I read eight books in May.
A Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell
I read this
before I went to Scandinavia for the first time – a visit to Copenhagen at the
end of May. Helen Russell, a journalist on a glossy, London-based
mag, gave up her job and moved to Denmark for a year when her husband got a job
in ‘Lego-land’, a small town in rural Jutland, around thirty miles from the Danish
capital. She decided to try and find out if Danes are as happy as they are
reputed to be. And they are: she asked people she met from all walks of life to
rate their happiness on a scale of one to ten and no one fell below eight
despite – or maybe because of – those long dark winters.
Living
there as a non-native wasn’t all hygge
but there were compensations not least pastry sampling (in the name of research
of course). I decided to follow her example ...
Then I read:
The Runaway Bridesmaid by Daisy James
After finding her own boyfriend and her sister in a
compromising position just before the latter’s wedding ceremony Rosie swaps her
Louboutins for Wellingtons and flies from bustling New York to sleepy Devon to
the house she’s been left by her aunt. Great fun – and see Daisy James’ latest
title Sunshine after the Rain whose
cover I previewed here.
The Coffee Shop Book Club – various authors including
Jojo Moyes, Ian Rankin, Tracy Chevalier, Jenny Colgan, Tessa Hadley and Val
McDermid.
Christian
Aid book sale. Short stories. I knew I hadn’t read the book before so couldn’t
understand why the stories seemed familiar until I twigged – duh, the clue is
on the cover – that they were first published in Woman & Home to which I had a subscription for a while.
I
particularly liked As The Time Draws Near
by Eowyn Ivey. Piper returns to Alaska to scatter the ashes of her daredevil
father ‘Red’ Robertson. I really loved Ivey’s writing and look forward to
reading her novel The Snow Child which
has been on my Kindle for ages.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Read for book
group. Becoming a vegetarian is apparently a very subversive act in South Korea
and the fallout from one young woman making this decision is told here from
three viewpoints (none of them hers). Several of the group admired some aspects
of the writing but only one was very enthusiastic about the book … which won
the Man Booker International Prize in 2016.
I is for Innocent and O is for Outlaw by Sue Grafton
Yes,
another Kinsey Milhone gumshoe blitz.
There was
an interesting To the Reader note in O is
for Outlaw which clarified the timeline of the books – or rather lack of
timeline. The books: are sequential but Miss
Milhone is caught up in a time warp and is currently living and working in the
year 1986, without access to cell phones, the Internet, or other high-tech
equipment … You’ll find few, if any references to current movies, fads,
fashions or politics.
Famously,
Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series is written in ‘real time’. The plus side of
this meant that Rankin could set books around topical subjects such as the G8
summit in Edinburgh; the downside of course was that Rebus got older and so
eventually had to retire.
As Sue
Grafton planned from the outset in the mid 80s to write twenty-six Kinsey
Milhone books I guess she had to make an early decision about how she was going
to handle time and thought she wouldn’t have wanted Kinsey to age too much
(plus her lovely landlord Henry who’s in his 90s clearly would not survive a
further twenty-six years however good his gene pool). Hats doffed to her
for pulling this off so successfully.
Since I’ve
read so many Kinseys on the trot I notice (from a writerly perspective) that when
a character is mentioned for the first time, however minor they are, we are always
told what they are wearing in some detail, maybe not a technique that would
work for everybody but effective here. Observing clothes would be part of
Kinsey’s quick summing up of a person perhaps because she is supremely
uninterested in what she herself wears – jeans and a black turtleneck being her
uniform.
A quick
Google tells me that in the US a ‘sport coat’ is what we in the UK call a sports jacket –
but it sounds much more dashing.
And courtesy of
a rescheduled flight and an unexpected four-hour train journey I was able to –
yes, let’s hear it for the Kindle – bring my monthly total to eight with these two
corking books:
The Daughters of Red Hill Hall by Kath McGurl
A dual time-line
novel (a device this author has made her own I think). Each story had a
connection with Red Hill Hall –in earlier times a family’s stately home and now
a hotel. The parallels were cleverly done and I enjoyed both the historical and
the contemporary strands.
Felicity at the Cross Hotel by Helena Fairfax
Of which I shall
say nothing for the moment, except do go and buy it and look out for an
interview with Helena Fairfax here in early July.
