1 May 2020

April 2020 reading list

Here’s the April reading list. I’m catching up after a busy COVID-19 period so haven’t written about these individually.

  • Criminal by Tom Gash
  • The Last Crossing by Brian McGilloway
  • Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
  • The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham
  • I Will Never See the World Again by Ahmet Altan
  • Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton
  • Airhead by Emily Maitlis
  • Truth to Power by Jess Phillips
  • Pale Rider by Laura Spinney
  • We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems and Poems by Mary Oliver
  • Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith
  • Crippled by Frances Ryan
  • Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey

Recommendation of the Month

I can still come up with a book of the month to recommend. Or at least I think I can. There are several very strong candidates on this list. Crippled by Frances Ryan is very powerful but it is very heavy on numbers — not usually a problem for me but I found myself just dizzy with it. It’s a book I will refer back to in the future but it’s not quite as readable as others. Spinney’s Pale Rider had been popping up repeatedly in Amazon’s recommendation algorithm and, given the pandemic, it seemed churlish to avoid it any longer. It is a little uncany reading it when one compares our current circumstances an experiences. The Rule of Law was more technical than I had expected and I can see why this is essential reading to those in the profession or closely related ones, but it felt less accessible than I had hoped. I thought Other Minds was tremendous, I listened to the audiobook and it was captivating. Poverty Safari has won multiple awards and plaudits for good reason and, like Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, will make you change how you think about you engage with discussions about their central topic — poverty and race. In the end, I’ll recommend Deaths of Despair because it is a lesser known book and I read it in hardback just a few days after its release. It is an unflinching summary of the so-called deaths of despair’ in the USA.


Monthly Reading List Scribbles


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March 2020 reading list Better late that never, here’s the March reading list. Just in time for the end of April. It all coincided with full COVID-19 busy-ness so has had
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May 2020 reading list Here it is, the May reading list. It was a little bit impacted by COVID-19 as I did, just ever so slightly, lose my focus and I was finding it