Mercury57: Book Talking 2013

I joined the 75 Books challenge late on in 2012. I'm still baffled by all the technology but the book discussions are brilliant so am determined to join right at the start of 2013.
Unlikely I will actually reach 75 but it doesn't matter - it's the getting there that counts

Prime Meridian Challenge

I want to broaden my reading horizons so am challenging myself to read a book by an author originating from each of the countries touched by the Prime Meridian longitudinal line and the Equator. Finding authors whose work is representative of each country will be easier in some cases than others. I'll use multiple sources to help me identify these and will add as I find them.



These are the Prime Meridian countries:

United Kingdom
Authors/novels selected Peter Ackroyd English Voices; Iris Murdoch The Sea The Sea

France
Authors/novels under consideration Balzac Old Goriot Laurent Binet HHhH (debut novel)

Spain
Authors/novels under consideration
Enrique Vila-Matas Dublinesque
The following authors were identified in a World Literature group in GroupReads
Miguel Unamuno
Pío Baroja
The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo Jose Cela
Algeria
Authors/novels under consideration

Mali
Authors/novels under consideration Yambo Ouologuem Bound to Violence;

Burkina Faso
Authors/novels under consideration

Ghana
Authors/novels under consideration

Togo
Authors/novels under consideration

Reading along the Equator Challenge

This is a multi year challenge to help me broaden my reading horizons. I will read one book by an author from each of the countries through which the Equator runs. I'll add authors and the titles of novels in stages after I've done some digging around for ideas.



Going from Asia in the east, the countries are:

Sao Tome and Principe
Authors/novels under consideration

Gabon
Authors/novels under consideration
Featured in the blogsite A Year of Reading the World: Daniel Mengara Mema

Republic of The Congo
Authors/novels under consideration
* Featured in the blogsite A Year of Reading the World:
Emmanuel Dongala Johnny Mad Dog Little Boys Come from the Stars
Sony Lab’ou Tansi The Antipeople

* Proposed by LibraryThing member DorsVenabili
Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou

Democratic Republic of The Congo
Authors/novels under consideration
Featured in the blogsite A Year of Reading the World:
Frederick Yamusangie Full Circle - self published

Uganda
Authors/novels under consideration

Kenya
Authors/novels under consideration
* Proposed by LibraryThing member DorsVenabili
The River Between and A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Somalia
Authors/novels under consideration

Maldives (the equator passes through the territory but not on dry land)
Authors/novels under consideration

Indonesia
Authors/novels under consideration

Kiribati (the equator may or may not touch dry land)
Authors/novels under consideration

Ecuador
Authors/novels under consideration

Colombia
Authors/novel selected : The Armies by Evello Rosero Diago. Currently reading

Brazil
Authors/novels under consideration
*Suggested by TooFond.wordpress.com
Paulo Coelho
* Featured in the blogsite A Year of Reading the World
Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro House of the Fortunate Buddhas An Invincible Memory
Clarice Lispector
Rubem Fonseca
Paulo Freire
Jorge Amado

Stopping by to say that I love your Prime Meridian and Equatorial Challenges..... what a fantastic idea! I am looking forward to seeing what books you read for the countries identified. Good luck with your challenge!

Hello and welcome, I also think that your challenges are a great idea. Good Luck! And a very Happy 2013!

Some interesting challenges! Good luck with them in 2013!

Thank you one and all (*4, 5, 6) for the positive feedback. After I wrote this initial post and then put it up on my website, I started to panic whether I was taking on something way beyond my ability. I'll be looking for suggestions so please help!!

Love your challenge! If you are in search of authors for specific countries, you should take a peek at the Reading Globally group and their regional threads for ideas.

Really interesting challenges that you've put together.

Hi Karen! Those are fascinating challenges. I agree that the Reading Globally group is a good place to go for ideas. I've been trying to gather Sub-Saharan African titles, but the only ones that overlap with your challenges are the following:

*Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou (Republic of the Congo)
*The River Between and A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Kenya)

Interesting approach to the Challenge. I'll be interested to see how it goes.

Happy New Year Karen

Looking forward to following you in another year of books and life.

* 12 - Likewise 'Calm'. Hope you're enjoying our rare burst of sunshine here in Wales. I almost didn't recognise that brilliant blue sky this morning...

Suggestions needed: England in Prime Meridian challenge

I'm starting to identify the authors and books I want to read as part of this challenge. The first on my list is UK - but strictly speaking it is England since the Prime Meridian doesn't run through Wales, Ireland or Scotland.

I thought this would be one of the easiest countries to select candidates given the rich literary history. But that's actually the problem - too much choice! So I need help in narrowing down the options. And here's where Library Thing members of this group could help.

I'm looking for suggestions of which authors would be considered most representative of the literature of England. I'll consider Dickens, Austen, Eliot though I'm hoping there could be other ideas. I'm really looking for something that conveys a sense of the place. The only stipulation is that the author must be a native of the country (in other words, not naturalised or someone who has lived in England for many years).

Any ideas???

I find your challenge intriguing too.

Off the top of my head for an English author, I would suggest two, both of them with a series that covers a broad range of life in England:

John Galsworthy The Forsyte Saga
Anthony Powell A Dance to the Music of Time

Anthony Trollope and than in particular his Chronicles of Barsetshire, starting with The Warden. He was born in London and grew up in Harrow, which is close to London. His novels are famous for showing the English countryside of the 19th century.

> 15: Thanks for those ideas. I've read the Forsyte saga though it was many years ago now but have never read Anthony Powell.

> 16: I do love Trollope Samantha. Have read The Warden and Barsetshire Chronicles (The character of Slope is just brilliant) and am due to read Dr Thorpe for a LT group read later this year.

All good suggestions.......

I'd suggest choosing something from the BBC's Big Read list for your England book.

*18 - thanks for the suggestion, just took a look and there are plenty of ideas in there.

Welcome back Karen - I love your equatorial and meridian challenges! I'll be interested in any ideas you come up with, particularly for Uganda as my sister-in-law's husband is from that country and we may be going on a family trip to Uganda at some point.

#14 That's tougher than I thought it would be! The ones that come to mind are the ones that convey a strong sense of a specific place in England but not necessarily England itself, so London or Yorkshire for example. A non-fiction book I've got in my TBR pile which I've heard very good things about is Kate Fox's Watching the English which is an anthropologist's study of modern Englishness. Other things that came to mind was Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men on a Boat or White Teeth by Zadie Smith.

