As I mentioned last week, I am leaving my favourite ever job at Mother London to be a creative director and writer at large. Next week, we’re taking our one-year-old daughter to Australia to claim her birthright and kiss the red soil of her homeland/the asphalt out the front of arrivals at Kingsford Smith Airport.
I’m going to take sabbatical from the newsletter for March, but will be back in April.
Anyway, here are the books I read.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (2024)
I think I am the last person with a Substack to read this book. I quite liked it and have nothing meaningful or original to add. Though I do enjoy her artfully jumbled sentence structure — EG: “Finds with his fingers the front door key” — quite fun to say out loud to myself in an Irish accent.
Dead Lions by Mick Herron (2013)
It’s the second Slow Horses book. It is fine and good and — still — exactly like the TV series Slow Horses.
*Honourable mentions:
Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood, by Lucy Jones
I am 62 pages in and realistically owe it to the world to finish this. It would be a failing of empathy to give up. But there’s no spies or pubs or guidelines to packing a carry on suitcase for a business trip or anything so it’s taking a little while.