We’re halfway through the year??! As per usual, I shall ignore the existential dread by sticking my head in a book. I read 10 books this month (the most books I’ve read in one month so far this year!), bringing my total books read this year to 39, which means I’m exactly 75% through my 2020 Goodreads reading goal of 52 books, so I have that going for me.

I found my groove halfway through the month and I’m excited to keep rolling. I read my first Agatha Christie novel ever and am reading my second one right now; there’s an ARC I need to get to ASAP; after that I’m going for Exhalation by Ted Chiang and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee. So there’s my preliminary July TBR!

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I don’t usually bother acknowledging when I post late, because what’s new? But I have a confession. The reason for this recap’s delay is because I spent the last couple days browsing secondhand books online. Man oh man I miss a physical book, especially as I don’t even have the borrowed pages of a library copy to preoccupy my fingers anymore! I read my one and only library checkout this month and then was left to fend for myself. I dealt with it badly and may soon be in possession of ten delicious sets of musty pages…

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5 books this month, but 2 of them were short plays, so I really only read 3 books, but they were all amazing reads. 2 of the 3 I flew through; the remaining 1 I savoured. I also read 2 other books throughout April that I didn’t finish in time to add to this wrap-up: The Best of Roald Dahl, a short story collection I decided to pause halfway through (I do plan on picking it back up eventually! It’s a good read, but I’m not in the mood for short stories currently), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which would have completed my first reread of the series in my entire life!

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To be published by WW Norton on 12 May 2020
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In the age of Trump and Brexit, every crisis is instantly overridden by the next. The turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Olivia Laing makes a brilliant, inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair. Art, she argues, changes how we see the world. It gives us X-ray vision. It reveals inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living.

Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, and their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Wolfgang Tillmans, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, Funny Weather celebrates art as an antidote to a terrifying political moment.