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Books on History and Fiction on the Price Writers Podcast Episode 41
21 Plays21 days ago
In this episode of the Price Writers Podcast, Catrin and Jeremy share their yearly book roundup. History and nonfiction to fiction that genuinely surprised them, this conversation goes well beyond a simple reading list.
They explore what reading outside technical comfort zones can offer, from perspective and empathy to slowing down and thinking differently. Along the way, they discuss standout books, unexpected favourites, and why fiction can be just as valuable for professional growth as nonfiction.
Tell us in the comments What was your standout read this year?
Listen now and subscribe for more conversations on learning, leadership, and the pricing profession.
#PriceWriters #PriceWritersPodcast #ContinuousLearning #PricingProfessionals #LeadershipDevelopment #BooksAndIdeas
Price Writers transforms pricing professionals into the most respected leaders in insurance.
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Transcript
Introduction to Pricewriters Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
No, couldn't start that again.
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Pricewriters podcast with Jeremy Keating and me, Katrin Townsend. Join us as we explore and discuss the world of insurance related books, offering our insights and recommendations.
Annual Book Roundup Overview
00:00:20
Speaker
Today we're continuing with our yearly book roundup and today we're focusing on history, miscellaneous non-fiction and our fiction picks. We don't usually about fiction on this podcast so I'm excited to share what we've read and how we felt about
Fascination with History Books
00:00:36
Speaker
it.
00:00:36
Speaker
So Jeremy let's start us off with history. Tell us why do you like reading history books? I really find history exciting and interesting. It's so wonderful to find out how people lived and what they did in the past and how that's different to today. And that's such a wonderful, adventurous story to people who've lived through often the most interesting times or very difficult times. So they might be quite ordinary people, but they, because of the circumstance of the world that they lived in, they had to do quite extraordinary things.
00:01:08
Speaker
I just find it fantastic. I like going both from the like overall big picture history all all the way down to individual stories.
Discussion on 'One Woman's War'
00:01:18
Speaker
And one of the individual stories you read was One Woman's War by Eileen Younghusband.
00:01:24
Speaker
I read this as well last year and I really enjoyed it. I found it on my grandpa's bookshelf. This is the story about really everyday women who did something really amazing in difficult circumstances. This is Eileen's own story and she was in the raft, but they worked out of command and control rooms and you often see it in films. I think that's probably one in the third Indiana Jones movies, but they've got these big rooms with them.
00:01:49
Speaker
laid out in the middle of it and it's this huge map with all the individual planes and pieces on it and you see people moving them around that's what she did and it was actually quite a hard job they had incoming report about where the enemy was and had to plot them and then keep it updated monitor where they were work at their attacking and then send that information out to the relevant people so that they could intercept the planes What I thought was amazing about this story was the remarkably low-tech nature about it. So for them to do this, they were using Scrabble tile holders to collate some of the information. And they had different tiles, different colours that they'd rounded up from various board games to denote the different types of planes, the different heights.
00:02:37
Speaker
And I think this is a really innovative use of what you've already got available. I think the other thing that shocked me was that she's talking about the group of women that she worked with. And later in life, they were all diagnosed with really severe sight issues. And a lot of them went blind in their early 60s. She was lucky enough to not have that in her early 60s, but slightly later on, allowing her to write this book. But that was a direct impact of working in these dark rooms, obviously blackouts.
00:03:08
Speaker
and I thought it was a really wonderful, like you say, story of an individual just doing her job in a really difficult situation. She writes about the other women that she worked with and how some of them also had problems adapting them to the lifestyle they were meant to lead after being integral really to the country's war effort for four five years.
00:03:31
Speaker
To then return to civilian life was quite a letdown for her. And I thought that was interesting because I often suspect there are people out there who were glad the war was finished, but found it hard to come back to their ordinary life.
00:03:44
Speaker
And it's something people don't very often talk about.
Exploring 'Colditz Story' Themes
00:03:48
Speaker
Conversely that, you also read the Cold It story by Pat Reed. Such an iconic book, obviously spinning off films, board games. This is a story about prisoners of war who were interned in Cold It.
