Six in May

I read six books in May.

Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives by Lucy Mangan

A book about books – what’s not to like? I enjoyed Bookworm which covered Lucy Mangan’s childhood years of not wanting to do much else other than read (a girl after my own heart then).

Of course, though, adulthood does have its compensations – an income to buy books and a house (and a specially built ‘shed’ in the garden, of which I am very jealous)’) to put them in. Oh, and a husband who’s equally bookwormish, and a child who provides a reason to reread favourites and to find new ones.

So this book ranges wildly and wonderfully (as anybody’s reading material should) from Library Lion to 1990s bonkbusters such as Lace, to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with much (much) in between.

I had the pleasure of seeing her recently being interviewed under the auspices of the wonderful Toppings bookshop in Edinburgh and got this lovely signed copy.

 

 

Free, Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi

Read for book group. I knew next to nothing about Albania; it was so interesting to hear about its recent history through the eyes of Lea Ypi, born there in 1979 and now a professor at the London School of Economics.

Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was a difficult place to live in for many reasons – but it was Lea’s home and all she knew. But in December 1990 political upheaval meant everything changed. There was freedom at last which seemed wonderful to begin with but it came with many downsides for everybody and, for Lea, some startling family revelations.

Fascinating.

 

 

Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty

Something extraordinary happens on a flight from Hobart to Sydney – an elderly woman called Cherry goes down the aisle telling each passenger (including children) and crew members when and how they are going to die.

Thereafter, the book focuses on some of these people and what effect their prediction has had on them (especially when they find out that some of the predictions have come true)  – and we find out Cherry’s very plausible backstory too. Riveting. I particularly enjoyed Leo’s and Ethan’s stories – Leo, the family man with a toxic boss, and Ethan, hopelessly infatuated with his rich, glamorous housemate. I still think about them actually …

 

April Lady by Georgette Heyer

Yay – the Christian Aid book sale was back this year in Edinburgh after a couple of years’ hiatus. Among my (very restrained) purchases were two GHs I’ve never read before. April Lady won’t go into my top five but it was very enjoyable all the same.

 

 

Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

A joy to catch up with Jackson Brodie again.

A painting has apparently been stolen from the Yorkshire home of a deceased woman but her unpleasant offspring are reluctant to involve the police. Our hero, rather reluctantly, takes on the case – which leads to a stately home, an array of characters straight from the Golden Age of crime writing, and a Murder Mystery Weekend. Hope that’s not the last we see of JB – I’m still cross that the television series was cancelled.

You can’t see from the image but my copy (also purchased in Toppings but this time the St Andrews branch) has sprayed black edges, a special edition for independent bookshops.

 

 

Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers

After I read Small Pleasures by CC a few years ago, I read through her backlist of six books, one after the other.

Shy Creatures, her latest, is terrific. Set in the 1960s, in the environs of Croydon, it was inspired by the true story of a man discovered in a house he hadn’t left in forty years – a man with wild hair and beard and an astonishing talent for art.

Helen, an art therapist (embroiled in an affair with a charismatic married colleague in the psychiatric hospital) becomes entangled in the man’s mysterious past.

Seven in July

 I read seven books in July (more or less)

 

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

Another page-turning story from Liane Moriarty – really, the kind where you don’t speak to your nearest and dearest for a whole day until you’ve finished. Twists and turns, humour, romance, dark secrets – it’s got the lot.

Joy Delaney and husband Stan have done well. Four wonderful grown-up children. A family business to envy. The golden years of retirement ahead of them. So when Joy Delaney vanishes - no note, no calls, her bike missing – it's natural that tongues will wag.
How did Stan scratch his face? And who was the stranger who entered and suddenly left their lives? What are they all hiding?

 

Summer at the French Olive Grove by Sophie Claire

When adventurous film-maker Lily has an accident and recuperates with her grandmother in Provence, she finds that her childhood friend and former crush Olivier is back there too, ready to marry his fiancée and settle down. ‘Former’ crush? – well, maybe not …

If you can’t face going abroad with all the passport problems/queuing etc, just stay at home, pour yourself a glass of white and escape, hassle-free, to an olive grove in sunny Provence with Sophie Claire.

 

Death on a Monday Night by Jo Allen

Book 8 in the Jude Satterthwaite Mystery series. Jute, jam and Jerusalem? Not at this WI meeting; instead there’s a body in the kitchen. There’s a lot for DCI Satterthwaite and his colleague and current partner Ashleigh O’Halloran to investigate in the complicated life of the victim including her relationship with her sister. Very satisfying conclusion.

