Books I read in December 2021

This post contains affiliate links. These links do not cost you money, but if you purchase something after clicking them I get a small fee for sending you there. Despite this the information below is an honest review, if I don't like something I will tell you!

Thanks to the Christmas break and a concerted effort to get through my extensive To Be Read list before Christmas books inevitably added to it, I managed to get through several books in December 2021.

I'm hoping that this will be a more regular series in 2022. I want to make an effort to get through more books in the coming year as my bookcases are overloaded (literally) and I really shouldn't be buying more until I get through at least half of the unread ones.

I've included links to both Hardback and Paperback versions where possible as I know some people like having Hardback copies on their bookshelves (or prefer to give them as gifts).

Invest Your Way to Financial Freedom

I'll be explaining my motivations for reading this book a little more later this month, but to start with I found this book a really interesting and very quick read.

It was highly recommended as a "beginners" book on the FIREUK subReddit. I've been reading posts on there for around a year now and while they're very helpful and interesting sometimes you need to actually read the background before taking your first steps.

The text in this book is very well spaced and the chapters are very short, which was why it was so easy for me to get through it. Despite picking it up and putting it back down repeatedly, I finished it in under two days. By the time I was done I was simultaneously really excited to open an S&S ISA and start investing, and also feeling a bit demotivated and worried that I was "too late" to start.

Most of the information does call upon people in their 20s and early 30s (I'm 36). But it was still good to get a proper insight into how investing works and why it's so important as a savings strategy.

Paperback available at Waterstones.

Our Uninvited Guests

This book looks at some of the stately homes around the UK that were requisitioned or loaned out during the Second World War.

In the introduction the author stated that this was a book of two halves. The first was about homes used for domestic purposes, so Brocket Hall became a maternity hospital, while Blenheim Palace housed a private school whose own buildings were requisitioned by the Civil Service. The second half looked at some of the properties that were used for training Special Operations Executive agents.

While it was a good read, I found that I preferred the first half over the second. This surprised me somewhat as I do find SOE interesting and my husband has a whole bookcase of books from his own research into it. But I think some of the information about the houses and their owners was lost or possibly even ignored in favour of more content about SOE.

Given the number of buildings that were taken over I wonder if perhaps some of the chapters could have been a little shorter so an extra property or two could have been included. But I did appreciate the final chapter which looked at what happened when the war was over. Quite a few houses had to be demolished as they hadn't been looked after while occupied by the armed forces or Civil Service, and several others were handed over to the National Trust.

The subject is fascinating, but you do need to go into this book expecting to come out learning more about SOE than you might otherwise expect!

Paperback and hardback available at Waterstones.

Bessie Blount

This was actually a re-read but it's been years since I read it so I decided to give it another try.

Many people have heard of Bessie Blount as she was the mistress of the Tudor king Henry VIII and gave him an illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy.

Unfortunately there aren't a lot of records about Bessie and her life, especially before she joined the Tudor court. As a woman from the gentry but not part of the upper echelons of society there are few references to her and a lot has to be guessed at in the context of other, broader sources.

While she's a fascinating character it feels like the book requires a lot of padding in order to make it into a full book. There is a lot about her wider family, for example, and while some members of her extended kin were helpful for her rise at court some of it felt unnecessary.

I did enjoy a lot of the information about the Tudor court, for example the chapter on Court Pageantry, as it covered the more general aspects of royal Tudor life that I hadn't read much about before. But as I was reading a book about Bessie I would preferred more about her. If there isn't enough about her as a person and her experiences then perhaps she would have been better off as a broader work on English royal mistresses.

This is nothing against the author, as I've read other works by Elizabeth Norton and enjoyed them. I just think that in this case she picked the wrong person to dedicate an entire book to.

Paperback and hardback available at Waterstones.