Bluestockings and How Not To Shop

Bluestockings by Jane Robinson is absolutely fascinating. It is strange to read how women had to fight for any sort of education as they were not considered worth educating. There's a marvellous quote from a sermon delivered by Dean Burgon of Chichester Cathedral in 1884 'Inferior to us God made you: and our inferiors to the end of time you will remain. But you are none the worse off for that.' The author comments that apparently his audience/congregation, brave souls, dissolved into incredulous laughter. I knew Oxford did not award degrees to women until the 1920s but I had not appreciated that Cambridge was even later - 1948!

I'm about half the way through the book which is written in a very approachable style. There is a comprehensive bibliography at the end and the author spoke to many of the women still alive who were involved in the early days of women's university education which really brings the whole subject to life.

How Not To Shop by Carmen Reid is excellent chick lit with great dialogue and characters. Yes there is a happy ending but there are also problems in the background. Annie Valentine - the heroine - is having to deal with her mother's increasing vagueness and with trying to support her sister through IVF. These issues are not reslolved at the end of the book. It's a real feel good read whether or not you've read the previous books in the series.

Where Does it Hurt?

Where Does it Hurt? by Max Pemberton is not quite what might have been expected from his previous book - Trust Me I'm a Junior Doctor. This latest offering is about the time he spent working at an outreach project with the homeless, drug addicts and people generally outside 'normal' society. He meets some real characters - the chap who thinks he's God who takes up residence near the back door of a Tesco supermarket; Molly the 80 year old drug addict and former working girl; Barry the schizophrenic who saves the author's life in a sticky situation; Georgia who goes mad and traps everyone in the outreach project's building; Janice the middle class housewife addicted to over the counter painkillers. Not all homeless people are drug addicts and not all drug addicts are homeless though many of each group have mental health problems.

There are people who want to be helped and others who don't. He is warned at the start he will be lucky if 5% of his patients turn their lives around. He has to go out and find many of his patients rather than them coming to him and he gets to know some of the seedier parts of the city intimately. The main point of this book is that there is no one solution to the problems of society because everyone at the bottom of the heap got there for different reasons.

I found the book moving and uplifting though it is difficult to know what to read after it! I have started Anne Brooke's The Bones of Summer and it looks good - especially seeing Paul from someone else's point of view; Bluestockings by Jane Robinson - strange to think women were first awarded degrees only in 1882 and not until 1920 from Oxford; and Carmen Reid's How Not To Shop - chick lit, which I found just too light and fluffy after Where Does it Hurt?. A pretty diverse selection of reading here!