wandering_star's ninth year in Club Read

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wandering_star's ninth year in Club Read

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1wandering_star
Modifié : Jan 2, 2017, 4:06 am

Hello Club Read! It's that time where we reflect on the year gone by and look ahead to our hopes and aspirations for the next one. For me, I have realised that every year I come up with the same personal goals, which on the good side means I am consistent, if not very effective at following through. So this year I have decided to think of my resolutions as being all about making sure I make the best use of my time. In reading terms, that will mean making more time for reading and also making sure I get to more of the many non-fiction books which make up many crags of Mt TBR.

My best books of last year were Alice Munro's The View From Castle Rock and two Ali Smiths, There But For The and How To Be Both. I also rated Ian McGuire's The North Water although I can't remember much of it now. Top genre reads were the first three in the Fiona Griffiths series of crime novels by Harry Bingham, and A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.

Early reads from last year which have still made an impression on me at the end of the year are David Malouf's Remembering Babylon and Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus - certainly the book which made me cry the most last year. Shirley Hazzard of course was one of the many fine artists who passed away in 2016.

Other bests of the year?
Best film: Kubo and the Two Strings (although right at the end of the year I saw Arrival, which might match it - I would like to see it again)
Best long-read article: The Really Big One in the New Yorker, a fascinating read about how bringing different disciplines together led to significant new understanding of a historical earthquake and the risk of a future one
Best music: Chaleur Humaine by Christine and the Queens

And here's something I stole from Nickelini last year - the places where books took me in 2016:

England, 1950s-1980s - Scotland, 1930s-40s - Australia, 1860s - interstellar warfare, 1990s-3143 - USA, 2010s - Chicago, 1930s (alternate universe, with magic) - a lifeboat on the high seas, 1914 - British East Africa 1899 & Rwanda 2000 - California, contemporary - Ireland & UK, 1782 - London, 1970s - England & Germany 1940 & 1950 - San Francisco, 2000s - NY state, contemporary - France (but also everywhere a teenager is not reading), contemporary - short stories: New Zealand, 1852; London, 1970s; France, 1882; Midlands and Scottish islands, 1970s; Istanbul, ?C19th?; New Zealand, late C19th; UK, 1970s; Istanbul, 1880; Central America, 1970s; UK, ?C18th? (The Means Of Escape) - Wales, Shropshire and London, 1979-80 - C15 Italy and modern London - England, 1940 - sea voyage from France, Americas, Asia, 1780s - Vikings in Scandinavia, Britain, France (x2) - Colombia 1970s-contemporary - “Zone X”, unspecified future time - Vikings in Britain - Northern Ireland 1960s and 1990s - Louisiana 1920s - Iceland 1000s - UK, contemporary - Australia early C19 - Cardiff, contemporary - Roman Empire, first century BC - Cornwall, 1919 (and earlier, and WWI in France) - future dystopian USA - future, antarctica and the afterlife - future, multiple (machine of death) - London and Wales, WWII and contemporary - Australia (from mid-C20 to contemporary) and the Burma railroad during WWII - C19 France - WWII UK and Norse myth - US, contemporary - Greenwich (London), 2009-2010 - UK, alternate reality, C20 - US and China (mostly - episodes in India and Middle East), contemporary - UK and North Atlantic, C19 - San Francisco, near future - Glasgow, contemporary - UK, 1976 - Paris, 1930s - Scotland, contemporary - China, 2008-2013 - Scotland, C19 - Scotland & North America, C18-C20 - Netherlands, contemporary - Huddersfield, contemporary - Louisiana & Texas, 1980s and contemporary - Spain and Netherlands, 1960s-contemporary - Wales, contemporary - Iran, 2011 - New Jersey, 1914 - Stockholm, contemporary - UK and fantasy versions of, 1960s-contemporary - US, alternative C19th - London, contemporary - anywhere that you read - Wales, contemporary - Pacific Ocean, C18 and contemporary - Bologna, contemporary - abstract (essays on art and culture) - US, contemporary - Lancashire, 1970s - Mediterranean/Atlantic, Napoleonic wars - deep space, alternate far future - Japan, 1960s - abstract (essays)

I look forward to sharing my reading with you again this year!

2rachbxl
Jan 2, 2017, 5:10 am

And I look forward to reading about it! Happy New Year.

3NanaCC
Jan 2, 2017, 11:08 am

Happy New Year. I took two of my granddaughters to see Kubo and thought it was wonderful. It's nice to see it as a favorite.

4arubabookwoman
Jan 2, 2017, 7:06 pm

I am looking forward to following your thread in Club Read in 2017. Last year I was mostly a lurker, but this year my goal is to comment once in a while.

5valkyrdeath
Jan 3, 2017, 6:01 pm

Looking forward to following your thread again this year! The one Ali Smith book I've read last year was in my list of favourites too, and those two you read are the ones I have plans to read, hopefully this year.

6DieFledermaus
Jan 7, 2017, 6:14 pm

Sounds like a lot of interesting literary journeys in 2016!

7SassyLassy
Jan 8, 2017, 3:11 pm

I always discover new books from you, so looking forward to more this year.

8wandering_star
Jan 11, 2017, 9:54 am

Thank you all - I'm looking forward to the discussion on the thread.

The first book I finished this year was Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus. As this book begins, a group of nuns are journeying up into the Himalayas, on their way to establish an outpost of their convent in a decaying palace which was previously the local ruler's harem. More recently it had served as a school run by Christian monks, but the monks left after five months, and no-one really knows why.

The sisters do their best to turn the Palace into a hard-working, devout building, but something about the place gets under their skin - in particular, the combination of the breathtaking, relentless beauty of the mountains, combined with the fierce wind. Gradually each of the sisters, in her own way, becomes distracted from her religious duties and devotions.

Two men, too, unsettle the harmony. The first is the handsome son of the local ruler, who comes to study at the convent. His heady perfume gives the book its name. The second is the louche Mr Dean, the local agent and the only other Westerner in the village. The nuns are initially horrified by his ready adaptation to the local culture - as well as his lack of deference - but we come to see in him a greater compassion than in these sisters whose lives are supposed to embody loving care.

There is an extremely famous 1947 film of this book, which I have seen a couple of times, although not recently. I have extremely vivid memories of a few scenes and even still images, bright blue skies and crazed eyes in distorted faces. Also, it is an expressionistic film, where the book is more low-key and realistic. Unfortunately as I read I kept wondering how what I was readng fitted into my vague memories of the film, which I think undermined my appreciation of the book. I would like both to watch the film again, and to re-read the book, to make sure I am getting the most from both.

She had driven herself and the others hard these last few days; she had tightened and narrowed her very thoughts, and worked and kept vigil at night, but still she found time to think. She had stopped her walks on the terrace and the hour she spent at her embroidery frame; if she work in the night she got up at once and went to the chapel, and still she found time to think. In the middle of her work, in the middle of giving her orders, at her desk or at meals, even in chapel, her thoughts would catch her unawares. She would find she had been sitting for half an hour with her pen in her hand, or that Sister Briony was waiting for her to speak, or the young General was looking at her, patiently waiting for her to finish her sentence.

9rachbxl
Jan 11, 2017, 10:49 am

Ah, Rumer Godden - not someone who would ever spring to mind if I were to be asked for my favourite authors, and yet she wrote several books that have been really important to me at different times in my life. I just looked up a list of her works, and I saw titles there that it gave me butterflies to think of, so many years on - The Dolls' House and The Diddakoi from childhood, and then I don't know how many times I read The Greengage Summer as a teenager. As an adult I've only read one of her books, Kingfishers Catch Fire, but I liked it a lot - quiet, understated and beautiful. I shall have to look for some more; thanks for the reminder.

10AnnieMod
Jan 11, 2017, 11:13 am

I love Rumer Godden. I do not remember about her often enough and I still need to get around and read more from her but I really like her style... It's probably a good idea to go read more from her. Good review in >8 wandering_star: and thanks for reminding me about her.

11wandering_star
Jan 12, 2017, 9:36 am

I don't think I read much Rumer Godden when I was younger, although I definitely had seen her books on the library shelves. I think if you enjoyed Kingfishers Catch Fire you would also like this. I have one more of her books on my TBR, a memoir of growing up in India which she wrote with her brother.

12wandering_star
Jan 12, 2017, 9:37 am

2. Herding Hemingway's Cats: Understanding how our genes work by Kat Arney

The title of this book comes from the fact that Hemingway is supposed to have been particularly fond of ‘polydactyl’ (six-toed) cats; some humans with a similar genetic mutation have a sixth finger.

We are all used to eye-catching headlines about ‘scientists discovering the new gene for’… - this book tries to explain to the layperson what “the gene for” something actually means. Arney does a great job of explaining very complicated ideas in a conversational way, helped by the fact that the information is often conveyed through an interview with a scientist. It reminded me a bit of the way that the Radiolab podcast used to use the conversation between the hosts to make the science they were reporting on more accessible. Arney’s clear passion for the subject also helps.

Despite this, some of the ideas are difficult to grasp. But I learnt a lot from this book. Unsurprisingly, the way that ‘genes’ determine characteristics is much more complex than portrayed in those media reports. But I also learnt just how much more there is for us to understand. To start with, what is a gene? Really this refers to our DNA, but so much of our ‘genetic’ information is not coded by DNA but by other things, which “switch on” the genes, determine how active they are going to be, chop them up and reassemble them, and sometimes re-transmit them wrong. And their activity can, at least sometimes, be affected by external factors (such as how much we are getting to eat). It turns out that there is a lot of redundancy in our genetic inheritance:

More than 2 metres (6½ feet) of DNA is packed into almost every cell of your body, crammed with thousands of genes that need to be turned on and off at the right time and in the right place. Rather than a neatly bound set of recipes, the genome as we understand it today is a dynamic, writhing library, buzzing with biological readers and writers. The text is constantly copied, tweaked and occasionally even torn up altogether. Every volume bulges with annotations and sticky notes, and there are thousands of pages that just seem to be complete nonsense.

In addition, there is still very limited scientific understanding of how some key elements even work, with some basic assumptions turning out not to be true - or at least, not true all of the time.

Along the way I came to understand why it is so easy for genes to produce random mutations (and therefore, evolution!) and to boggle at the way that the same cells become skin, or part of the liver, or the bones, tendons and muscles of the hand. (We learn, for example, about a gene nicknamed ‘Sonic Hedgehog’: Although Sonic Hedgehog is active in various places at different times as an embryo grows in the womb – in the limbs, the face, the precursors of teeth, brain cells and more – it always does the same job: helping cells make decisions about what to become. Will they be muscle or skin? Tooth or jaw? Little finger or thumb? … Sonic Hedgehog is important for directing the growth of fingers and toes in the right place at the right time… the normal control region turns on Sonic Hedgehog in a small area of the lower part of the limb bud as an embryo grows in the womb. This somehow communicates to the developing hand or paw to make a certain number of fingers in the right order, thumb to pinky.)

Somehow, this book left me both feeling better informed and at the same time even more awed by the incredible unlikeliness of life.

13wandering_star
Jan 12, 2017, 9:39 am

Arney's frustration with media mispresentation of scientific research reminded me of this classic cartoon:


14wandering_star
Jan 12, 2017, 9:52 am

3. A Letter of Mary by Laurie R King

I was back in the UK for Christmas, and for some reason this time around my jetlag has been unusually bad, with the result that last weekend I was well behind on my sleep and dropping off every few hours (except, of course, when it was actually night...)

I decided to treat myself like an invalid, tucking myself up in bed with a comfortable detective story. This is the third in the Sherlock Holmes & Mary Russell series, and fitted the bill perfectly.

An elderly acquaintance of Mary's is killed just hours after giving Mary one of her archaeological finds, a scrap of parchment which appears to be a letter from Mary Magdalene in which she describes herself as one of Jesus' apostles. But is the murder because of this fragment, because of modern politics (she had been running a dig in Palestine), because of anti-suffragist feeling or perhaps something more personal and close to home?

It's not the most believable crime novel I have read, but that's not what I was looking for. I like the character of Mary, I like her relationship with Sherlock, and I enjoyed the cameo appearance of Lord Peter Wimsey - I am hoping that he will make a fuller appearance in a future volume of this charming series.

15wandering_star
Modifié : Jan 12, 2017, 9:56 am

Incidentally, on the subject of Holmesiana, I thought this was an excellent analysis of why the first episode of the latest series of BBC Sherlock fell a bit flat for me.

16RidgewayGirl
Jan 12, 2017, 10:25 am

Regarding Sherlock, I think that it's been so long since the last series that I needed an episode to reenter that world. With the second episode, I was happily enjoying all the delicious melodrama. Sherlock does heightened emotions barely expressed so well. Also, Una Stubbs is always wonderful and I'm happy any time Rupert Graves gets more than a few seconds air time.

Personally, I'd love a spin-off of Lestrad trying very hard, but failing to solve, various crimes.

17kidzdoc
Jan 13, 2017, 7:15 am

Nice review of Herding Hemingway's Cats. I won't read it, as I have a strong background in molecular biology in undergraduate and graduate school, but I do want to read The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee later this year.

I love that cartoon!

18dchaikin
Jan 13, 2017, 12:38 pm

Great cartoon. And great review of Herding Hemingway's Cats. I listened to Mukherjee's The Gene last year but I didn't love it. I was a little bored even. Seems like Arney inspired you a bit.

19wandering_star
Jan 16, 2017, 9:28 am

>16 RidgewayGirl: teehee! I think all of that is true. Although I am rather sorry for Lestrade who can't be as much of a plodder as he is painted.

>17 kidzdoc:, >18 dchaikin: glad you like the cartoon :-) my partner is a research scientist and it is on the pinboard in his office.

20wandering_star
Jan 16, 2017, 10:07 am

4. Mr Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt

This modern Gothic tells the interlocking stories of two women - Ruth, a troubled teenager, and Cora, her niece.

Ruth lives in a foster home with a number of other damaged youngsters (reminding me a bit of Geek Love), under the tyrannical rule of a cult leader who fosters them for the money it gets him from the state. Her closest friend there is Nat, a boy who seems to be able to commune with the dead, and whose abilities draw the attention of the mysterious Mr Bell, who sees a(nother) money-making opportunity in these kids.

Some fourteen years later, Cora is working a dead-end job in insurance, and falling out with her useless boyfriend Lord. One evening, Ruth turns up at her house. She can't, or won't, speak, but she conveys to Cora that she wants her to leave home and come with her. Cora has idolised Ruth since their single meeting many years previously, and so, with little to stay at home for, she joins Ruth and they start to walk across New York state.

As the book progresses, the two time periods start to echo. Both stories are full of con tricks and religious cults, mothers who have lost their children, ghost towns of foreclosed or deserted houses.

For me, though, the road trip ended up leading nowhere. There are some interesting ideas in the book - I particularly liked the young woman campaigning for the rights of the dead - "a totally unrepresented population" she points out, "I'd start arguments with my classmates and professors as to why they always privilege being over non-being. Why they behave as if the only words people hear are the spoken ones". But it didn't quite hang together - I felt that the book was a collection of interesting ideas, ornate prose, and carefully planned structure rather than having real emotional depth or connection.

"Are you an artist?"
"I walk. A lot."
She misunderstands. "A walking artist. OK. I like that. That's good. Walking can definitely create things. Thoughts. Footsteps. Lines that intersect. Lines that connect us historically. Ley lines, right? You could connect every place in New York where daisies grow. Or the places where girls named Lisa live. Or sites where meteorites crash-landed. Right? What would that map look like and how would you read it? What message is that map trying to tell us?"
I like the idea that Ruth and I are walking artists, as if our tracks leave colour behind. Blue and green. Orange painting the map we make each day. But if everybody in the world were a walking artist, the land would be so jammed with traces of everyone who ever came before. Haunted, polluted.

21Nickelini
Jan 17, 2017, 11:49 pm

Adding that gene book to my wishlist. You often have unusual and interesting non-fiction books.

22wandering_star
Jan 18, 2017, 8:28 am

>21 Nickelini: Thank you! I feel like I don't read enough non-fiction, but perhaps as a result I tend to read only the things which really grip me, and then give them enthusiastic reviews!

23wandering_star
Modifié : Jan 18, 2017, 8:49 am

5. Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

New York, 1746. A young man steps off the transatlantic boat, keen to explore this strange new city. But the city is just as keen to explore his intentions, because political tensions are high between the governor and city assembly, and there are things about his behaviour which seem almost designed to arouse suspicion.

For example, he arrives with a note drawn on a London bank for one thousand pounds, a mind-boggling sum of money, and refuses to tell anyone what he plans to do with it. Almost more suspiciously, he does not react angrily when the banking house he tries to draw the money from hint that they think he is a forger or a thief. Because surely, any honest man would want to defend his reputation? (The importance of reputation and surface stories is a key theme of the book).

On the other hand, if he is not a cheat, he is a young man with a lot of cash to spend, and perhaps this is a good opportunity to introduce him to the daughter of the house, if she can be persuaded to sweeten the bad temper which has made her unmarriageable in the city.

It will take sixty days for the money to be gathered together, and so our young hero has plenty of time to explore the city - to make friends and enemies, to baffle and irritate the city establishment, and to be raised high and brought low.

It's clear that a lot of historical research has taken place into early New York - at that time, barely even a city with a population of 7000 people. But it is a terrific example of how to weave that research seamlessly into the story, from the first scene where Smith - having almost been thrown out of the counting-house as a rogue - produces four golden guineas, his spending-money until the rest comes through, and asks to change it into smaller currency. He is given handfuls of silver - Mexican, Danish, North African, Portuguese - and even more strangely to him, all manner of paper money issued by the different states.

Spufford was apparently inspired by the eighteenth-century novel, which did not yet need to have a unity of tone. Smith is not a picaresque hero because he stays in the city for the whole book, but his rollicking adventures do give us plenty of variety.

I loved this book. I liked the character of Smith - enthusiastic, probably too cocky for his own good but fundamentally decent. I found the story thrilling and funny and interesting and I really enjoyed the writing, which echoed Smith's own personality in its enthusiasm and its rambling delight in everything.

