Hayley

Ooooh, I love both of those ideas! I think I'm going to have to second The Natural World. Mainly because 'first book in a new series' sounds perfect for the new year!

Your English is excellent! I don't know which book it is, but it does sound vaguely familiar! I'd love to know if you find it!

I wasn't a big Faulkner fan either - I can't even remember why (but I do think Of Mice and Men was brilliant, despite the fact that I was also horrified and want to cry literally every time I have to teach the ending 😅)

That sounds like an interesting but slightly confusing experience, overall! I know different branches of Christianity have differences in the Lord's prayer, but I've never seen one just completely change all the words like that... maybe they thought it would make more sense to people? They didn't want them to think it was literally about just bread? It sounds like your mum was a lovely person

@KEV67 and @Madeleine, it's interesting that you both mention two languages - we were only allowed to take one language! A few years before I started at my school, they used to offer French, German and Spanish - but then the German and Spanish teachers left, so by the time I got there we could only learn French!

Hi Briber, welcome to the forum! Hopefully you've already discovered that we have pretty wide-ranging tastes in books on this forum . What are your preferences? You said you read all types, so I'm guessing maybe you have a preferred style of writing, rather than a preferred genre?

Would you recommend it @lunababymoonchild? I know The Five by Hallie Rubenhold was meant to be excellent, but I hadn't heard of this one until you mentioned it!

It's much cooler today - it even feels a little bit autumnal! I'm very happy about it - it is stressful with a newborn when it's hot 😅. Someone gave me a room temperature monitor and it's been displaying a sad face for about a week!

Aww, thanks Poppy 🥰. I really agree that you can't comprehend the time babies take up until it happens. I feel like while I knew, technically, that most of the hours of my day would be spent on the baby, it feels really crazy just how many hours I spend feeding every day 😂. Luckily, I never have to see that health visitor again - they've cut back on home visits to save money, so that was the only one I have to have! Although the cutbacks weren't so great when I had to keep asking people to take me to the hospital to have the baby weighed, because you're not allowed to drive for 6 weeks after a caesarean and there was no way I could walk far enough to get the bus 😅. It did feel like a weird suggestion when he's so small. I don't know how long she thought it was going to take to fix the computer 😂. That must have been very intense, with a baby, a toddler and a young child at school!

There was an interesting follow-up to this story in the Guardian. It seems that quite a few people who were featured in the book (or whose businesses were featured in it) claim the author lied to paint them in a negative light, while portraying themselves as victims. The evidence seems pretty damning. They included details that couldn't possibly be true and would be easy to prove wrong. Honestly, that really pushes it far into 'this is morally wrong' to me. They could have badly affected the reputation of these people and their businesses. (Article is here, if you're interested: The Salt Path: portrayals that left a sour taste ). I do think it's different if the author says from the start that it isn't entirely factual - or even if they admit that they added things because they could no longer recall specific details. That isn't really deceptive, so I think it's fair.

That one does sound interesting!

I have managed that a couple of times but turning the page is awkward 😅. It's lovely that your kids were so into reading - how many do you have? Yours was much nicer than mine! Considering Olle was only days old at this point, she told me my table was cluttered (my boyfriend was fixing a computer on it, so it had small screwdrivers, little pots of screws etc.) and I'd need to make sure the baby didn't get hold of small parts when he was old enough. We also have a door leading from the hallway that has thick square glass panes in it; it had one pane out and on the side because (before I had the baby) one of the wooden panels at the side of that pane had come loose - we were worried about it potentially falling out, so we took the pane out to put wood glue around it, but then baby became imminent and it wasn't really a priority. Almost the first thing she said to me was 'is that supposed to be like that?' as I let her in 😅. Combined with the fact that I was in a fair amount of pain and very sleep deprived, I couldn't wait for her to leave!

@France I'm going to need you to tell me how you managed to get more reading done when you had a baby, because that is not happening for me so far 😅. At least, not in the same way! I have read the whole set of Hairy Maclary books, The Hungry Caterpillar, Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, Spot goes to the Farm and other such classics . Although he doesn't understand the words yet, Olle does either watch my face intently or stare at the pictures in the book when I read. I'm really feeling the urge to get into a good new book now though. I just checked in on the group read theme and I think I'm going to go for Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain by Amy Jeffs. I'm not sure how much of it is going to be fiction and how much will be Jeffs talking about mythology, but it seems to be split into small sections, which should make it easy to read in bursts, I think. Time has become a strange thing since having a baby. So many hours of the day are taken up by feeding. It causes a little panic of 'how am I going to get everything done!?' every so often, but at the same time part of me just wants to stare at him all day, even when he's sleeping! Luckily that's what he's doing now though, because it's time for me to work 😅

Did we not decide on this? 😅 If nothing else was put forward, I think we should go for History! It does overlap a little with our last theme, Time. I might narrow my challenge a little bit and go for mythological history. I have Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain by Amy Jeffs on my shelf, so that seems like a promising place to start! Anybody joining?

Apologies to anyone who was trying to use the forum earlier today! The downtime wasn't an issue with us, but a global server outage from our web hosts. Just to note, if you can't access the forum and you're not sure why, you can always email me at hayleyflynnbcf@gmail.com or check our twitter/X page (where we're @bookclubforum) .