Watching the English is very good - I'd strongly recommend it.

#21 and # 20 Watching the English sounds an interesting read, a little like a book written by Jeremy Paxman a few years ago. Downside is I was looking for novels rather than non fiction. Still it's a good suggestion to keep in mind for the future

# 20 Zadie Smith i've read already but you've given me an idea because her new novel NW is about Londoners so that could fit the bill

Your equatorial and meridian challenges are such a cool idea!

Plenty of good ideas coming forward in response to my appeal here, on my blog and via Twitter for recommendations on authors that typify England (part of my Reading the Prime Meridian challenge)

So far suggested are:
Zadie Smith
Peter Ackroyd
R F Delderfield
Jerome K Jerome
Anthony Trollope
John Galsworthy
Anthony Powell
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea) recommended by my creative writing tutor
Margaret Foster
Bernard Cornwell

The first two Zadie Smith and Peter Ackroyd are rising high on my list because both of them have novels set in London which has particular significance for the Prime Meridian. According to Wikipedia by 1884, over two-thirds of all ships and tonnage used the prime meridian at Greenwich, London as the reference meridian on their maps.

Keep the suggestions coming please.....

What a great list of authors! How about Angela Thirkell?

#24 Are you starting her fan club like you did with Elizabeth Taylor?? (just teasing)

Just discovered the delights of CJ Sansom. Wouldn't have read him but for the fact that the first of his Tudor period mysteries featuring the hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake, is the book club read for January. Review to follow shortly but what a great way to start the new year.

The Matthew Sharldake books are one of my favorite historical mystery series. I wish Sansom would write faster!

#28 the other book he wrote Winter in Madrid - is that very different in style Carrie?

# 10 By coincidence I found Broken Glass in the library sale today. So fate seems determined this is what I will read. Thanks for the tip

I haven't read Winter in Madrid so I can't say how different it is from his Matthew Shardlake series. The setting is very different (Spanish civil war vs. Tudor England), but it's still a spy novel.

I discovered Sansom's Matthew Shardlake series last year and I'm really enjoying it. Which reminds me: I have #3, Sovereign, on my TBR.

Great list of British writers Karen - I would want to add Muriel Spark, JB Priestley, Anthony Powell, John Le Carre, Ian Fleming, Kingsley Amis, Graham Swift, Wilkie Collins, Beryl Bainbridge, AS Byatt, Margaret Drabble, John Fowles, Rudyard Kipling, Ford Madox Ford and for those Brits that travelled a bit further afield Maugham and Greene.

Have a great weekend.

#27 I think Sansom's Shardlake books are great. I have two of his standalone's left to read but I hope he writes another Shardlake at some point.

# 27, 32, I just had to add the other titles to my wishlist having read Dissolution so its good to know the others in the series don't disappoint.

#33 All good suggestions Paul. I've read my first Spark novel just the last week and am a fan of Collins. Byatt is my next Booker read. Drabble and Ford Maddox would be new to me. They're all going on the list for consideration. Will then have to make a decision.... oh dear.

#31 Sounds intriguing though I such a sucker for the Tudor period.

With the help of a Guardian podcast on Latin American literature and a helpful resource on novelists from Colombia -via this website, I think I've narrowed down my selection for Colombia to The Armies by Evello Rosero and Delirium by Laura Restrepo.
I could have gone for García Márquez of course but the Guardian podcast persuaded me that todays novelists from Colombia are moving away from magic realism which characterised their country's literature in the 60s and 70s so it seemed a good way of reading something different.

More nominations for authors representing England .
Laurie Lee
Colin Dexter (the Inspector Morse series)
Agatha Christie
Arthur Ransom

List so far
Zadie Smith
Peter Ackroyd
R F Delderfield
Jerome K Jerome
Anthony Trollope
John Galsworthy
Anthony Powell
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea) recommended by my creative writing tutor
Margaret Foster
Bernard Cornwell
Laurie Lee
Colin Dexter (the Inspector Morse series)
Agatha Christie
P G Wodehouse
Melvyn Burgess
Susan Hill
Bernard Cornwell

First completed book for 2013

Dissolution - C J Sansom
Dissolution plunges us into the turmoil of a sixteenth-century England whose citizens fear for their lives unless they adhere to the country’s newly proscribed form of faith. Chief Minister Thomas Cromwell is hell bent on ensuring Catholicism is eradicated; dissolving the monasteries, evicting its cloistered inhabitants and selling the land and assets to loyal supporters of his master King Henry VIII. Those who resist and speak out against the new order find themselves imprisoned in the Tower of London and tortured or executed.

The murder of a Royal Commissioner while on a mission to root out corruption at a monastery in Kent , threatens to disrupt all of Cromwell’s plans. He needs the perpetrator found quickly and secretly — and he knows just the man to do the job. His choice — Matthew Shardlake, lawyer and long-time supporter of the Reformation. Shardlake and his young relative Mark Poer are despatched to the south coast to investigate the murder.

As in all good murder mystery stories, the investigators quickly learn almost everyone has a secret and a motive. Hidden passages; false trails; multiple corpses; near death experiences; fights and escapes: all the standard components of the genre are in this book. What lifts Dissolution well above the usual fare is the quality of Sansom’s writing with its strong sense of place and atmosphere and an intriguing, multi-dimensional protagonist.

Sansom perfectly evokes the desolation and isolation of the monastery’s setting on the edge of the Weald with its treacherous currents that only smugglers and a few inhabitants dare cross. The heavy snow which falls as Shardlake arrives at the monastery acts as a metaphoric cloak through which he must penetrate to find the killer.

But Shardlake uncovers more than the answer to the crime. What he discovers creates deep unease within himself about Cromwell’s motives and challenges his beliefs about the new future for his country once Reform is fully enacted. By the time the book ends, his faith in humanity is damaged and his idealism has given way to an acute awareness of the corruption all around him.

"…. there is nowhere safe in the world now, nothing certain. …. The Bible says God made man in his image but I think we make and remake him in whatever happens to suit our shifting needs. I wonder if he knows or cares. All is dissolving."

Dissolution is the first in a series of books featuring Shardlake. I will definitely return for more of this intriguing character.

Your review makes me more eager to read this than I already was. Good thing I've got it planned for February - that's not too long a wait :D.

Great review!

I've got to get round to these CJ Sansom books. Mr SandDune raves about them, and he's a historian so I suppose the history is pretty accurate as well!

