her own story about the process of gaining the Democratic Nomination, the call to Donald Trump to concede, give her concession speech and then finally go home to mourn her loss is such a far cry from anything I had read before. She was eminently more qualified than her opponent, she had made it to the final night as the frontrunner, thought she had it in the bag, won the popular vote by a wide margin and yet still lost and I found that fascinating!

As the London Evening Standard said at the time:

“Two decades after her husband humiliated her with his affair with Monica Lewinsky, she lost the prize she most coveted to a self-proclaimed “pussy-grabber”. She lost as an elitist against a second-generation New York real-estate tycoon who lives in an apartment gilded in gold. She lost as a devout Methodist among conservative evangelicals to a man who had rarely set foot inside a church. She lost as an expert on every big political issue, to an opponent who preferred big, blousy slogans to detail, and who got all his news from cable television.”

Clinton spends a bit of the book devoted to blame. Hacking authorised by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders for not supporting her sooner, imbalanced media coverage, misogyny, Mitch McConnell’s partisan politics, a late bombshell from then-FBI Director John Comey and plenty of others. However, she also reserves a chunk of the blame for herself, detailing how she feels she might have acted in that Presidential debate with Trump looming behind her, or her complete unwillingness to feed into the fear, hate and resentment that Trump revelled in, plus a chapter on those emails! She says: “every time I hugged another sobbing friend – or one stoically blinking back tears, which was almost worse – I had to fight back a wave of sadness that threatened to swallow me whole. At every step, I felt that I had let everyone down. Because I had.”

The little sly asides and comments about others from the political landscape are where this book really shines. Something that an ordinary civilian, miles from those conversations would never hear, and the emotion that they land with has heft even years later. Among my favourites, immediately after calling Trump to concede, she called Obama to say “I’m sorry I let you down.” At Trump’s Inauguration, she gritted her teeth and repeated her mantra, “Smile now, scream later”. On a happier note, George W. Bush’s suggestion that they should go out for burgers at some point. “I think that’s Texan for I feel your pain” She quipped.

I enjoyed Clinton talking about policy that she had planned to implement on divisive issues like gun control, how to prevent police shootings and how to improve immigration rules, among many others. All things that stand in stark contrast to the current incumbent’s policies. The wistful feelings continued throughout the book as I considered what a Hillary Clinton White House might have been. While I thoroughly enjoy a talk about government policy in this depth, and it is a topic that Clinton clearly revels in, I could see many readers finding it boring and worth skipping, and that’s something that Clinton herself recognises. She says that she more closely resembled a “spoilsport schoolmarm” compared to a Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders, who she said promised big with Universal Healthcare and didn’t have the budgets to back it up as a generous Santa.

My problems with this book are complicated. There were a few times I was listening to it and rolling my eyes or scoffing at the incredible privilege and hubris that Clinton must often forget she has, to be able to find it surprising that certain groups didn’t vote for her or didn’t turn out to vote at all, or her own grudging annoyance at the “bad optics” of getting paid millions for corporate speeches to Wall Street banks. “What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I’m really asking. I’m at a loss.” But while I see these as clear errors in her judgment; the assumption of victory, already having bought the house next-door to cope with the extra secret service staff, the last-minute edits to her victory speech, they add to the pathos in the story and add more threads to the tapestry of this failed Presidential candidate. It built to such a great height that when it all comes crashing down she was even more broken for it.

Hillary Clinton is an incredible dichotomy with all of the experience and expertise that make her a great candidate for the Presidency. Yet who she is and what she represents to the American people precluded her from being the candidate that enough people in key states wanted to get her over the line. Since the woman herself cannot split those two parts of her, What Happened makes for a fascinating listen!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The story settles around Cora Seaborne. The recent widow of an influential London civil servant towards the end of the Victorian era. Her new-found freedom from her cold and abusive husband allows her to leave the bustling big city for village life in Essex to exercise her passion for palaeontology. Upon hearing the widespread rumour that the Essex Serpent, a creature from local folklore, had returned to terrorise the people and livestock and was blamed for a series of deaths in the area, that her passion is piqued.

In her excitement to verify the claims, she comes up against the local clergyman Will Ransome, who is intent on convincing his congregation that the monster is nothing more than fear and superstition.

The book is the award-winning second novel by Sarah Perry, published in 2016. This was my first introduction to Perry, who it turns out grew up in Essex to a strict Baptist family and spent much of her time with classical literature and music since access to more contemporary forms of media was restricted. She has described how the King James Bible was a strong influence on her writing and she studied gothic literature for a PhD as well. It’s clear to see how these have impacted on this book.

There were several things I enjoyed while I was reading this book. The interplay between Cora Seaborne, Will Ransome and his wife Stella. It was interesting to see how all three of them perceived the times that they met as we were given each of their thoughts. I also found the prose beautiful and engaging and operatic in its own way. It is like very few contemporary books, and that in itself makes it a fascinating read as it harkens me back to reading Frankenstein at school!

