Highlights of what I’ve read / liked / been recommending recently / cannot stop thinking about.

Fiction:

• Mohammed Hanif - Rebel English Academy. Utterly delightful, and wholly consuming. I started to type out words like irreverent and dark to describe it, but the reality is that this particular brand of humour is more reverent and quintessentially Pakistani to me; the unnatural is strident nationalism and joylessness. This book is anything but that.

• Emma Brodie - Into the Blue: I am completely obsessed with this. It’s such a technically complex novel: there are layers of stories within, and its so beautifully told that I quite literally had a sob stuck in my throat the entire time. I’ve already reread chunks of it several times. Obsessed.

• Jodi McAlister - An Academic Affair: There’s yearning and footnotes! Off the charts yearning. I enjoyed this wee gem (thank you, my rereading of Marian Keyes, for bringing this phrase back into my life) so much.

• Han Kang - The Vegetarian: Several years too late to this. For me the mark of an unsettling book is how much it stays with me, in slivers and memories, afterwards. I think about this far too much.

• Carley Fortune - Our Perfect Storm: Personally, Carley Fortune can never one-up Every Summer After/One Golden Summer’s Charlie Florek as a character but George comes pretty close. A lovely summer day read.

Non fiction:

• Lena Dunham - Famesick: I wrote about this here!

• Ruby Tandoh - All Consuming: Why We Eat The Way We Eat Now. Tandoh takes us through all the ways cooking and consumption has changed, layering anecdotes, research and exceptionally astute (and very, very funny) writing. It’s the honesty with which she covers this that makes this so refreshing, somehow, even when she describes her cynicism or tiredness. You might think you’ve passively learned a lot about the subject already, just by virtue of being online and consuming content all the time, but I was surprised by how much I learned (and laughed) reading this. At some point I thought I should just bookmark every page.