Hayley

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) .

Maybe it was a seaside farm 😂

Those blackberries look so juicy! They're nowhere near ripe yet here. Well that is very unlucky 😅. Maybe you could just keep cutting it back for now, wait until you dead-head the hydrangea flowers and then see if you can find the base of the blackberry to pull it out? Maybe you could even re-plant it somewhere else (although I don't know how hard that would be, I've never grown a blackberry bush!).

I thought that too! It does seem timed for maximum damage/ attention, with the movie having recently released. I guess that could be why. I did notice a smaller article (I can't remember where now) which said that the publisher refused to comment on whether the new book would still be released (although that could just mean they didn't want to talk to the journalist). Apparently if you look at lower-rated reviews of the book, people had questioned the honesty of it before, especially when it came to the illness Moth was supposed to have.

I never got round to reading The Salt Path, but I've read so much about it since it came out that I sort of feel like I have! It sounded really lovely - a properly hopeful and inspirational story of a couple defeating the odds and the unfairness of modern life by embracing nature. It also sounded incredibly tragic. Not only did the couple lose their home (them hiding from bailiffs was in one of the extracts I read), the husband was suffering from a rare incurable illness. Now, just as a movie based on the book is out, an article in the Observer seems to prove that a lot of the story was a lie. Or, at least, a pretty significant exaggeration of the truth. I thought it was interesting to see how people reacted to the news. Most comments I saw were angry - people felt like they'd been tricked and the meaning of the story was ruined by it not being genuine. But a few people did still think they found value in it, despite it being a little sad that it wasn't real. My first thought was 'how did they get away with it?'. The Salt Path was only the first book - but nobody ever checked that the stories were actually true? But then, when it comes to someone's life experience, how could you really check that it's true? How many non-fiction books aren't actually that factual after all? And should there be room for exaggeration (or lies) if it's in the interest of portraying the message of the book better? Interested to see what others think of this. The article is here, if you haven't seen it: The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

Wow, I can’t believe it has been 19 months! I used to love Peter Rabbit. I’d like to get a Beatrix Potter set for Olle at some point. ‘Don’t let an elephant drive a digger’ and ‘you can’t throw your granny off a bus’ sound like hilariously specific bits of advice 😂.

How old is Adrian now? They definitely do understand words before they can say them. I’m testing my memory a bit here but I think it’s usually from 6 months that they can understand some words . Nobot does sound like good child humour but I don’t think I’d want to read it 4 times either 😂. Which other picture books did you get?

I’m tempted to read it purely based on this discussion but I know the historical inaccuracies would really annoy me too 😅. I do love Victorian settings - looking forward to hearing what you think of this one!

I’ve seen art like that, with woodland animals in military outfits, but I’m fairly sure it was online and not in a book! I know that’s not very helpful but at least you probably didn’t dream it 😅.

Finished Dallergut Dream Department Store by Miye Lee as my first book for Time. It’s a strange book (it doesn’t really have a plot!) but just what I needed really, it captured my imagination without needing much concentration! Appropriately, if you’ve ever listened to one of the ‘sleep stories’ from apps like headspace, the narrative style felt very similar to that - probably because it’s mainly description and in first person. It’s set in a sort of pre-dream world, which exists outside of normal time. Sleeping people go there and can purchase dreams from the multiple available dream-stores, as well as food items to help them to relax into deep dreamless sleep. We follow Penny, who just got a job at the most prestigious store. Each chapter is essentially about a different type of dream Penny comes across as a seller and why it’s necessary to the dreamer’s waking life. They all end up having a deeper meaning (about things like perseverance and, in one quite heart-breaking one, grief), which did mean that all the chapters ended with a fairly didactic tone. Worth reading if you want something very gentle but also quite fun and fantastical.

The group read is a good excuse to buy a new book 😄. How is it so far!?

Olle 😄