00:04:02
Speaker
There's such great resilience in that story. What did you like about that one? Oh, i'm really I really, did really enjoy this one, actually. It is the various many ways in which they kept trying to escape.
00:04:17
Speaker
And it feels like not a single day went by when they weren't plotting or planning or carrying out some kind of escape. The spirit of, I will keep trying.
00:04:27
Speaker
And the reverse spirit of the enemy to accept that people are going to try and escape and what do they do about it? It's interesting the sense that in a way he tells it like it's almost a jolly adventure, but it does occasionally have some quite nasty consequences to what they're doing. So people do die.
00:04:47
Speaker
They are recaptured. Some quite bad things happen. I believe the commandant of Colditz was a head teacher. That's in the book, isn't it? so it's quite interesting how there is a certain sort of teachery, schooly side to this book that does come across as well.
00:05:04
Speaker
It's got a real Enid Blyton type spirit. But I think a lot of that is because a lot of people who were captors prisoners of war were higher up in the army and that was because they were coming from privileged backgrounds. So a lot of them had been to boarding school.
00:05:21
Speaker
It feels like a real spirit of adventure and mischievousness. But I love the fact that they saw that that as being their role. They actually wanted...
00:05:34
Speaker
more German camp jailers. They wanted to have higher security because that would draw resources to the camp instead of those resources being used to fight the British who were were still fighting. So they saw it was their sense of duty to keep escaping. You've read two more. Second World War history. but You went on a bit of a Second World War spree there, didn't you?
00:05:57
Speaker
I often do. a Hardly goes by where don't read a few books about the Sakharaj War. I'm actually reading one about Midway, literally at the moment, which I'm not talking about here. But it's quite normal for me to read least a few books. I think there's a lot to learn from this period in history.
WWII Books and Wartime Innovation
00:06:13
Speaker
Yeah, so I read Blackett's War, which was about an academic who was very senior in the British fight against the U-boat, how they actually tracked down the U-boats and fought against them.
00:06:26
Speaker
I also read Mosquito, which by Roland White. This is about particular type of plane, which was a largely unarmed bomber during the Second World War.
00:06:39
Speaker
So it's a very fast maneuverable bomber that could get into places quite accurately, bomb them and then leave. The story does go wider about it It's kind of everything that Mosquito was involved in in some way during the war.
00:06:54
Speaker
So it was also used to drop spies behind enemy lines. In fact, one of them was used to extract a scientist, it's Bohr, yes, from Denmark. And he later went on to be instrumental in the Manhattan Project. so an extremely important event.
00:07:16
Speaker
It talks about the plane and the lives of the people and the battles it was used in, which includes a bombing the site where Goering was going to give a speech during the Battle of Stalingrad, actually.
00:07:30
Speaker
So he began his speech and then it had to be stopped because of the loud noises of the building being bombed in the background. And this was genuinely a special operation. It was a wonderful propaganda win. They actually include testimony from some soldiers at Stalingrad whose morale genuinely was broken by this event. It's quite incredible.
00:07:49
Speaker
It's a long book and it's full of stories like this about this one particular bomber that had such a huge impact. Amazing to think as well that it's a wooden aircraft. It's like four-ply wood.
00:08:02
Speaker
The story of why it was even made is fantastic. There was so much rationing and so much of the building materials went on specific planes like the Lancaster and so on, that they had to make this one out of wood. But in fact, actually turned out to be a fantastic choice to make an out of wood.
00:08:20
Speaker
And they had pretty much the whole nation's furniture maker making various small parts of this aircraft. It's one of the most diverse manufacturing systems. So even if a particular area was bombed, they never had problems with production.
00:08:35
Speaker
My granddad actually was trained to be part of the ah RAF at the very end of the Second World War. As part of his training and his general interest in aircraft, he'd memorised what all the aircraft looked like. As he was walking around, he said, excuse me, what's that plane? I don't recognise it.
00:08:54
Speaker
And her mom was going, don't look over there. Don't look over there. do You see nothing. So yeah, my granddaughter, I'm very proud of. ah He actually was accepted to be a rear gunner.