(It may not suit a reader who prefers that the story get on with it - this description of a bonfire is a pretty good taster of the style: A faint contour formed in the air ahead of it, black on black; then, bigger than Smith could have imagined, a mountain where no mountain had been on the grass of the Common, all formed of wood and flammable rubbish, with flanks of discarded wardrobes and smashed cabinets, and ravines in which broken bedsteads gaped, an alp composed seemingly of every old thing, every burnable thing, every imperfect cumbrance of past time the city of New-York could scour from its attics, its middens, its cellars.)

I'm pretty certain this will be one of my top ten books of the year. If it isn't, then this will be the best reading year I have had for some time!

24Linda92007
Jan 18, 2017, 4:30 pm

>23 wandering_star: I'm intrigued by your review and enthusiasm for Golden Hill. I'm not familiar with the book and it's always great to discover a new author, especially one whose works cover a variety of genres and topics. I'm curious about The Antarctic: An Anthology.

25kidzdoc
Jan 18, 2017, 6:37 pm

Great review of Golden Hill!

26wandering_star
Jan 19, 2017, 10:52 am

>24 Linda92007: It turns out I have quite a lot of his books on Mt TBR: Red Plenty, I May Be Some Time and The Antarctic, along with its sister volume The Arctic. Hmm. I did almost start reading Red Plenty last month! I have read The Child That Books Built and enjoyed it a lot.

>25 kidzdoc: It was such a great reading experience - just delightful.

27wandering_star
Modifié : Jan 19, 2017, 11:46 am

6. River of Ink by Paul M M Cooper

I was intrigued to hear about this book because of its unusual setting, thirteenth-century Sri Lanka. In 1215 the Kingdom of Polonnaruwa was conquered by the Indian prince Kalinga Magha. River of Ink imagines that the court poet is asked by the new king to translate an epic Sanskrit poem into Tamil, as part of his mission to 'civilise' the people he now rules and help them understand that they have been conquered by a superior people. The king is brutal and murderous, but the terrified poet finds ways to sneak in subtle satire and criticism into his version. Magha loves the translation, though, and interprets it as justifying his harsh rule.

What worked about the book?

I lived in Sri Lanka for three years and visited the spectacular ruins of Polonnaruwa several times, so I enjoyed the reimagining.





The author is a Brit who taught English in Sri Lanka for a time, and he clearly immersed himself in Sri Lankan history and culture. There are several lovely quotations from classic Tamil poetry, and the poet's voice is well-imagined - he uses many similes, which all feel very realistic for his time and place: "Perhaps in ceasing my mockery of the King I had merely drawn attention to it, the way one sometimes only notices the chirp of the cicadas when they stop." "{The crowd} hushed gradually, the noise dying in a pattern like the fall of raindrops."

The language of the book manages to be poetic without being flowery or orientalist. I think he achieves this through simple, specific details, vivid to our senses: ...the soldiers' backs steamed in the heat. Unable to watch, I looked down at the dust and loam beneath my feet, at a single stamped okra finger and a pink rambutan skin, a blood-spatter of spat betel juice. There are such enormous termites in Polonnaruwa, so large you can see the dust on their backs. I remember following their lines to where the mounds rose between the buildings, homes for cobras, monuments to their own futility.

Unfortunately, there were also some key things which didn't work for me.

One was the pace. For a book about destruction and conquest, love and epic poetry, not much happens! Or at least, the ratio of things happening to things not-happening is too high.

Partly this is the fault of the narrator, who spends a lot of time being frightened and worried at great length. It is possible to show that your hero is indecisive and cowardly without needing to dither on every page. I hate ditheriness in real life and it turns out, in literature too (sorry, Hamlet).

And finally, the romance at the centre of the book. I was not invested in this, perhaps because of my annoyance with the narrator, or perhaps because the description of the relationship was not as vivid as the description of their physical environment or the terror induced by the brutal King. This reduced the stakes.

So for me, only a middle-ranking read, although I would have liked it much more if it had been shorter.

28wandering_star
Jan 19, 2017, 11:44 am

Here are some of the lines of Tamil poetry, all from an anthology called Kuruntokai:

As part of their work,
farmers leave water lilies piled high by the field edge.
And yet the water lilies do not say
"These men are so cruel;
we will go to another field to live."
Again they bloom
in the field from which they were weeded.

+++

In the darkest depths of night,
when all have surrendered
to sleep's sweet embrace,
their slander coming to an end,
and the broad earth itself slumbers,
bearing me malice no longer,
I alone can find no rest.

+++

Torrents rush down from the mountains,
sweeping along with them
the flowers that lie upon the cool fragrant pools,
left by the previous rains.
Yet he has not come, my friend.
He may have forgotten us,
but how can we forget him,
he who gave us his word, before he left,
that he would return
before the dark clouds of the rainy season,
gathering in the evening,
brought thunder's welcome roll?

29wandering_star
Jan 19, 2017, 11:56 am

I've just read the Wikipedia page for the Shishupala Vadha, the epic poem which Magha has the poet translate. It sounds incredible - there is a whole section devoted to the poem's linguistic ingenuity, including that "the entire 16th canto, a message from Shishupala to Krishna, is intentionally ambiguous and can be interpreted in two ways — a humble apology in courteous words, or a declaration of war"; and the description of passages of 'decorative writing', eg each line uses only one consonant (this line in the original is all one consonant: "Sri Krishna, the giver of every boon, the scourge of the evil-minded, the purifier, the one whose arms can annihilate the wicked who cause suffering to others, shot his pain-causing arrow at the enemy"), or incredibly long palindromes. It makes me want to go and learn Sanskrit!

30DieFledermaus
Jan 20, 2017, 6:25 pm

>27 wandering_star: - Sounds like an interesting premise - too bad the execution didn't work. Do you have any recommendation for Sri Lankan literature/books about Sri Lanka?

31valkyrdeath
Jan 20, 2017, 6:46 pm

>29 wandering_star: That link was fascinating! I'm always impressed when people can use language in ways like that. I wouldn't know where to start. River of Ink sounds a really interesting concept, though perhaps not quite well enough done for me to want to read it judging by your review.

32Nickelini
Modifié : Jan 20, 2017, 7:47 pm

>30 DieFledermaus: Do you have any recommendation for Sri Lankan literature/books about Sri Lanka?

Oh, oh! (waving hand wildly in the air) Can I jump in? I've read a lot about Sri Lanka, although I haven't been so lucky as to have visited.

My 5-star Sri Lankan novels are Mosquito, by Roma Tearne and Anil's Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje. I also enjoyed both authors' other Sri Lankan books, along with Homesick by Roshi Fernando, Funny Boy, by Shyam Selvadurai, and Reef, by Romesh Gunesekera. The last one was nominated for the Booker Prize, and although I can see why many readers didn't like it because not a lot happened, I call it a "quiet novel" and thought it was rather beautiful.

The memoir Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala was moving (she was the only member of her family--husband, children, parents-- to survive the tsunami). If you want to learn more about the civil war, The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers was very interesting.

33wandering_star
Modifié : Jan 21, 2017, 5:45 am

>30 DieFledermaus: >32 Nickelini: Joyce, I thought of you when I was reading River of Ink! I think with your interest in reading about Sri Lanka you would enjoy it. There were some bits about the culture (food etc) which were definitely inspired by present-day Sri Lanka. For example, he mentions a fruit which is so sour that everything you taste afterwards, even plain water, is really sweet - I had completely forgotten about eating this fruit.

Good recommendations above. Funny Boy is where I would start - it's a series of interlinked short stories and a coming-of-age story but would also give you a good introduction to the history of ethnic conflict. The two books which had the strongest spirit of place in terms of the Sri Lanka that I experienced are The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka (also published as Chinaman) and Ondaatje's family memoir Running In The Family.

Tearne, Ondaatje, Selvadurai and Gunesekera were all born in Sri Lanka and now live elsewhere. Michael Ondaatje used his Booker Prize money to establish the Gratiaen Prize (Gratiaen is his mother's maiden name) for books written in English by resident Sri Lankans. Unfortunately many of these books are not published/available outside Sri Lanka.

I have just had a look at the list and discovered that The Legend of Pradeep Mathew was the winner in 2008. The Road from Elephant Pass also seems to be available on Amazon.

34baswood
Jan 21, 2017, 6:21 am

Enjoyed your excellent reviews of The Golden Hill and River of Ink and especially liked your extracts from Kuruntokal.

I spent a month in Sri Lanka way back in the 1970's and I am familiar with the ruins at Polonnaruwa and so I loved the pictures. A legacy from my stay in Sri Lanka is that I can eat green chillies whole.

35dchaikin
Modifié : Jan 21, 2017, 10:11 am

A lot to catch up with here.

>20 wandering_star: interesting and I love the quote

>23 wandering_star: Wow. Author and title (Golden Hill) all new to me. Reading the description I expected you to explain why it didn't work. No easy thing to pull that off. Noting, for sure.

>27 wandering_star: awesome review of River of Ink And fascinating follow up info. The poems in >28 wandering_star: are moving, even in translation.

36wandering_star
Fév 11, 2017, 9:12 pm

>34 baswood: Impressive! My chilli tolerance definitely went way up but after I left it declined again.

37wandering_star
Modifié : Fév 11, 2017, 9:30 pm

7. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

It's 20 years after a virulent pandemic killed the majority of humankind and changed our way of life forever. An acting troupe travels between towns, performing Shakespeare - some of the few people who remain on the move, rather than staying in the location where they have found some sort of safety. Their story is interwoven with vignettes from the last years before the end of the world as we know it - telling the stories of a group centered around a famous Shakespearean actor, perhaps the last person to die of natural causes before the pandemic struck in the US.

I liked the fact that this is not a stereotypical post-apocalyptic dystopia, particularly regarding the threat against women - 20 years on, some semblance of civilisation has returned, and many of the women in the troupe are well able to defend themselves. There are also clever touches in the way that a few objects - a glass paperweight, a comic book - move between the people in the story over time. These and other puzzles keep the reader trying to fit the story together, although the answers always come through in a few pages.

The overarching theme of the book is about worlds that we miss, whether that's your relationship with a childhood friend that you have grown apart from, a former love, or a whole world that has been taken away from you by apocalypse. And the corollary - appreciating what you have when you have it, paying attention to daily life and the people around you, not wasting it whether that's by going through life looking at your smartphone or not screwing around on the person you love.

I enjoyed reading this but I don't think the writer really knew how to end it - some elements of the story get tied up abruptly and too neatly before we reach the final climax of the story.

She'd been thinking lately about writing her own play, seeing if she could convince Gil to stage a performance with the Symphony actors. She wanted to write something modern, something that addressed this age in which they'd somehow landed. Survival might be insufficient, she'd told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare. He'd trotted out his usual arguments, about how Shakespeare had lived in a plague-ridden society with no electricity and so did the Travelling Symphony. But look, she'd told him, the difference was that they'd seen electricity, they'd seen everything, they'd watched a civilization collapse, and Shakespeare hadn't. In Shakespeare's time the wonders of technology were still ahead, not behind them, and far less had been lost.

38wandering_star
Fév 11, 2017, 10:00 pm

8. The Maker of Heavenly Trousers by Daniele Varè

Daniele Varè was an Italian diplomat who lived in China in the early decades of the last century. He was first posted there in 1912, a politically turbulent time with the end of the Qing dynasty and the beginnings of the warlord era, returning as Ambassador from 1927-1931.

The Maker of Heavenly Trousers is a whimsical story whose narrator is a Westerner living in Peking, a devotee of Chinese culture, much like Varè himself. Its setting is really the foreign community in Peking, rather than China itself - but what a fascinating time to glimpse! The first half of the novel is a story of day-to-day life in the narrator's neighbourhood - his own household, and two neighbours, a Russian family and an Italian and his daughter. The Russian father and the Italian are both working for the railways in China, and the Italian is away from the city a lot, so the narrator ends up almost taking in his daughter - partly to save her from the erratic mores of the Russian family. The second half becomes more dramatic with the arrival of a Russian exile and former devotee of Rasputin.

A very interesting read, although there are some dated elements, particularly at the start when the narrator is introducing his household (foreign servants with 'amusingly' poor English, for example). But it's clear that Varè has real respect for Chinese culture, despite the occasional joke. I enjoyed it enough to order a couple of his other books, a sequel to this one The Gate of Happy Sparrows, and his autobiography The Laughing Diplomat (out of print but fairly easily available from abebooks).

'Well,' I said, 'are you satisfied with what the magician told you?' I sat down beside her on the sofa. 'In all the foreign novels,' she said, 'that I have read about China, there is always a fortune-teller of some sort who says mysterious things which always come true.'

'And in all the foreign novels about China,' I said, 'there is always a wonderful dust-storm, that half chokes all the principal characters. The dust-storm is here all right, and looks as if it might be a bad one. And the family magician has told you that you are going to get married some day. What more do you want?'

39wandering_star
Fév 11, 2017, 10:07 pm

9. The Small Hand by Susan Hill

A ghost-story novella which starts with the protagonist, lost in the country, stumbling upon a derelict mansion and overgrown garden. As he stands looking at it, he feels a child's hand taking his own - but no child is there. A good, creepy start but this dissipates because of the erratic pacing of the book - far too much time spent on his daily life as a rare book dealer, with long gaps between eerie happenings, which are pretty insubstantial when they do happen.

I am a perfectly calm driver and I had driven in atrocious conditions before then, but now I was afraid. The narrowness of the road, the way the storm and the high rocks seemed to be pressing down upon me at once, together with the tremendous noise, combined to unnerve me almost completely. I was conscious that I was alone, perhaps for many miles, and that although I had a map I had been warned that the monastery was difficult to find.

40Nickelini
Fév 12, 2017, 6:22 pm

>39 wandering_star: I had much the same reaction. Great creepy beginning that fizzled.

41janeajones
Fév 13, 2017, 3:33 pm

Your reviews of Station Eleven and The Maker of Heavenly Trousers are certainly tempting!

42wandering_star
Fév 13, 2017, 7:36 pm

10. Upstairs at the Party by Linda Grant

Upstairs at the Party follows the story of a group of university friends, through their university years, with intermittent encounters during their adult life, and in the final section returning to the university to see one of their group, now a baroness, receive an honorary degree. It is narrated by Adele, a classic Linda Grant heroine, tough but naive, who is an intrigued but sceptical observer of her fellow students. Unlike them, she lives pragmatically, rather than forcing her life to conform to principles. However, this doesn't give her a clearer view of them - the book is full of misunderstandings of other people's thoughts and motivations.

The core of the plot is about a tragic event which happens during Adele's birthday party, and who is responsible for it. However, the book is most interested in left-wing politics, with 1970s radicalism fizzling out into various forms of soft-leftism, and real change coming not from the social experiments the 1970s was so keen on, but from the mystifying computer lab which none of our students ever went near.

Linda Grant is one of my favourite writers but this is the least good of her novels. It's got some great writing, characters and observations, but the plot is weak and it's difficult to make the passionate student debates compelling, partly because of Adele's detached view and partly because they seem so irrelevant now. Remind Me Who I Am, Again, The Clothes on their Backs, Still Here or When I Lived in Modern Times are all much better places to start.

This is how I came to be at university, I came at it as if I'd shot myself from a cannon aimed across a river at a fortified target. I passed through the glittering gate to knowledge, to the concrete campus and its plastic-bottomed lake, its ducks and drakes and population of girls and boys with immaculate examination records and me the imposter, trying to learn how to speak and dress and not be dragged back to the cut-glass bottle and the Rosenblatt trap.

43SassyLassy
Fév 13, 2017, 7:49 pm

I too like Linda Grant a lot (thanks Dan) and am noting your comments on this one, which is new to me. Her books aren't too common on this side of the ocean, at least where I look. I am wondering whether it is because they are so anglocentric, in the sense of a certain time in England, that they don't travel well. Do you think this would be the case here?

I really liked When I Lived in Modern Times.

44wandering_star
Modifié : Fév 14, 2017, 11:48 am

11. Hammer and Tickle: a history of Communism told through Communist jokes by Ben Lewis

Political humour under a despotic regime: does it give power to the powerless, highlighting that the real world is not as your masters say it is? Or it is a safety valve which enables people to let off steam and therefore reduces the likelihood of taking action? My thinking is that you can’t share a political joke if you don’t share some sort of common worldview, so the act of telling someone a political joke produces a small solidarity - but what do you then do with that solidarity? Of course, small acts of solidarity and resistance in an oppressive environment can still have power - they are the reverse of Havel’s greengrocer putting a slogan in his shop window.

Anyway, on to the review. Apparently there is some debate among historians of the USSR about the role of humour, with some (‘maximalists’) even suggesting that, in the long run, it brought the system down. Ben Lewis claims to be examining this debate, and providing a history of the Soviet Union through its jokes, but is not in my view particularly successful at either. It’s probably a fool’s errand. The evidence around the role of humour is mixed. Reagan loved to tell Communist jokes to highlight that ordinary people didn’t support their government, but Stalin loved to make jokes too, and his jokes tended to focus around his life-or-death power over the people around him. Lewis tries to establish how many people were indeed sent to the gulag or otherwise punished for telling jokes - but even this isn’t clear. Probably the truth is that the answer changed over time. But the history in this book is too anecdotal to make these comparisons. He also contradicts himself, at one point suggesting that there is something unique about the Communist joke, at another pointing out that a lot of the jokes were repurposed from previous eras with the names changed. And I could really have done without the interludes in which he tries to convert his on-and-off girlfriend, an East German communist.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book are actually the ones about individual humorists rather than the jokes themselves - such as a Polish surrealist who avoided military service by turning up to the military commission offices already in military uniform and professing great zeal for the work - and was judged mentally unfit to serve; his group also demonstrated against a fixed referendum with the slogan “Vote Yes Twice”.

Overall, in general it is the joke-tellers Lewis interviews who argue for the importance of humour, while those who’d been the butt of the joke dismiss it. A dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky: “In the jokes you can find the thing that has left no trace in the printed sources: the people’s opinion of events”. A Hungarian who compiled a book of Communist jokes: “The jokes were a kind of counter-propaganda. They were a way to undermine the enormity and uniformity of Soviet propaganda. Told over decades, they gradually broke down the prestige and moral authority of the regime.” Perhaps the best encapsulation comes from a British professor who spent some time studying Soviet jokes. “The effect - the consequences - of jokes are so small in comparison with other social forces that you might as well forget about it. The jokes are a thermometer; they’re not a thermostat."