I found the locations and settings and their descriptions lifelike and believable and I also enjoyed the way in which the characters wrestle, at least to a small extent, with religious belief and superstitious belief, especially when a clergyman is forced to argue for one but not the other and when Cora challenges him on it, leading to my favourite quote:

“I had faith, the sort of thing you might be born with, but I’ve seen what it does and I traded it in. It’s a sort of blindness, or a choice to be mad - to turn your back on everything new and wonderful - not to see that there’s no fewer miracles in the microscope than in the gospels!” - Cora Seaborne

On the other hand, there was so little real conflict in the story. I was hoping for Cora’s entry into the rural life of Essex to make real waves, but we never get that impression. People just seem so polite that I found it a little bit dull. No drama, gossip, suggestions of impropriety between the married vicar and this interloping widow. I wanted more arguments, deeper discussions, and to hear more of Cora’s innermost thoughts. And when we finally got those, right at the end, the story was almost over.

I found it boring. I think it took me about three quarters of the book to begin to care about any of the characters. This was my biggest struggle with the book and really hindered my enjoyment. I just did not care for the different characters and only continued reading because a friend had recommended it to me!

Even if I didn’t engage with the characters, there are several things which I would take from the book. Perry’s ability to write in different dialects was excellent and it clearly showed another way to distinguish characters from different locations or strata of society. Couple that with the widely varied chattiness of different characters and it makes for clearly differentiated personalities in the story. Both of those are things I could definitely work on in my own writing.

Perry obviously did a great deal of research for the book, and the detail with which she described Victorian-era surgery was definitely a highlight for me!

Her clear descriptors for her different locations really caught my eye. It was easy to feel the difference between London and her invented Essex town Aldwinter. She definitely goes into a lot more descriptive detail than I do when I’m writing fiction, although that fits with the Gothic nature of this story.

In the end I found The Essex Serpent a book that definitely has positives, but I just didn’t find myself caring until the end. Reading it felt more like a literary exercise to complete than a gripping story.

⭐️⭐️⭐️★★

Get a library card! No, really, get a library card - they’re free. Support your local library, pop in, borrow them, read them and bring them back! That saves you paying anything for them, which is pretty cool and the more that we can do to keep libraries open for everyone, the better.

I mentioned before how I’ve been trying to get reading again. There are some awesome apps that I have found to make it far easier. They might still require that library card though!

LibriVox

You can get started right now with the free, ad-supported app, which provides free and paid audiobooks. It’s a great place to find out of copyright classics. For example it let me go through Jane Austen’s back catalogue and Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and get someone to read them to me for free! That’s pretty cool.

The downside is that the quality of the recordings can be wildly changeable with some being close to Audible quality whilst others can sound like they were recorded by 6 different people in different places with completely different mic settings. But it is free, so if you’re after an audiobook or audio play, and don’t want to pay for Audible, then this is a great place to start!

Libby

This will allow you to sync your library card to the app and give you access to all of the eBooks and audiobooks that your local chain of libraries has, to download onto your device. For free. It’s pretty awesome, and my current favourite way to get audiobooks and eBooks that normally I would have to pay for.

There are downsides, since it’s attached to your library card, it works just like a library. This means that it only has access to books that your local library system has access to. It has licences of a book, rather than unlimited sharing, meaning that if another user has withdrawn one and it is on their device, you’ll have to place a hold to get it once it has returned to the library’s collection, just like a real book. So if it’s a particularly popular book, you might find there is a hold list that’s several people long. But once you get to the top of the list, the book will be downloaded onto your device and will be ready for you. The best part of the system is that when the loan period is up, the book will be automatically removed from the device and sent to the next one. No late fees required!

This is how I’ve managed to get through so many books in the last few months - I’ve been using my library! I’m not slowed down by having to pay for them and I can listen to them on my commute or while doing the washing up. I really think audiobooks are a great option for people to consider. It has definitely helped me enjoy more books straight from my phone!

Librivox

Libby

I used to burn through books. This stopped dead in the last year of school, when I stopped reading for pleasure and instead read for academics. And for my own pleasure, I swapped fiction books for the internet, watching television shows and films. Then after arriving at university in 2007 I began listening to podcasts as well. I found that I only very rarely went back to reading and almost never went back to the books I had on my shelves.

On the other hand I have been trying to write several different novels on and off since 2011, which I have found really rewarding, at least when I’ve been able to dedicate time to it! Perhaps that’s an odd dichotomy - the writer who does not read, and while researching how best to complete my stories, I found that one thing that all novelists said was to read - as much and as widely as possible.

On the realistic, more physical side of things, I moved cities and couldn’t bring the bookcases and boxes of books I had been collecting for years with the faint, childhood notion of building a little library or study for myself. In the end I brought about 15-20 books with me and sold, gave away or donated the rest. I didn’t count them in the end, but I know it was several hundred. It definitely meant the journey up with all of my stuff was much easier!

I competed in Nanowrimo again in November, and read that piece of advice again - “Writers read. Read as much as you can!” But I still wasn’t reading. I knew that if I wanted to make my stories the best I could, I would need to read. So I did what any self-respecting human being does and copied a friend. I resurrected my Goodreads account and joined the Goodreads challenge - to read a certain number of books by the end of the year. I wasn’t sure I could meet his target of 26 books, but it was a target to strive for, and I do love a challenge.

I also loved the Goodreads idea of cataloguing the books I was reading and more importantly cataloguing new ideas that I might want to include or exclude from my own writing. That would make this challenge useful and beneficial to my writing.

So this is what I’m going to do - I’m going to write about that here, my own views on the books I’m reading, now that I’m finally reading again, in and among anything else I happen to write. Follow me here, on Twitter, or add me on Goodreads if you want. Let me know what you think.