00:09:05
Speaker
So fortunately, he never had to fight because he was at the very end of the war. So I feel like a bit of personal history to Mosquito as well. All right, so they were four books about the Second World War that Jeremy has read. Jeremy, have you read any other miscellaneous non-fiction this year that hasn't really fitted into our economics or society category that we talked about last time, that we haven't already talked about on this podcast, and that doesn't really fit into history either?
Insights from 'Ultra Processed People'
00:09:29
Speaker
Yeah, there's probably three that fit into the miscellaneous categories. I read a really good book, which is Ultra Processed People by Chris Van Tolken.
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah. Really good, though it did put me off of eating certain food and I'm still not back on ice cream. It's about the mass processing of foods, which really began actually in 70s and the 80s.
00:09:53
Speaker
How our food is not really made to sustain us and be nutritious, but it's made to be mass produced cheaply. Even the foods we would consider to be luxury quality foods, when you come down to it, the makers of it are about profiting from selling that.
00:10:11
Speaker
So again, it may not be made in the best ways. He talks about how the food is like pre-chewed. And I think there's a lot of food. Yeah, it's all just made to be really easily eaten. He also talks about the politics of the food industry as well and goes into some wonderful cases that people have fought just to get the tax changed on stuff. I think Pringles being a food that you actually prepare home was a bit a strange one. They fought a case saying that it's actually the raw ingredients because it's quite common for people to dip it in things and it should be taxed in the way that raw foods are. Very, very strange. And the...
00:10:50
Speaker
crazy amount of money that is spent by the food industry on fighting in these court cases. I thought this was a wonderful book, but it does make you think about the food industry and that a lot of the additives, if they've got names, sound like they belong in chemistry class. You probably want to think twice about eating it.
00:11:07
Speaker
I read this book last year and my biggest takeaway from it was to read out loud the ingredients of food you're about to eat. And I just still do this now. So, for example, sometimes I treat myself to pretzels, quite like a pretzel. But when I was reading this book, realized that these pretzels are ultra processed. They're not even really food. It technically is edible, but it really has no nutritional value.
00:11:32
Speaker
Well, maybe a good one if you are looking to get a bit healthier in January, maybe. isn' in the hotel Definitely. If you want to go off some of your favorite foods that you know you probably shouldn't eat for your January diet.
00:11:44
Speaker
What else did you read? I read Burn the Page by Danica Roam. It's an interesting one. She's the first transgender state level politician in the USA and it's her life experience effectively.
Danica Roam's Story in 'Burn the Page'
00:12:01
Speaker
She does go into the difficulty of being transgender and a politician and also just the amount of hatred and lies that is spread about her online. quite maliciously. There's stuff that's just patently not true.
00:12:16
Speaker
She does go into the effect it had on her family, how some of her family doesn't talk to her, but also the wonderful success she had running and how she's often turned the rubbish people say to move the debate forward. It's not a book I would recommend, but I did find it quite interesting. And your final miscellaneous nonfiction book is Grief Sucks by Brooke Carlock. And I can attest, yes, grief does suck.
00:12:43
Speaker
What else did the book tell you? Grief does suck. Brooke Carlock won an award, one of the awards ceremonies the Pricewriter also won an award at. So that's how I found out about this book. Like Hugh Catrin, I will also attest to the fact that grief sucks. So my dad passed away in 2022. So it's been three years now.
00:13:04
Speaker
And I can hardly comprehend that it's been three years now. So i felt wanted to read it. It's about how grief is terrible that you have to go on living.
00:13:15
Speaker
And she doesn't pull any punches from the fact that it is really awful that you have live your life. You can't just live in a pit. of grief.
00:13:26
Speaker
Now, Brooke's experiences are really extreme. I'm not going to list it out because it's really nasty, but she had in a very short space of time suffered several bereavements, including one that she found out about while she was at funeral.
00:13:42
Speaker
It's quite harrowing. Well, I think the exercise is actually about going through the most awful things that have happened to you and that you have effectively survived because you are still alive and have to live.
00:13:57
Speaker
On Audible, I think it's under two hours. i would actually say yes to people to to read it if they have had similar experience, but it's not an easy read.
00:14:09
Speaker
Alright, so now we get to the category that I'm most excited to talk to you about today because we barely ever talk about fiction on a podcast.