But perhaps you would like to hear some of these jokes?

On the gulag:

In the gulag three prisoners are talking about why they were deported. “I’m here because I always arrived at the factory five minutes late - so they charged me with sabotage.” “That’s strange - I’m here because I arrived at work five minutes early, so they convicted me of spying”. “I’m here because I arrived on time, every day, and then they found out that I owned a Western watch”.

or

Two prisoners are talking about why they got put away. “I’m here for laziness,” says one. “You mean you didn’t turn up for work?” “No, I was sitting with a friend telling jokes all night, and I thought at the end, I’ll go to bed, I can report him to the police in the morning.” “Why was that so lazy?” “He reported me that same evening.”

On the end of the Prague Spring:

Is it true that Czech patriots appealed to the Red Army for help? Yes, but they appealed in 1939 and help only arrived in 1968.

On shortages:

An old lady says, “I’m getting so absent-minded - I left the house today, shut the front door and looked at the empty bag in my hand and for a moment I couldn’t remember if I was about to go shopping, or if I had just come back."

45wandering_star
Fév 14, 2017, 9:50 am

12. The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson (audiobook, read by Joseph Kloska)

This historical mystery is set in a notorious debtor's prison in 1727 London. Tom Hawkins, a charming but irresponsible young rake, finally reaches the end of his luck and is thrown into the Marshalsea. He has never imagined that people might live in such terrible circumstances, hunger, overcrowding, brutality and prison fever. Not to mention a ghost - the ghost of one Captain Roberts, brutally beaten to death some weeks earlier. An old friend of Tom's knows the prison marshall, and offers him a lifeline - track down Captain Roberts' killer, and he will be released.

A lot of historical research has gone into this book, but I would never have guessed that without the author's afterword - it is worn very lightly. It does make for a vivid setting though. Sometimes too vivid given the gruesome environment of the gaol!

I enjoyed this hugely. It's a real romp, and the audiobook narrator gave Tom an innocent enthusiam which added to his charm.

"Does it become easier?" "That's up to you, Mr Hawkins." He poured a glass himself, knocked it back in one gulp, like medicine. "Your heart will break in here, or it will turn to stone. It's your choice."

46wandering_star
Fév 14, 2017, 10:09 am

13. Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell

Summer in a 1930s country house. Lady Emily is scatty, her husband sardonic but indulgent. A distant relative comes to stay; a French family take rooms at the vicarage. Romance, with some extremely gentle social satire - a fun read, but pure froth.

A few years ago I read Thirkell's Before Lunch, written six years later and set in the same milieu, which was frothy but with real heart - there are genuine stakes and deep emotions for the main characters in that book. Not so here.

"I think Lionel Harvest is a nephew of yours," said Miss Stevenson. "He is under me at Broadcasting House."

“Is he? Queer boy, Lionel. I’d let my girls go out with him, but I don’t know that I’d let my boys." Here Lady Dorothy laughed the laugh before which every fox in her division of the country quailed. "He’ll come into four thousand a year though when old General Harvest dies."

Miss Stevenson registered this statement with her well-trained brain.


47Rebeki
Fév 14, 2017, 10:36 am

>42 wandering_star: Ah, that's a shame. I have this on my shelf of books to read soon, but will adjust my expectations accordingly!

48baswood
Fév 14, 2017, 11:28 am

I like that sentence: "The jokes are a thermometer; they're not a thermostat"

"I will not be tempted by Hammer and Tickle" >44 wandering_star: I have read some of the jokes.

49wandering_star
Fév 14, 2017, 11:46 am

>43 SassyLassy: Interesting question. I had never thought of them as particularly British books - they are definitely not set in an environment which is familiar to me and yet I still really appreciate them. That said this one would probably travel less well than others because of that very specific 1970s campus radicalism.

50wandering_star
Fév 21, 2017, 8:15 pm

I have just found some notes I made during a talk by Linda Grant at the V&A in which she said that Adele, the narrator of Upstairs at the Party, is the one of her characters which most resembles her - particularly in the way that she felt very out of place at university as she came from a background which was very different from everyone else.

51wandering_star
Modifié : Mar 11, 2017, 10:35 pm

14. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

If you've ever read I Capture the Castle you probably remember the first line. It introduces us to Cassandra, who is seventeen when the story starts. She wants to be a writer, and so she is starting a journal in which she will try and capture the life of her eccentric family, as practice for writing a novel. She is sitting with her feet in the sink in case sitting somewhere that she hasn't sat before gives her extra inspiration.

Cassandra's father is a novelist who published one great novel, a runaway success, after which he has never been able to write again. They live in a crumbling castle which he bought, with great excitement, on the proceeds from this book - but now they live on little more than a dribble of royalties and the occasional money brought in by Cassandra's stepmother, an artist's model, when she goes to London to sit for a painter.

I first read this book as a teenager, and remembered a lot of the mood, but I had forgotten that the family is living in real poverty - not just picturesque artistic eccentricity. Cassandra's elder sister, Rose, is 21, beautiful, and desperate to escape her life, and it's easy to see why. So when two young and handsome American brothers inherit the manor house in the village, it's not surprising that she sees this as a potential way to get out.

This description sounds as if the book would be rather whimsical, but actually it isn't. I think this is largely due to Cassandra's narrative voice, which combines naive enthusiasm with a matter-of-fact honesty about what she is thinking, along with some sharp observations of what is going on around her. It's very charming. I am so glad that this held up and could be enjoyed by forty-something me as much as I did when I was in my teens.

Heavens, how it is coming down! The rain is like a diagonal veil across Belmotte. Rain or shine, Belmotte always looks lovely. I wish it were Midsumer Eve and I were lighting my votive fire on the mound.

There is a bubbling noise in the cistern which means that Stephen is pumping. Oh, joyous thought, to-night is my bath night! And if Stephen is in, it must be tea-time. I shall go down and be very kind to everyone. Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.

52Nickelini
Fév 22, 2017, 9:36 pm

>51 wandering_star: I read I Capture the Castle a few years ago and while I didn't love it as much as I hoped I would, I have nice memories of the reading experience. I adored the scene where they go swimming in the moat.

53Rebeki
Modifié : Fév 23, 2017, 5:33 am

>51 wandering_star: I first read I Capture the Castle at 26 and have a vague memory that, like Nickelini, I didn't love it as I thought I would. However, it's a book I've held onto and your review makes me want to reread it. I think I may even enjoy it more 12 years on...

Edited to add: >50 wandering_star: Interesting about the character of Adele, and I've never thought of the V&A as a venue for author talks. Did the talk tie into an exhibition?

54SassyLassy
Fév 23, 2017, 10:30 am

>51 wandering_star: This is one of those books that has always sort of been on the periphery for me, that I've always meant to read, but keep forgetting about. Thanks for the reminder. It's also good to see your clarification that you don't have to still be an idealistic teen to get something out of it. I think part of the reason I haven't picked it up is fear that I might have moved beyond the stage when it would really have glommed on to it.

>50 wandering_star: Another reason to read Upstairs at the Party.

55RidgewayGirl
Fév 23, 2017, 12:32 pm

I adore I Capture the Castle. In unrelated news, I first read it when I was fourteen or fifteen.

56dchaikin
Fév 23, 2017, 2:49 pm

Enjoyed catching up, especially your posts on Linda Grant. I would like to read those books you list in your review.

57wandering_star
Fév 23, 2017, 7:48 pm

>53 Rebeki: It was part of an occasional series called "Fashion and Fiction" - I think Margaret Atwood spoke at one of the other events. One of the nice things was that it was at the V&A after hours - you go in through a side door - and so on the walk up to the lecture theatre you walk through normally crowded galleries that don't have anyone in them. You can't linger, because there are gallery staff to keep an eye on you, but I still enjoyed it.

I have just had a look at the current schedule of evening events at the V&A, and I am so sorry to be missing the 28 Feb event, which has Shashi Tharoor talking about his new book about the British Empire in India, in conversation with the new V&A director Tristram Hunt who is a historian himself and has written an excellent book about the Empire, Ten Cities that Made an Empire. Should be fascinating.

58wandering_star
Modifié : Mar 11, 2017, 10:48 pm

15. Hild by Nicola Griffith

Hild is based on the true story of the seventh-century Hilda of Whitby, niece of the Northumbrian king Edwin, who grew up at the time that Christianity was coming to Britain, and ended up as St Hilda, founder of Whitby Abbey.

Not much is known about the historical Hilda, but Bede describes her as a woman of great energy, who was a skilled administrator and teacher, and who advised kings and princes, living up to the vision her mother had had while pregnant with her - that her child would be 'the light of the world'. In this book, Hild gains a reputation as a seer. What we see, however, is that Hild's supposed mystical powers are the result of paying attention, noticing things, and thinking carefully about what they mean. She learns much about politics from her fiercely ambitious mother, and from an early tutor, an Irish priest who is initially a hostage at the house where she is staying. She also speaks British and Irish as well as her family's Anglisc and this helps her to gather information too. But being a seer is dangerous as well - she has to keep on being right, but she also has to stay useful and at the same time, not threaten anyone too powerful.

“Good mead,” she said to Osric, but pitched to be heard at the farthest tables. “Made from southern honey. No, farther away than that, a land of blossoming walnut groves and poppies.” Obvious, now that she thought about it. “You didn’t tell us you were trading with the Franks, cousin.” Silence rippled outwards. Edwin looked at her, nodding. His eyes were ordinary, not black in the middle and banded with swarming green. He wasn’t surprised. He’d just been waiting for her to declare it openly. She nodded back and raised her cup, as though she had known for a week and had waited for the proper moment. But her heart thumped. So obvious but she had nearly missed it. She had nearly missed it.

This book is an immersive read. Nicola Griffith doesn't show off her historical research, but it comes through in the detail of the material culture which surrounds Hild. (I read an interview with Griffith where she said that she tried to choose words which would trigger sense-memories in her readers, "to run my software on the reader's hardware" so that they could see, smell, hear, taste and feel what Hild does, and see her mindset and worldview developing.)

The court did not leave that month, nor the month after. They would be a great company, four hundred strong, and riders must be sent ahead. An overking travelling with his court did not sleep on the ground, did not go uncombed or eat squirrels and figwort in the lee of a wall. He did not break his teeth on more-grit-than-grain ceorl bread, or let the ribs of his horse show through from lack of oats. He did not ride with one fist on his sword and his helm to hand but confidently, in brilliant clothes, to be seen, knowing his guard had cleared the road for half a mile ahead and to each side. He must be the pip at the centre of an apple of perfect safety and unstinting bounty. He must be as close to a god as any but priests ever saw.

And there is more complexity here than we imagine of the 'dark ages' - not just in the politics but in the finery of the king's court. There is a wonderful scene where Hild visits the market at Ipswich, and sees the amazing range of things (and people) which come through a trading port. Buildings and roads made by the Romans are still used, and it's fascinating to think about the idea of living surrounded by technology that you no longer understand.

I loved this book - the world it opens up, the character of Hild and the way she navigates the situation around her. It is a long read, but even so for several days after finishing it I kept thinking "I want to read some more" and then being disappointed when I remembered that I had already finished it. I was delighted to find out that Nicola Griffith is working on the second of a planned trilogy.

59wandering_star
Mar 12, 2017, 12:34 am

16. Chemistry and other stories by Ron Rash

Short stories, set in Appalachia, from the early days of settlement to today. Most of the stories are about the mood, with perhaps a moment of epiphany. That mood is mostly bleak. People are killed, beaten up or injured. Marriages end. People seek hope in drugs, dating ads, or in the case of one character, the Pentecostal church of his youth.

The writing is excellent - the people are real and vivid and not a word is wasted. The stories elicit compassion, not despair. That said, because the stories focus on mood rather than events, I am not sure that I will remember any of them by the end of the year.

I look back at the woman with the battered face. Her brown eyes hold mine for a moment. She nods, and I want to believe that both our lives might somehow turn out better than either of us can believe at this moment. Not tomorrow or next week, just sometime.

60Nickelini
Mar 12, 2017, 2:37 pm

>58 wandering_star: & >59 wandering_star:

You're adding to my wish list again!

61wandering_star
Mar 16, 2017, 11:07 am

>60 Nickelini: They are worth it!

17. Macbeth: a novel by A. J. Hartley and David Hewson (audiobook, read by Alan Cumming)

Yes - two authors - both crime writers, and Hewson is also an academic specialising in Shakespeare. This is not exactly a novelisation of the Shakespeare play, instead it draws from both the play and the earlier resources which inspired it. There are additional scenes - for example, things which happen off-stage in the play, or other pieces which set the context. In the foreword, the writers say they wanted to explain Macbeth's actions - why would a loyal lord turn from defeating a traitor to killing the king he was fighting for?

For me however, they were not successful in this goal. Most of the extra information seemed to be about material surroundings - what the castles look like, the tattoo on one of the witches, Lady Macbeth's first name - rather than adding psychological understanding.

Kings die in two ways only, Duncan thought to himself, in battle at the head of their failing troops, or through the artful, knowing treachery of friends.

62wandering_star
Mar 16, 2017, 11:30 am

18. Redeployment by Phil Klay

This collection of short stories by a former Marine packs a powerful punch. The first couple are about the difficulty of readjusting to civilian life after being used to the constant threat of violence and death. I've read things on this theme before, but they are very well done. Other stories look at the tension in encounters between a veteran and a civilian (often a civilian woman), in interesting ways. "Psychological Operations" centres on an argument between two students at a liberal arts college who each stand out from the crowd - the one an Egyptian Copt who is a veteran of Iraq, the other a black woman who has converted to Islam. They both look sceptically at the naivety and idealism of the other students, but their encounters with each other are less simple. In "Unless It's A Sucking Chest Wound", a veteran who is studying law is trying to decide whether to go for a public interest or corporate career, but realises that nothing will give him the sense of common purpose that he had in the Army.

In "War Stories", there is a conversation about the fact that there is no such thing as an anti-war film. The only real anti-war film would follow a man whose life was ordinary, but rich and full of love, and then "in the last sixty seconds of the film they put them in boats to go to Inchon and he's shot in the water and drowns in three feet of surf and the movie doesn't even give him a close-up, it just ends. That'd be a war film". Despite this I think that these stories are anti-war, in terms of the impact that the war has on people's lives; although (as some of the stories I have summarised show) there is also something which comes from that closeness to life and death which cannot be found elsewhere.

By far the most depressing of the stories is not about soldiers at all, but about a political advisor actually trying to improve lives in the area he is responsible for, but being hindered at every turn by political imperatives which serve different people's interests, whether that's the need to keep a particular group of Iraqis happy, to tick a box on a funding bid, or to look like a generous benefactor - aptly called "Money As A Weapons System".

From "After Action Report":

Somebody said combat is 99 percent sheer boredom and 1 percent pure terror. They weren't an MP in Iraq. On the roads I was scared all the time. Maybe not pure terror. That's for when the IED actually goes off. But a kind of low-grade terror that mixes with the boredom. So it's 50 percent boredom and 49 percent normal terror, which is a general feeling that you might die at any second and that everybody in this country wants to kill you. Then, of course, there's the 1 percent pure terror, when your heart rate skyrockets and your vision closes in and your hands are white and your body is humming. You can't think. You're just an animal, doing what you've been trained to do. And then you go back to normal terror, and you go back to being a human, and you go back to thinking.

63NanaCC
Mar 22, 2017, 5:46 am

Just catching up on threads this morning. I think I enjoyed Wild Strawberries more than you did. Angela Thirkell's tongue-in-cheek humor is just what I need occasionally. I do wince at some of the dialog as it would never pass a test for appropriate respectful dialog in this day and age.

64RidgewayGirl
Mar 22, 2017, 9:15 am

I love that you're reading so many short stories. I've got to get back into that habit, because I love them. Ron Rash's next book should be another short story collection - I was at a signing for The Risen and asked about that, and he said he just needed a few more to have enough for a new collection.

65baswood
Mar 22, 2017, 12:37 pm

Enjoyed your excellent review of Hild. that one is now firmly on my radar.

66wandering_star
Modifié : Avr 23, 2017, 4:52 am

Just back from holiday with lots of reviews to catch up on! Starting with: 19. The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers

By the start of the nineteenth century, magic has almost disappeared from the world. Casting the simplest spell exhausts a practitioner, and is likely to go wrong in any case. In a final, desperate move, two sages try and cast a spell so powerful it will return the world to the glory days of magic. They fail - but in the process blow a number of holes in the world, as well as releasing a twisted version of that magic power. This is the prologue: two hundred years later, an entrepreneur has worked out how to use those holes to jump through time, and has sold tickets for an early Coleridge lecture.

This book could have been reverse-engineered to be full of all my favourite things. Time travel - complicated interlocking timelines with clues that you figure out much later - a detailed, vivid, slightly gruesome underworld Victorian London - I also enjoyed the way that the story purports to fill in the (real) mysterious gaps in a couple of famous Victorian lives. About two-thirds of the way through, when I got to a magical battle, I exclaimed to my partner, "This book has everything!". He pointed out that it didn't have dragons. Which is correct, but probably a little too much to ask...

So anyway, I loved this. It could have been 50 pages shorter - there is too much additional tying up of loose ends once the main stuff is over. But the other 400 pages were such fun.

The beggars who were assembled at the long wooden tables presented a parody of contemporary dress: there were the formal frockcoats and white gloves, mended but impeccably clean, of the Decayed Gentlemen, the beggars who evoked pity by claiming, sometimes truthfully, to be wellborn aristocrats brought to ruin by financial reverses or alcohol; the blue shirt and trousers, rope belt and black tarpaulin hat, bearing the name of some vessel in faded gold letters, of the Shipwrecked Mariners, who even here spiced their speech with nautical terms learned from dance shows and penny ballads; and there were the turbans and earrings and sandals of the Distressed Hindoos; and blackened faces of miners supposedly disabled in subterranean explosions; and of course the anonymous tattered rags of the general practitioner beggars.

