Lessons in Chemistry

Bonnie Garmus’s celebrity-endorsement-bedecked global number one and multi-million-copy bestseller Lessons in Chemistry was a Christmas gift in 2024. It’s a curious fish, part roustabout women’s lib comedy, part devastating document of just how abhorrently men can treat women in the workplace and the home, part sensitive examination of how tragedy shapes people’s lives and how love doesn’t always conquer all. There’s a workplace rape after 18 pages of light-hearted scene setting that pulled me up short, just as I was settling in for a less serious read than has been my habit of late. It sets out the stall of this exploration of the fight for equality in the workplace as seen through the life of one very particular woman.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

‘Cherry’ Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossom’s

Have you visited Japan during the cherry blossom season? Have you done your own hanami (花見/はなみ) ritual, gazing at the ephemeral beauty of the sakura (桜/さくら) in the brief window the trees are in flower? I have. Did you know that a single variety of cherry tree, the Somei-yoshino, a cultivar from the end of the Edo period (1603-1868), became popular at the end of the Meiji era (1868-1912), was unofficially selected as Japan’s national tree at the start of the Taishō era (1912-1926), and became a political symbol in the Shōwa era (1926-1989)? Or that prior to industrialisation Japan had a greater variety of cherry trees that blossomed over a longer period? I didn’t. Naoko Abe told me about it in her whirlwind of a book about Collingwood ‘Cherry’ Ingram.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

Raising Hare

The hare on the cover of Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton’s non-fiction debut, had stared at me from book selection tables, bookshelves and book carousels in bookshops I visited and on social media across 2025. My need to buy fewer books than I read in the year meant I worked hard to resist it. The arrival of a book token for my birthday at the end of October was all the reason I needed to buy it from my local independent bookshop. It was a treat to myself to be saved for the miserable days of January when I always need cheering up.

At the front of the book is a drawing of Dalton’s home in the country, a converted barn enclosed by dry stone walls, hooked round by a stream and bordered by wheat fields and woodlands. This is the place Dalton retreated to from her Foreign Office political advisor job in Westminster during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s the place where she raised the day old leveret she discovered, exposed on an open track, on a walk one day.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 6

The Goldfinch

I have owned Donna Tartt’s third novel The Goldfinch since 2015. It was about time I read it. In the near 11 years that I’ve owned the book, I’ve managed not to read any reviews. If I knew anything about the story when I bought it, I’ve forgotten. It made for an intriguing read.

The story begins one Christmas in an Amsterdam hotel. An American man has fled New York with inappropriate clothing for the time of year and not even a book to pass the time with. He reads newspaper reports in Dutch papers that he can’t understand, seeking out news of his own flight. The words in Dutch translate to an unsolved murder, and a criminal record. He is ill from the cold. In a fever, he dreams of his dead mother. She died when he was 13, one April day 14 years in the past, in a way he feels responsible for.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 10

Six Degrees of Separation, January 2026

New Year, new month, and the first Saturday of both. Time for Six Degrees of Separation!

It has been a while. Almost three years, in fact. I’ve seen the posts in my WordPress reader, but today’s the first time I’ve felt the urge to join in. Over at host Kate’s blog, Books Are My Favourite and Best, I see we’re to start with the last book from last month’s chain, or the last book we read. I’m doing neither. I’m going back to the last time I took part, in April 2023. The last book in my chain back then was …

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 7

2025 Round Up and a Look Forward to 2026

How was your 2025 in books? Mine went pretty well. Despite finishing 2024 with 172 unread books, I somehow started 2025 with 176 books forming Mount To Read, of which I aimed to read 40. I called it my Year of Reading Independently, because a good proportion of my backlog is made up of books from independent publishers.

The header image to this post shows the 40 books I chose. I managed to read 35 of them.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 7

Wes Anderson: The Archives

Wes Anderson: The Archives is the catalogue to an exhibition of the same name. It’s a co-curation between La Cinémathèque française, Paris, and the Design Museum, London. I have yet to make it down to the Big Smoke to see it, but the catalogue has geed me up to book tickets and a city break in 2026. A Christmas present, it made a perfect end to my reading year. Reading the catalogue has also made me want to watch all of the films again, in sequence.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 2

Bindlestiff

Bindle stiff (noun): Hobo, especially: a person who carries their clothes or bedding in a bundle ~ Merriam Webster online dictionary

Bindlestiff is the first novel by Wayne Holloway, a director and screenwriter whose career has travelled from Channel 4’s Dogma TV at the start of the century to the docudrama Snake and Mongoose (2013). His debut novel is set in Hollywood in 2016, where a director is trying to get a film off the ground. The film is the futuristic Bindlestiff, touted as the story of “a black Charlie Chaplin” named Frank wandering a post-federal USA in 2036.

Bindlestiff the book is a satire. It mixes the bleakness of 21st century creative industries with climate disaster, the zombie lurch to the right orchestrated by the ones who will benefit the most from the civil war it will bring, the socio-economic and racial divisions embedded in US society, and the live streaming overwhelm of social media.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 2

Fire Exit

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty is a bildungsroman and a work of masculine realism. The narrator, Charles, recounts his teenage years growing up on a Penobscot reservation in Maine, intertwined with the story of his adult life as a single man shut out from the life he wanted for himself. He is not Penobscot himself, but grew up on the reservation with his mother because she had married a Native man after Charles’ father walked out on her. We learn that Charles was forced to leave the reservation when he reached adulthood, a year after the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act.

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Purity

Purity is a collection of short stories by Andrzej Tichý, a Czech writer living in Sweden and writing in Swedish. In this collection, which has been translated into English by Nichola Smalley, Tichý explores the challenges of modern urban life in Swedish society through the lens of social realism.

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