Fiction Books Discussion
00:14:17
Speaker
So let's talk about the fiction books that we read this year. We're not going to do spoilers. We're not going to tell you what happens in the book. We're just going to tell you the initial premise and how we felt about it or what attracted us to reading that book. Maybe that's, that's a green, no spoilers.
00:14:35
Speaker
Right, no spoilers. No spoilers. Okay, I read five non-fiction... I feel like your brain is just like, no, we can't talk about fiction. No, it's like, yeah.
00:14:48
Speaker
I read a bit of a theme of female writers doing everyday things and kind of the messiness, but also the joy of everyday life. I read four books on that theme. Wow.
00:15:03
Speaker
So there's I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Su. This was a book that I just saw on Kindle, a super cheap deal. And the premise is that someone works at a boring office job. She has no friends. She feels very unloved and alone. And she accidentally is granted powers to read everyone else's email.
00:15:26
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. So this is, this has hilarious consequences, of course, but it's a really touching. concern I love this book. I actually wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did.
00:15:37
Speaker
this and This book was really fun. It's really relatable in terms of the, like, passive aggressive emails that she gets, like, what she wants to say when someone is like reheating a fish curry in the microwave in the office, that kind of thing. If you do spend a lot of time in an office environment, this one just brings a lot of joy Can I say oddly enough, i actually do have power to read all the people that work at PriceWriters email.
00:16:04
Speaker
I choose not to. note to self being noted in my email similar i also read the truths and triumphs of grief atherton and this is kind of similar person who feels undervalued and lonely and ends up going outside of her comfort zone one that i was hesitant to read this year was thrown by sarah cox like sarah cox from the radio This is one of those books where it's like from the point of view of four people and it keeps switching. They're all women and they all feel similarly disconnected from each other, from their relationships, from their work.
00:16:41
Speaker
And they come together in a pottery class. I'm always bit nervous about celebrity authors because they sometimes aren't very good.
00:16:52
Speaker
That's pretty honest. I do wonder, was it like, did maybe your name help you a little bit there? Yeah, she is quite honest in the acknowledgements that it went through quite a significant editing process. So i do wonder what the initial manuscript was.
00:17:11
Speaker
But yeah, it was i say it's a fun read. I really wouldn't recommend that one. I would recommend, I hope this finds you well, but I definitely recommend the Sarah Cox one. Sorry, Sarah Cox. And then the final book I read on the theme of discontentment and loneliness was The Glitch by Leanne Slade. The audible performance was really, really good. It was actually really fun to listen to.
00:17:32
Speaker
And it's about what if I had done something differently in my 20s? And it's kind of like a sliding doors type thing, except that it doesn't keep flipping between the present and the past. I feel like with fiction that I usually quite enjoy it when I do read it But it's not something that I spend a lot of time reading. I do read a bit of historical fiction. i read two Jean Plady's Victorian series earlier this year and I quite enjoyed that. When I do read fiction, i often find it quite uplifting and I'm always pleasantly surprised how much I take away from it. I feel like Nonfiction sharpens your brain, but fiction just melts your heart, you know? who
00:18:19
Speaker
And it's really important to remember other people's experiences. I feel like I'm not very good at doing that. I'm quite an objective person or I like to think I'm an objective person.
00:18:30
Speaker
And so even just seeing the point of view of different characters within a book, I think really helps build not just empathy, but a bit more understanding how the people in your life or the people around you, you work with, whoever it is. So seeing things from other people's points of view,
00:18:48
Speaker
Yeah. And I thought the I Hope This Finds You Well book was really interesting because at the beginning of the book, she's quite set in her ways. And a lot of things I was like, I totally relate to that. Like...
00:19:01
Speaker
Oh yeah. You know, there's so much about office life that she really doesn't like. And initially I was like, oh yeah, that person's annoying. Oh my goodness. I hate it when people do that in the office. you know And you think, yeah, she's being normal and her colleagues are all being unreasonable ones.
00:19:16
Speaker
And then later in the story, things unfold and and you realize that her colleagues are just doing their best as well in some difficult circumstances. And they've all got their own perspectives on... her behaviour but also their own behaviour. I thought it was a good reminder. I really enjoy these books about doing everyday life and it being a bit hard and a bit unfulfilling but also some things that they really love and it felt very realistic to me.