I’m hoping there will be a Book 9 as there is some unfinished business between Jude and his former girlfriend Beccy …

 

The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown by Vaseem Khan

Thoroughly enjoyed the first book in this series The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra (read in May) and the second did not disappoint. The British crown jewels, including the fabulous Koh-i-noor diamond, have gone on display in Mumbai and are stolen … As well as the wonderful Inspector Chopra and his wife Poppy and the fast-paced (and far-fetched but who cares) plot, what I loved was the way the author totally submerges you in the sights, sounds and smells of this huge city.

 

The Man with the Silver Saab by Alexander McCall Smith

AMS is currently the Honorary President of Edinburgh Writers’ Club (new members welcome in September!). In June he came to our AGM and not only gave a fabulous talk, presented prizes and was happy to pose for photographs but also brought along a selection of his titles and handed them out free and for nothing … this fell to my lot and very entertaining it was. 

In the best-selling Detective Varg series, an eminent art historian is framed and the ace investigators of the Department of Sensitive Crimes are on the case.

 

 

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

No, I didn’t read all of the 712 pages this month. It’s one of those books, non-fiction or sometimes short stories, that I dip in and out of between other reads. Mr Bennett and his untold stories have been very pleasant company over the last few months containing as they do ‘significant previously unpublished work, including a poignant memoir of his family and of growing up in Leeds, together with his much celebrated diary for the years 1996-2004, and numerous other exceptional essays, reviews and comic pieces.’

 

Cotillion by Georgette Heyer

Continuing my happy travels through Georgette Heyer’s oeuvre. I have many titles still to read but I can confidently say that Cotillion will, at the end of the journey, be in my top five. I liked it excessively.

 

I read eight books in June.

Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty

I’ve had a binge over the last couple of years on Moriarty’s titles, loving especially The Last Anniversary and Big Little Lies. So, despite the number of disappointed reviewers, I was eager to read her new one in which nine people spend ten days at an extraordinary health resort.

I enjoyed it, mostly. It’s partly a psychological thriller (well, sort of; there are various twisty bits). There was a chunk of the book when I felt I was the po-faced designated driver at a very jolly party, not a happy place to be, and I didn’t care for the way the ends were wrapped up. But I’ll hold faith and look forward to the next one.

Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan

Christian Aid booksale 2018. Set in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1917, and published in 1941. Neil, a young man accused of disobeying orders in the trenches of France and now presumed dead, has made his way home to Canada to clear his name. Having been told of his death, Penny, his cousin and former lover grieves for him. Penny is an interesting character – a very talented designer of ships, she encounters daily the sexism given to professional women. And she has a secret …

Her family is pretty unpleasant apart from her young brother but everything changes the morning of 6 December when there’s a collision of ships, one carrying high explosives, just outside the harbour (a true event experienced by the author as a child: over 2000 people died and Halifax was virtually destroyed). Extremely readable; considered a Canadian classic.

You’re Next by Gregg

From a second-hand shelf in a café. I was attracted by the blurb:

'I know you, don't I?' Five words – that's all it takes to plunge Mike Wingate and his family into mortal danger. Mike doesn't recognise the crippled stranger who approaches him at a party . . . but the stranger seems to know all about him.'

The reason why Mike, abandoned by his father in a play park and brought up in a foster home, is being hounded is satisfying and original. But there is, to my mind, a big flaw – I didn’t notice at the time and I kept turning the pages but now it occurs to me – in that: the baddies have killed others before for the same reason, in gruesome fashion but always without leaving any trace or clue. With Mike, as it says in the blurb, they turn up to confront him in public which makes no sense.

Flowers for his Funeral by Ann Granger

‘Accompanied by Meredith Mitchell, Chief Inspector Alan Markby is enjoying the Chelsea Flower Show, until he runs into his ex-wife and her current husband, and when the husband is murdered with a poisoned thorn, Markby and Mitchell set out to find the killer.’

Cosyish crime; first I’ve read in the Markby and Mitchell series; would read more. But why so many first and second names beginning with M – Meredith, Molly, Miriam, Mavis, Martin, Mitchell and Markby and one house name, Malefis?

Reading Allowed: True Stories and Curious Incidents from a Provincial Library by Chris Paling

Chris Paling is a novelist, playwright and BBC radio producer – and a library assistant. Did he take on that last job with a view to writing the book or did that come afterwards? My inner jury is out on that one. It’s entertaining enough but not in the same league as Shaun Bythell’s Confessions of a Bookseller. I hoped for more booky discussions but the anecdotes are mostly of the assorted folk who use the library to sleep in, take drugs in, stalk pretty librarians in etc, and of course it’s about the downplaying of the role of the professional librarian and all the redundancies/library closures.