# 43 Mr Sansom gained a PhD in history before he became a lawyer so I think he can be relied upon to be accurate. Oh and he hates the tv series The Tudors because its so wide of the mark.

Checking in and love the review of Dissolution. I am so looking forward to starting this series at some point.

# 45 Hi there - glad you had a moment to stop by . How are you getting on with the Commonwealth challenge??

Audio Book Review: The Girl who Fell from the Sky

During World War II, 39 British women were recruited and trained to work in Nazi-occupied France, providing intelligence and supporting the local resistance movement. Of these, only 26 survived; 12 were murdered following capture by the Germans and one died from meningitis.

The Girl who Fell from the Sky traces the war-time experience of Marian Sutro, a fictional member of that group who is recruited from the Women’s Air Auxiliary Force.

The novel begins as Marian is parachuted into France to begin her mission with a Resistance cell in the south. It then backtracks to her training in spycraft, weaponry and self-preservation techniques as a result of which she becomes a highly trained killer. Her official mission is to act as a courier but she is given an additional and highly secret assignment: to track down Clement Pelletier, an old family friend living in Paris, and persuade him to escape to England. The future of the war could depend on whether she succeeds for Clement is a leading authority on nuclear physics and the Allies need his help to develop an atomic weapon before the Germans do.

It’s a story that should make for a compelling novel, particularly when the author is as experienced as Simon Mawer. It should be compelling. But it isn’t. It’s just rather ordinary, particularly when compared to Sebastian Faulks’ Charlotte Grey which covered similar territory.

It’s not the writing that’s at fault here. It’s smooth and professional. The plot is well controlled and the detail about dead drops; false passports, border controls etc has the ring of authenticity. All the technical elements are there; it’s just that the novel doesn’t sing.

Part of the problem lies in the character of Marian. She is a rather naive girl who constantly thinks of her self as an outsider’ particularly because she doesn’t really understand the science analogies of the games her brother and friends play. Special operations training in the arts of espionage and combat, toughen her up but otherwise she remains rather immature in her view of the world and in her relationships with men. Though intelligent and resourceful she takes foolhardy risks including forcing her brother to reveal top secret information.

As a spy thriller, there is meant to be considerable suspense but the ending felt rather predictable to me though by then I didn’t particularly care one way or another whether Marian’s quest succeeded.

> 46 - Well, I have the thread set up.... and that is about as far as I have gotten with it so far. ;-)

Great review of Mawer's The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.... at least I think it is Mawer's. I was super confused as I was reading your review because it appeared as though we had read two completely different books, which it turns out we have, as it was Heidi Durrow's The Girl Who Fell From the Sky that I have read!!! LOL!

# 48: We all have to start somewhere Lori. Sorry about the confusion but hope the Durrow one was better than the Mawer was......

Started reading AS Byatt's Possession - part of my Booker challenge but also the selected novel for the book club read in February. It takes a bit of getting used to with all those poems in between the narrative.

Karen Possession is wonderful - the poems add so much to the story:)

I'm resisting the temptation to skip them since she worked so hard to create all of them (quite an achievement to write in so many different styles)

Karen - I do like AS Byatt but Possession is far from my favourite Booker winner. Good, worthy but not mesmerising.
Have a lovely weekend.

Which would you rate the best Booker Paul?

Not terribly original Karen but it would have to be Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. I have a soft spot for Saville by David Storey and really enjoyed reading Last Orders and they would make the rostrum but inevitably my favourites never seem to win!

The first two would definitely not get anywhere near my winners rostrum Paul. I found Saville desperately dull. Rushdie was impressive but frustrating to read. Have not read Last Orders yet though do like the sound of the plot. For me so far Seige of Krishnapur stands out

Gradually adding names of authors and books I want to read in the Reading the Equator and Reading the Prime Meridian challenges. These are the countries where I have authors names and titles identified. Some of the smaller countries are proving difficult ....

United Kingdom
It took me a long time to select from the list that LT members and bloggers suggested. It proved impossible to find just one novel that reflected 'England' so I have gone for two very different books.
Authors/novels selected Peter Ackroyd English Voices; Iris Murdoch The Sea The Sea

France
Authors/novels under consideration Balzac Old Goriot Laurent Binet HHhH (debut novel)

Spain
Authors/novels under consideration
Enrique Vila-Matas Dublinesque


Mali
Authors/novels under consideration Yambo Ouologuem Bound to Violence;

Republic of The Congo
Authors/novel selected This author was suggested by LibraryThing member DorsVenabili
Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou I'm reading it right now.

Colombia
Authors/novel selected : The Armies by Evello Rosero Diago

Reading Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou the first book in my Equator challenge and its a totally unexpected experience. The book blurb mentions its 'riotous humour'. Not sure riotous is the right word but the opening sections were certainly funny enough to make me laugh out loud. Alain has a wicked sense of humour.

Hi, Karen. Looking forward to when you get to Spain since I too have Dublinesque on my shelf for reading this year as well as Vila-Matas' earlier Never Any End to Paris.

It will probably take a while to get to Spain but good to know I'll have a travelling companion Randy. How many bikinis are you taking??

Karen - I have Bartleby & Co by Vila-Matas on the shelves and have been keeping an eye out here for Dublinesque. He seems like a fascinating author.

Have a brilliant weekend. I haven't read anything by anybody from the Congo so will be interested in how it pans out.

Hi Paul. I just looked the Bartleby book up. It sounds fascinating - had to laugh had some of the reviewers comments about researching the authors mentioned only to find some are totally fictitious.

Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou

Take a seedy bar in a dilapidated part suburb of an African city; mix in a few odd ball characters and the stage is set for Alain Mabanckou’s effervescent narrative Broken Glass.

The eponymous narrator is a disgraced school teacher. He spends his days soaking up large quantities of red wine at the Credit Gone West bar . Requested by the bar’s proprietor to write the story of the bar and its clients, Broken West finds himself beset by a string of misfortunates with hard luck stories who all want to set the record straight about their downfall. Each tries hard to convince Broken Glass that they are the innocent victims but Broken Glass exposes the delusions at the heart of their tales of woe. Some of the tales and episodes border on the absurd and the fantastical – in one scene two customers engage in a contest to prove who can urinate for the longest time.

Though most of the early part of the book is taken up with the stories related by his fellow patrons, Broken Glass gradually begins to reveal the story of his own misadventure and his growing revulsion towards these downbeats. The tone veers between downright funny and bizarre and then, with a deft touch, to mocking satire on the nature of African politicians, the self-delusion of upstart Congolese men or the mediocrity of authors.

