Eight in May

I read eight books in May.

 

West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge

This was recommended to me and I loved the premise, which is based on a true story. In 1938, two giraffes are on their way to San Diego Zoo in California. There’s a hurricane, the ship is tossed about, but miraculously the giraffes survive. (A hippo wasn’t so lucky.)

The giraffes’ story is a morale boost to Americans so soon after the Depression and with the threat of another war in Europe. So the twelve-day cross-country road trip to deliver the giraffes to the zoo is one eagerly followed by a myriad cast of characters, some with the best of intentions, some not.

I loved it and so did my book group – it’s a great yarn combined with brilliant writing, not something you often get. Apparently, a film is in the pipeline.

 

 

We All Live Here by Jojo Moyes

Lila has her hands full. Her husband has left her; she has two daughters; her mother has died and her stepfather, Bill, gradually moves in with her. To crown it all, her unreliable biological father, an actor past his famous heyday, makes a re-appearance. Oh, and she’s trying to have a love life.

Jojo Moyes’ books are always page-turners but this wasn’t one of my favourites. While I liked some of the characters, especially her two dads, I didn’t take to Lila herself. I wouldn’t take to anybody who has written a book detailing the breakdown of their marriage, since she is identifiable and there are children involved. It was a best-seller though (so what do I know?) so now her agent has encouraged her to embark on a follow-up, about the aforementioned love life. That doesn’t go so well.

 

 

Before I Met You by Lisa Jewell

Dual timeline, set in the 1920s and the 1990s (it's not one of LJ's psychological thrillers). In the later age, Betty moves from Guernsey to London to find the mysterious woman mentioned in her grandmother’s will. Her search will uncover Arlette’s glamorous life in Soho, a whirl of cocktail parties and smoky night-clubs. In researching Arlette’s tragic love story, Betty finds her own place in the city.

(And, no, the mysterious woman is not who you might immediately think she will be.)

Fabulous, loved it.

 

 

The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves

The first Vera. Excellent. So I’ve read them all now, perversely finishing with the first.

 

 

The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths

I haven’t read any of Elly Griffiths’ (forensic archaeologist) Ruth Galloway books before. Quite enjoyed it, especially the Norfolk setting. It’s probably not typical as it’s set in 2020. It does bring that strange time to life, with its restrictions on movement (not that they prevent the characters from doing whatever they want) and uncertainty.

 

The recent Christian Aid book sale presented the opportunity to buy these three vintage books for children. How could I refuse?

Enjoyed them all.

 

The Lark in the Morn Elfrida Vipont.

 

 

The Lark on the Wing by Elfrida Vipont

 

 

Lillipilly Hill by Eleanor Spence

 

 

Seven in July

I read seven books in July, one I wish I hadn’t.

Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner

Christian Aid sale purchase. Loved this police procedural. The main character, Manon Bradshaw, is a detective sergeant and what she has to deal with is this – ‘Edith Hind is gone, leaving just her coat, a smear of blood and a half-open door’. How could you not want to find out what happened next? The New York Times, no less, called it: ‘Smart and stylish. Manon is portrayed with an irresistible blend of sympathy and snark.’

I Found You by Lisa Jewell

Read on Kindle. Lily has only been married for three weeks. When her new husband fails to come home from work one night, she is left stranded in a new country where she knows no one.

Alice finds a man on the beach outside her house. He has no name, no jacket, no idea what he is doing there. Against her better judgement, she invites him into her home.

I stayed up very late to finish this. My goodness, it has some extremely dark and harrowing moments. You have been warned.

Alone Through China and Tibet by Helena Drysdale

Christian Aid sale purchase. I am rather obsessed by China (see why here) and wish that, like Helena Drysdale, I saw it before its modernisation began.

She went in 1985 and I travelled vicariously with her. I would not have the courage to do what she did – or the temperament. I like knowing where I'm going to sleep, and even the thought of arriving other than ridiculously early at a station or airport gives me the screaming heebie jeebies.

But I like to think that in some respects that I am more prepared for a journey than Ms Drysdale. I wouldn’t take the hour-and-a-half bus trip to Glasgow without an emergency granola bar. She got on a bus to go through Tibet, a journey of several days in one of the most unpopulated parts of the planet, and she did not take a single thing to eat with her, nor any water. Her fellow travellers were laden with snacks, including tins of mandarin oranges – they fished the segments out with chopsticks. She does not say whether they offered to share with her but after a day or two someone by the roadside ‘made us omelettes’. I’d have eaten my own hand by that stage.

Apologies to my Censor: The Highs and Lows of a Foreigner in China by Mitch Moxley

Christian Aid book sale purchase. Another sojourn in China, this one a mere twenty-two years later but in a very changed country. Canadian Mitch Moxley finds himself in Beijing in 2007 as a correspondent for China Daily. He wants to be a journalist, or so he says … he doesn’t actually seem very keen on writing, or working come to that, but he gets up to various shenanigans as twenty-something men are wont to do … But hey, he’s in China so I’m willing to follow him.