Some reviewers have said they found it uplifting; I did not.

 Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller

‘Gil’s wife, Ingid, has been missing, presumed drowned, for twelve years. A possible sighting brings their children, Nan and Flora, home.’

I loved wild-child Flora, from the moment she ill-advisedly borrowed a car to drive to the family’s island home, and I liked the writing very much. I wasn’t convinced though by the way of telling the story. Before she disappeared the girls’ mother, Ingrid (very much younger than her womanising husband; she’d been a student of his) wrote accounts of her life in the form of letters and hid them in her husband’s books. No one in the household discovers them but the reader is privy to their contents. There was something unsatisfying about that.

The Skylarks War by Hilary Mackay

I am a very big fan of children’s writer Hilary Mackay. This book won the Costa Children’s Book Award 2018 but it can be read and appreciated by anyone over the age of about ten. It follows ‘the loves and losses of a family growing up against the harsh backdrop of World War One’ and includes scenes on the Western Front –beautifully done.

Heart-breaking inevitably, but so warm and funny too. 

The World my Wilderness by Rose MacAuley

Read for book group. Set in 1946 and published just three years later; this is a Virago Classic edition. The ‘wilderness’ is the ruined landscape of London after the Second World War – and running wild in the bombsites is Barbary, brought up by her unconventional mother in Occupied France, and now under the care of her stuffy father and stepmother. The characters are all interesting and come to life but the book is really a love letter to London as it was before the Blitz; what Rose MacAuley has done is to bear witness to the destruction. I loved the lists of buildings and businesses that would never rise from the ashes.

My Life (maybe) – according to the books I read in 2017

Describe yourself

Vinegar Girl

How do you feel?

Lost for Words

Describe where you currently live

The Whaleboat House

If you could go anywhere where would you go?

The Road to Harmony

Your favourite form of transportation is

The Christmas Train

Your best friend is

Hester and Harriet

You and your friends are

Rainy Day Sisters

What’s the weather like?

Autumn

Favourite time of day

At the Edge of the Orchard

If your life was a book

The Child that Books Built

What is life to you?

Standard Deviation

Your fear

Big Little Lies

What is the best advice you have to give?

Chin Up, Chest Out, Jemima!

Thought for the day

I Found You

How would you like to die?

Terms & Conditions

Your soul’s present condition

A Red Herring Without Mustard

This is a fun idea I saw first on Portobello Book Blog:

https://portobellobookblog.com/2017/01/01/my-life-according-to-books-i-read-in-2016/

Seven in June

I read seven books in June.

Calling Major Tom by David M. Barnett

Read on Kindle. Think of a story where a highly trained astronaut is about to leave on a one-way trip to Mars, his task to take ten years to set up a colony there. However, when he dies before take-off his place is taken by forty-year-old Thomas Major (and yes, he is Bowie fan) who is unqualified for the job except that he is so unhappy he relishes the thought of the forthcoming solitude. Now think of the Ormerods, a family firmly rooted on Mother Earth, where a teenage girl is desperately holding things together for herself, her little brother and their increasingly forgetful granny, terrified that bureaucracy will separate them.

It seems impossible at first that these stories could plausibly coincide. Yet they do, in this cleverly constructed and heart-warming book.

The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty

OK, I cracked. I couldn’t leave my last two Liane Moriartys unread any longer. They lay at the side of my bed saying … go on, you know you want to …

Hypnotherapist Ellen is fascinated by what makes people tick. So when she falls in love with Patrick, the fact that he has a stalker doesn't faze her in the slightest. If anything it intrigues her, and the more she hears about Saskia, the more she wants to meet this woman. But what Ellen doesn't know is that they've already met . . .

Not my favourite, which remains The Last Anniversary, but once embarked upon not to be put down until finished.

Truly Madly Guilt by Liane Moriarty

Some similarity to Big Little Lies – an event at a social function has unexpected consequences and results in someone’s death. Terrific characters – I loved Vin in particular, and little Ruby just jumped off the page.

So that’s where my bingeing has got me … no unread Liane Moriartys; I can only hope she is typing at top speed at this very moment.

Foreign Fruit by Jojo Moyes

On the bright side I found a Jojo Moyes I hadn’t read at the Christian Aid booksale and enjoyed it very much too. Set partly in the 1950s and partly fifty years later, the story centres around Arkadia, an Art Deo House, in a staid English seaside town. Notorious in its early days for its bohemian inhabitants, it falls into disrepair until its transformation into a hotel uncovers past secrets.

