Five in June

 I read five books in June.

 

The Private World of Georgette Heyer by Jane Aiken Hodge

I read a few GHs in my teens and then inexplicably she dropped off my radar until a couple of years ago when my enthusiasm was ignited by my friend Anne Stenhouse (no mean Regency writer herself); she kindly lent me this biography.

GH was extraordinary in that she seemed to despise her own writing and she never gave interviews or did signing sessions or author tours or anything required (pre-pandemic anyway) of big-name authors today. And she was a big name, with legions of fans, despite being so private and elusive; her forthcoming novels were serialised in Woman & Home for which she received £10,000 in the middle of the last century. 

It was so interesting to read of her attention to detail and accuracy – she kept dozens of notebooks with historical minutiae and also invented her own slang words, just one of the things that make her writing so dazzling.

 

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

‘When Sophy is sent to stay with her London relatives, she finds her cousins in quite the tangle. …
Fortunately, Sophy has arrived just in time to sort them all out – but Charles is eager to rid his family of her meddlesome ways. Has the Grand Sophy finally met her match?’

What do you think?

 

And now for something completely different:

 

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None meets Lord of the Flies at a wedding on a small island off the coast of Ireland. And the consequence was … murder and mayhem and revenge.

 

Your Blue-Eyed Boy by Helen Dunmore

Simone is in a very difficult situation. Formerly a lawyer in London who was able to take on badly paid cases close to her heart, she has now moved to a rural area to be a district judge – because her husband’s business is virtually insolvent and 75% of her salary will be going to pay debts and bank charges. He’s depressed (unsurprisingly) and they have two primary-school-age boys.

But the book opens with Simone in America twenty years earlier, in a relationship with an older man, a damaged Vietnam veteran – and as if she doesn’t have enough to worry about in the present day that relationship comes back to haunt her.

Helen Dunmore is (was, sadly) a wonderful writer (poet as well as novelist) and her descriptions are stunning. I loved this (the writing and the tension evoked) up until the end which – no spoilers – I felt a little disappointed by.

 

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

This is a book lots of people seem to be talking about at the moment (and soon to be a TV series). In 1922 Count Alexander Rostov has been sentenced to indefinite house arrest by a Boshevik tribunal – or hotel arrest because he must spend the rest of his days in the Hotel Metropol, not in the grand suite he previously occupied but in an attic room.

But, the book blurb asks, can a life without luxury be the richest of all? How the Count passes his days (and months and years) makes for a delightful, if perhaps rather over-long, read.

 

NOTICE FOR EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS

Many thanks to those of you who opted to receive notifications of blog posts by email. Blogger is very unhelpfully discontinuing this service (‘in July’ so may already have done … ). To transfer to another email service involves signing up to Google Analytics which I have done but there is a password needed by Blogger that I cannot find. Online help forums shed no light (and it would appear I’m not the only one with the issue). If anyone can help please contact me via the comments.

Lovely email subscribers, I trust the situation will get resolved soon. (The list of names will remain after July.) In the meantime, perhaps you’ll be kind enough to check in with the blog every so often without a reminder.

 

 

 

Seven in November

I read seven books in November.

The Little Library Cookbook by Kate Young

I love reading (and using ... ) cookery/baking books; don't usually mention them here – making an exception because this lovely book (bought with the last of a birthday book token) has 100 recipes that the Australian-born author and blogger has written and road-tested, inspired by food references in her favourite books. They all sound delicious and very doable, not in the least gimmicky. If you are looking for a Christmas present for a book-loving cook look no further.

The Cactus by Sarah Haywood

I liked this first novel a lot – it’s ‘uplit’, the same category as, eg, Needlemouse and Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (also first novels as it happens; look forward to all their second ones). Susan is in her mid forties, a workaholic living on her own with no outside interests (apart from seeing a friend-with-benefits once a week) and a toxic relationship with her brother. She has a complete lack of self-awareness which is funny and sad at the same time. An unplanned pregnancy and the revealing of family secrets after the death of her mother turn her carefully managed life upside down.

