Five in April

I read five books in April.

 

Brave Hearted: The Dramatic Story of Women of the American West by Katie Hickman

Most people have heard of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her pioneering family, from the Little House on the Prairie books and the loosely based TV series in the 70s.

In this fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking book, Katie Hickman tells us about other women in the days when ‘America’ was still expanding its territory – whether they were wives, mothers or daughters in pioneering families, missionaries, poker players, sex workers, madams, bar owners, African Americans in search of freedom from slavery or displaced Native Americans (the last two is where the heartbreak happens and the resonances down the years are inescapable).

‘Brave hearted’ scarcely begins to cover the courage of all these women.

I’ve previously read KH’s book Daughters of Britannia:The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives, also recommended.

 

 

Burial of Ghosts by Ann Cleeves

A standalone title, first published in 2003. (How prolific is Ann Cleeves? Incredibly is the answer!)

Lizzie, brought up in care, receives an unexpected legacy of £15,000 from a man she had a holiday fling with – but there are strings attached.

 

 

Overkill by Vanda Symon

The first book featuring Constable Sam Shepherd. I bought it and three subsequent titles in the series in a charity shop because they are set in South Island, New Zealand, which I love to read about, and also because Sam(antha) is described as being feisty. I anticipated a Kinsey Milhone or V. I. Warshawski with gorgeous NZ scenery.

Well, all four books will be returned to the charity shop, three of them unread. For ‘feisty’ read ‘irritating’, ‘needy’ and ‘complete pain in the posterior’. She thinks she’s the only one who can sort anything out (she can’t) and the lip she gives senior officers (while being suspended from duty) would surely see her dismissed in real life. Disappointing (if you haven’t guessed that already).

 

 

The Republic of Love by Carol Shields

The much-missed Carol Shields in fact.

A reread. Not one of my favourites of hers (Happenstance and Larry’s Party taking that slot) but she’s always a pleasure to read. If you like Anne Tyler (and if not why not?) you will like Carol Shields.

Rather incensed to see the strapline on the big online retailer: ‘a charming chick lit novel’ – even when it was published in 2003 that would have been a misleading description; it should certainly be updated now.

Fay is a commitment-phobe (as we say in the 2020s) and in any case thrice-married late-night-radio host, Tom, does not seem like a good bet. She has plenty to keep her busy with her research into mermaids for the Folklore Society and with worrying about her parents’ long and apparently happy marriage.

But there’s the inconvenient fact that for both herself and Tom it was true love at first sight …

 

 

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie

This appealed to me when it first came out and I wish I’d read it before going to an Edinburgh Book Festival event with the author last year.

I’ve read it now. It’s told in two voices – each one a 15th-century female mystic: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Although not much is known about their lives (which Victoria Mackenzie has imagined most vividly), it is documented that the two did meet each other and that both had visions – or ‘shewings’.

Margery – mother of fourteen children, cried a great deal in public following her visions of Christ on the cross, leading to support from a few people and condemnation from many, including her husband. She wrote a book (or probably dictated it) – astonishingly, the manuscript was missing for six hundred years and found in a cupboard in an English country house in 1934.

Julian (she took a saint’s name) lost her husband and child to the plague and so decided to be an ‘anchoress’, the term for a female hermit. As it would be dangerous for her to live the life a male hermit could (ie in a cave or other isolated place), she had herself bricked up in a room attached to a church in Norwich. There was a curtained window where the necessities of life were passed to and fro to/from a devoted maid whose face Julian never saw. People came to her for guidance; again she couldn’t see them, only hear them.

She also wrote a book, thought to be the first book in English by a woman that has survived.

Imagine being bricked up … yet, this is the person whose optimistic words have lasted down the centuries: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Seven in March

I read seven books in March, two more than last month. But one was very short and I’d read four of them before …

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Read for book group. The first in a series of, possibly, autobiographical novels (the identity of the author is uncertain). The cover does not remotely reflect what the book is about. Two girls come of age in the back streets of Naples in the 1950s. I liked the premise, I liked the setting and the era, I liked the characters – but I won’t be reading any more by this author because I didn’t care for the actual writing. Usually I admire and appreciate spare, economic writing but here there was virtually no flesh on the bones and after a while I longed for some. Others in the group were very keen though so don’t let me put you off.

I was looking at my bookshelves for something else and caught sight of the Carol Shields section and thought I was due for a reread of this late and much lamented Canadian writer. So one after the other I read:

Happenstance

I blogged about this here recently, in a post called Patchwork Pieces.

Small Ceremonies

Judith Gill is writing a biography of a minor Victorian novelist; she has also written a novel of her own but is unhappy with it – is it plagiarism and has she, in turn, been plagiarised? She’s also puzzled by her husband who keeps odd balls of wool in a bottom drawer, and her son, who shares his secrets only with a pen friend. This is a companion novel to The Box Garden.

The Box Garden

Judith, from Small Ceremonies, has a sister, Charleen, and this is her story. Charleen’s husband has left her and their laid-back teenage son Seth, but they’re doing fine. She is a published poet, she has a job on the National Botanical Journal, and she has a man friend, Eugene. But her life – and Judith’s – is suddenly thrown by the news that their geographically and emotionally distant elderly mother is to remarry. Charleen goes to the wedding leaving Seth behind with her friend, Greta, who decides to interfere in the family dynamic in a very dramatic way.