ETA: in the footnotes from God's Traitors I came across this wonderful list of Elizabethan underground slang, which reminded me of the beggars in The Anubis Gates: High lawyer: a full-time highwayman. Ruffler: a beggar claiming to be a discharged soldier seeking employment. Clapperdudgeon: a beggar born. Whipjack: a beggar claiming to have suffered losses at sea by shipwreck or piracy. Dummerer: a real or pretended mute. Counterfeit crank: a vagrant pretending to be epileptic. Prigger of prancers: a horse thief, usually at fairs and markets. (Salgādo, The Elizabethan Underworld, pp. 122–30)

67wandering_star
Avr 4, 2017, 10:36 am

20. The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

I loved historical fiction when I was a kid, but I remember starting The Eagle of the Ninth a couple of times and not being able to get on with it. Reading it now, I can see why - the start is rather too much description and it takes a while to get to the action.

However, once the story gets going, it is an enjoyable one. Marcus Flavius Aquila, a young centurion, is posted to Britain, where he longs to discover what happened to his father, who disappeared with the Ninth Legion when they marched into the Scottish mists (a real historical mystery). When he is injured in battle, he thinks his useful life is over, but then he is given a chance to follow his father's traces...

I enjoyed this for what it was, although I think (hope!) young readers now would question the relatively uncomplicated friendship between Marcus and his ex-slave. One thing I particularly liked was the way that Roman life interleaved with British (and the echoes between this and Hild, in which the Roman buildings are ruins of an earlier civilisation).

There were wine-shops everywhere, the craftsmen of the town made things to please the garrison, and everybody else sold them dogs, skins, vegetables, and fighting-cocks, while the children scrambled after the auxiliaries for denarii. But all the same, here in Isca Dumnoniorum, Rome was a new slip grafted on to an old stock—and the graft had not yet taken.

68wandering_star
Avr 4, 2017, 10:51 am

21. Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll

Ani FaNelli seems to have the perfect life. She has her dream job writing for a famous women's magazine, and is planning a dream wedding to the perfect boyfriend. But she is still haunted by something which happened when she was at high school - and people still judge her for it. Now a documentary is being made, which promises to unveil the truth about this notorious incident. Can Ani participate in the documentary and really tell her side of the story?

I can barely express how much I hated this book. Ani is a hateful person. She is absolutely obsessed with weight and looks - hers and other peoples - and with what the brands people choose tell her about them. Every single encounter with another human being is a battle, with only one possible winner. Meeting one of her fiance's clients for dinner, she describes them like this: I had vaguely noticed the couple standing by the hostess station, looking on as though they were waiting to be introduced. The client and his wife, body mean with Equinox muscles, cheery blond hair swept away from her face in a ninety-dollar blow-out. I always eye the wife first; I like to know what I’m up against.

Perhaps we are meant to think that this is the consequence of the thing which happened in high school, except that Ani was like this even before - obsessed with fitting in and wearing the right clothes, and manipulative of others.

The blurb compares this to Gone Girl, and there are clearly some parts which are meant to be like the "cool girls" manifesto/rant in Gone Girl, but here they are meaner and more desperate. There is the occasional sop to the reader to show that she is a Good Person, better than her surroundings - she is polite to waitresses! She doesn't like it when someone says something racist!! But she is still horrible.

Also, there is no consistency to any of the characters. Everyone monstrous does whatever the meanest possible thing is at that time, whether or not it's in character for them. The same thing with the one 'good guy' in the story. And Ani herself has a thoroughly unconvincing epiphany at the end of the story. UGH. To be honest, I don't know why I even finished reading this book - except perhaps that I was more than half-way through before I realised that there wasn't going to be a twist - that what was on the surface was all we were going to get.

69ipsoivan
Avr 4, 2017, 1:06 pm

>66 wandering_star: I read another by him, The Drawing of the Dark that sounds like it might also be right up your alley. I very much enjoyed it! Thanks for the Anubis Gates review.

70wandering_star
Avr 4, 2017, 7:14 pm

That sounds excellent - thanks for the recommendation!

71wandering_star
Modifié : Avr 5, 2017, 9:58 am

22. Merchant Adventurers: The Voyage of Discovery That Transformed Tudor England by James Evans

This is a history of a journey made in 1553, in which three ships set out from London and sailed north-east. Spain and Portugal had already gained fabulous riches from their colonial possessions in South America, but there were rumours that jewels and spices abounded in Asia, and no European powers stood in the way - as far as anyone knew, anyway, as this was literally a voyage off the map. There would be some cold lands on the way to Asia too, which could well be a good market for English woollen cloth (the traditional market for this, in Antwerp, had collapsed because of an exchange rate spike).

From this it's clear that trade was the priority from the start. A letter from King Edward carried by the expedition talked about promoting amity between peoples, but this wasn't about gaining knowledge for its own sake, or indeed promoting the country's religion - in fact, the expedition was specifically enjoined by the organiser "not to disclose to any nation the state of our religion, but to pass over it in silence" and conform with the traditions of their new hosts.

The history is divided into three parts - the context and preparation for the voyage; the voyage itself; and what followed. I found the first part particularly fascinating, but it is all readable and interesting.

At the start of the sixteenth century, Bristol had been a maritime hub, a centre for trade and the launching point for a number of great expeditions. They had had the support of Henry VII, who was very interested in global exploration. After his death, though, Henry VIII was more focused on military victories in Europe. Navigational ability was lost and international trade was run by foreigners. It was the vision of one man, Sebastian Cabot, which really brought about this expedition, and in addition to creating a new trade route, the voyage aimed to start the process of retraining English sailors in exploration (rather than just following well-known routes).

Much about the venture was revolutionary. It was the first 'joint stock company' outside Italy, precursor to the East India Company. Previous 'companies' had been groups of merchants who banded together, each taking up some space (and some of the costs) on a boat and each trading their own goods along the voyage. Now for the first time, it was possible to invest in a venture without being personally involved. And there was capital available following the dissolution of the monasteries - this had led to a soaring demand for luxury goods and also for somewhere to invest that money. You could join this particular venture for £25 - about £5000 in today's money.

Another thing which was new about the voyage was Cabot's insistence that records should be kept. This was to be the first of many journeys along what was hoped would be a profitable trade route, so the information would be useful again in future. Records should also be kept about the countries visited - including the crucial questions of what commodities they might be willing to export (and the cost) and what English goods would sell well there (and the price). All the while, though, the expedition should pretend not to be at all interested in the local produce, and talk up how wonderful their own goods were.

Of course the ships never reached the fabled riches of Asia. The ship which travelled furthest only got as far as Russia, a country of which the English knew almost nothing, and where the expedition meet a young ruler who would later be known as Ivan the Terrible. Excited by the possibility of buying the latest weaponry from England to help him defeat his neighbours - who wouldn't let modern arms reach him through their territory - he grants the English merchants special trading rights. Diplomatic uproar ensues - the Polish Ambassador in London urges the court not to export any weapons, and the Swedish king despatches his ambassador to London specially, with the same message. Meanwhile a number of German states lobby Poland to lead a naval expedition to cut off this new trade before it begins. England, in what might seem a familiar manoeuvre, seeks to continue the trade without ever committing itself to a particular political side. It is not just arms: this is a trade which builds up English manufacturing and helps industrial advances, unlike the short-lived riches coming from the New World to Spain and Portugal.

This review is definitely long enough so I will stop here. I found this very readable, with a good mixture of the wider contextual stuff (including the political and religious upheaval of England at the time) and the interesting detail. It also had very short chapters, which sounds trivial but I think contributed to the feeling that it was an easy read.

72wandering_star
Avr 5, 2017, 10:25 am

23. The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905 by Ferdinand Mount

This is a history by Ferdinand Mount of some of his ancestors and their lives and careers in British India. The main character is one John Low, described like this:

He took an active part in deposing three kings, each of them rulers over a territory and population the magnitude of a middlesized European state. He deprived a fourth raja, perhaps the grandest of them all, of a large portion of his kingdom. He survived three shattering mutinies. Yet at no time do you have the feeling that he was spurred on by a sense of imperial mission. He wanted, if possible, to do his duty, that was all. But what exactly was his duty? That too was shadowed in doubt and mired in misgiving.

Mount says that when he started researching the book, he "was not prepared for the ferocity {of the events}, but I was not prepared for the doubt either". Low's story is in some ways a sad one. A hard-working administrator, he frequently argues against policies he believes are unjust or immoral, rarely with any result - but then he comes to fame towards the end of his life, for the role that he played putting down the Indian Mutiny.

Mount has a good eye for a story and mines many from the raw material of his ancestors' letters, diaries, memoirs as well as the histories of the time. He writes vividly, describing characters with rather wonderful throwaway lines like "All his life, he possessed three conspicuous qualities: high liberal principles, buckets of charm and a recurring shortage of cash" or "Governor-General Herman Willem Daendels, who was one of those indefatigable tyrant-modernizers". But his eye for a good story handicaps this history. There isn't really a clear focus to the book, so it is neither a history of British rule in India nor a family memoir. There is not enough context and too much detail within individual stories, which comes across most clearly in the long chapter covering what the different family members did during the Mutiny. I didn't understand how the pieces fitted together, and focusing on individual stories gives the narrative a 'boy's own' feeling even though it is deeply critical of the British behaviour.

I did learn a lot from reading this, in particular about the really despicable and underhanded way that the British chiselled and cheated Indian rulers out of their territory, their money and their power. In many cases this was done by the local senior officials, not just without authorisation from London but in the full knowledge that London would tell them not to do it. The trouble is that both sides of the argument tended to be swallowed up in the terrible imperial thirst for rupees. It was always difficult for the British to argue convincingly that they were taking over to help the poor ryots when it was so embarrassingly obvious that they were helping themselves. It was interesting though to see that this was often controversial, and criticised, in Britain at the time - although Mount also makes a case that one of the consequences of the Mutiny was a much more antagonistic and less sympathetic attitude to India, which made the late Raj what it was.

So as I say, I definitely learnt a lot, and there were some things about the book which were really interesting. But overall I don't feel that I can recommend it, as it was a very long read and often dragged.

73baswood
Avr 9, 2017, 7:36 pm

I usually find something really interesting from your reviews and this time Merchant Adventurers is right up my street.

74wandering_star
Avr 16, 2017, 6:34 am

>73 baswood: glad to hear that! I have just finished a history of a Tudor family which I picked up because I thought it would fit in with Merchant Adventurers, and now jumping off from that I might read 1599 soon. It is quite nice to read non-fiction books which complement each other as it makes the information stick better in my brain.

75wandering_star
Avr 16, 2017, 6:45 am

24. Pretty Honest by Sali Hughes

For some reason, after 20 years of feeling like wearing make-up was a stressful chore, I have recently started to enjoy playing around with it. Who knows why? Anyway, I enjoy reading Sali Hughes' beauty column in the Guardian, which has no-nonsense recommendations for beauty products. This book, subtitled "The Straight-Talking Beauty Companion", is similarly clear, helpful and supportive, with answers to all sorts of questions, from what on earth some of these new products are (primer, BB cream etc), how to choose a facial or a makeup consultant, and some advice not just for wedding makeup (which is standard in a beauty book) but also for makeup when you are ill, for example. I have been dipping into this for a while, have enjoyed it and am taking away a lot of useful advice. This for example on tipping at the hairdresser's, which is something which fills me with panic:

Americans obviously have this pretty nailed, but we Europeans struggle with the gratuities minefield. This is how it works: if you are happy with your hair/ facial/ massage/ wax and the service you received, then a tip is nice. I generally tip 10–15 per cent of the total. If it’s a hairdressing tip then I immediately ringfence £5 from the tip and give it to whoever washed my hair (they suffer sore, irritated hands, wash towels, sweep floors, massage heads and basically work like dogs for terrible money). I give the remainder to the therapist or stylist. If there is also a colourist, I split the remainder clean in half between them. I tip everyone via the receptionist and tell her/ him how much is for whom. It takes seconds.

76wandering_star
Modifié : Avr 16, 2017, 7:50 am

25. The Lost City of Z by David Grann

This really is a boys-own adventure story, in which Grann becomes fascinated by Colonel Percy Fawcett, a Victorian explorer who disappeared in the Amazon rainforest.

Fawcett was quite a character: the Royal Geographical Society, which sponsored some of his trips, said: “it is quite true that he has a reputation of being difficult to get on with... but all the same he has an extraordinary power of getting through difficulties that would deter anybody else.” He rejected an offer from Lawrence of Arabia to go with him on one of his expeditions into the Amazon, because he didn't believe that Lawrence would be able to cope with the trip! His family motto was “Nec Aspera Terrent”, which Grann translates as “Difficulties Be Damned.”

Countless other explorers tried to trace what happened to him; so many that eventually the Brazilian government banning the search parties unless they received special permission. Many of them vanished too, and perhaps 100 people died in the searches.

The book also talks about the rainforest itself and the people who live there - in particular, there is a scientific debate about whether the rainforest is able to sustain large-scale human life. Fawcett was looking for a great lost city, and early reports by the conquistadors describe huge settlements, but little proof was found - and the rainforest, while lush, has much that is poisonous and relatively little that is edible.

One of the hazards for the explorers too was the number of bugs and pests, some of which sound really horrible. The least gross of the insects, and therefore the only one that I can bring myself to write about in this review, is a tiny species of bee that is drawn to sweat, and that invaded the pupils of some of the explorers and made their eyes blurry. (Brazilians called the bees “eye lickers.”) There are a couple of quotes from the diaries of explorers that are almost literally being sent mad by the insects that are plaguing them.

An enjoyable read, although Grann never explains what it is that made so many people obsessed with exploring the rainforest. One of Fawcett's group, agreeing to a second visit, said, “It’s hell all right, but one kind of likes it.”

The most interesting thing for me was the evidence which has recently come to light, and which appears at the very end of the book, about the great cities which it turned out did exist - just not in the shape that the explorers were looking for. Rather than being built up, they were great moated settlements, now overgrown and hard to see. Here is an artist's impression of what they might have looked like:



Grann recommends 1491 by Charles Mann as a guide to the latest thinking about what the Americas were actually like before the arrival of Columbus. I am intrigued enough by this book to want to follow up.

77wandering_star
Avr 16, 2017, 11:06 am

26. American Housewife by Helen Ellis

A collection of stories, which are short, sardonic and, at their best, a little unsettling. I hugely enjoyed reading them, and often found myself honking with laughter - most unladylike!

A few of the stories are ironic takes on all the rules that women are supposed to follow in order to be perfect: "What I Do All Day", "How To Be A Grown-Ass Lady" and finally and most subvertingly, "Take It From Cats". In the first, an American housewife narrates her day: going to the store, doing her chores, and hosting a party in the evening.

I shred cheese. I berate a pickle jar. I pump the salad spinner like a CPR dummy. I strangle defrosted spinach and soak things in brandy. I casserole. I pinwheel. I toothpick. I bacon. I iron a tablecloth and think about eating lint from the dryer, but then think better of that because I am sane. I rearrange furniture like a Neanderthal. I mayonnaise water rings. I level picture frames.

Is she deranged? Or is she just behaving as the good housewife is told to from the glossy magazines?

It sounds much more fun to learn from cats instead:

If someone moves to make room for you, take up more room... Clean between your toes. Flaunt your full figure. Hide loose change. Even though you can take care of yourself, it’s okay to let someone be nice to you. It’s fine to take a nap on the laundry.

Some of the stories are a little deeper. "The Fitter" seems like a similarly sardonic take, in which the narrator side-eyes the women she believes have designs on her husband, until you realise that they are moving in on him because she is dying of breast cancer. The narrator of "Dead Doormen" has lived with a domineering mother-in-law for so long that she has taken on her control-freak tendencies. "Dumpster Diving With The Stars", told by a misfit contestant on a crazed parody of a gameshow, is the longest and probably the most substantial of the stories.

Not all the stories worked, and I would love to see what Ellis can do if she gives herself a wider space and dials down the frenetic wisecracking. But still, overall, highly recommended.

78wandering_star
Avr 23, 2017, 5:00 am

27. God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England by Jessie Childs

This is the history of the Vaux family, devout Catholics in Queen Elizabeth's England, a time when Catholics were threatened and persecuted - including with brutal torture.

In the early years of the period covered, hostility to Catholics waxed and waned, depending on the security of the English throne and the amount of perceived threat from outside (read: Catholic) forces. Here we see how Catholic families adapted their behaviour accordingly, following their own devotions when there was no attention on them, but having to decide how much lip service to pay when they were under scrutiny. Some went to church, but blocked their ears or read a book during the sermon, kept their hat on during prayers or other such small rebellions. Local administrators sometimes turned a blind eye or treated their recusant Catholics as local eccentrics.

The Vauxes muddled through the later years of Henry's and Edward's reigns, breathed a sigh of relief under Mary, and also enjoyed the early years of Elizabeth's reign, when the law was not rigorously enforced. Elizabeth herself had conformed during Mary's reign, and the Spanish King Philip was focused on the Inquisition and the battle against growing Protestant activism in the Low Countries. But there were still concerns about a Catholic 'fifth column', who might rally behind an alternative ruler in the shape of Mary Queen of Scots. Early in 1569 the Queen's Secretary William Cecil "wrote a memorandum outlining his fears of an international Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth. Everywhere he looked – Rome, France, Spain, the Low Countries, Ireland, Scotland, even at home, where Mary Stuart now resided – he saw ‘perils … many, great and imminent’. " In 1570 a Papal Bull was issued declaring Elizabeth a heretic and releasing her subjects from any allegiance to her - indeed anyone who did obey her would also be subject to the sentence of anathema. This triggered a clampdown - both legal (restricting people's movement without permission, banning the ownership of Catholic religious objects) and in terms of enforcement. In fact Childs suggests that the Papal Bull was seen as such a mistake by the Papacy that it was brought up in discussions of how to respond to Hitler: "discreet voices in the Vatican privately recalled the bad precedent, and behind the scenes it was a factor in preventing a public papal condemnation of Nazism."

