Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on or the music we’re loving.

Bronte is listening to The Electric Lady by Janelle Monáe

I’m crushing so hard on this album at the moment. Janelle Monáe’s music is fun and inventive and even though I know it’s too early to say this - I have a sneaking suspicion

The Electric Lady

is going to be my favourite album of the year.

Janelle continues her Metropolis series (her debut EP Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) and album The ArchAndroid (Metropolis: Suites II and III) kicked off the series) which follows the fictional tale of female android Cindi Mayweather. A messianic figure sent back in time to free the citizens of Metropolis from The Great Divide - a secret society who use time travel to suppress freedom and love - Cindi is an empowering role model for this listener.

With featured guests that include Prince (!) and tracks that slide unexpectedly but easily between genre touchstones - funk, soul, gospel, jazz, pop-punk, dreamy ballads (see Janelle’s duet with Miguel, ‘Primetime’) - The Electric Lady is unrelentingly danceable and I can’t recommend it enough. I’d also encourage you to read through Janelle’s online interviews as she presents herself as this supremely excellent mix of pop-culture and raw political angst. Please see statements such as:

Cindi is an android and I love speaking about the android because they are the new ‘other’. People are afraid of the other and I believe we’re going to live in a world with androids because of technology and the way it advances.

And:

I always carry my classic black-and-white tux and custom-made George Esquivel saddle shoes.

How could this lady not have your vote for Pop Queen?

Mark is reading A Spy in the Archives by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Sheila Fitzpatrick came to the Carlton shop last week to talk with historian Stuart McIntyre about her new book,

A Spy in the Archives

. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay and listen to the whole talk but what I did hear inspired me to buy a copy of the book.

Sheila spent a year in Moscow in 1968, researching for her doctoral thesis. While there, she was ‘outed’ by the Russian newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya as all but a spy for Western intelligence. In her memoir she presents a wry, fascinating look at Cold War Russia. Each day I can’t wait to get home to read more. If you liked Anna Funder’s Stasiland, I think you’ll feel the same way about this book.

Emily is reading Perfect by Rachel Joyce

I can’t remember what prompted me to read

Perfect

by Rachel Joyce this week but I mistakenly went into it thinking I’d already read her debut novel,

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

– I think the title alone, being so memorable, may have given me this false impression! But having polished off

Perfect

in a couple of days I will certainly need to fix that because Joyce is a fabulous writer whose measured prose and clever structure, which flips between a before and after forty years apart, had my undivided attention.

In the before parts we follow Byron, a young boy whose love for his ‘perfect’ mother Diana will have mothers everywhere wringing their hands with the heartbreak of it all – he’s a beautifully drawn character and the voice is never irritating. (Is it just me or can child voices in adult fiction sometimes grate?) In the after parts we follow Jim, who has spent much of his life in a mental institution but now has to cope on his own, ‘in the community’, such as it is, with his many troubling rituals and a past that haunts him in ways he cannot grasp, much less articulate.

This book is so engrossing it may make you ignore your children but it will prompt you to hold them very tightly afterwards. And everyone else! It’s beautiful and sad but ultimately hopeful.