It’s a clever book full of teasing (unattributed) quotations from other texts, from Hamlet to Catcher in the Rye, from One Hundred Years of Solitude to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, slipped into the narrative as if they are the narrator’s own words. It doesn’t take long to discover that Broken Glass takes his task as a writer and curator of the bar’s history very seriously.

even when I’m drunk I hate useless repetition or padding, as used by certain writers known to be first-class drivellers, who serve up the same old stuff in every new book and try to make out they’ve created a new word, my eye ….

This is a short book with a distinctive voice and style in which words, images and literary allusions freewheel with barely a pause or a full stop. It’s stream of consciousness but without any pretensions to grandiose statements about the universe or humanity. I read this book as part of my Reading Along the Equator Challenge. I didn’t learn much about the Congo from it (would love to know what kind of a dish ’bicycle chicken’ is since Broken Glass seems to live on it) but it was enjoyable and memorable nevertheless. Alain Mabanckou is considered one of Africa’s leading living novelists with an impressive list of commendations and awards. I came across him by chance in a library book sale but will now definitely want to read more of his work.

New purchases this week.....

English Voices - Peter Ackroyd - I'll be reading this for my Reading the Prime Meridian challenge
A Lifetime's Reading: An Introductory Guide to Five Hundred Great Classics of World Literature for a Private Library by Phillip Ward. Have just skimmed the intro and its a bit of an odd book. Ward is a librarian so this is his list of books everyone should read. It's organised by year - you're supposed to read 10 a year....

Two I picked up from a charity shop....at bargain price
Sovereign by C J Sansom. This is the third in the series featuring the lawyer Matthew Shardake. I read the first Dissolution earlier this month and enjoyed it hugely. So I just have to get book 2 now.

Alexandria Quartet - one of the books in Anthony Burgess's Ninety Nine Best Novels

The beginning and the end of Possession are the most enjoyable. The middle would have been better if A S Byatt hadn't included so much dire poetry.

I want to read Possession. Maybe I can work it in later this year. If it seems to drag in the middle for me, I'll keep in mind that it gets better at the end.

It's a cleverly written book but goes off into way too much detail as if the author is showing off how much she knows

>67 Mercury57:: oh, I felt the same way -- and skimmed the "dire poetry" as well.

#68 - glad to know I wasn't alone then.....

Possession by A S Byatt
This was a re-read since it's the Feb choice for my book club. I'd forgotten most of my first experience of reading it.. Here's what I thought this time around.


When a writer dies, should their private lives die with them? Or should they become the possessions of academics and enthusiasts, to be collected, catalogued and analysed like laboratory specimens. Possession in all its manifestations — physical, spiritual, emotional — is the focus of A S Byatt’s 1990 Booker winning novel. The more you read it, the more forms of possession become apparent: legal ownership of correspondence and creative work; obsession with words; control of one’s history; exertion of influence; emotional disturbance.

The first example comes only a few pages into the story when a postgraduate researcher uncovers some letters which hint at a secret relationship between the Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. He steals them and also hides his discovery from his boss. Instead he teams up with another academic Maud Bailey, who has devoted years to dissecting LaMotte’s work. Together they embark on a quest to discover the truth, piecing the story together from a vast array of sources, including letters, journal entries and field trips to Yorkshire and France.

But they are not the only ones in pursuit. From across the Atlantic come Professor Leonora Stern, an avid feminist who is possessed by LaMotte’s supposed lesbian tendencies and Mortimer Cropper, a scholar-collector who is hell-bent on acquiring everything once owned by Ash and shipping it to the USA. In the background there is Cropper’s arch rival Professor James Blackadder, editor of Ash’s Complete Works who is determined to preserve all of Ash’s work in England. Ranged against them all is the determination of Ash’s widow to preserve her husband’s secret. What ensues is a cross between the tradition of the romance adventure with its battle between good and bad and the tradition of a mystery story where the characters have to follow a trail of clues to find the solution.

Byatt skillfully weaves these (or to use Byatt’s own description of ‘a piece of knitting’) into two parallel stories. The painful Victorian love story of Ash and LaMotte, retold through their poems and letters, has its counterpoint in the present-day story of Mitchell and Bailey, whose academic partnership slowly grows into love. Their stories are intertwined so objects from one era reappear in the other — a Victorian jet brooch that Maud wears for example — and the two pairs of lovers share similar behaviours; so Roland’s admiration for Maud’s hair parallels Ash’s fascination with LaMotte’s tresses.

Byatt’s versatility as a writer is evident in the multiple narrative styles found in Possession. She wrote all the poems herself, a task which required her to adopt different voices and styles for each of her Victorian poets – so successful was she that many readers apparently believed Ash and La Motte were real. Her publishers were not so convinced, fearing that readers would find the the inclusion of so many poems too intrusive and a distraction from the mystery story.

I didn’t find them distracting so much as tedious. I’m not a fan of poetry which relies on my knowledge of myths and legends, nor do I enjoy poems which use over-blown language. Both Ash and LaMotte were guilty on both counts – many of their poems were just so dire I skipped them. Nor did I appreciate the long, and frankly often very tedious, passages in the letters between these two poets in which they discussed layers of meaning in Nordic myths. If this is how writers in their era talked to each other, I can’t imagine I’d enjoy spending much time in their company. Was Byatt making fun of them in the same way she ridiculed the academic world for its dogged pursuit of apparently trivial knowledge? I still wasn’t sure by the time I finished reading.

I can’t say that reading Possession was a deeply enjoyable experience. I admired Byatt’s command of language and her ability to tell a story but never felt her contemporary characters came alive in the same way as the Victorians did or that the inclusion of so much poetry really enhanced the book.

Been quiet in here lately because it's been a miserable week at work. Knowing colleagues I've worked with for years have lost their jobs has been a shock. Only now starting to pick up again.

Sorry to hear about your work situation. I've been going through a very similar situation this week at work as well, although in my case I did now it was coming. But still very stressful.

Oh, that's awful, there's something similar underway where I work as well. It can be very sad. Hang in there.

Thank yiu for those kind thoughts ladies. We knew this was coming since it was announced on Jan 9. A lovely New Years gift. But this week the individuals got informed. In the UK it was managed very sensitively but in our North America HQ security guards with guns and tasers were brought in "as a safeguard" and people were not allowed back to desks to collect personal items. How despicable is that.