Ten years later, the tension was stepped up further with the arrival of a secret Jesuit mission, led by Edmund Campion, to preach, convert, and support the Catholics in England. This is where the book moves away from being a more general history, albeit with a focus on the family, to a history of the family's involvement in the mission, and particularly three women of the family, Eleanor, Anne, and their half-sister Eliza. For decades they rented properties for the Jesuit priests, sometimes helping them to move at short notice to escape the law, contributed to and managed their secret budgets, promoted the Counter-Reformation through their social networks, and hosted biannual Jesuit conferences. The sisters are fascinating characters, bold and clever in pursuit of their goals, and (at the end) brave under interrogation. They sometimes played up to feminine stereotypes when their houses were being searched by soldiers - Eleanor's daughter cried out to the soldiers that her mother would collapse at the sight of an unsheathed sword, or allowing the priests time to hide by saying "Do you think it right and proper that you should be admitted to a widow’s house before she or her servants or children are out of bed?"

There were a number of women who played important roles among the recusants. They were to a certain extent immune from prosecution because their husbands were believed to be responsible for their conduct: so if the man went to (Protestant) church while the wife worshipped at home, there was little that the authorities could do. And as they owned no property (again, it was their husbands'), there was little point in convicting them because there would be nothing for them to give up.

This is the period when the famous "priest's holes" started to be built in English country houses. There were some concessions from Rome for the priests being constantly on the move - they could celebrate Mass on a small altar-stone rather than on a full altar, although they needed to wear their vestments. Some vestments were made reversible, others disguised as ordinary household items like quilts. "Raids were often timed to catch the priest in the act of saying Mass, but households grew wise to their tactics and soon developed their own. At the signal, a well-drilled priest would throw off his vestments, snuff out the candles, strip the altar, pop his stone in his pocket and scuttle into his hide." Mattresses would be turned over so that they felt cold to the touch, not giving away the number of people that had slept in the house the previous night. Sometimes the priests and other celebrants would have to stay in their hides for a week or more.

I mentioned before Anne's interrogation - this took place after the Gunpowder Plot, in which the family narrowly avoided being implicated. A contemporary report says: "They asked her whether she had known about the Gunpowder Plot. She said, of course she had known, for since she was a woman, how could anything possibly happen in England without her being told of it? They asked her if Master Farmer* knew about it. She said that since he was the greatest traitor in the world, he hadn’t missed getting involved in that treason; and that she was in great debt to them because she hadn’t been able to find a single place in all of London to stay, even with money, and they had given her room and board for nothing. To more weighty questions, she responded very sensibly and she pays no attention whatsoever to them, and so she has them amazed and they are saying, ‘We absolutely do not know what to do with that woman!’"

*Henry Garnet, Superior of the Jesuit Mission in England

This is a long review but there is so much more I could say. I enjoyed this and I thought that it gave a good sense of what the persecution of Catholics actually involved, on a day-to-day basis. My only complaint is that it could have been more concise - sometimes it felt that every piece of information the author had was stuffed in somehow, and as an example, the epilogue goes through the perception of Catholics in the UK all the way up to Pope Benedict's 2010 visit to the UK and the inauguration of Pope Francis in 2013...

79wandering_star
Avr 23, 2017, 5:36 am

28. Underground Airlines by Ben Winters

Ben Winters' The Last Policeman books are police procedurals set in an unusual context - sixth months before a huge asteroid will destroy the world. In Underground Airlines he has pulled off something similar - an action thriller set in an alternate US where slavery never ended. Instead of the Civil War, the country was so shocked by the assassination of President-elect Lincoln that they came together in a grand compromise, in which the constitution dictates that the States have the final say on whether slavery can exist within them.

There is a lot to admire in this book. It's a properly effective thriller, with plenty of twists, threats, people not being what they seem etc. (It stumbles a bit towards the end, but that's a minor point by then given everything else that's going on.) There has been a lot of thought given to the setting, from the economic consequences of the international sanctions on the US to the way that slavery would be 'managed' in the modern era, with 'observers' ensuring that all the oh-so-rational 'protocols' are followed in the facilities which use slaves. James Brown was a former slave who defected to Canada. Young radicals tattoo themselves with the marks of a covered-over logo. On my own collarbone was a single black box where there once had been the bell-and-cow logo of my birthplace, long since filled in. This would be a telltale sign of my former status, except that a lot of people marked themselves this way—in some parts of the North, almost every black person did, freeborn and manumitted and runners alike. A mark of solidarity: if we are all former slaves, then none of us is.

Above all there is our narrator, a tracker of slaves who escape the Hard Four - and a former slave himself. He is a great character, stubbornly trying to do his job, and suppress all his feelings as he does so. it was my practice at the beginning of a new job to think of myself as having no name at all. As being not really a person at all. A man was missing, that’s all—missing and hiding, and I was not a person but a manifestation of will.

A tough critic could find things to quibble with - some of the writing style, and an extremely unbelievable female character - but I think this is interesting and worth reading - especially, but not only, if you enjoy thrillers.

80wandering_star
Avr 23, 2017, 6:54 am

29. The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks by Amy Stewart

This is basically a book of interesting facts about alcoholic drinks and the plants that make them, structured "from mash tub and still, to bottle, to glass". So we start with the grains and other plants that get distilled, moved on to the flavourings and finally the garnishes that are added to a cocktail. It's a book for dipping into - which I didn't immediately realise, opening it on my Kindle. The first part I found most interesting - partly because each plant is relevant to a wider category of drinks, and so the stories of those drinks are more interesting. For example, the section on agave explains all about mezcal - the process of making it and the different types and flavours (Stewart quotes an 1897 article that mezcal tastes like "a mixture of gasoline, gin and electricity"). We also learn about some of the science behind alcohol. The simplest form - fermentation - involves the natural process of yeasts eating the sugars in the plant, and creating two waste products, ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. Over 15% alcohol, the yeast die off - so before the invention of distillation, the strongest drinks are beers and wines. Lower-sugar plants will never ferment into strong alcohol because again, the yeasts die off once the sugar is consumed.

The most amazing fact in this first section was what grain bourbon is made from. Do you know? I will put the answer at the end of the review.

Having lived in China (and sat through formal meals with Chinese officials) I enjoyed the section on sorghum. On February 21, 1972, President Nixon, his staff, and members of the American media attended a banquet in Peking to mark the beginning of Nixon’s historic trip to China. The ceremonial drink that night was mao-tai, a sorghum spirit with an alcohol content over 50 percent. Alexander Haig had sampled the drink on an advance visit and cabled a warning that “Under no repeat no circumstances should the President actually drink from his glass in response to banquet toasts.” Nixon ignored the advice and matched his host drink for drink, shuddering but saying nothing each time he took a sip. Dan Rather said it tasted like “liquid razor blades.” It turns out that mao-tai and other baijius are so popular not for some obscure cultural reason but because sorghum is incredibly drought-tolerant and easy to grow in poor soils. As with the eating of chicken feet and offal, Chinese cuisine is a cuisine based in scarcity.

Compared to all this, as you get towards the end of the book, the section on garnishes like strawberry are just not as interesting. Regardless, a good book for dipping into, full of tips for drinks to try, recipes for cocktails and ideas about what and how to grow if you want to stock your bar from your garden.

*Turns out bourbon is made from sweetcorn (as we call it in the UK), or maize. I think I was so gobsmacked by this because I think of sweetcorn as a really bland, tasteless flavour, something for children and fussy adults, far removed from the fiery taste of bourbon. However, Stewart quotes Master distiller Chris Morris, the brains behind Woodford Reserve’s line of extraordinary, award-winning bourbons, said, "We just want big, clean, dry corn. The starch is what it’s all about. The corn is pretty much just the muscle that we use to make alcohol". So I guess it doesn't matter. But I will look differently at all those old-timey Jack Daniels ads on the tube from now on. (And yes, I know JD isn't a bourbon. But it is still made from sweetcorn).

81japaul22
Avr 23, 2017, 7:49 am

Very interesting nonfiction reading you've been doing! The Lost City of Z was already on my radar as something that sounded fun. And the one about Catholicism under Queen Elizabeth sounds interesting.

82wandering_star
Avr 30, 2017, 10:25 am

30. Just Kids by Patti Smith (audiobook, read by the author)

- I think they're artists!
- Just kids


The title of this memoir comes from this overheard exchange - the young Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in New York in their bohemian dress, spotted by some tourists. But the title applies throughout the story - the two are portrayed as real innocents, almost holy fools in their desire to live and create as truly and honestly as possible. At one point Smith explains the fact that she turned down a recording contract by telling a story she'd heard about Crazy Horse: "Crazy Horse believes that he will be victorious in battle, but if he stops to take spoils from the battlefield he will be defeated. He tattoos lightning bolts on the ears of his horse, so the sight of them will remind him of this on the rides." Smith gets herself a similar tattoo.

The memoir is a vivid glimpse into the incredible flourishing of creativity that was all around them, and it does convey what it must have felt like to live in that milieu. It is also about all of their influences. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the way they (especially Mapplethorpe) thought so carefully about their outfits, and their look - the consciousness of their inspirations.

I cut out all the pictures I could find of Keith Richards. I studied them for a while, and then I took up the scissors, machete-ing my way out of the folk era. I washed my hair in the hallway bathroom and shook it dry. It was a liberating experience.

Most of all though this is about their relationship - lovers, friends, collaborators, confidants. Mapplethorpe takes the photograph which ends up as the cover of Horses.

"I really like the whiteness of the shirt. Can you take the jacket off?" I flung my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra-style. I was full of references. He was full of light and shadow.

83wandering_star
Avr 30, 2017, 10:31 am

31. What Becomes by AL Kennedy

The short stories in this collection all follow the same pattern. At the start, we are focused on one character, and it's not at all clear what the context is. Gradually, the rest of the story is revealed, and with only one exception, that story is one about miscommunication and the lack of human connection. (The one exception is a story about a woman who falls in love with an actor who is playing a role made famous by her dead husband.) They are very well written, but my god, they are bleak. I could barely bring myself to finish the book.

"Da will be very upset if the last thing he sees of you is two dirty boys who can't be at peace. Let's have a good morning. Before your mother starts to scream and doesn't stop and has to be taken away to the hospital for screaming people. Who would make your breakfasts then?"
Her sons showed no sign of having heard her and she wondered again which of her threats they would remember, which would be useful and which would scar. It never was easy to tell, she supposed, if your parenting was mostly beneficial or bound to harm.

84wandering_star
Modifié : Avr 30, 2017, 11:54 am

32. NW by Zadie Smith

I am having a really good reading year. I am pretty sure I've already read more excellent books than in either of the last two years. Maybe even more than the last two put together.

Anyway, Zadie Smith. I read White Teeth in 2000 when it came out, and loved it. I remember missing my stop on the bus because I was reading the scene about Irie getting her hair straightened. Two years later I read The Autograph Man and tried not to feel disappointed. And that was more or less it. Over the next ten years Smith published two novels, On Beauty - which I dutifully bought, but never got round to reading - and NW. Which I think I only bought because it was one of those special cheap Kindle deals. Well, thank you Amazon - because this is an amazing book.

As the title suggests, this is not just about the characters, but also about the place which produced them, in a similar way to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. It is about social mobility (up and down), about opportunity and the luxury of choice, about our perceptions of each other, about human relationships. The book follows three people, two women and a man, who were at school together (and are a couple of years younger than me). They have all taken different paths in life, although the two women have remained friends. But they are not just examples of types of people, but real people in themselves - particularly the two women. They are all dissatisfied with their lives in ways that they cannot tell their partners. I sympathised most with the overachieving Natalie (whose name, at school, was Keisha), and her continual feeling that she essentially doesn't exist. The longer she spent alone the more indistinct she became to herself. A liquid decanted from a jar.

I also liked the writing style - which is reminiscent of Ali Smith - and the density of ideas. I am sure I missed many of them, because they are so throwaway. One example: the first part of the book, Leah's story, is about an incident where she was conned by a young woman who turns up at her door in apparent distress. Her friends both laugh at her gullibility and enjoy getting outraged on her behalf. They often ask her to tell the story again, or to update it with further encounters with the woman. At one of these later dates, Leah mentions that the woman was wearing a headscarf. And promptly, this becomes "the story about the girl in the headscarf".

Leah traces a knight’s move from the girl with her finger. Two floors up, one window across. – I was born just there. From there to here, a journey longer than it looks.

85wandering_star
Modifié : Avr 30, 2017, 11:54 am

33. A Chinese Life by Li Kunwu and Philippe Otie

A graphic memoir. Li Kunwu, a Chinese graphic artist, was born in 1955, and so his story covers most of the upheavals that China has experienced in its modern history. It is divided into three sections - The Time of the Father (both Li's own father, and Mao), The Time of the Party, and The Time of the Money (1980 onwards).

I really enjoyed this. The drawing style is vivid and give a real sense of the teeming, bustling cities or the quiet countryside. And although I know the story of modern China so well, there is something about the graphic memoir style which makes the emotions hit very hard - the humiliations and family separations of the Cultural Revolution, the anger of those left behind by China's modern-day economic growth. But as Li tells us at the end of the book, China today may be imperfect, but for anyone who has lived through those times, today's China is a source of great pride.



86wandering_star
Avr 30, 2017, 11:30 am

34. A Death in Sarajevo by Ausma Zehanat Khan

I basically bought this by mistake. Someone recommended Khan's series of detective novels featuring Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak, community police officers in Toronto. This one was cheap on Kindle and so I bought it, not realising that it was a novella which doesn't tell a detective story of its own but seems to be filling in the gaps between a couple of the books. Half of it is a tribunal examining Khattak's conduct of an investigation which makes up the first book in the series, The Unquiet Dead. The second half sees him in Sarajevo where a friend has asked him to help find out what happened to his girlfriend, who disappeared during the Bosnian War. This part is not really a mystery though as there is not much of a story to it. An unsatisfying read, not surprising because of the nature of the book, but I also didn't really enjoy the writing style and won't be following up with other books from this series.

87wandering_star
Modifié : Avr 30, 2017, 11:55 am

35. The Sad Part Was by Prabda Yoon

Short stories, originally published in Thai in 2002 but only translated into English this year by the new Tilted Axis Press which is publishing contemporary international fiction, particularly from Asia (it was founded by Deborah Smith, who has translated Han Kang and Bae Suah).

Yoon runs a bookshop and has himself translated Salinger and Nabokov into Thai.

These stories are non-realistic, sometimes experimental in form (one takes place entirely within a parenthesis in the sentence "The sheet of paper fell (...), so I bent down and picked it up.") and apparently full of wordplay, setting the translator an almost impossible task. They also convey an off-beat picture of modern Thailand, the changes that have taken place in a couple of generations, the modernity and shallowness of Bangkok, the cynicism about politics.

The first story, "Pen in Parenthesis", sets the scene for this. The piece of paper that fell was torn from a seventh-grade notebook, on which the young Pen had written "I will never change". But in the act of picking up the paper Pen considers his life, as a young advertising executive (perhaps the job most defined by alienation) and how much this has in fact changed from his youth being brought up by his congee-seller grandfather and teacher grandmother.

In "Miss Space", a young man falls in love with a woman he keeps bumping into on the bus, attracted to her first by the huge spaces she puts between words in the notebook that she is writing. (Thai doesn't have spaces between words, except in books for children). She speaks only a few words to him, but he cannot stop himself from pouring out his feelings in lengthy, complex sentences.

"Marut by the Sea" features a character breaking away to complain to us about Yoon's writing style. The examples I brought up are his specialty. In other words, the type of bizarre story which he makes end so cryptically, as though the harder it is to understand, the better. If you try asking Sir Yoon what the meaning of each of his stories is, believe me, he'd chuckle deviously, heh heh, before answering, "Why don't you try asking the stories themselves?" Or else, "The meaning? What do you think the meaning of your life is? The meaning of my story is the same. Or, "If I knew, why on earth would I write?"

Not always satisfying, but interesting.

88baswood
Modifié : Avr 30, 2017, 2:28 pm

>78 wandering_star: I have just added God's traitors to my to buy list. Thank you for an excellent review.
and yes AL Kennedy does bleak very well. Good thing you cheered yourself up with Just Kids, I read the print version which I enjoyed very much.

89wandering_star
Mai 6, 2017, 2:20 am

>88 baswood: I have read AL Kennedy before, many years ago. I had a vague memory of not enjoying it, but I really like the ten-minute essays that she does for the radio, so that made me think it was worth picking up a book of hers again. Maybe another 15 years will pass before the next one!

90wandering_star
Modifié : Mai 6, 2017, 2:47 am

36. The Santa Klaus Murder by Mavis Doriel Hay

This book is from the "British Library Crime Classics" series, in which the BL has republished a number of Golden Age mysteries. I've picked up a couple when I've seen them in secondhand bookshops but this is the first one I've enjoyed enough to read to the end.

Christmas 1935. A family gathers in a country house for the festive season. On Christmas Day, the tyrannical patriarch of the family is shot dead. Who could have done such a thing?

It was a perfectly acceptable cosy mystery - easy to spot how the murder was carried out - and some terrible 1930s snobbery in the spelling of the speech of the lower-class characters. The book feels lovely - nice paper and cover. Quite a fun way to pass the time if you like this sort of mystery.

Incidentally, the 'Klaus' of the title - I thought that there would be some significance to this, but in fact it seems to have been normal spelling for the time. When I was younger I was told that British people ought to say 'Father Christmas' as 'Santa Claus' was a terrible Americanism, so I was amused to see from this book that apparently 'Santa K/Claus' came first, but we adopted 'Father Christmas' during WWI because the other was too German - like the royal family becoming Windsors.

91wandering_star
Mai 6, 2017, 5:03 am

37. Euphoria by Lily King

Inspired by an incident in Margaret Mead's life, this story follows three anthropologists in 1930s New Guinea - a couple, Nell and Fen, and another man, Bankson. They meet on Christmas Eve, at a stultifying party for the few Western colonists in the region. All of them are in crisis - Nell and Fen because they have just fled the tribe they were studying, and Bankson because he has just failed to commit suicide, partly driven to it by loneliness. Bankson sees potential neighbours, and helps Nell and Fen to find a new tribe to study and live among, a few hours' canoe ride from his own.

Of course, any novel whose characters are anthropologists is really going to be about how we understand each other, and the three have very different approaches - Fen's is almost physical, trying to live as one of the people; Bankson's is theoretical and Nell's interest is all about working her observations into stories about how to live. There's also something here about whether you understand people better through words or through observation, and if the latter, do words actually interfere in your knowledge?

