The newsletter is mostly a way for Penguin to get me onto their website and read articles about books and literature - this month there's links to pieces about love stories and 'book crimes', along with quotes, tips for writers and, of course, a lot of advertisements for their books and literature-themed merchandise.
What I expected from the reading challenge was for 10 new book recommendations each month, or for me to be able to tell them which books I'd read so that they could tailor suggestions as time went on. However, there's actually only one 'reading challenge' book suggestion in each newsletter which takes away the joy of choosing my next read from a selection of blurbs. This month's selection for the "read the books you've always meant to" challenge is Love & Mr Lewisham by HG Wells, which I don't have a copy of, and in fact have never even heard of. It sounds like an okay read, and I like the seance-y cover, but it's not something that I can easily pick up in a charity shop - which is why I picked the classics category in the first place. Instead, I zeroed in on another of the books in the photograph:
It's the book of the month for a different challenge category, but I bought a copy of Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton on my last shopping trip of 2019 - I found it for £1 on the damaged books shelf in Waterstones and I've enjoyed Dolly's work on podcasts and in the media so took a chance on it. This past weekend I've been to see The 1975 in three different cities so a lot of my time has been spent on trains, and I thought this would be a good book to keep me company over these four days.
In truth, I ended up reading it in two days and I was completely engrossed in it. The book starts out with Dolly's teenage experiences of meeting boys on MSN Messenger, a world I remember well despite being five years younger than her, so I expected that I was going to relate to her story and mirror a lot of her experiences. However, after that point our lives are drastically different - she talks frankly about her experiences with alcohol, sex and her close-knit group of female friends which she has in abundance and I have little to none of. Even though our lives are so different, I didn't want to put the book down and ended up having to buy another to keep me company on the remainder of my journey.
There's a ton of glowing reviews printed on the book jacket but one compares this book to Caitlin Moran's 'How To Be A Woman', another of my favourites, and I think it's fair to say that if you like Caitlin's work then you'll probably like this too. It's both heartwarming and heartbreaking, sometimes at the same time, and I'm glad Dolly has put all her mistakes down on the page for me, and hopefully a generation of girls, to learn from.
Even though I didn't read the book that was recommended to me, I'm glad the Penguin newsletter prompted me to pick this out of the growing pile of paperbacks in my bedroom. I've moved on to a book about Prince's Purple Rain and an Irvine Welsh short story collection to tide me over until next month's recommendation, join me again then!
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