One Winter Morning by Isabelle Broom

I’m a bit puzzled by how this book is presented, in its title, wintry cover and promotion banner beginning ‘Warm your heart this Christmas … ’ None of these, to my mind, give a true indication of what the book is like.

The incident that happened ‘one winter morning’ in England was offstage and a year before the story begins. It was the catalyst for Evangeline (‘Genie’) going to New Zealand where most of the book is set. Genie is there during the month of December, one of the hottest times of the year on the other side of the world, and Christmas barely gets a mention.

I wasn’t keen on Genie (perhaps it was the way she came over in the first person, present tense voice). Her little sister Tui was delightfully drawn though and there was a great sense of place – I enjoyed, vicariously, revisiting Queenstown in the South Island of New Zealand.

Bright Lights and Lies by Gill-Marie Stewart

When I was a child and got new books only at birthdays and Christmases and from additions to the folding bookcase that was the school library (we weren’t anywhere near a public library), I read them immediately.

Nowadays I’m spoilt for choice – I can buy books for myself in print or digital from bricks-and-mortar and online bookshops, or I can borrow from Edinburgh’s Central Library, fifteen minutes’ walk away. I can acquire them from second-hand or charity bookshops or buy and get them signed at events; even get out-of-copyright titles free from Project Gutenberg.

So there is always a tottering to-be-read pile; I wouldn’t go back to my previous state but I know I’ll never recapture the total joy I used to feel at embarking on a book I’d never read before.

Bright Lights and Lies was bought at a book launch four years ago and only now fished out of the pile. And well worth the wait it was too – a YA set mostly in Glasgow, a sweet romance between Finn and George (Georgina) with some very gritty subjects along the way, such as drug addiction and police corruption.

Lily’s Just Fine by Gill-Marie Stewart

And having enjoyed that Gill-Marie Stewart it was great to be able to whiz over to the TBR pile for the first in her new series Galloway Girls. That one was bought at the Romantic Novelists’ Association conference a mere four months ago. Again, a sweet romance plus difficult subjects for the protagonists to tackle, set in beautiful Galloway in south-west Scotland. Lily is a terrific character because she’s so well rounded; she just walks off the page, as do all the other teenagers and adults.

You think it; I’ll say it by Curtis Sittenfield

Short stories. I loved CS’s first four novels especially The American Wife and Sisterland; I was disappointed however in her fifth, Eligible, a bleak modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice. So I was interested to read this, her first short story collection. In several of the stories she references and skewers current American politics, one of her favourite themes as evidenced in The American Wife (an imagined life of Laura Bush – yes, really, and far funnier than you’d expect).

She’s good too on the perennial theme of meeting your high school nemesis; that’s in A Regular Couple. The secret game (that gives the book its title) played by Julie and Graham, married to other people and who meet through their children, is embarrassingly misconstrued by Julie; in Plausible Deniability it’s Libby who thinks her relationship with her brother-in-law is other than it is.

‘You won’t want these stories to end,’ said Reese Witherspoon no less.

Girl, Balancing by Helen Dunmore

Read for book group, these are short stories which were published after the writer’s untimely death in 2017. The subjects and themes are wide-ranging and include: a teenager, abandoned by her parents, gives the book its title; a young man caught in a storm while on a boat to Sweden meets a mysterious girl; the last days of John Keats; two women from very different backgrounds have an unusual night out; a young mother is left with her unpleasant mother-in-law while her husband goes exploring; and much more. She's such a wonderful writer.

Seven in March

I read seven books in March.

Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore

Read for book group. What I like about Helen Dunmore, apart from her fabulous writing, is that she never writes the same book twice. Her previous one, Exposure, was a spy novel set in 1960. This one is set in Bristol in 1792 but it also has the background of the turmoil in Europe and the French revolution. Lizzy’s family are Radicals (her pamphlet-writing mother is based on a real person) but her new husband, a property developer of what are now Bristol’s grandest houses, has everything to lose from the reality of social upheaval.

I enjoyed it but was puzzled by the first chapter which is contemporary and involves <spoiler alert>an interesting narrator we never hear of again. And there was a major aspect to the plot that I would prefer not to have known about so early on. But it was a fascinating period (‘bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven’ as Wordsworth said) and Helen Dunmore shows us a different side to it through the resourceful Lizzy.

