Twelve in December

 I read twelve books in December.

 I had three days away in a cottage in Sutherland, then I had a few days of feeling peaky and having to cancel various things, then I was on holiday from work/regular activities – all of which allowed lots of lovely reading time.

 

 

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

I’ve been saving this up for the Christmas holidays. I bought the splendid edition Waterstones produced with the periodic table printed in blue down the fore edge.

I didn’t study chemistry beyond second year at school but if our heroine here, Elizabeth Zott, had been my teacher I could well have been persuaded.

The book lived up to the hype for me, and then some. It’s got everything really – an inspirational main character, a family mystery, a love story, social history, a setting in 60s America, and more.

 

 

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

I was lucky enough to be given a Bookshop.org voucher for  for my birthday – which was months ago but I took ages to make up my mind what to spend it on. I ended up with five titles including this: again, a book that lived up to its reputation. It’s a novella most beautifully written by this Irish author. Her portrayal of the dilemma faced, in 1985, by family man Bill Furlong when he delivers coal to a convent that takes in unmarried mothers, stays in the mind long after you put the book down.

Buying through Bookshop.org was easy by the way; it’s a site that supports independent bookshops. In my case it benefitted my local Edinburgh Bookshop.

 

Bedpans and Bobby Socks by Barbara Fox and Gwenda Gofton

I love reading books about nurses (see this article I wrote for Corazon Books on the subject) and I love road trip books especially if they are set in America. So this (another Bookshop.org purchase) was a double whammy. Five British nursing friends took jobs in American in the late 1950s and then intrepidly set out in a very unreliable car to see as much of America as they could, making lots of friends along the way. A treat.

 

Death on the Crags by Jo Allen

The ninth book in the satisfying DI Satterthwaite series.

 

Hancox by Charlotte Moore

Bought in the Christian Aid book sale, this is the story of the family who has owned Hancox, ‘a Tudor hall house in rural Sussex’, since the end of the 1900s. The author was brought up in Hancox and lives there now. Luckily for her they were/are a family who never throw anything away – her difficulty was deciding what to leave out from the extensive archive. She doesn’t hold back on the streak of severe mental illness that runs through the family.

 

Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King

This would have been one of my purchases with my voucher if it had been in paperback, but that’s not coming until the end of this month. However … Waterstones had a half-price hardback sale and lo and behold this was included. I absolutely loved her Writers and Lovers and will definitely seek out her other novels.

Five Tuesdays in Winter is a short story collection. My favourite was the title story; it’s a love story featuring a grumpy bookseller – what’s not to like?

 

Murder on Christmas Eve

What it says on the tin; an excellent collection.

 

Also with Christmas in mind – I read all the Little House on the Prairie books to my children and I recalled that there was a scene where a neighbour of theirs came through a snowstorm with Christmas candy for her and her sisters. I thought it was On the Banks of Plum Creek but it wasn’t so I started the series at the beginning and up until the end of December I read these others.

 

The Christmas scene was actually in Little House on the Prairie – and I’d misremembered something else: Mr Edwards walked 40 miles there and back to the town of Independence for the candy and struggled home not through a snowstorm but through high floodwater.

The account of enduring seven months of snow and blizzards and -40F temperatures in The Long Winter made me thankful for a watertight (if not always warm) house, plenty to eat and the electric blanket, and stopped me moaning (for a while) about feeling cold.

 

I also wanted to reread the books before embarking on the ‘true’ story, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser – a big brick of a book (charity shop purchase) that I shall report back on in due course.

Eight in July

 I read eight books in July.

 

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

Paperback, bought with the birthday book token that also bought Rodham (see below). I hadn’t heard of Lily King before but Writers & Lovers was on the same table as Rodham in Waterstones and I thought it looked my cup of tea. And it was, a complete afternoon tea in fact with jam and cream and a cherry on top. I’ll certainly be reading her four previous titles.

Casey Peabody is writing a novel, living in a gloried garage, waitressing, recovering from a relationship break-up. So Writers and Lovers encompasses her struggles and otherwise to write and her working life in the restaurant with characterful co-workers; she has non-sugary romances with the two new, very different, men in her life; she tries to come to terms with the recent death of her mother and to mend bridges with her ghastly father.

Glowingly endorsed by fellow writers such as Ann Patchett and Tessa Hadley, the book, to my mind, occupies the sweet spot between commercial and literary fiction. 

 

Midsummer Magic at Miss Moonshine’s Emporium by Authors on the Edge

Read on (ancient) Kindle but I shall get a paperback too because the map of Haven Bridge drawn by Livi Gosling looks lovely but not seen to best advantage in black and white. I do love a map at the beginning of a book, ever since my sister and I used to pore over the Toytown endpapers in our Noddy books. I love the covers of the three Miss Moonshine books too – they were done by one of the talented authors, Mary Jayne Baker.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first two outings for Miss Moonshine and on this evidence the series is going from strength to strength. The nine authors each have their own voice but the whole is made cohesive by their short stories all being set in the same place, the town of Haven Bridge, and in each story the amazing, time-travelling, Miss Moonshine sorts out everybody's problems.

 

Choose Me by Tess Gerritsen and Gary Braver

Read on Kindle. Taryn is a clever girl whose single mother is struggling to keep her daughter at a prestigious university. Taryn’s planned thesis has attracted the attention of a prominent feminist academic; together they are going to rewrite classical myths. But while Taryn’s work is about reclaiming history from men, in her personal life she is clingy to the point of stalkery. When she finally realises that her relationship with Liam is finished she overly responds to the admiration of married professor Jack Dorian to the ultimate tragedy of them both.

 

A Village Murder by Frances Evesham

Read on Kindle. Promising characters and plot but ultimately unsatisfying in outcome. The sleuth, a retired cop turned publican, made leaps of connections and puttings of two and two together that the reader (this one, anyway) couldn’t see; plus, we hardly met, never mind got to know, the villain  – so there was no ‘I wonder … ’ moment followed by feeling clever that you’d cudgelled your little gray cells and come up with the answer.

 

The Darkest Evening by Ann Cleeves

Paperback from a charity shop. The latest case for Vera and one of the best, plus the title comes from my favourite poem, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost, not an original choice I know but it’s popular for a reason.

 

Hand-grenade Practice in Peking by Frances Woods

Reissued in this lovely edition by Slightly Foxed. Frances Woods spent a year at a language school in China in 1975-76; the book is based on the letters she sent home. So she was there at the very end of the Cultural Revolution and the end of the life of Mao Zedung – at a time when China was virtually closed to outsiders.

Funny, fascinating and jaw-dropping.

I blogged here about my own, much shorter but still funny, fascinating and jaw-dropping, visit to rural China in 2011.

And to read about China somewhere between those two dates I highly recommend Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler.

 

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

Read in paperback for book group. I thoroughly enjoyed American Wife by CS in which she imagined the life of Laura, wife of George W Bush – the result, I promise, is much more amusing and touching than I know you are thinking it could possibly be …

In Rodham, as you can see from the cover, she imagines what would have happened to Hillary Rodham, to the US, and indeed to the world, if she hadn’t married the charismatic Mr Clinton.

It’s an entertaining and thought-provoking read.

 

I Know I Saw Her by E D Thompson

Read on Kindle. A really good psychological thriller. Alice’s quiet (quiet for a slowly revealed reason) home life is disrupted by new neighbours, and a game of cat and mouse is played out over one hot summer.

Eirin Thompson writes excellent women’s magazine stories; I look forward to seeing what she does next as her alter ego.