Larry’s Party

Winner of the Orange Prize in 1998. Larry gets fascinated by mazes after visiting Hampton Court on his (first) honeymoon, and eventually acquires a career and reputation for building them in Canada. I love the clever way this is written. It’s Larry’s life from 1977 to 1997, told in chapters called eg Larry’s Folks, Larry’s Words, Larry’s Friends, Larry’s Kid, Larry’s … er, a dangly piece of Larry’s anatomy. It ends with Larry’s Party and as the reviewer from Good Housekeeping said ‘The brilliant finale will go down as one of the great literary dinner parties, up there with Thackeray, Woolf and Austen.’

 She also described it as ‘An intricately textured, utterly captivating new novel’ and these words could be used to describe all Carol Shield’s books. She won the Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries, which proves, for me, that Pulitzer winners are much more readable and lovable books than are the Bookers (see the Pulitzer/Booker winners I’ve read here).

 

Paris for One by Jojo Moyes

A ‘Quick Read’ – but, as usual, from this author a warm and sparky one. When her boyfriend doesn't turn up for their romantic mini-break normally unadventurous Nell decides to go on her own.

The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty

Resisted this for long enough because there was a lot of hype round it but it waved to me from a scout jumble sale. I should probably have realised before I did what the secret was but when, with horror, it began to dawn on me I couldn’t put the book down. All the characters (it’s set in Australia) and their story-lines were interesting as was how they all tied together. I wasn’t sure about the epilogue though, didn’t think it was necessary, but will definitely read more of hers.

A talented family –  Liane is the sister of Jaclyn Moriarty whose YA epistolary novel Feeling Sorry for Celia I read and loved a few years ago.

I must admit I thought the name Moriarty had been made up by Arthur Conan Doyle – but then perhaps you thought Rowan Atkinson made up mine.

Patchwork Pieces

I have yet to finish the patchwork quilt I began in 1975 (one day … ) but I am fascinated by patchwork that other people do and I like reading about it – in fact (all those wonderful patterns, their origins and their makers) and in fiction.

The fifth book I read in February was:

The Aloha Quilt (Elm Creek Quilts Novels)

Jennifer Chiaverini

A Christian Aid book sale purchase from last year.

There are umpteen other titles in this series. I’d read them to find out more about patchwork patterns but not for plot or characterisation. The story was so wrapped around the subject of patchwork that any action seemed like a token gesture, and the people were there principally to relay the history of/how to make Hawaiian patchwork – which sounded gorgeous, pity there were no pictures of it apart from the cover.

My favourite novel in which patchwork plays a part (in fact, one of my favourite novels ever) is (the late lamented) Carol Shield’s Happenstance which I’ve just finished re-reading. Its format is original – it’s in two parts, one from the wife’s point of view and one from the husband’s, each printed a different way up from the other; it doesn’t matter which one you read first but it’s fun if you re-read it to try it the other way round.

Brenda, wife of Jack and mother of two, is making a name for herself as a quilter and leaves her family in Philadelphia for a few days to attend a prestigious craft fair in Chicago, during which time she wins a prize, loses an expensive new raincoat and is almost unfaithful. Jack is left to hold the fort, the fort being complicated by the unexpected arrival of his oldest friend, by the near-suicide of a neighbour, by a crisis at work, and by a snowstorm.

Quaker patchwork featured in The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier. I heard Tracy talk about the book at the Edinburgh Book Festival – she said she took a patchwork class as part of her research and loved it so much she’s carried on doing it.

I’ve just spent a lovely weekend at the Scottish Association of Writers Annual Conference. Author Linda Gilliard was one of the guest speakers/adjudicators and I had the pleasure of sitting next to her one lunch-time. She is a hybrid author – partly traditionally published and partly (and successfully) self-published. I bought one of her books that I hadn’t read before called House of Silence.

Summed up as ‘Rebecca meets Cold Comfort Farm’ the blurb includes:

‘When Gwen discovers fragments of forgotten family letters sewn into an old patchwork quilt, she starts to piece together the jigsaw of the past … ’

Really looking forward to reading it.

I’d love to write a story involving patchwork – but I can only hope it won’t take as long to finish as my quilt; not sure I’ll be around in forty years time ...

Prize-giving

Tonight, 14 October, this year's winner of the Man Booker Prize will be announced.

The short-listed titles are:

How to be Both by Ali Smith

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

How to Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

J by Howard Jacobson

The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

We are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

I have not read any of them (yet … ).

I thought I would look back at twenty years of the prize and see how many of the winners I’ve read (and if I liked them or not). There were more than I’d expected:

2010 The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson x

2009 Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel √

2007 The Gathering by Anne Enright -

2002 The Life of Pi by Yann Martel √

2000 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood √

1997 The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy x

1995 The Ghost Road by Pat Barker √

(2012 Bring Up the Bodies, I have a lovely hardback copy and look forward to reading, suspecting though that I might have to skim through Wolf Hall again first)

2013 The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, bought, signed by the author, as yet unread)

  

The American equivalent is the Pulitzer Prize and my reading of those is:

2011 A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan √

2010 Tinkers by Paul Harding √

2006 March by Geraldine Brooks √

2005 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson √ (coming to Edinburgh on November 16th)

1995 The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields √

1994 The Shipping News by Annie Proulx √

Not so many – but they include titles by three of my top ten authors, Geraldine Brooks, Marilynne Robinson and the late lamented Carol Shields. Another winner, Anne Tyler (in 1989 for Breathing Lessons) is also a favourite. Donna Tartt won this year with Goldfinch, yet another title on my wish list.

So little time … so much to read.