However, I found the book less interesting than that summary makes it sound. To me, it was an average story, quite well-written and with an interesting setting. There was nothing wrong with it, but I am puzzled by the number of awards and books of the year that it seems to have been garlanded with.

Extract - from Nell's journals (which are part of the book):
My new friend Malun took me today to a women's house where they were weaving & repairing fishing nets and we sat with her pregnant daughter Sali & Sali's paternal aunt & the aunt's four grown daughters. I am learning the chopped rhythm of their talk, the sound of their laughter, the cant of their heads. I can feel the relationships, the likes & dislikes in the room in a way I never could if I could speak. You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.

92SassyLassy
Mai 6, 2017, 7:57 pm

>83 wandering_star: A L Kennedy has to be one of the best "bleak" authors around, and it is that which makes her one of my very favourite authors. She usually does manage to insert her wicked sinking ship sense of humour into her work too, which alleviates some of that remorselessness.

Noting God's Traitors and A Chinese Life (the touchstone for the went to 1984 and offered options such as Black Beauty. I suppose Beauty was in reality an oppressed worker.

93valkyrdeath
Mai 15, 2017, 5:40 pm

A lot of interesting reviews here! I've seen Anubis Gates mentioned before and I'm glad to be reminded of it, since it sounds a lot of fun. I've seen A Chinese Life in the shops and kept wondering whether it was worth reading. Also good to see a positive review of NW, since I loved White Teeth but haven't got round to reading any more of Zadie Smith's novels yet.

94wandering_star
Juin 4, 2017, 1:31 am

I started several other books since reading Euphoria, but the first one I finished was 38. The Sun is God by Adrian McKinty, which is coincidentally also set in New Guinea in the early 20th century, and also based on true events. The events here though were a strange cult who called themselves ‘Naked Cocovores’ or ‘Sonnenorden’, because they went about naked, believed in sunbathing as worship, and ate only coconuts and drank a concotion based on heroin. The story apparently adheres to the historical facts as much as they are known, with the addition of a young investigator, a former military policeman, escaping from demons of his own. An odd little tale.

Will awoke in darkness, drenched with sweat and with creatures biting at him through the mosquito net. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ he said, swatting at his face. The lattice vibrated but Will’s blow did little to disturb any of the local arthropods who were using it alternately as feeding station, battleground and place of reproduction.

95wandering_star
Juin 4, 2017, 1:38 am

39. Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald

I'm going to have to come back and write a fuller review of this one when I have laid hands on my copy. But for the moment, I can say that this is a slightly whimsical look at the BBC during World War Two - set almost exclusively within the walls of Broadcasting House, and looking at the lives and friendships of the people in the building, as well as the slightly awkward role the BBC found itself with during wartime - truth, of course, but also a patriotic spirit - and, like Fitzgerald's The Golden Child, a satirical look at the bureaucracy within a great institution. One of Fitzgerald's lighter works, but I am a great fan of hers and found this worth reading.

96wandering_star
Juin 4, 2017, 1:45 am

40. Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson

The third in the series of novels featuring pompous aesthete Gerald Samper, after Cooking with Fernet Branca and Amazing Disgrace. Like the first two, the humour comes partly from Gerald's outrageous way of saying the unthinkable, and partly from the gap between his self-perception and the pratfalls he regularly makes with his life. The humour is very much not for everybody - in this book Gerald's latest project is a satirical opera on the life of Princess Diana - and to be honest the first book in the series is far and away the funniest. But I still cackled out loud several times while reading this. If you enjoyed the other two, it's worth picking up.

It’s exactly in these small-hours moods that one wrestles with the question of where to live. The imagination proposes locations in copious variety. Each has advantages, each drawbacks. At the end, in fretful impatience with my irresolution, the white-night questions come: ‘Why live anywhere in particular? Why live at all?’ And suddenly the simple, practical problem of buying a house takes on existential proportions and swamps the mind with desolation. This may be connected with eating Gorgonzola before going to bed. Certainly the utter futility is overwhelming once we have truly seen ourselves in the hours of darkness as plankton adrift in an ocean of time, each microscopic organism pathetically calling ‘Remember me!’ before winking out.

97wandering_star
Juin 4, 2017, 2:02 am

41. Lighthouse by Tony Parker

This book has been on my wishlist since I read Stargazing, a memoir about being a trainee lighthousekeeper in the early 1970s. It turns out I read that in 2008! - but had always remembered that it referred to this book, a collection of verbatim interviews with lighthousekeepers and their families, which Tony Parker collected at around the same time.

It's a fascinating read, particularly to see how different people react to the same, rather extreme circumstances. The keeper is on the tower for two months and then has a month of home leave, which creates a lot of pressure on the family, particularly given 1970s assumptions about family roles - one interview, with a priest who looks after lighthouse families, points out that the wives have to be the head of the family effectively for two months, but then step back and allow their husbands to take that role when they are onshore. As for the lighthousekeepers themselves, not everyone enjoys the life - it seems that it is normally something extreme which sends them to join the service, but many of the men interviewed by Parker are not happy about their situation. I wasn't expecting this so much, as the author of Stargazing makes it sound like a wonderful existence. But of course it's obvious that it's an unusual way of living and not suited to everybody.

Every keeper on a rock moans about having to go back at the end of his month's shore leave. But the moment he gets there, he stops moaning and settles in to get on with it. In fact if we're going to be honest about it, most of us give a sigh of relief. It's 'Good-bye world' for a couple of months: no one can get to you out there, you're in a kind of retrest. Whatever we like to say or pretend to ourselves and other people, it is. When we come ashore its for a month's leave; but just as true a way of looking at it would be that when you go off you're taking two month's leave from the world.

98wandering_star
Modifié : Juin 4, 2017, 2:30 am

42. Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes

An unusual story about a 'humane pest controller' in Cape Town, called to a job at an immense, luxurious residential complex called Nineveh, a sterile spot in a weird swampy landscape, which has never been lived in because of a persistent problem with pests. The developer tells Katya that he'd already asked one pest controller to do the job, but he got ripped off. The previous pest controller turns out to be Katya's estranged father - but Katya is not like him - is she?

The whole story is an extended metaphor for all the things we don't like to think about and how the cracks will eventually show - whether those cracks are in our own carefully constructed personalities - in our families - or in our societies (this last is only hinted at, in the name of the complex - Nineveh was the largest city in the world until "it was sacked by a coalition of its former subject peoples" {wikipedia}, a name with resonance for this gated community with a shanty town outside its gates).

It does an excellent job of unsettling the reader.

Katya blinks in the sunlight and sees that they have come quite far - far enough, in fact, to see the boardwalk extended into the swamp. Behind it, Nineveh looms like an ice fortress. Approach is everything, she thinks: how different this landscape seems if you come to it from the outside, through a village of shacks. How things change, according to the routes one takes to them. She can hardly believe she belongs behind those battlements.

Henrietta Rose-Innes won the Caine Prize for the best short story by an African writer in English in 2008 - the story can be read here.

99wandering_star
Juin 4, 2017, 2:59 am

43. The Bone Readers by Jacob Ross

A detective novel set on the fictional Caribbean island of Camaho. Michael "Digger" Digson is a bright kid with no future, shanghaied into the police force by a superintendent who excels at spotting talent in unlikely places. Digger is reluctant to join at first - he has his own history with the force, as the illegitimate son of the Police Commissioner and a woman who was killed by police during a demonstration. But the temptation of finding out what really happened to his mother - and the lack of any other options - brings him into the job. Superintendant Chilman gives him a hint now and again about his mother, but is obsessed with an unsolved case of his own - a young man called Nathan, whose disappearance he feels hasn't received the police attention it deserves. As Digger follows both trails, he starts to uncover some of the corruption within the island - reminding me of Ian Rankin's portrayal of Scotland's underbelly.

I really enjoyed this - a good mystery, vivid sense of place and culture, and interesting characters. This is billed as the first book in a quartet, although the only one published so far. I expect the overarching story of the quartet will be what happened to Digger's mother, which we have only uncovered a little of so far. I will certainly get the next one when it comes out.

She was sifting through the Friday post. She pulled out a brown A4 envelope, got up, dropped it at my elbow. I nudged it aside and turned around to face them. "Talk to me, ladies. Something on y'all mind?"

"Digger, how's Miss Stanislaus?"

I dismissed the question with a flick of my head, held their gazes until Pet directed a glance at the window. "Talk out there say that something happen, yesterday?"

Pet paused for my reply. I offered none.

Lisa raised blue-pencilled eyebrows at me. "People say the Department kill a big-time preacherman? Is all over San Andrews."

"When y'all hear that?"

"First thing this morning. Neighbour come round and tell my mother. I wasn listening but I overhear."

100Nickelini
Juin 4, 2017, 1:25 pm

wow, you've really done some interesting reading. You didn't say if you actually liked The Sun is God. I'm interested in it because I spent 2 months in Papua New Guinea back in the 80s, and there just aren't very many books set there.

101janeajones
Juin 5, 2017, 9:53 am

Catching up here. Interesting, varied reviews.

102wandering_star
Juin 8, 2017, 8:59 am

>100 Nickelini: Good spot! I think it's because it was fine - but not good enough for me to enthuse about. It's quite a quick read and it passed the time. If you're interested in the region then you might get more from it than I did.

103wandering_star
Modifié : Juin 8, 2017, 11:55 am

44. Indonesia, etc. by Elizabeth Pisani

This has been on my wishlist since reading the author's The Wisdom of Whores a couple of years ago - that was a well-written popular public policy book (is that a category?) about the politics and morals of the response to HIV/AIDS and how they distort effective policy-making.

This however is more of a travel book, recounting a year that she spent travelling throughout the Indonesian archipelago. Pisani is a Bahasa speaker, and someone who understands the history and politics of Indonesia - she worked there twice, first as a Reuters journalist (she recounts an incident in 1990 when, while she was reporting on an apparent rebel attack on a gas plant, the military intelligence phoned her at her hotel and asked her to check if they'd left her skeleton key in her room) and later with the Ministry of Health as an epidemiologist. She's also prepared to travel under some pretty rough conversations, and to strike up conversations with - and really listen to - almost everyone that she meets. So this is not the average superficial travel book but one which is really interesting and revealing about the complexities and contradictions of this huge and important country.

The title comes from the 1945 declaration of independence, which read in its entirety: "We, the people of Indonesia, hereby declare the independence of Indonesia. Matters relating to the transfer of power etc. will be executed carefully and as soon as possible". Pisani comments that Indonesia has been working on that etc. ever since.

Entirely by chance, I had happened upon the celebrations that mark the opening of Wulla Poddu, the 'month of bitterness'. In the Marapu religion, Sumba's particular brand of animism, the bitter month is the equivalent of Christian Lent or Muslim Ramadan. It's a month of restraint, a month where women are not allowed to pound rice after dark, and when there's no dressing up or playing loud music. Striking gongs, sacrificing animals and ritual celebrations are all forbidden. Except, of course, for the gongs, sacrifices and celebrations that go with the Poddu itself.

104wandering_star
Juin 9, 2017, 10:35 am

45. How to Read a Word by Elizabeth Knowles

A guide to how to research the history of words. Not quite what I expected so I only skimmed it. (I thought it would be more about the different ways to break down words into their component parts, how to spot what language a word might have originally come from, etc.)

There are a couple of interesting examples of word history, though, such as 'scientist', proposed in 1834 by analogy with the word 'artist' following a discussion on what word might be used to designate 'students of the knowledge of the material world'. An article about this discussion in the 1834 Quarterly Review noted that the proposed word was "not generally palatable" and that others, working by analogy with the Germany word natur-forscher, suggested compounds such as 'nature-poker' and 'nature-peeper'.

105Nickelini
Juin 10, 2017, 1:44 pm

> (I thought it would be more about the different ways to break down words into their component parts, how to spot what language a word might have originally come from, etc.)

I took a first-year linguistics course on exactly that at uni called "the Wonder of Words." I wish I could tell you that we had a text book, but we just had handouts and the dictionary. It was fun and I learned a lot. We did Latin, Greek, Old English, French and bits of other languages and their impact on English. I was surprised to find that the Old English part was by far the most difficult. Can't remember why but it was. Also, "fart" is from Old English and is a 1200 year old word (and one my mother wouldn't let us say).

106wandering_star
Juin 11, 2017, 5:09 pm

>105 Nickelini: That sounds a lot of fun!

107janeajones
Juin 11, 2017, 10:19 pm

'105> Most of the "forbidden" four letter words are from Old English -- perfectly respectable at the time.

108Nickelini
Juin 11, 2017, 10:26 pm

>107 janeajones: Yes! I also took a course on Chaucer, and we had to pull out a word from one of his works and do a class presentation no its history. One of the guys in my class did the c-word. It has a long history. (I did "wife" which can be traced back to the earliest language we know).

109wandering_star
Juin 12, 2017, 11:24 am

46. The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson

In the 1970s, an elderly Englishwoman thinks back to her youth, specifically the five years she spent in Moscow. She went there in 1914 as a governess, to the horror of her very conventional parents - they only let her go because a stout and upstanding member of their chapel, Miss Clegg, had worked in Moscow for 10 years and made the introduction to Gerty's new employers. Miss Clegg gives Gerty advice on how to stay out of trouble, but Gerty is rebellious - "I'll do my best to encounter untowardness", she thinks.

She is soon caught up in the romance of the large, disorderly family she works for - and, when it comes, the October revolution. By mid-1918, she is part of the Institute of Revolutionary Transformation, a commune that she has established with a group of friends. Their hallmark is to believe in the perfectability of the human being, and their manifesto "declares war" on the Private, the Old and the Ego. But human nature is more stubborn than that, and the commune becomes a microcosm of the trends, good and bad, in the wider Soviet world.

Gerty is conscious of the negative impact the Revolution had on many people, and is ashamed that she and her friends ignored what they knew to be the truth. But at the same time they were caught up in a hopeful idealism, the search for better lives and better relationships. The group's ringleader, a genius and crazed scientist and engineer called Nikita Slavkin (the vanishing futurist of the title) urges them: "Each time we - just we few - allow ourselves to imagine a harmonious world, we bring it closer. We are creating a future here, in our minds." Slavkin's inventions include the Propaganda Machine, which in 5 minutes of sensory overload aimed to create socialists from bourgeouis consciousnesses. His final invention is the Socialisation Machine, which transports the user to an alternate or future world where Communism is already a reality. But when he and his machine disappear, is that his ultimate success or failure?

This was a terrific read. It took me vividly into a world which I couldn't have imagined before, both in the hardships and the idealism - and it is a plea for optimism and belief in the possibility of making things better, however hard things get.

History may not advance in the swift straight lines that the early Soviet artists envisaged. But surely the cynics who claim it moves in circles are just as foolish. If it does seem to repeat itself, if we do seem to arrive back at the same place again and again - the outbreak of war, the counter-Revolution - we are still in a slightly better position each time. We have the experience of our previous passes.

110wandering_star
Juin 16, 2017, 11:12 am

47. Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: stories from the trailblazers of domestic suspense ed. Sarah Weinman

A collection of short stories from the 1940s to the 1970s, which have in common the fact that they are mainly psychological thrillers with a domestic focus, and all written by women. One of the best is the opener, a Patricia Highsmith story about a young nanny perhaps overly keen to look after her young charges. Other favourites were Margaret Millar's "The People Across The Canyon" in which a young girl starts to spend more time with a new family which have moved in across the way - but is that what is really happening? - and Shirley Jackson's "Louisa, Please Come Home", about a teenage runaway:

It's uncomfortable walking around all day on a wad of bills in your shoe, but they were good solid shoes, the kind of comfortable old shoes you wear whenever you don't really care how you look, and I had put new shoelaces in them before I left home so I could tie them good and tight. You can see, I planned pretty carefully, and no little detail got left out. If they had let me plan my sister's wedding there would have been a lot less of that running around and screaming and hysterics.

I like the idea of collecting these stories and highlighting the popularity of women writers of crime fiction in these decades, not least to counter the idea that what's currently called "grip-lit" is somehow a new thing. Most of the stories, though, I didn't find that suspenseful, perhaps because of the short length or perhaps because more modern stuff is often more graphic and hard-hitting. Nevertheless, an enjoyable read.

111arubabookwoman
Juin 16, 2017, 3:41 pm

Coincidentally, I'm reading Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives now too. I'm only a few stories in, including Patricia Highsmith's story you reference above, which I believe was her first published story. Enjoying it so far.

112bragan
Juin 19, 2017, 2:08 pm

>110 wandering_star: That "grip-lit" article is terrific. Or, at the very least, it made me laugh. I don't know what weird human impulse it is that makes us look at things that have been around forever and treat them as if they're exciting new developments, but it seems to happen in a lot of areas.

113wandering_star
Juin 20, 2017, 12:08 pm

>112 bragan: Marketing! But I think you're right, there's a human impulse too - perhaps a combination of liking new shiny things and liking to put things into categories?

114wandering_star
Juin 20, 2017, 12:08 pm

Oh, and short memories.

115bragan
Juin 21, 2017, 11:50 am

>113 wandering_star: Marketing is the answer to a lot of those odd "why do we think about things in this dumb way?" questions, I guess. But in this case, I imagine all of those answers are probably right.

116wandering_star
Juin 24, 2017, 12:20 am

48. Now You Know by Michael Frayn

If there was total openness and honesty in the world, would that be a good thing? That's the question Michael Frayn puts at the heart of this farce.

Our two main characters are Terry - a 'what you see is what you get' big personality who is a high-profile campaigner for government openness - and Hilary, a quietly committed civil servant.

All his life Terry has believed in the value of openness. It's his vocation - but he also believes in its value in private life. His vision of heaven is based on the Bible's description of it as made of 'gold like unto clear glass':

"A golden light in all the rooms. Nothing hidden. Everything visible. All kinds of comic arrangements you can see inside those rooms, Hilary. People living in their offices, with their suits on coathooks and their clean shirts in the stationery cupboard. People living half the week with their sister-in-law, and half the week with the postman's grandmother. Some of them up to a lot of even more comic goings-on than that. But all of it open for the world to see. So no one thinks there's anything comic about it. And if that's the way it's going to be in heaven, why wait? Why not try and make it like that here on earth?"