Added another contender for my Reading the Prime Meridian challenge - The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo Jose Cela is now in the running for Spain.

#74 but in our North America HQ security guards with guns and tasers were brought in "as a safeguard" and people were not allowed back to desks to collect personal items. Wow! That's scary! I've been made redundant myself once and then everyone was escorted out of the building once they'd been informed. But you were allowed back to your desk to collect your stuff under supervision if you wanted to. But it was an investment management company and potentially a disgruntled staff member could have done a lot of damage. But guns! And tasers! I think if you did that here you'd probably make the national news!

Hi Karen - First of all, I'm so sorry to hear about the work situation. Two years ago, my husband's company was bought out by a larger company and they eliminated several positions the week before Christmas (I kid you not), although his job was spared. What a nightmare.

Book comments: Broken Glass is already on my radar, but your review makes me more eager to read it. And, of course, I must read Possession one of these days, as it's my goal to read most of the Booker winners. I did recently finish a Margaret Drabble (A.S. Byatt's sister) novel and it was fantastic. I plan to write a review this week - The Radiant Way.

#76 I know American attitudes to guns are very different to ours in the UK. But that is definitely scary as you say

#77 Thanks for those kind thoughts - I know it will get better, just takes time. telling people just before Christmas shows real bad taste and judgement.

Hope you enjoy Broken Glass - there are some fascinating interviews with the author available on line. he seems such a character......

i never knew Drabble and Byatt were related. What are the odds on having two leading authors in the same family!

The Clerkenwell Tales by Peter Ackroyd

There are times when I see the blurbs on cover of a book I've just finished and wonder if I'd been reading an entirely different book. And so it was with Peter Ackroyd's The Clerkenwell Tales; a book that seemed to have all the elements of a good read but proved to be — if not a dud exactly — a big disappointment.

I chose this novel to represent England in my Reading along the Prime Meridian challenge. It's set in the heart of London in 1399 which was a tumultuous year in English history. King Richard II, a staunch advocate of the divine right of kings to rule, has his throne threatened by a revolutionary army led by Henry Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke is not the only one who wants to overthrow the King. Dominus, a clandestine group of high-powered officials that seems to be in league with an apocalyptic religious sect is similarly intent on causing mayhem. The atmosphere of fear and anxiety is exacerbated by a nun whose prophesies of Richard's demise are unleashed on a superstitious public.

Murder, arson, conspiracy. With a plot like that, how can a book fail especially when written by an author with a tremendous skill with period detail? Ackroyd doesn't disappoint in that respect. His descriptions of daily life, of meals and mystery plays, of footwear and headwear, of tooth sellers and medical potions turn the past into a fascinating though smelly present. Next time I'm feeling ill, I won't bother my local GP, I'll just follow one of the cures from the leech featured in Ackroyd's book:

"he was much discomforted by her heaviness of stomach and suggested she mix the grease of a boar and the grease of a rat, the grease of a horse and the grease of a badger's, souse the concoction in vinegar, add sage and then put it upon her belly."

The problem with this book is the way Ackroyd chooses to tell his story. Each of his chapters is named after a character from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Each of these characters has only partial knowledge of the plots and intrigues so what the reader experiences is a gradual revelation of the story. It's a clever idea, almost akin to the way witnesses in a trial contribute to the jury's understanding of the whole picture, but since none of the characters enters the story for more than a few pages it's difficult to get know them in anything more than a superficial way. It's such a shame because some of them have a lot of promise that is just bursting to be fully realised. But it never does.

I've got about a third of the way through Little Dorrit. Dickens doesn't seem to be anywhere near his usual convoluted style in this one. There are a few digressions where he has a pop at the Circumlocution Office but generally the story romps along. Some brilliant characters too. Such a big improvement on my last experience with the maestro Tale of Two Cities.

>81 Mercury57:: I haven't read Little Dorrit, but the Andrew Davies BBC dramatization was excellent.

I didn't know he had done an adaptation. One for me to keep an eye open for I think. Thanks for the tip.

Not really sure what I have let myself in for with this Classics Club extra challenge. Oh well, he who dares wins (UK members over a certain age will recognise that line I'm sure).
Click here to see my list

Book club meeting tonight discussed Possession by A S Byatt. I'd chosen this book but was worried by some initial comments in the meeting when we selected the book. I had the feeling people would feel it was too esoteric. Couldn't have been more wrong - it had the second highest score for any book the club has read in the last two years. Just shows what a hopeless judge I am....

Hi Karen! I was hoping to read Little Dorrit last year, but never did. I have a friend who raves about it and considers it his favorite book. I haven't read Dickens for years.

I'm glad Possession was a hit for your book club. As I said above, I plan to read it one of these days.

It's such a relief to read a good Dickens after my awful experience with Tale of Two Cities

I had to read A Tale of Two Cities in high school and it put me off Dickens for years. Now he is one of my favorite authors, and Little Dorrit is a particular favorite.

thats good to know. I love Great Expectations and Dombey and Son

Review Will the Real William Shakespeare Please Step Forward

This is about the worst book I have read the whole year

Just as new theories about who really killed John F Kennedy seem to materialise as often as a re-release of the Beatles greatest hits, so too does the thorny question of who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Hot on the heels of Professor James Shapiro’s Contested Will, came the film Anonymous which maintained that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays was not the bearded wonder from Stratford on Avon but Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Could one man really have written all 38 plays and more than 100 sonnets? Was it likely that a man who, as far as we know, never set foot outside London, write so authoritatively about Italian cities, Danish court life and Roman politics? How could the son of a lowly glove maker be as familiar with the Elizabethan courts as he was with the works of Plutarch and Hollinshed? These are just some of the questions posed by the Anti-Stratfordians. Surely, they argue, all these plays were actually the output of a man from a less humble background — maybe an aristocrat like the Earl of Oxford or another playwright (specifically they point to Christopher Marlowe).

These are questions that David Lawrence-Young uses as the basis for his ‘literary mystery’ novel Will the Real William Shakespeare Please Step Forward. It begins with a bold declaration from a university lecturer that William Shakespeare was a con man, a faker and a forger. Those words are enough to compel Daniel Ryhope, a fellow lecturer in English literature, to embark on a quest to uncover the truth about the authorship of all those plays and sonnets. Rhyope engages his wife and two friends in his campaign. They meticulously gather information on each of the possible candidates, dissecting and analysing the arguments for and against before reaching some conclusions.