How to Measure a Cow by Margaret Forster

Knowing I was going to be reading Margaret Forster’s schoolgirl diary for the book group at the beginning of April, I went on a little MF jag after seeing this and Isa and May in a charity shop.

Tara/Sarah has moved from London to the north of England, changing her name after a shocking event in her life. Although determined not to get involved with anyone she does find herself sort of friends with her rather lonely, older neighbour (who was brought up on a farm, hence the title). I thought it petered out towards the end and wondered if I’d got to know Tara any better than I had at the beginning.

Isa and May by Margaret Forster

Isa and May are the narrator’s two grandmothers: Isa is the posh one and May is plain speaking and working-class. The narrator, Isamay, is called after both of them. She is trying to write a thesis on grandmothers in history but as she talks to her own two she begins to find out family secrets.

Relationships are Margaret Forster’s big thing and although I like her novels I prefer her non-fiction on the same theme such as Hidden Lives: A Family Memoir.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J D Vance

This book made a stir when it came out last year, with some reviewers claiming that it ‘explained’ why the current president of the United States got elected. The author (in his early thirties) was brought up in Ohio, in ‘hillbilly’ country. His mother, although alcoholic and changing husbands frequently, instilled a love of learning in him. For day-to-day parenting though he relied on his maternal grandparents (Mamaw and Papaw). But while there was real love and the feeling that family, however dysfunctional, always had your back, there were also physical and verbal fights of the most ferocious nature between any combination of people, and Mamaw’s gun was never far from her hand.

Joining the Marine Corps changed Vance’s life and he ended up studying law at Yale University. But it seems you can take the boy out of hillbilly country but not all the hillbilly out of the boy. Despite his extreme change in lifestyle his loyalty to his roots is unwavering. He is clear-sighted about the problems in what is known as ‘rust-belt’ America, acknowledging, for example, the issues that some of the population have in sticking to a job when they have one, and bemoaning the disappearance of the industries that once were major employers.

Whatever your Democrat/Republican preferences are, do read this book – because it’s terrifically written and as gripping as any novel.

My (not so) Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella

Katie, from deepest Somerset, is determined to make a life for herself in London. But the glamorous photographs she puts on Instagram do not reflect her ghastly commute, the tiny room she rents and her weird flatmate, and the lowly admin job she has in a PR company. When she is ‘let go’ she has to slink home to her dad’s farm and try to pretend that it’s just a temporary measure.

Sophie Kinsella is the absolute best at mixing serious with spluttering hilarity and this is no exception.

Diary of an Ordinary Schoolgirl by Margaret Forster

Margaret F died two years ago. Although they never read them while she was alive, her family knew she kept diaries as they were referred to, to check events or dates. But they didn’t know that the diary keeping had started early until they found ones she’d kept as a schoolgirl, including this one in 1954 when she was fifteen. It’s been reproduced most beautifully. There were no big revelations – she was a very enthusiastic scholar, with no interest in boys or make-up (‘soppy’). Brought up in a council house in Carlisle, she helped a lot with the housework; made some of her own clothes; went on long walks, sometimes by herself; loved listening to radio plays and going to the library. Ordinary stuff maybe, but a glimpse into someone else’s life is always of interest to me.

But you won’t ever read my teenage diary.

A Colonial Experience by David Allison

As the author says: a ‘colonial experience was the somewhat derogatory term that was given to young men who made their way from the UK to Australia in order to gain worldly and practical experience working on remote sheep and cattle stations.’ David Allison had his ‘colonial experience’ in the 1970s, going out from Scotland to work in the Australian outback – and then as an overseer on a coconut plantation in Papua New Guinea, a time full of drama to say the least.

David is my cousin and I was spellbound when I heard him talking about his Papua New Guinea adventures; he is a great storyteller. Much of that verve has been transmitted to the written word here.

It was interesting too, to read the last chapter in which he tells of a recent visit back to Papua New Guinea, finding much that was changed and much that was the same.