Autumn by Ali Smith

Read for Book Group. I must admit, because I thought it would be a difficult read, that I put off starting it until the Sunday morning before the Monday evening meeting – but then found myself completely involved and read the first 150 pages without looking up, finishing it in the afternoon. Her writing is mesmerisingly good. There’s not a plot as such but different stories illustrate the state of Britain in the time of Brexit. It has some very funny scenes such as when Elisabeth is trying unsuccessfully to produce a suitable photograph for her new passport, and when two characters get onto a TV programme called The Golden Gavel (clearly AS is poking fun at Antiques Road Trip). An unexpected treat.

The Making of Us by Lisa Jewell

I loved Lisa Jewell’s earlier books but after I read, and wasn’t very keen on, The House We Grew Up In, I didn’t pick up her more of hers until I saw this one and liked the premise.

Lydia, Robyn and Dean don't know each other – yet.

It would be a spoiler to tell you what these three have in common so I’ll just say that it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for my favourite TV programme Long Lost Family. Loved it. Now I’m back being a Lisa fan with lots to catch up on.

The Boy that Books Built by Francis Spufford

Christian Aid Book Sale purchase. FS had a difficult childhood in some ways – good parents but also a little sister with a very rare medical condition. So he retreated into reading and in this beautifully written memoir he revisits his favourite childhood books. I think he’s a little younger than me but we both grew up before the ‘Young Adult’ book was a thing.

I was a retreater too, if not for the same reason, so I felt we were kindred spirits even if our tastes rarely coincide – for some reason the Narnia books completely passed me by and neither have I read Tolkein or Ursula Le Guin, all of which obsessed him. However, we are a hundred per cent on the same page about Little House on the Prairie; he has a wonderful chapter on the series, and its author, including an account of a visit he made (in order to write a newspaper feature) to De Smet, immortalised in the later books, and now trading on the fame Laura Ingalls Wilder brought to it.

Seven in April

 I read seven books in April.

Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty

Recently I heard an interview with a novelist who specialises in ‘issue’ books. I read about six of them before giving her up a few years ago. She was asked which came first (when she was thinking of her next book) the character or the issue, and she replied, as if it was a no-brainer, oh, the issue. I realised why I’d stopped reading her books – because although I can remember the issues her main characters had I can’t remember anything else about them.

Liane Moriarty’s characters all have lots of issues – as do we all, that’s life, but they are never flagged up as such. Triplets Lyn, Cat and Gemma are the protagonists in Three Wishes – LM is terrific on this sibling relationship. Loved it – not quite as much as The Last Anniversary reviewed here, but lots. I’ve bought The Hypnotist’s Love Story and, her latest, Truly, Madly, Guilty, but am putting off reading them because then I’ll have finished all the books she’s written to date and I don’t know how long the wait will be for the next one …

And while I’m having a wee rant about ‘issues’ I was cross and upset to read that a new version of Anne of Green Gables is being filmed for Netflix. Called Anne with an E it tells the ‘real story’ of ‘a more troubled’ Anne and will be concerned with ‘trauma, bullying and being an outsider’ in the ‘hard, gritty, scrappy’ life she apparently would have had in Prince Edward Island in the late 1800s.

Leaving aside the fact that Anne is a fictional character … I think we can read between the lines that her life, certainly before she came to Green Gables, was what we would now call dysfunctional, but the whole point of her delightful character is that despite her bad start in life she’s never self-pitying, never thinks of herself as a victim. Quite the opposite in fact. Grrr. I won’t be watching.

N is for Noose

V is for Vengeance

W is for Wasted by Sue Grafton

After reading U is for Undertow last month I went on three further crime sprees with private investigator Kinsey Milhone. The next one is available, called merely X, and then only two more to come in this very enjoyable series.

Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney

Read on Kindle. Psychological suspense novels promising a twist are the in-thing just now. I didn’t see the twist coming that was revealed about two-thirds of the way through this one but it made sense when I put my Kindle down for a few minutes and thought about it – very clever. The twist on the very last page though – perhaps someone could explain it to me?

In Her Wake by Amanda Jennings

Read on Kindle. Another psychological one. I wasn’t sure about the slightly magical (or were they?) elements in this one but otherwise I thought it was a great page-turner (if you can say that about an e-book) and I liked the Cornish setting.

The Whale Boat House by Mark Mills

This is the first book I’ve read by this author but it won’t be the last. It’s set in Long Island just after the Second World War and begins with the dead body of a beautiful young socialite being caught in a fisherman’s net. Long Island is just beginning to be the weekend/holiday destination for rich New Yorkers who build large houses, a contrast to the homes of the permanent residents. Some Amazon reviewers thought the author shoehorned too much of his research on the lives and work of the fishermen into the story but I liked all the detail and I think it’s good to learn something while being entertained.