It should have made for a fascinating read. Lawrence-Young is an English literature lecturer himself and a voracious collector of books on the Shakespeare authorship conundrum. So he does know his Shakespeare inside out. We get the benefit of that knowledge through multiple quotes from the plays that are woven into the narrative along with the short resumes of the key points for and against each theory.

The problem is that all this knowledge weighs too heavily in a book which pays only slight attention to the principles of good fiction writing. So we get large chunks of factual information written in a style that could easily have been lifted from an encyclopaedia and introduced in a rather clumsy way — for example, as a list of facts or potted histories of certain historical figures. This problem is compounded by the fact the ‘action’ consists of little more than a bunch of people who do some research, then sit around a kitchen table, drinking coffee and eating cake while they discuss their latest discovery. Daniel and his chums are only sketchily drawn and keep uttering impossibly unrealistic dialogue in which they address each other by first name as if to remind the other person of their identity. Here’s a fairly typical passage:

Twenty minutes later, four of us, Beth having driven over to join us, were sitting around the table tucking into home-made vegetable soup, scrambled eggs, bens and toast and Jenny’s delicious apple pie for which Beth immediately requested the recipe.

‘Not a fantastic meal for my first as a hostess,’ said Jenny but I promise to do better next time when I have more advanced warning.’

‘Fear not, gentle hostess,’ I said, quoting Sir Hugh Evans in the Merry Wives of Windsor. ‘I will make an end of my dinner; there’s pippins and cheese to follow.’

‘No Daniel, there isn’t. There are biscuits and coffee or Earl Grey tea.’

And so, after clearing away the dishes from the table I brought the meeting to order.

Are you still awake after that riveting section of narrative?.

To be fair, Lawrence-Young does try to vary the pace by having some historical figures speak in their own voice; like one of the potential authors, the Earl of Rutland or the Reverend Wilmot the man who first cast doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship. But their voice doesn’t come across with any authenticity.

I wasn’t looking for a fast paced novel in the mode of Jennifer Lee Carrell’s 2007 mystery novel Interred with Their Bones (a dire book in my view). But the initial promise of the first chapter of Will the Real William Shakespeare Please Step Forward, just never materialised and the more I read, the more tiresome the experience became. This would have been much more effective as a work of non fiction; the artifice of a fictional ‘search for truth’ just didn’t work. Now if Lawrence-Young were to write a more academic book about the theories about likely contenders, it would be one I would definitely want to read.

Progress so Far this year

January 2013

Dissolution by C J Sansom
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky Simon Mawer
Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou
Possession by A. S Byatt

February 2013

The Clerkenwell Tales by Peter Ackroyd
The Armies by Evello Rosero Diago, a novelist from Colombia

March 2013

Little Dorrit by Dickens (started this in February but it took me to mid March to finish).
Crime and Punishment by Doestoevsky
Will the Real William Shakespeare please Step Forward by Lawrence-Young

Currently reading
Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan

>90 Mercury57:: well that sounds pretty dire. You've done all of us a service with your candid review!

>92 lauralkeet: - its now become awkward because the same author has invited me to review his latest book (yes he had seem my comments on Shakey). How do I tell him gently that I don't think its a good use of my time??

>93 Mercury57:: hmm, that's a tough one. You could claim to have several reading commitments and just not enough time.

Hi Karen - nice to see you back on the threads, sorry that your last book was so bad.

Gosh - the author offered you another one to read! That is slightly awkward and I think Laura has a good idea.

>94 lauralkeet:: I was thinking that indeed could be my get out clause Laura. And it would at least be true.

>95 calm: Thanks for the welcome back Calm. I've just taken on a hugely expanded role at work so will be struggling to keep my head above water for a while.

Little Dorrit

I am way behind on my reviews..........

Corruption; inept officialdom; capitalism, the pretensions of social class and status: few elements of Victorian life seem to escape Dickens’ scrutiny in Little Dorrit.

Published in monthly instalments between 1855 and 1857, first reactions from the critics were not very favourable. They completely overlooked the social critique element and focused their attention instead on what they considered an unnecessarily incoherent plot and insubstantial, two-dimensional figures. Fortunately the mid twentieth century saw a revival of interest in the novel and a significant shift in attitude. In fact attitudes shifted so far that George Bernard Shaw claimed Little Dorrit was a more seditious text than Marx’s Das Kapital while George Orwell declared that ”in Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached.”

Much of Dickens’ ire in Little Dorrit is focused on government bureaucracy. He brings it to life with the wonderfully imaginative invention of the Circumlocution Office. It’s a government department run entirely it seems by the incompetent and the inept (ring any bells???). Its sole purpose is to frustrate and obstruct anyone who has the temerity to ask for information or assistance. Forms need to be filled in just to request permission to fill in more forms to ask for an appointment.(the Soviets learned a thing or two from the Circumlocution Office methinks).

Some of his greatest anger is directed at debtors’ prisons such as the notorious Marshalsea in which people who owed money were imprisoned until they repaid their debts. It was an impossible situation because they were not allowed to work so had to rely on family or friends to help pay bills and to provide food and clothing. Such becomes the fate of William Dorrit who moves his entire family into the Marshalsea when he becomes a bankrupt. His youngest daughter Amy (the Little Dorrit of the title) is born within its walls, becoming a true child of the Marshalsea.

But even in prison the appearance of gentility and the gradations of class and status must be maintained. The Marshalsea inhabitants refer to themselves as “collegians” rather than prisoners; Papa Dorrit pretends ignorance about the fact his daughters go out to work every day to put food on the table, and openly solicits financial gifts from visitors, masks their true nature by calling them “tributes” and ‘testimonials’. As his status within the prison rises and he becomes the longest-serving resident, so his consciousness of his status increases, going into orbit when he is released upon discovery that he is in fact a very wealthy man.

What Dickens shows is the personal cost of such esteem for one’s position in life. Mr Dorrit is so blinkered by his sense of his own importance that he fails to connect with the one person who loves him without question – his daughter Amy. Though she has loved him without question for decades, cared for him and undergone personal suffering so that he would be spared, he does not recognise the debt he owes her. Instead he subjects her to criticism over petty mistakes and castigates her when she doesn’t wholeheartedly welcome and adopt the trappings of the family’s new-found wealth. Does he repent on his deathbed as characters do in so many novels? I won’t spoil the plot by disclosing that; you’ll just have to read the novel yourself.