Lost for Words by Stephanie Butland

Read on Kindle. I heard about this on the Portobello Book Blog (read Joanne Baird’s review here).

I loved it. Loveday works in a second-hand bookshop in York for the wonderful, mysterious Archie. She lives on her own and doesn’t seem to have any friends or family – her story is slowly revealed. When she picks up a book on the street Nathan enters her life. 

I never intend to get a tattoo but after reading this I’m pondering which first line of a book would I choose if I did. Perhaps it would be the beginning of Lost for Words: A book is a match in the smoking second between strike and flame. Isn't that lovely?

 *****

I’m not going to say what the sixth (e-)book was. If I’d read the first page on Amazon I’d never have bought it – won’t make that mistake again. I kept going thinking surely it will get better but it never did. Banal writing, badly edited (not self-published, shame on the publisher). A young couple’s marriage is in crisis but as we never see them in the good times so what? I could tell you what happened to them but I couldn’t tell you anything about them, they were so one-dimensional. Two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

 *****

The Print Petticoat by Lucilla Andrews

Lucilla Andrews was the doyenne of hospital romance and some of her titles have just been brought out as e-books. This one is set a few years after the Second World War in a maternity unit that was evacuated from London and has not yet gone back. Joanna has several men who are very keen on her and it takes a serious and unexpected event to show which is the right one for her.

The 'print petticoat' by the way is a reference to the full-skirted uniform worn by nurses at St Gregory's Hospital.

 

Lucilla Andrews’ wartime memoir No Time for Romance (highly recommended) became part of a controversy involving Ian McEwan and his novel Atonement.

I was honoured to be asked to contribute an article for the publisher’s website and I chose to write on my favourite books about nurses (fiction and fact), see ‘Florence, Cherry, Lucilla and Me’ here.

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.

Six in November

I read six books in November.

Here’s Looking at You by Mhairi McFarlane (on Kindle). I read and enjoyed Mhairi McFarlane’s first book You Had Me At Hello but didn’t believe at all in the relationship at the core of this one. Very disappointing. (Incidentally, have you noticed that on Amazon reviews lots of people spell that word ‘dissapointed’?) Maybe you have to be the age/mindset of the characters (30-something adolescents) to appreciate it. Or maybe it suffers from quickly-written-follow-up-to-successful-first-novel syndrome. I'll probably give her the benefit of the doubt and try her third one.

The House We Grew Up in by Lisa Jewell. I’ve been a big Lisa Jewell fan ever since her first book Ralph’s Party – didn’t think this was her best although I wouldn’t say I was ‘dissapointed’ with it. Have you seen those TV programmes about people who hoard – the extreme cases who end up hardly able to move for stacks of newspapers and other stuff most would call rubbish? The mother in this story is one of those hoarders and her husband and each of her offspring have to find their own way of dealing with it, as children and then as adults.

Martha’s Ark by Charlotte Moore. A pleasure to reread this, published in 1996 (now o/p) and described by the Sunday Telegraph as ‘Like Jane Austen, Charlotte Moore directs a sharp and sympathetic gaze.’ Charlotte Moore seems to have concentrated on non-fiction in recent years; I’ve just googled her and see she’s written the story of her family home which sounds fascinating: 

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/21/hancox-charlotte-moore-review 

Something Beginning With by Sarah Salway (on Kindle) With quirky alphabetical headings, this is Verity’s account of her relationships with her friend Sally and her married lover John. Original and observant, albeit with a rather abrupt ending.

Snow Angels, Secrets and Christmas Cake by Sue Watson (on Kindle)

What it says in the title. Frothy ‘Christmas read’.

Empress Dowager Cixi by Jung Chang – actually this 500-pager spilled over into December, a book group read. And a very colourful one it is, from the author of Wild Swans.

Cixi (pronounced See-shee, 1835-1908), the concubine who became an Empress, is the most important woman in Chinese history – credited, although not in China, for bringing that medieval empire into the modern age. She opened up links with the rest of the world and allowed railways and telegraph lines to be built. Just before she died she was paving the way for the country to be governed by a constitutional monarchy – and if she had lived a few years longer the history of China in the twentieth century might have been quite different. Not a saint, but a clever, fascinating woman.

In China (where this book is banned) Cixi is regarded in a different light. The author relates how present-day visitors to the Summer Palace are told by guides that extravagant Cixi redirected money that should have been spent on the Chinese navy to the restoration of the Palace, and that China lost a war again Japan as a result. This was exactly the experience my sister and I had in China four years ago – our guide pointed to a marble boat and told the story of the redirected funds; he did not say one word in Cixi’s favour. That was the first time I had even heard of Cixi so I was extremely interested to read a quite different account of her in this book.

Summer Palace 2010