Eight in May

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.