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I've been promising my son that I'd read this so we can bond over it. We read The Hobbit together when he was about twelve, and I thought it was a pretty good story, and he began a lifelong passion for all things Tolkien. He's 18, now, and still waiting impatiently for me to follow through on my promise, so here we are.

I read the Foreword, the Prologue, and Chapter 1. So far, so meta.

I picked this up because I'm on a mission to read more of the books other people think you should have read. I hope it improved me in some way, because, spoiler alert, it has a sad end. And you can see it coming for the whole time. And I don't know what the answer is for Lennie and George, but they didn't deserve this.

It's good. It's tense, and anxious, and you're waiting for the other shoe to drop all the way through, and then when it does, you're simultaneously shocked and horrified, but also, not remotely surprised.

It's short, though, so there's that. And next time someone sends me a list of 99 books I should have read by now, I can tick this one off.

Well, at first, I thought it was about two missing people in an exotic island community. Then I thought it was about WWI, and the way it changed everybody, forever. Then I thought it was a ghost story. But then it turned out to be about domestic violence, and the many ways in which women have been victimised over the centuries.

Sark sounds fascinating, though. It's set there, and I used to confuse it with the Scilly Isles, but actually, it's next to Guernsey.

I enjoyed this. It's set in 1933, but also in 1923, and it's about parents and children, and anger and disappointment, and frustration, and your past coming back to kick your arse.

I liked this. It's a translation of a modern Japanese fantasy, which brings feline astrologer-baristas into contact with slightly broken Japanese people, and helps them turn their lives around through self-knowledge and star charts. I don't always get on with translations, but this one was mostly not too distracting, and I enjoyed the concept. Very pleasant read.

No holiday has begun correctly, if we didn't spend the first day in Waterstones, choosing the week's reading.

I'm not sure if I was supposed to like Scarlett O'Hara. I definitely DIDN'T like her, but it's such a mammoth book, to spend all that time loathing the main character, I wondered if I was supposed to like her, at least a bit. However, she's so unspeakably selfish, never kind unless she can get something she wants by feigning kindness, and unimaginably dense about what anyone else might be thinking or feeling, never mind why. Dense, but also, utterly disinterested.

I found Rhett Butler a much more interesting character. He shares many of her quirks, but he has vastly greater understanding, compassion and potential for kindness than she does. He's a proper anti-hero - he does terrible things, but also great things, an enigma of a man, whom Scarlett would have done well to study properly, instead of skimming over him as if he was as shallow as she was.

The story of the American Civil War isn't one I'm particularly familiar with, and I'm not sure the way it was presented in this book has added much to my education. Sure, all wars are terrible, civil wars are generally worse, and being on the losing side rarely turns into a barrel of laughs. But whether the unmitigated awfulness of "Reconstruction" in Georgia was truly as bad as it's depicted, I'll never know. Certainly, Wikipedia has skimmed over some of the details, and I suspect that eventualities described as rife in the book, probably happened, but with much less frequency than is suggested.

It is a very, very racist book. It's major social commentary points are: 1) it is the station in life of black people to be enslaved, because black people are children who must be managed carefully, and not be trusted with their own agency; 2) good black people would stay with you even if they were emancipated, proving that you had clearly been a good slave owner, and that their emancipation was a mistake that they'd had the good sense to reject; 3) Yankees are more racist than Confederates, because they want to see enslaved people freed, but then don't wish to hire them for paid work; 4) The stifling, oppressive upper class society of the pre-war South is good, and to be mourned, even, in the end, by Scarlett and Rhett, who railed against it, and whom, arguably, were set on paths of misery and failure by that very system, before the war ever came.

Anyway, all credit to Margaret Mitchell, who manages to write compelling characters I somehow care about, even though they're dreadful people, and whose blatant and horrifying racism doesn't get in the way of what is, in fact, a gripping story.

Not for the faint hearted.