00:19:43
Speaker
I read a book that's probably quite similar actually. It's Eleanor Oliphant by Gail Honeyman. This is about a woman who again works in an office and she is quite isolated or at least she's rather isolated herself from the other people that she works with and from the world around her.
00:20:06
Speaker
I would recommend this one actually. It was very good. Yeah, it was very good. And I gave it five stars. i honestly was totally gripped by it. Yeah, I was greatly gripped by it And it's an easy to read book I would recommend this one I really liked it actually And again, it does make you think about What goes on in other people's lives And to think to yourself Not that person was really hard work today But I wonder what might be going on with them That they're behaving like that Don't you hate it when your colleagues are hard work?
00:20:36
Speaker
Another book that you read Actually, I think I recommended this one Was Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson Did you enjoy it I love this one, actually.
Recommended Reads and Reflections
00:20:45
Speaker
It's a nice gentle story. It's told as letters between mostly two people.
00:20:52
Speaker
And I just found this very heartwarming story, actually a real way of thinking about people's lives and what matters to people and what's important.
00:21:05
Speaker
I recommend this book to you because I think it's absolutely beautiful. You asked for fiction picks and this was probably the best fiction book that I read in 2024. So I'm really glad that you read it this year. It's just so touching and it's got some really wonderful metaphors. One of them is that life is like when you go blackberry picking.
00:21:24
Speaker
And you go along hedge row and you're picking out all the best batteries, right? And you think by the time you've got to the end of the hedge that you've got all of the really best ones. And then you look back down the hedge and you suddenly notice from this new perspective, all of the ones that you didn't get.
00:21:43
Speaker
And they look really good as well. And it's about the feeling of acknowledging your choices, but also understanding looking forward to and anticipating what's next for you.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. Because I think part of that is that it's not over. You can you can walk back down the blackberry bushes the again. Yeah. I love that bushes. Yeah.
00:22:07
Speaker
Yeah. Hedges. Shrubbery. The blackberry shrubbery, maybe. Shrubbery. All right. and must get shrubbery. And then you read three big names. I feel like the next three fiction books that you read are very well known. would think so. So I'll start with The Seven Husbands of Ebelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I love this one.
00:22:31
Speaker
And I wasn't sure would. It's about a elderly movie star. She started during the real heyday of Hollywood.
00:22:42
Speaker
and is now an elderly woman relaying in absolutely unfiltered her actual life and how it really was through all of those years. And I felt like that sounded like a vacuous premise for a book.
00:22:57
Speaker
It was not. This was very emotionally deep, very emotionally intelligent as well. I cried twice. And yeah, it's genuinely a moving story. Big recommend on that one.
00:23:11
Speaker
So I also read Looking for Alaska. If you don't know John Green, he's a brilliant guy. absolutely love John Green. The work he does in the world as a YouTuber, as an author, as a campaigner, as all the things he does, he's a brilliant guy.
00:23:26
Speaker
It's a great book. I've never read this one before. It's his debut novel. it's his first book. And it's fantastic. The way that he writes about young people. So he was an English teacher and this book is about young people at school.
00:23:41
Speaker
And I was like, oh, you know, it's about young people at school. I'm not going to relate to that. I'm really related to this book. It is a coming of age story, but it's well worth reading even as an adult. I totally see why it's regarded so highly by people.
00:23:56
Speaker
I can also mention that it's often banned. Wow, okay. Talking of banned books, you also read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Now, most people will already be aware of this premise, having either studied it at school or having watched the amazing TV adaptation of it. So let us not go over the premise.
00:24:16
Speaker
But what I want to know is what made you pick up this book this year? Yeah, so actually want to read the sequel, which The Testaments, and I still haven't done that yet.
00:24:27
Speaker
But I first read The Handmaid's Tale in the 90s, so a long time ago. And it'd been such a long time that I was like, oh, I should really read the first book again before reading the second book.
