The back garden, a cup of tea, Little White Lies and some book recommendations

I forgot to include the things the book club folks have been reading recently, which I decided I would post here on the blog rather than the website. So when she wasn't struggling with / enjoying Gilead, Coco read Waiting by Ha Jin, which she thought was terrible, but 'maybe something got lost in the translation'. To anyone who might like Georgette Heyer / Jane Austen crossed with Harry Potter (but that's an unbelievably reductive way to describe one of my favourite books ever), I recommended Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, the long but spellbinding (I'd say – I remember scampering home from work super-quick to plump down on the sofa and read more of it) tale of two English magicians in the 18th-century. This came up because we were having a discussion about whether or not we liked books with footnotes (e.g., A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers – I love it for the discursive footnotes, but others hate that kind of thing and never read them, or so it turns out. And if you don't like footnotes, you won't like Jonathan Strange, that's for sure). Sally read A Case of Exploding Mangoes, by Mohammed Hanif, which is about the assassination of General Zia in Pakistan. She described it as a fascinating satire along the lines of Catch 22, except that these things actually happened. And Sarah's reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I can't wait to find out if she likes it as much as I did – it was by far and away the best thing I read last year. (By the way, it's not that I want to endorse Amazon, or anything, with these links, but more that you might want to know more, and Amazon's a quick'n'easy place to start.)

So it was a gorgeous day in London today. The official last day of summer, I thought, but it seems like it might be nice tomorrow, too. When I got home I came out into the garden to do this & catch up with the new Little White Lies, which (if you don't know it) is a great film magazine. I love the amount of love and effort they put into each issue, and the design, which is always around a different theme each issue, and is never the same but always feels like them. It's done by The Church of London.

Anyway, not strictly a book I know. I am reading some, I just haven't worked out quite how / when to post about them. Do I do it while I'm reading them, which is probably when I have the most to say, but I won't know the end, or do I wait till I've finished, in which case I'm usually straight on to the next thing, coz, you know, there's a lot to get through. Hmn…