Hilary meanwhile comes from a family where secrets were never spoken about, which she reflects wryly was good training for her work. And yet - she is working on a controversial case, a death caused by police brutality which her office is covering up. And Terry's personality can be very magnetic...

This is a farce, so sexual attraction and other hijinks ensure, and Terry comes to realise that there are benefits to being allowed to keep private things secret. As you would expect from Michael Frayn, it's very cleverly written; but the characters also feel like real people, which makes it more than just a farce. I particularly liked the way that many minor characters are given a short period of narration, which makes you realise that they are very different people to themselves than the way they are perceived by those around them - perhaps a nudge back in the direction of openness?

117wandering_star
Juil 16, 2017, 7:25 am

Oh dear, I have got very far behind myself with my reviewing. It's a combination of having had a few long trips and weekends away - with a lot of reading - and a busy time when I am at home. Also, because I have a lot of things to say about the next book I need to review, so I didn't feel I could just sit down and dash something off.

That book was 49. Bad Feminist, a collection of essays by Roxane Gay. I actually started reading a library copy earlier this year, but soon realised that I wanted a copy of my own, to dog-ear pages and return to certain sections.

The essays cover a wide range of topics - memoir pieces, pop culture, politics, race and feminism. I didn't find all of them interesting: but the first few were really revelatory to me, and some of the same themes which had that impact recur through the book.

One reason for this is that Gay is very good at not taking a single knee-jerk approach to anything, but at teasing out the contradictions within her response. I often feel reluctant to express my point of view because it feels self-contradictory, and most other people (especially on the internet) seem so definite. It was a pleasure to read something which acknowledges contradictions and just sits with them, instead of feeling that we need to come down on one side of the argument or the other.

Gay describes herself as a 'bad feminist' because for a long time she didn't think she could call herself one - she loves pink and sometimes enjoys dancing to music with misogynistic lyrics, she doesn't know enough about feminist history, sometime she is a bit of 'a mess'. But then she points out that people who call themselves feminists are held to unrealistic standards - they are supposed to do everything right and think about everything from a feminist perspective, otherwise they have somehow lost the right to express a feminist point of view about any particular thing. Gay's point is that not being perfect shouldn't stop us from trying to do the right thing.

This was very resonant for me, as was her essay on privilege. "We tend to believe that accusations of privilege imply we have it easy, which we resent because life is hard for nearly everyone" - and shutting down a discussion by crying “privilege” implies that there can’t be multiple truths. "We need to get to a place where we discuss privilege by way of observation and acknowledgment rather than accusation … We should be able to say, ‘This is my truth’, and have that truth stand without a hundred clamouring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot co-exist."

One theme in several of these essays is the question of diverse representation in popular culture. Here’s what I think about diverse representations.

1. Diverse representations are good. They are good because they represent some of the real complexity of life and because they reduce lazy stereotypes. Perhaps they are the opposite of lazy stereotypes. I am half Chinese and when I was younger the appearance of an East Asian character on TV playing a normal person was hugely worthy of comment - even if they were almost always medical professionals in small or non-speaking roles.

2. Calling out lack of diversity is good - because there are people who don’t notice it, and it might encourage them to notice it in future. I remember going to see Disney’s Aladdin with friends when I was a student, and a South Asian friend and I were laughing afterwards about how all the background characters had stereotypically Semitic features, while the heroine had a cute little button nose like every other Disney princess. The white member of the group was shocked that she hadn’t noticed this.

3. But when I see a headline fulminating about lack of diversity in a particular piece of work, I quite often think that this is just clickbait designed to lead to an angry discussion. What if the work has other merits? What if it has other, more significant, flaws?

Gay brings this out very well in her essay on the TV series Girls. Yes, the number of ethnic minority characters is tiny, but she points out that a lot of weight rests on this show because there are so few portrayals of realistic women on television.

“We see the life of one kind of real girl and that is important … More often than not, the show is trying too hard to do too much, but that’s okay. This show should not have to be perfect. … {discusses problems with representation} Still, Girls is not the first show to commit this transgression, and it certainly won’t be the last. It is unreasonable to expect Dunham to somehow solve the race and representation problem on television while crafting her twenty-something witticisms and appalling us with sex scenes so uncomfortable they defy imagination."

It's not unusual for essays like this to give a reader things to think about, but I think for me this book has helped me to a new way of thinking - acknowledging the difficulties in an issue such as safe spaces vs freedom of speech, and teasing them out rather than simply picking one side or the other.

118wandering_star
Juil 16, 2017, 7:33 am

50. Standing In Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin

This book marked the return of Inspector Rebus after a couple of books featuring Malcolm Fox. Rebus is retired and working in a cold-case unit, although without the job what does he have? And so when a cold case appears to have links to a recent incident, Rebus can't resist getting a piece of the action, whatever means he needs to use to do so. Fox appears here too, but as a more minor character - watching Rebus very carefully to ensure he doesn't step across any lines.

Maybe it's a while since I've read any Rebus but he seemed to be more cranky and maverick than usual. However, a good story and by the end of it I enjoyed spending time with Rebus again.

"I didn't grass you up, Gavin."
"I know that. But if she set her mind to it, it wouldn't take her five minutes to work out I'm the one who got you that visitor's pass."
"Well, we'd better get you into her good books pronto, then." Rebus rose to his feet and reached for his jacket. "But if you should happen to hear anything on the grapevine..."
"You'd be grateful for a tip-off?" Arnold guessed with a smile. "Tell me, is it possible for anyone to come to know you without them always feeling they're slipping their neck into a noose?"

119wandering_star
Juil 16, 2017, 7:47 am

51. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

A family saga, telling the story of several generations of Korean immigrants in Japan from the start of the century through war, post-war redevelopment and into the modern era. The title comes from the popular arcade/gambling game in Japan, partly because it's a sector which employs a lot of Korean-Japanese, but also because as a game of chance, it's a metaphor for life - you have some control over what happens to you, but much more it is about luck and wider circumstances.

I had mixed feelings about this book. The stories are interesting, and set in a community that I didn't know much about. The writing is very simple, almost fable-like: a bit more tell than show, but it meant that when I picked the book up it was very easy to keep reading. But when I had put the book down, I didn't especially feel compelled to pick it back up - perhaps because the characters never felt like fully real people to me, more like pieces on a chessboard. There was also a very strong morality throughout the book - good people work hard and want a simple life, and any enjoyment of beauty or luxury is portrayed as something very wrong. This was sometimes troubling, for example in the case of one minor character, a young escort who is beaten up by a client for bugging him at the wrong moment - she is disfigured by this and the book gloats at the fact that her future life will be a slow descent into nastier and meaner sex work. I thought that was pretty unpleasant.

Yoseb sounded hopeful—yes, life in Osaka would be difficult, but things would change for the better. They’d make a tasty broth from stones and bitterness. The Japanese could think what they wanted about them, but none of it would matter if they survived and succeeded. There were four of them now, Kyunghee said, and soon five—they were stronger because they were together. “Right?” she said.

120wandering_star
Juil 16, 2017, 7:55 am

52. Bodies of Water by VH Leslie

An insubstantial novella about two women inhabiting the same space at different times - Evelyn, a Victorian woman sent to a sanatorium for 'hydro treatment', and Kirsten, a contemporary woman who moves into a flat in the newly converted sanatorium, one of the first two residents there. The other resident tells her, "Sometimes old places like this retain a bit of the past, in the fabric of the building, and occasionally, they seep."

Of course, as is the way in these things, the sanatorium was really a way to punish troublesome women, or remove them from society - and the painful water treatments are somehow made to link to the fact that for Victorian 'fallen women' there was often no way out of social and economic disgrace than to drown oneself in the Thames. And so after Kirsten moves in, strange watery things begin to happen - for no obvious reason, other than the fact that the same Thames runs past the sanatorium.

‘Are there other women in the water?’ Milly asked, leaning back on her elbows. Evelyn ignored the obvious answer. Too many fallen women ended up in the river. Beneath Waterloo Bridge, the water swelled with drowned girls. It was better to focus on the mythical women who swam in the depths. ‘Of course, there are rusalkas and nixies, sirens, undines.’

121wandering_star
Juil 16, 2017, 8:06 am

53. We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson

Now *this* is how to do eerily chilling. Eighteen-year-old Merricat lives in a crumbling mansion with her older sister and an uncle, the only survivors after an incident in which most of their family members died of poison. Constance, the sister, was acquitted of the poisonings, but the people of the nearby town believe that they know what happened and as a result the girls are ostracised. Merricat tries her best to keep the household going - burying talismans around the property and once a week, running the gauntlet of suspicious townsfolk to come back with groceries. But one day, a handsome cousin arrives and tries to persuade Constance that she can return to a normal life - triggering a hostile reaction from Merricat and a permanent change in the way the young women live.

I had always buried things, even when I was small; I remember that once I quartered the long field and buried something in each quarter to make the grass grow higher as I grew taller, so I would always be able to hide there. I once buried six blue marbles in the creek bed to make the river beyond run dry. 'Here is a treasure for you to bury,' Constance used to say to me when I was small, giving me a penny, or a bright ribbon; I had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps someday they would grow as dragons. All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.

122ELiz_M
Modifié : Juil 16, 2017, 9:36 am

>117 wandering_star: And finally a tipping point is reached and this is added to the wishlist.

>121 wandering_star: Wonderful review -- I listened to this audiobook and it was an excellent experience it in that medium!

123kidzdoc
Juil 16, 2017, 8:59 am

Fabulous review of Bad Feminist, Margaret! I read another review of it by a member of the 75 Books group yesterday, which made me want to read this book, but your comments about it have ensured that I'll actively look for it and buy it soon.

124wandering_star
Juil 16, 2017, 10:05 am

>122 ELiz_M:, >123 kidzdoc: Good - I don't think you'll regret it!

125wandering_star
Juil 16, 2017, 10:20 am

54. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

And this is how to do real Victorians as opposed to clichés. I read an interesting interview with Sarah Perry after finishing this book, in which she was asked how the story would have been different if it took place nowadays. She replied:
"I am not sure that much would have been different had these events taken place in 2017: Will would still have loved his wife, he would still have been a man of faith, Cora would still have walked a very uneasy line between intellectual friendship and physical intimacy. I suppose they might have met up in the pub rather than gone for country walks, and might have texted rather than written letters, but these are not the essentials.”

In an afterword to the book, Perry comments that she was inspired by Matthew Sweet’s history, Inventing the Victorians, which "challenges notions of a prudish era enslaved by religion and incomprehensible manners; rather, he shows us a nineteenth century of department stores, big brands, sexual appetites and a fascination for the strange."

And there is certainly a fascination for the strange here. Cora, a young woman recently widowed out of a sadistic marriage, moves to Essex with her companion Martha, and the background to the story is the reawakened legend of the Essex Serpent, a sea-beast which may have been woken by a recent earthquake, and on which every bad thing which happens in the village is blamed. The book too is full of things lurking under the surface: lusts and passions, parasites and diseases, fears and suspicions. Perhaps it doesn't all quite hang together, but I enjoyed it - the characters (especially the women) are interesting people to spend time with, and the background is an unusual take on Victorian times.

She’d lived all her life here at the margin of the world, and never once thought to mistrust its changing territory: the seeping of salt water up through the marshes, and the changing patterns of its muddy banks and creeks, and the estuary tides which she checked almost daily against her father’s almanac, were all as untroublesome as the patterns of her family life.

126wandering_star
Juil 16, 2017, 10:36 am

55. Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith

One in the Canongate series of reimagined myths, this time the story of Iphis, a girl who grows up disguised as a boy, falls in love with a girl, and is magically transformed into a boy so that she can marry her beloved. Perfect material for Ali Smith, you might think, and the epigraphs for the book encapsulate some of her usual themes - Joseph Roth saying "It is the mark of a narrow world that it mistrust the undefined", and someone called John Lyly saying "Practise only impossibilities".

The story itself is rather thin - a girl falls in love, another girl realises that she doesn't have to suppress herself to fit into a macho corporate world - but there are some lovely touches (I like the grandfather who tells all sorts of stories from history as if they happened to him, whether the protagonist was male or female) and the writing is beautiful.

The grey area, I'd discovered, had been misnamed: really the grey area was a whole other spectrum of colours new to the eye. She had the swagger of a girl. She blushed like a boy. She had a girl's toughness. She had a boy's gentleness. She was as meaty as a girl. She was as graceful as a boy.

127wandering_star
Juil 16, 2017, 10:56 am

56. Blackout by Connie Willis

Part of the loose series of books about time-travelling historians, and the first in a two-volume story. In this one, three of the historians are sent to different parts of WWII in the UK - but for some reason at the end of their assignments they are unable to return to modern-day Oxford. The book imagines WWII very well, but without the second volume I can't judge the story. I did however order the second volume as soon as I finished this one, so that's a good sign.

57. Nowhere to be Found by Bae Suah

Teenage anomie, in Korea. Similar to Banana Yoshimoto but without whatever it is that makes Banana Yoshimoto good. Not really my thing.

I didn’t understand what was going on either. Was this hatred I was feeling? Or a dull affection buried deep inside? Or was I merely acting out some dramatic emotion in order to endure this chaotic life? I had no idea.

58. The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

The rather depressing story of a young woman in Edwardian London, bullied and mistreated by her horrible father, and her ill-fated attempts to find some love and happiness in her life.

Blinkers had put me in a second-class ladies' carriage, although I would have preferred a first-class smoking one. In the corner seat opposite me was a scraggy woman with a fringe, dressed in lolly pink. She told me before the journey was over that she resembled Queen Alexandria. I was surprised.

128wandering_star
Juil 16, 2017, 11:00 am

59. Heresy by SJ Parris

First in a series of historical mysteries, set in Elizabethan times. The sleuth is (the real-life philosopher) Giordano Bruno, and in this novel he finds himself in Oxford, a university riven by religious differences, at a time when several people have been murdered in ways which appear to have been inspired by Fox's Book of Martyrs.

I expected to like this more than I did - it's a period of history I've been reading about recently, and I've enjoyed other medieval mysteries like Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death series. But this didn't quite work for me - perhaps the history is a little undigested or the detective-story formula is a bit too visible?

"And this is Signor Filippo Nolano, is it not?" Jenkes greeted me with a feline smile, holding out a surprisingly delicate hand, which I shook with some reluctance, feeling Florio's curious eyes on the side of my face. "I wondered when we would be seeing you here, after you followed me from the Catherine Wheel the other day."
"I - that is..." I was unsure how to meet this accusation, especially with Florio's amazed stare burning into me.
Jenkes waved his hand as if to dismiss my small offence.
"No matter. But Signor Nolano, I cannot help noticing that our friend here, Signor Florio, seems surprised to hear me address you so. Perhaps he knows you by a different name?" He raised one eyebrow theatrically, steepling his fingertips together.

129ChocolateMuse
Juil 16, 2017, 10:11 pm

If I ever run out of things to read, I'll know to come here to this thread! I loved The Essex Serpent too.

130kidzdoc
Juil 17, 2017, 10:32 pm

Nice review of The Essex Serpent. I've read several enticing reviews of it, so I'll have to crack open my copy of it sooner rather than later.

131wandering_star
Modifié : Juil 19, 2017, 8:16 am

>127 wandering_star: For an alternative take, here's a much more enthusiastic review of The Vet's Daughter - this is the first episode I've listened to of this podcast, but it seems like a good one.

132avatiakh
Juil 31, 2017, 3:27 am

Oh, I just wandered over from the 75er group where we sometimes share a read in the TIOLI challenge. I'm completely riddled by book bullets and will now stagger back to where I belong! Will read the grip-lit article.

I followed Linda Grant's blog for while a few years ago, she was completely a fashionista and I remember her commenting on what she should wear to the Booker Prize when she was shortlisted for The clothes on their backs, she certainly suffered a lot of angst. I'm looking forward to reading The Dark Circle.

I quite liked Bernice Ruben's take on expats in Indonesia in The Ponsonby Post. I've added the Pisani book to my to-read list.

Love your comments on Bad Feminist. Another one to read.

133wandering_star
Juil 31, 2017, 10:15 am

>132 avatiakh: Sorry about the drive-by book bulletting! Do come by whenever you like ;-)

The Ponsonby Post looks interesting.

134wandering_star
Août 8, 2017, 9:56 am

60. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

A man has disappeared in the Amazonian rainforest. He went in to trace a researcher, working for the same drug company as him, who is deep inside the jungle and has almost cut off communication with her employer, barring the occasional mystifying update - in the most recent letter, she writes that Dr Eckman has died and been buried in the forest.

Dr Swenson gets away with this erratic behaviour because her research is so potentially lucrative. But all she will say about that is that the work is progressing, slowly. The drug company sends one of Dr Eckman's colleagues after him - Dr Marina Singh - although she only makes up her mind to go when Eckman's widow asks her to find out what actually happened.

The rest of the story concerns Singh's journey into the forest - with a long period of waiting in Manaus until she can make contact with Dr Swenson - and what she finds there, not just in terms of people and the story of what happened, but also in new contexts and perspectives and questions that she needs to ask herself.

This book truly has everything. It's a great story, with great writing and interesting, complex characters. All this explores themes including belonging; the difference between right and wrong and how much this is a question of context and perspective; the importance of hope; and overall, the question of who has a right to make decisions about other people's lives.

I enjoyed Bel Canto when I read it some years ago, but after this, all of Ann Patchett's books are now on my wishlist.

Before Easter's accident, if pulling a snake into a boat can be called an accident, Marina had asked several times to see the trees, but her requests had been met by a vague evasiveness - they had already been or this wasn't the week to go. Since the anaconda, she had frankly forgotten about them. Her notions of what was important had shifted. The jungle was not short on trees and she had seen many of them. It was difficult to imagine that some would be so substantially different from the others. Still, now that the invitation had been extended she accepted with pleasure, feeling that her patience had been noticed and rewarded.

135wandering_star
Août 8, 2017, 10:26 am

61. The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

This book is about the English scientist Joseph Priestley, most famous for his discovery of oxygen, and his life and afterlife in the context of the politics of the time he lived in.