The Dorrits are a far cry from the epitome of the happy loving families found in Dickens’s earlier works. None of the families in Little Dorrit actually fit that particular description being neither loving nor happy. They’re all rather dysfunctional in fact. When Arthur Clenhome, one of the book’s good guys, returns to London from China where he ran the family business for twenty years he gets as much of a welcome from his mother as if he’d just returned from a weekend in Brighton.

Like most of Dickens’ big novels, the plot does require attention to keep all the threads intact but this book isn’t anywhere as complicated as Bleak House. It also relies on a remarkable series of coincidences – the first two characters we meet in a prison in France not only turn up again in London many many chapters later and somehow manage to play key roles in the plot. But it wouldn’t be Dickens without coincidence would it. Nor would it be Dickens without a wildly extravagant female character. Just as Dombey and Son has the dippy Miss Lucretia Tox, and Martin Chuzzlewit has the drunken nurse Sarah Gamp, in Little Dorrit Dickens serves up the garrulous Flora Finching to entertain with her gushing and breathless simpering talk of nothing in particular. A brilliant invention.

So in case you haven’t twigged by now, yes I did enjoy this book. And yes I would definitely read it again.

Excellent review! I've not read it but really enjoyed the dramatization.

It restored Dickens in my eyes after the failure with Tale of Two Cities and the semi failure with Bleak House

Progress so Far - to end March

January 2013

Dissolution by C J Sansom
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky Simon Mawer
Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou
Possession by A. S Byatt

February 2013

The Clerkenwell Tales by Peter Ackroyd
The Armies by Evello Rosero Diago, a novelist from Colombia

March 2013

Little Dorrit by Dickens (started this in February but it took me to mid March to finish).
Crime and Punishment by Doestoevsky
Will the Real William Shakespeare please Step Forward by Lawrence-Young
Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan

Currently reading
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The End of Your Life Book Club - Will Schwalbe

Book Number 10: Farewell to Arms

When a book comes from the pen of a Nobel prize-winning author and it’s his first best-seller, my expectation is that I’ll be offered something special. But the only sensation brought on by reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was one of mystification about why this novel is rated so highly.

The story is a romance set in Italy during World War 1 between an American serving with the Italian forces and a British nurse. It’s based on Hemingway’s own experiences while serving as an ambulance driver on the Austrian-Italian front. The driver and the nurse meet, have a passionate affair, flee the country and spend months billing and cooing in a snowy idyll somewhere in Switzerland. Which doesn’t sound too bad a plot. The problem for me was that the story is related with all the passion of someone reading the back of a cornflakes box.

I understand that Hemingway was striving for an ultra lean writing style; one that avoided complicated syntax and eliminated what he considered unnecessary punctuation. Where many authors used the comma to connect phrases, Hemingway preferred to use ‘and’ as his connector. The result is so pared down it felt drained of all colour and vitality. Conversations between the two love birds were rendered in such a simple way that it was very hard to get inside their heads and to experience the intensity of the emotion they felt for each other. In short I found the whole thing under-whelming.

I don't care for Hemingway's writing style either. My husband recently read this and enjoyed it, but as he shared aspects of the book with me he said he thought it was probably not for me. You've reinforced that message!

I read A Farewell to Arms years ago and I still think of it as one of the most boring books I've ever read. It put me off of Hemingway.

# Glad to know its not just me ladies. I missed the colour. Some of their conversations felt so pedestrian as if they were discussing the time of the next bus.

Half way through The End Of Your Life Book Club and its beginning to pall. The most interesting part is about the mothers charitable work. The book discussions are rather so what.

Reading more than I'm reviewing/posting at the moment. Work getting in the way - now doing a job previously done by 13 people. At least I have a job!

Finished End of Your Life Book Club - reasonable though a bit too maudlin
Read The Snowdrops by AD Miller. Well written but can't understand how it got to be a Booker longlisted title

A job previously done by 13 people?! That must keep you busy!

Just a little Laura. We are meant to use external agencies instead but of course they all need directions and info.

Trying to decide which books to take for a weeks holiday next week. So many to choose from.

Progress so Far

January 2013

Dissolution by C J Sansom
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky Simon Mawer
Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou
Possession by A. S Byatt

February 2013

The Clerkenwell Tales by Peter Ackroyd
The Armies by Evello Rosero Diago, a novelist from Colombia

March 2013

Little Dorrit by Dickens (started this in February but it took me to mid March to finish).
Crime and Punishment by Doestoevsky
Will the Real William Shakespeare please Step Forward by Lawrence-Young
Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan

April 2013
The End of Your Life Book Club - Will Schwalbe
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Snowdrops by A D Miller

Currently reading
Dark Fire - C J Sansom
Dom Casmurro - De assis

>108 Mercury57:: oh yes, I understand that situation. I work in an IT department where we have outsourced a great deal of the work, but there's still a significant amount of oversight required.

Review End of your life book club

“What are you reading?” A question that Will Schwalbe had asked his book-loving mother for as long as he could remember. When Mary Anne Schwalbe is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the question turns into a device enabling them to talk about difficult subjects like mortality. As they wait in hospital outpatient clinics and attend chemotherapy sessions over almost two years, they discuss books they have swapped and reflect on the resonance each text has for their own lives.

These discussions are ostensibly the subject of Will Schwalbe’s memoir The End of Your Life Book Club, though in reality, the book is about a son’s love for a remarkable woman and the means by which he celebrates her life.

A picture emerges of a truly extraordinary woman. After an early career as an actress, she served as director of admissions for Harvard until she made a life-changing visit to a refugee camp in Thailand. Her experience there led her to co-found the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. For years she campaigned relentlessly to bring the plight of refugees to public attention and to raise funds on their behalf, travelling herself at personal risk to the war zones of Afghanistan, Liberia and Sudan. In the final days of her life, she continued to fund raise on behalf of a cause very dear to her heart – starting a travelling library in Kabul.

Will Schwalbe punctuates a narrative of innumerable visits to hospitals with the back-story of his mother’s life and conversations which reveal a gentle and thoughtful woman with a deep-seated interest in people around her. In one episode we discover she has paid for expensive drugs needed by a woman she met only an hour earlier.