00:24:40
Speaker
But it's quite a heavy subject matter. So after reading it, I was like, oh, I don't really fancy reading The Testaments yet. I need a bit of a break first. But I'm going to read the sequel at some point.
00:24:51
Speaker
However, the The Handmaid's Tale is brilliant and it's so relevant for now, isn't it? It makes you think about the world that we live in very carefully. and also Margaret Atwood just is a genius writer. She manages to write three time periods regularly in the book. in the same chapter, the same paragraph, and you are comfortable knowing when we're talking about the past. It's brilliant. Just the praise is extremely good, let alone the concept and the story, which are also brilliant.
00:25:24
Speaker
And you have, of course, read this one as well. Yeah, I read The Handmaid's Tale when I was a teenager. I haven't read since, but I have read The Testaments. And I did watch the TV show. Although only watched the first two or three seasons because then it got bit heavy and I stopped.
00:25:40
Speaker
Heavy? Heavy. Yeah. Can't be to start off with. I know. Oh, I know. i don't want to do spoilers for the TV show either, but that gets like progressively heavier as well. I've not watched the last season.
00:25:53
Speaker
and I'm not very good with suspense is my problem. So as soon as it gets like suspenseful, as soon as we exceeded the bounds of the book, I obviously didn't know what was going happen. And that just becomes not really like evening TV viewing for me at that point. I get too like stressy about it.
00:26:11
Speaker
I just felt it went on too long. I did. i think we could have wrapped it up a couple of seasons earlier. all right. Okay. hello Good job we don't review TV series. Okay. The last book I did want to mention was really not my usual style. Every year I try and vary my reading goals a little bit. i'll tell you more about that next time.
00:26:31
Speaker
But I picked this one up because it had a prize winning sticker on and you know at Prize Writers, we love an award winning book. So I picked this one up. It's called Held by Anne Michaels. And this is quite a short book that flips between points of view and different people in every chapter.
00:26:50
Speaker
But this is a book that is meant to be read slowly. Honestly, there were some lines, some paragraphs that I read and reread, you know, for five, 10 minutes before I even moved on to the next section.
00:27:03
Speaker
not but It's hard to understand just because it's so beautifully written and so poignant in places. It's incredible. Yeah. And that's really unusual for me. So really pleased that I read this fiction book because, like I nonfiction, usually I'll blast through at 1.5 or 1.7 speed. I know you go to two times speed sometimes. do, yeah.
00:27:25
Speaker
You know, and and we blast through being like we want to be super productive. we want to hit our reading goal. want move on to the next thing, take the knowledge and run. But the thing about reading fiction is that this book, while it doesn't have a lot of plot,
00:27:40
Speaker
It's so beautifully written that you want to linger on it and you just want to like feel all the feelings per sentence. It really helped me to slow down this year. Wow, that sounds awesome.
00:27:54
Speaker
Yeah. It's definitely one of those books that if you try and describe it to anyone, you sound like a weirdo because... Okay. yeah It's one of those prize-winning books where they give a what happened and you're like, well, nothing like really happened. But it's like, there is like, it it you get it. you It's not one if you're looking for lots of action and adventure, but really beautiful.
00:28:17
Speaker
Amazing. All right. So we're now almost at the end of the year. We're just coming into December as we record this. How many books have you read this year, Jeremy? I have read 56 books so far. There's a quite a long nonfiction book at the moment that I have been very carefully reading. So that's actually a lower number than I would have expected. i usually do more in the sixties.
00:28:39
Speaker
I probably will break over 60 by the end of the year. So we've still got five-ish weeks left. I'll be surprised if I don't get to 60, maybe 65. Nice. I'm currently on 64, but like I said, i really enjoyed reading slowly this year.
00:28:54
Speaker
Held by Anne Michaels and also some of the nonfiction as well. Having the time to really absorb some of those ideas. Cool. So that's our roundup. We're going take a little break throughout December. Let's be honest, you just want to read your new Christmas book anyway.
Podcast Conclusion and Future Plans
00:29:12
Speaker
We'll be back in January when we'll be talking about our reading goals for 2026 and also how do the two us manage to read so many books? We'll also be reviewing the 12-week year. I'm so looking forward to seeing all of you 2026.
00:29:40
Speaker
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