MARCH(ish) READING WRAP-UP

I've been on a slight reading slump for the past two weeks but can feel myself picking up again, so I've not read loads but here's what I have read over the past 3-4 weeks. Generally I am actually quite a fast reader, but I never set aside enough time to actually commit to it. I always try to read before bed but, alas, the lure of the YouTube video seems to be winning a lot recently. It's such a terrible habit to get into because it makes me sleep worse than I would if I read and makes me feel way more tired the next morning, so I'm going to be making a concerted effort to stop picking up the iPad and pick up one of the amazing books I have on my TBR pile instead.

'A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You' by Amy Bloom

This is probably my favourite short story collection that I've ever read. I read a couple last year and would say I enjoyed them but they didn't particularly stick with me, however, there were certainly few stories from this collection that have stuck with me since reading it. Sometimes I find that with short story collections they're all a bit weird and wonderful, but this one was just stories about people going through some stage in their life that are written in an incredibly relatable way, full of care and attention and a real sense of compassion. My favourite stories were probably 'Rowing to Eden' and 'Light Into Dark', mainly because after reading these I felt almost like I'd read a whole novel in just a few short pages - something that shows Amy Bloom's clear talent for writing.

'They Can't Kill Us All' by Wesley Lowery

This non-fiction book is all about the Black Lives Matter movement, what happened in the lead up to the movement forming and effectively what the straw that broke the camel's back was. I really, thoroughly enjoyed this book and felt myself eager to get back to it whenever I wasn't able to read. The author, Wesley Lowery, a reporter for the Washington Post, writes with complete honesty and frankness and gives a seriously compelling first-hand account of what happened in the months and years leading up to the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the year (ish) afterwards. The book is divided up into sections in different locations, starting off with Ferguson where the death of Michael Brown essentially sparked the protests that sparked the entire movement. Lowery writes the book with an amazing amount of detail, first hand accounts of events from interviews he himself has done and an interesting, but not overwhelming, amount of background detail. There wasn't a point throughout reading this that I was found my mind wandering, I think this is partly perhaps because this is such a current topic that I was very keen to find out more about, and Lowery's ability to provide a lot of information in a very readable and accessible way.

I have also been dabbling again in some feminist texts, namely 'We Should All Be Feminists' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and 'The War On Women' by Sue Lloyd-Roberts, however I've not finished the latter, and I'm waiting to write a post more focused on feminism as a whole, how I feel about it, my views on certain aspects of it etc. before I put my thoughts down here.

#books #bookreview #reading