27/05/16: Alain de Botton – Essays in Love (1993)

Don't be put off by the title: this does not consist of essays. It's a first-person love story, presented as fiction, which takes a philosophical look at every stage of a relationship. The author details his chance meeting with Chloe on a plane, how they become a couple, fall in love and so on. He is excellent at the tiny details of relationships and what they tell us about ourselves. Anyone who is in – or has been in – a relationship will recognise parts of their own experience here. How do you say "I love you" without resorting to cliché? What do you do if you hate the new shoes your partner loves? How much of your inner self will your partner ever really know? He gives all this near-forensic analysis without ruining what is also a page-turning love story. One to savour.

20/05/16: Penelope Lively – According to Mark (1984)

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, According to Mark follows writer Mark Lamming as he tries to research a literary biography. His research into the unsung author Gilbert Strong gets him involved with Strong's granddaughter, who runs a garden centre in Dorset, sparking off a series of events that culminate in a road trip through France.

This is another hugely intelligent, entertaining Penelope Lively novel. It's funny in places and contains gems of social observation. Particularly well drawn characters – such as Mark's controlling and super-controlled wife Diana – make this a real pleasure to read. Lively flits between perspectives, sometimes approaching a scene from an unexpected point of view and sometimes revisiting the same events to give another person's take on them. This is unusual and refreshing: so much fiction takes a more static line on whose perspective a book is from. She makes it work very freely and accessibly.

The book asks some deep questions about identity. It can also be read as a straightforward novel about human relationships. I came to this soon after the more serious Booker-winning Moon Tiger and was not disappointed.

14/05/16: Davy Rothbart – Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World (2004)

The idea is great: people send in curious things they found in the street, from love letters to random-seeming notes. All human life is here – disturbing, funny, angry, sometimes poignant. What lets it down is the design, which blurs the distinction between the found item and its presentation. The labels of who found what and where get mixed in with the items themselves. Plus, it's not always clear where one find ends and another begins, so it feels artificially "arranged" and "designed". With a slightly more logical, documentary-style layout, this could have been one of the greatest books ever. Instead, the self-consciously "fanzine-y" feel never quite lets the humanity of the found items live and breathe. That's a shame, as there is some incredible material here.

13/05/16: David Cavanagh – Good Night and Good Riddance: How Thirty-Five Years of John Peel Helped to Shape Modern Life (2015)

A wonderful book. It's such a brilliant idea that you wonder why no one else thought of it. Cavanagh listens to John Peel radio shows across the decades and writes about them. It works as a history of Peel, a history of music and a history of British life in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s.

Two minor criticisms:

1. I would have much preferred complete tracklistings rather than the incomplete lists of artists played, but perhaps the full data of every artist and song name wasn't available. Or perhaps it would have taken up too much space.

2. It's a shame that the 1989 Hillsborough show wasn't discussed. Peel's heartbroken broadcast just after the disaster was a distressing, hugely emotional show and one I will never forget. You don't expect to hear your lifelong hero so consumed by grief that he can barely speak. Maybe Cavanagh regarded it as voyeuristic or exploitative to discuss Peel at such an emotionally vulnerable moment, and he'd probably be right, but the book reads a little as though this key event never happened (even though it's later mentioned in the news snapshots that opens each mini-section).

Those points aside, this is pretty much the perfect book and one I will read again (and again). Cavanagh writes so well about the artists Peel played, the evolving musical scenes they were part of (particularly punk and its aftermath), and about Peel himself, totally capturing the spirit and wit of the man.

It's also worth pointing out that the opening chapter is the best single piece of writing anywhere about the importance and legacy of John Peel. If you have any doubts about the influence of this legendary DJ, just read these 28 pages.