And then there are the conversations about the multitude of books they read together (the titles are all listed in the appendix as a helpful guide to those of us who really need to add to our to be read list). This is much lighter fare than Reading Lolita in Tehran. The book discussions are often rather perfunctory, they’re not meant to be learned commentaries on style, themes, etc but rather they exist purely as a means to an end, a way of reflecting on ’lessons in life’ or introducing the more difficult subject of Mary Anne’s condition. A short discussion on David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter leads Mary Anne to reflect:

"Thats one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we can all talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselves."

while a reading of Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, leads to a discussion about courage shown by missionaries and nuns who forsake homes, countries and children and then onto the courage needed to face pain and likely death. At times the ‘life lessons’ creep too close to the pedestrian advice found in the kind of self-help books to which I have a complete aversion but occasionally there is a well-observed comment about the ability of reading to bring people together.

After reading The Savage Detectives and Man Gone Down Will comments that:

"these books showed us that we didn’t need to retreat or cocoon. They reminded us that no matter where Mom and I were on our individual journeys, could still share books and while reading these books we wouldn’t be the sick person and the well person; we would simply be a mother and a son entering new worlds together."

The writing isn’t wonderful and the ending is – given the subject matter – inevitable. It’s not one of the most rewarding books I’ve read so far this year but there is a comment towards the end that struck a nerve.

"We’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not, each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one."

Dark Fire by C J Sansom
The second of C J Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake series sees the hunchback lawyer summoned once again to the aid of Chief Minister Thomas Cromwell. It’s 1540. London is sweating uncomfortably in an intense heatwave, the King is in pursuit of yet another bride more to his taste than Anne of Cleves and Cromwells hold on power looks increasingly precarious as his enemies circle and plot. He can keep them at bay and retain Henry’s favour if he can get his hands on a mysterious new weapon called Dark Fire or Greek Fire that could be a deciding factor if the French decide to wage war on Henry. Problem is, Dark Fire seems in short supply and the men who developed the formula have been murdered. Cromwell has only 12 days to find the formula and stage a demonstration for his royal master. There is only one man he can trust take on this quest, Shardlake.

It’s three years since Shardlake was last pressed into service of the state, an experience that left him questioning his faith and his belief in religious reform. He’s much happier doing battle with the law on behalf of his clients than getting embroiled in political affairs. He has a particularly tough case on his hands already, defending Elizabeth Wentworth, young girl accused of murdering her cousin by throwing him down a well. Time is running out – if Shardlake can’t prove her innocence in the next 12 days, she will go to the gallows. But what Cromwell wants, Cromwell gets.

The two plot lines combine into an intricate maze which sees Shardlake and his new assistant Jack Barak criss cross London, visiting stinking prison dungeons, the perfumed salons of the society elite and the whorehouses of Shoreditch in a series of chases and adventures that become increasingly dangerous. Shardlake complains of the pain he endures from his infirmity, but it doesn’t stop him clambering up walls, carrying women from burning buildings and throwing off would-be assailants. The pace is rapid, the list of potential villains lengthy and the solution satisfyingly unclear until the final pages.

Sansom’s writing can be clunky at times but what makes amends for this is the introduction of Barak as Shardlake’s assistant. Like all good side kicks he exists to do the grunt work, like clambering down wells at dead of night or trawling the brothels and taverns for would be assassins and to act as a straight man when the brilliant detective needs to test a theory. Barak’s uncouth behaviour and propensity to be rude to anyone in authority, make him a great foil for Shardlake’s more considered, temperate nature. Shardlake’s own character is more finely tuned in Dark Fire. His desire to seek justice for the common man shown in Dissolution is still in evidence but now combines with his passion to expose the type of corruption that preys on the defenceless poor. We also get to see another side to Shardlake as he forms an affection a woman whose wealth and family status put her well above that of a lowly lawyer. Does she return his affection or is she really trying to hoodwink him as Barak maintains? Sansom keeps his readers guessing on this point as on so much else in a novel that is an even more enjoyable read than Dissolution.

Great review, Karen. I enjoyed this book although I agree with your comment that the writing can sometimes be clunky.

Great reviews Karen. I've got The End of your Life Book Club sitting in the TBR pile and I must get round to it soon. And my husband keeps trying to persuade me to read the Shardlake books which he loves. I don't read a lot of mysteries but maybe I should give those ones a go.

Laura: I can excuse clunky writing if the story is so good it sweeps me along which Sansom does. I'm going to read his non Shardlake book Winter in Madrid one day just to see if he is versatile.

Hi Rhian, I guarantee if you read the End of Yr Life book you will get even more titles to add to your TBR list. I started highlighting those that see,ed interesting end then realised every title is listed at the back.

An Accidental Life
She’s the golden girl of the New Orleans legal circle. He’s senior assistant district attorney for one of the Louisiana districts and is being tipped as a contender for the top office at the next election. Babies are not part of their game plan – they’d just interfere with their march to the top of the career ladder. But then within days of achieving a lifetime ambition to make partnership status, Rebecca Jacobs discovers she’s pregnant. And then a case emerges which could prove to be a career defining moment for her husband.

It’s a sensitive and emotional case involving a doctor who is accused of letting a child born as a result of an abortion, to die when it could have lived. Both situations force Rebecca and Peter to confront questions about faith and ethics and to re-assess their ideas about their personal priorities.

This in essence is the plot of An Accidental Life, due for publication in September. It’s a plot that has good dramatic potential and in the hands of an accomplished writer would make a thought provoking, challenging novel. Unfortunately this isn’t how it turned out.

The characters of Peter and Rebecca seldom rise beyond the predictable and the cliched and the story takes too long to get going because it’s bogged down in irrelevant detail, Had this not been a review copy, I would have given up at a fairly early stage. Things only perked up when we got into the meat of the murder investigation and particularly the court room scenes which were written with good pace and skill. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the author Pamela Ewen was a practising lawyer for some twenty five years because the arguments for both prosecution and defence have clearly been well researched. It’s not easy to make detailed and complex legal arguments easy for laypeople to follow and keep a strong narrative thrust at the same time but Ewen succeeded well on both counts.

Maybe with a really strong editor, the flaws in the rest of the narrative could be remedied. But as it stands, this wasn’t my cup of tea at all.

Have reluctantly concluded that I can not continue with this challenge this year. My new work responsibilities mean I have less time than before so something has to give. I may return kin the future.but for now you can follow me at my blog.

Oh, I know that feeling Karen. Sometimes we do need to adjust our priorities, as painful as it can be! Good luck and I hope to see you back here at some point.

#119 Sorry to hear that - I hope the situation at work eases up. I am following your blog but I'm afraid I don't comment on the blogs I follow. I am reading it though!