This is London, by Ben Judah

I liked this book very much, I think it's an excellent reportage about the immigrants in London today. It starts in the Victoria Coach Station and ends at a Muslim cemetery, and it gives portraits of several of the different immigrants that compose the 55% majority of non-white British inhabitants of London at the present time. It focuses mostly on the poor people, the "invisible" ones, and I would have liked to see something more about the Muslims that are so often referred but have much less space than the Africans or the East Europeans. The writing is sometimes a little tiresome, but all in all it's a great book.

You Are Not So Smart, by David McRaney

This is a very interesting book, about human psychology, how our mind constructs our memories and judgements based on our emotional background and experience. I was aware of most of it, so it didn't change my conceptions about memory and decision-making, but I enjoyed it very much. It's an easy and engaging reading, funny and very informative.

Hanging On, Diaries 1960-1963, by Frances Partridge

I was not expecting much of this volume of Frances Partridge's diaries, convinced they would get less interesting as they became farther from the golden age of Bloomsbury - since Frances Partridge's claim to fame is mostly as a witness and friend of the Bloomsbury set. I was pleasantly surprised - this volume deals with the loss and mourning of her husband and her happy marital life, and for the first time Frances Partridge becomes the main character, now it's her personality, herself that matters, interesting in her own right. The book depicts the way she coped with her loss and how she endured the mourning period and was able to build herself a new life, not as happy as the one she had lived before, but satisfactory and fulfilling enough, which I think it was quite an achievement. From her diaries, Frances Partridge doesn't strikes us as a particularly intelligent person, nor especially witty or creative; her main quality is warmth, a keen aptitude to enjoy life and friendships, a kindness that must have made her dear to the people who knew her, which it seems to me a wonderful gift in itself.

And so the narration of this woman's life journey, sprinkled here and there with some Bloomsbury anecdotes, and also stories about the post-Bloomsbury British literary and cultural set, makes for a very interesting and uplifting reading.