Johnson's best-known book is The Ghost Map, the story of a similarly maverick pioneering scientist, John Snow, and his discovery of the causes of cholera. In my memory, that book told the story of John Snow's work and his efforts to persuade the medical establishment, and capped it off with a final chapter about the importance of networks and interdisciplinary approaches.

There's a similar 'moral of the story' here, the question of why at some periods of history there are multiple breakthroughs in many varied fields - in this case, breakthroughs from politics to science. There is a link between Priestley and the American Revolution, as Franklin was a fellow science enthusiast and friend of Priestley's. However, rather than being captured in a final chapter, the 'moral of the story' is scattered throughout the book, which for me distracted from the story and made it less interesting. Or perhaps the story, being much more diffuse than John Snow's was already less interesting.

Another handicap is that I know very little about early US history, so all the references to the arguments and friendships between the Founding Fathers left me a little confused.

That said, it was interesting to consider what creates genius and innovation, in the context of one particular story. Johnson discusses the theory of the paradigm shift (a paradigm, ie a set of rules and conventions, governs the boundaries of scientific thought => anomalies gradually build up => 'revolutionary science' starts to look outside those boundaries and anomalies multiply => the paradigm collapses and is replaced by a new one).

But he goes past this - it's not just about the conventions bounding scientific thought, but all the other social, cultural, political, technological elements of the environment. In Priestley's case, his non-conformist religion and radical politics drove his spirit of scientific experimentation and desire for reforms.

And you have to add to this the individual details of a personal life. Priestley lived next to a brewery. He started conducting experiments on the 'mephitic' air which bubbled up from the fermentation vats - what we now call CO2 - accidentally invented soda water - and in the process became interested in the properties of gases, leading to his famous experiments.

There are also lots of fascinating details scattered through the book. Did you know that Benjamin Franklin discovered the Gulf Stream? His research (taking detailed measurements of water temperature along the path of a 1775 sea voyage to America) was triggered by a complaint that letters posted from America to England took longer than the other way around.

Johnson also writes about "the eighteenth-century concept of subscribing {which} is one without an exact modern equivalent, falling somewhere between a magazine subscription and a charitable donation to a museum or park or university." In that, this 10-year-old book is already showing its age - but how nice to see modern 'crowdfunding' options like Patreon and Kickstarted fitted into this centuries-old tradition!

To understand the importance of electricity in the imagination of the educated classes in the mid-1700s, one has to understand the unusual convergence that made it so fascinating. In most cases when a fundamental force in the universe is first formally understood by science, there is a lag between that understanding and the emergence of popular technologies that depend on the science for their existence. Newton's law of universal gravitation didn't immediately spawn a craze for gadgets build on his equations. Even in today's accelerated world, it took at least two generations for Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA to engender mainstream technologies such as DNA tests. But with electricity, the two phenomena overlapped: you had the discovery of one of nature's most fundamental forces, and you had an immediate flood of mesmerizing parlor tricks. You had awe-inspiring scientific genius, and you had gadgets, all in one swoop.

136wandering_star
Sep 3, 2017, 10:57 am

68. How's The Pain by Pascal Garnier

A short French noir in which an ageing cynic ends up on a road trip with a much younger man. Simon has had all manner of interesting experiences, Bernard has never even seen the sea. And yet for all his interesting life, Simon is ending his life detached from everything around him, unable to feel any emotions. Bernard, naive and enthusiastic, befriends people everywhere he goes. Extremely deadpan style.

Simon opened one eye and closed it again almost immediately, assailed by the sunlight daubing the windscreen with a lurid carousel of colours. Past a certain age, sleep becomes a rare luxury, given up reluctantly. His mind had been empty of dreams or nightmares, which seemed to him like the most perfect state of grace, as though he had never existed at all. But now he was forced to re-inhabit his pitiful skin that sagged over tired muscles and stuck to creaking bones; to regain his basic thoughts and functions, which at that moment meant nothing to him.

137wandering_star
Sep 3, 2017, 11:13 am

69. Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson

First published in 1978, this is the story of a circumscribed life. At the end of her life, Nora returns to her childhood home. Falling sick from the strains of the journey, she thinks back over her life - her misfit childhood, unhappy marriage to a bully, and eventual escape to London, where she was able to live on her own terms, at least until impoverishment forced a return to Australia. This is one of those subtle books where a throwaway comment returns chapters later to hit you with great force, as you piece together the events of Nora's life - I thought it was an excellent read.

I asked for a small allowance, and Colin said he would think about it. A fortnight later I asked if he had thought about it.
‘Thought about what?’ he said to his shaving mirror.
‘My allowance.’
‘What allowance?’
‘You must remember.’
‘Must I?’ he was inclined to be humorous. ‘Well I don’t.’
I went back to the beginning and made my request again. When I had finished he pulled his mouth awry to tauten the skin under the blade. A minute passed in silence except for the scrape of the razor. Then he leaned forward and looked intently into his own eyes.
‘But why bring that up when I am shaving?’

138wandering_star
Modifié : Sep 3, 2017, 11:30 am

70. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola

As a young boy, the narrator of this book is being chased by members of an enemy tribe. He flees into the bush, but somehow manages to enter a magical 'bush of ghosts', and the rest of the book is the story of his life there - 27 years, until he returns to the world of the living.

There were many interesting stories of the ghosts and spirits which the narrator encounters - many of which I assume are linked to Yoruba myths and legends. At one point the narrator encounters his cousin, who has died, and is working as a missionary in the afterlife, with a very successful church! However, no episode connected to anything else, which made it difficult to stay with the book. It was better when read in smallish doses, and slowly enough to appreciate the musicality of the rhythm of the language.

But as the bush which surrounded this pond was very quiet without any noise of a creature whatever it might be so I began to feel much cold without being cold, and when my head was not at rest for the quietness of the place then I went to the place that I spread the skin in the sun and began to warm myself in this sun perhaps my body would be at rest, but when there was no change at all until the skin was dried then I took it and left that area as quickly as possible. So I wore it as a cloth, of course, it could only reach from my knees to the waist, so I was going on with it like that. It was on this day I believed that if there is no noise of a creature in a bush or if a bush is too quiet there would be fear without seeing a fearful creature.

139wandering_star
Sep 3, 2017, 11:39 am

71. The Dry by Jane Harper

An Australian thriller. A small farming community is horrified by what seems to be a brutal murder-suicide - a farmer, unable to cope with the effects of the terrible drought, driven crazy by the worry. But Luke's parents refuse to believe that he could have killed his wife and son, and when his childhood friend Aaron - now a police officer - comes to town for the funeral, they beg him to do some investigating. But there is another tragedy in the town's history, one about which Luke and Aaron shared a secret, and as Aaron investigates the deaths he also uncovers some memories about the past - and he's clearly not welcome in the town. A good atmospheric thriller, although not with enough substance for me to want to read it again.

The huge river was nothing more than a dusty scar in the land. The empty bed stretched long and barren in either direction, its serpentine curves tracing the path where the water had flowed. The hollow that had been carved over centuries was now a cracked patchwork of rocks and crabgrass. Along the banks, gnarled grey tree roots were exposed like cobwebs.

It was appalling.

140wandering_star
Sep 4, 2017, 9:23 am

72. Burnt Island by Alice Thompson

This is the story of a struggling writer who goes on an island retreat, to help him break through his writer's block - he is intent on writing something that will be popular, not like his previous books, which were critically acclaimed but didn't sell very well. Or perhaps this is the story that he writes - a gripping thriller full of twists and turns and with, as he notes to himself, a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter.

Either way, the island retreat is not everything that Max hoped for. His luggage is washed overboard during his boat ride out to the island, his promised traditional bothy turns out to be a stationary caravan, and his mysterious benefactor is revealed as a more successful writer than he is. Everyone on the island seems to know his business:

"You're the writer, aren't you?"
It was funny how each person said that in a different way. Dr Macdonald said it as if it were a medical condition. How right she was.


However, none of them is exactly what they seem - and some of them drop mysterious warnings about the fate of the last young writer to accept James' generosity.

I don't think it was inevitable that I enjoyed this book - sometimes this sort of slightly show-offy cleverness annoys me - but I was in the right mood to enjoy the cleverness both of the overall concept and of the writing.

Max hadn't really lived his life, just watched it pass by while making copious notes. He felt only about twenty-five in earth years. But life always took a great big bite out of you in the end. A chunk out of your time on earth when you weren't watching, when you were busy writing your next novel. In writing years, Max was actually about 1027.

141wandering_star
Sep 4, 2017, 9:34 am

73. The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes

A typically wise and charming story by Marian Keyes, this time focusing on the lives - family, love and work - of a miscellaneous group of people living in a single building in Dublin. As usual with Marian Keyes, the characters are often dealing with challenges which are difficult and very real; yet her warmth and sympathy for them make her books an easy read rather than feeling like they are about a particular "issue". These are twenty-first century women, and there is no moralizing about what their relationships should look like - no mean feat to combine this with a happy ending. And while she is warm and charming she is no pushover - the spikier elements and weak points of her characters are also there and this makes them interesting.

He'd been fond of Katie, very fond if truth be told, and he hadn't been at all prepared for them breaking up. A woman finishing with him was a radical mutation in his pattern of romance. It hadn't happened in a long, long time, perhaps never, and it had shaken him. Not to his core, no; his core was sealed in titanium. But to quite near his core. Enough to cause the coffee cups on the tables of his core to rattle.

142wandering_star
Sep 24, 2017, 8:12 am

74. Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman (audiobook, unabridged, read by the author)

I've now read a few different versions of Norse myths, and I really enjoyed this one - somehow Neil Gaiman seems to have stayed true to the original mood, while giving the gods more individual personalities than they have when the stories are told in a classic 'myth' style. This meant that there seemed to be a story arc rather than a series of unconnected stories.

143wandering_star
Sep 24, 2017, 8:28 am

75. The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited by Louisa Lim

While living in Beijing, Louisa Lim had to go to extraordinary lengths to maintain security when she was researching and writing this book: she wrote it on a computer which had never been connected to the internet, and which was locked away in a safe when she wasn't writing on it; and she never ever mentioned the book either at home or at work. It's unlikely she will ever get a visa to go to China again. All this goes to demonstrate the huge political sensitivity that the events of 1989 continue to have in China, almost 30 years later.

Lim uses interviews with people involved in the 1989 events - a soldier, a protester, a photographer, the mother of one of the victims - to tell the stories of the protests and crackdown themselves, of the way the story was managed and covered up afterwards, and of some of the consequences of the event - for example, the rise in angry nationalism which the Party uses as a means to distract energies which might otherwise turn into dissatisfaction with its rule. It highlights the absolute paranoia of the Party - for example, the bereaved mother reveals that there is a CCTV camera trained on the spot where her son was temporarily buried after 4 June - positioned there solely in case she ever goes there to mourn his memory. But it also suggests that the Party doesn't really need to be so paranoid:

Over time, worries about government retribution and the profound taboos surrounding June 4th had solidified to such an extent that some families would rather disown their own offspring than admit they had been killed that night. Zhang Xianling was shocked by one phone call in particular, with a husband and wife, both teachers, who had moved to Guangzhou after their son’s death on June 4th. She had been hoping to confirm the details of what had happened to their son, but the boy’s mother refused to speak. “Her attitude to me was fine, but she said, ‘We don’t want to bring this matter up. We’re living a nice life. We don’t want to talk about this stuff.’ Then the father said, ‘What’s all this about?’ I heard his voice by the phone. The mother said, ‘She’s asking about so-and-so—their son. Then the father grabbed the phone and said, ‘It’s none of your business. We have a good life! Don’t give us any trouble!’ And he hung up.”

144wandering_star
Sep 24, 2017, 8:41 am

76. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: a memoir of food, family and longing by Anya von Bremzen

A family memoir and history of the twentieth century in Russia/the Soviet Union through the prism of food. Von Bremzen and her mother cook one meal to represent each decade of the century; at first this feels gimmicky and fortunately the device is largely dropped as the story of the family and of the country take over. Telling the history with a focus on food is surprisingly revealing - in the chapter on the 1950s, von Bremzen explains how each new printing of the Soviet kitchen bible, "The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food", represented the shifts in the political orthodoxy - removing first foreign recipes as Bolshevik internationalism waned, then later the quotations from Stalin and pictures of Beria disappeared.

Anya herself is born in 1963, and her food stories include hanging around outside a restaurant frequented by foreign diplomats in the hope that they will give her some gum. The next day, in the girls' bathroom, aided by ruler and penknife, I would sell off the gum, millimeter by millimeter, to favoured classmates. Even a chewed-up blob of Juicy Fruit had some value, say a kopek or two, as long as you didn't masticate more than five times, leaving some of that floral Wrigley magic for the next masticator to savour. 11 years later she and her mother emigrate to the US - mixing the stories of emigres with the continued developments back home.

145wandering_star
Sep 24, 2017, 8:45 am

77. The Lamp of the Wicked by Phil Rickman

An overwrought thriller featuring a rural killer, who escapes from the police by climbing up an electricity pylon, shouting out confessions of multiple other murders, and dying in a shower of sparks. But was he driven by a obsession with another (real-life) serial killer - or by the psychological consequences of living near to electricity pylons? (yes, really).

I don't think I'll be reading any more of this series.

Mrs Lodge almost brushed past her to reach the kettle on the Rayburn. Close up, Merrily registered that she was quite a few years younger than her husband, although the age gap was fogged by colourless, wispy hair and an absence of make-up - somewhere along the line, she'd lost the need or the will to be noticed.

146lilisin
Sep 28, 2017, 2:32 am

>149 wandering_star:

An apt title for a book that sounds quite interesting. I really enjoy visiting China's history now and then. It's so fascinating.

147janeajones
Sep 29, 2017, 11:36 am

Intriguing review of The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. I had no idea the Chinese government was STILL so concerned -- certainly bespeaks collective guilt.

148wandering_star
Oct 1, 2017, 8:44 am

>153 yes, it's remarkable, isn't it. I even saw a news story that a young censor recently failed to black out one of the iconic photographs of that night from a newspaper retrospective of the photographer's work, because he had no idea what the photo was of.

149wandering_star
Oct 1, 2017, 9:01 am

78. Four Frightened People by E Arnot Robertson

This book has been incredibly badly served by its publisher (Virago). Firstly, the cover art features a rather stolid-looking woman in a grey cardigan, which led me to assume that this was going to be a book about a painfully shy spinster, and the fear of the title based in some sort of social awkwardness.



That's not in itself a criticism - I have read other books like that and appreciated them - but it severely undersold this, which is about four people escaping from a plague-ridden boat and battling their way through the Malayan jungle, facing disease, wild animals and angry villagers. Proper fear, in other words.

Secondly, the blurb on the back cover gives away the ending, undermining the tension the reader would otherwise feel as we follow the group through the forest, where the sense of threat and unease is evoked wonderfully.

Although this was published in 1931, it is surprisingly modern in the characters' emotions and reactions, and the sharpness of some of the comments about the ills of colonialism and nationalism.

Once that morning a troop of baboons fled whooping overhead, startling us with their shattering din: but there was no room for echo in the forest; the closeness of the foliage muffled all noise, so that the composite stillness of tiny insect hummings and far-off bird calls and the whisper of monstrous growths sucking at the dank earth seemed to leap back afterwards, obliterating the outrage.

150wandering_star
Oct 1, 2017, 9:16 am

79. The Past by Tessa Hadley

This novel interleaves two time periods - the present and the past. In the present, a family of grown-up siblings is gathering at their grandparents' house for a summer holiday - and for the last time, because they all know deep down that this is the year they'll finally decide to sell it. The family catch up, they bicker, they go for long walks on their own. A couple of people fall in love, or at least lust, with extended family members. The youngest children become obsessed with exploring a tumbledown cottage and the various gruesome things inside it. And in the middle of the description, we get a few chapters of the time decades before when their mother, having walked out on her husband, returned to the family home to figure out her life.

I picked this up because I had read somewhere that Tessa Hadley was a hugely underrated writer, prolific but little-known. There is some nice writing, drily witty about the way, for example, that a rather pompous child becomes a more pompous adult: "He didn't mind his sister teasing him but he didn't respond in kind, he never had: he hadn't been very playful even when he was a child and supposed to play. He had always preferred knowing and explaining things."

But the book never quite lit up for me. Perhaps the entire book can be summed up in the following quote:

All the siblings felt sometimes, as the days of their holiday passed, the sheer irritation and perplexity of family coexistence: how it fretted away at the love and attachment which were nonetheless intense and enduring when they were apart. They knew one another so well, all too well, and yet they were all continually surprised by the forgotten difficult twists and turns of one another's personalities, so familiar as soon as they appeared.

For me, this wasn't quite enough meat to carry the whole book; a little too understated.

151wandering_star
Oct 1, 2017, 9:37 am

80. The Clocks In This House All Tell Different Times by Xan Brooks

This book seems to have received wildly differing reviews; although I think that the negative reviews are to do more with the subject matter, and the matter-of-fact way it is handled, than with the story or the writing.

The subject matter is certainly disturbing - it is the story of a young teenager, orphaned by World War One, who is essentially pimped out by her aunt and uncle - they are getting money from a man who takes Lucy and a couple of other young girls to be sexual partners for "the funny men" in the forest - a group of ex-soldiers who were badly disfigured in the war. There is a lot of callousness shown towards the girls by the other characters in the book, and only a little sympathy. And even they don't entirely realise the terribleness of their situation - there is a comment early on that Lucy "will never completely regret her trips to the forest, in spite of the trouble they cause and the horrors that follow".

So I can understand, this is not a book for everyone. But I thought it was very good - the subject matter is in some ways about the awful effects on society of the violence of war, but also about the things that we all choose not to see because it's too difficult to think about them.

The four funny men had each been hurt in the war. This knowledge steals up on her incrementally, impreceptibly, until it strikes her as strange that there was a time when she did not know it. Nobody ever goes so far as to state it aloud; certainly the funny men have never discussed their history except glancingly in rueful asides or in a private, playful language she does not fully understand. And yet through the very act of circling the heart of the matter they eventually put a frame around it, as wary ice-skaters navigate the rotten centre of a frozen pond, scoring marks around the edge that only make the middle gleam brighter.