wandering_star's 2015 reading

My seventh year in Club Read! An amazing thought.

The start of the year is going to be dominated by Japan-related reading, as I'll be living in Tokyo for the next few months. When packing to come I grabbed all the Japanese books I could find from my TBR, which turned out to be:

The Twilight Years by Sawako Ariyoshi
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
Silence by Shusaku Endo
The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki
The Waiting Years by Fumiko Enchi
Child of Fortune by Yuko Tsushima
Out by Natsuo Kirino
The Informer by Akimitsu Takagi
A Hundred Years of Japanese Film by Donald Richie
a periodical, Monkey Business: new writing from Japan

and I've bought Granta 127: Japan, Tokyo: a view of the city by Donald Richie and a graphic novel/memoir, Showa 1926-1939 by Shigeru Mizuki.

Oh, and I've started reading The Tale of Genji which has been on my TBR for an embarrassing 20 years. Good so far!

I finished my first book on 1 Jan: The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst. There are five parts to the book, a few decades passing between each one.

In the first part, pre-WWI, George Sawle has invited his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance to the family home for a weekend stay. Cecil is George's lover, but during the weekend he also plays at seducing George's sister Daphne, who is swept away by the romance of him being a published poet. On leaving, George writes a long poem in Daphne's autograph book - most people think that it's a poem to Daphne, but we know that some of the poem was written to George - and that he wrote, but didn't include, some rather explicit lines about their relationship.

In the second part, the war is over, Cecil has been killed, and Daphne is slightly unhappily married to Cecil's brother. And so it continues - we follow the family, but also the afterlife of Cecil and the poem that he wrote, which has become a hugely popular and patriotic verse after being quoted publicly by Churchill.

I think one of the biggest problems that I had with this book is that Cecil is by far the liveliest and most interesting character, and the people get less and less interesting as the book goes on. The first four parts are each concerned essentially with one episode - always some kind of family event with an unwelcome guest - but they are long and detailed and all the key developments happen between them, so I came to feel that I was getting much too much information about people I didn't care about. And to be honest, even in part one I felt like Edward St Aubyn does this sort of upper-class unhappiness much better.

There are some great bits of writing, but I would skip this and read The Line of Beauty instead.

She was standing, perhaps by design, beneath her own portrait, which in a way made remarks superfluous. This was the house she had ruled for forty years. She was gaunter now about the brow than when she'd been painted, sharper about the chin. Her hair had gone from russet to ash, the red dress changed irreversibly to black. Every time she 'came in' from the set of rooms she now occupied, and where she often chose to dine alone, she moved with a perceptible shiver of shaken dignity, made all the clearer by the sunny bits of play-acting that accompanied it.

>1 wandering_star: You have some very good reads listed! If you have access to English-language books and enjoy modern mysteries, I would recommend All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe. It is a good read and it demonstrated the unique structure of identity/family relationships in Japanese society.

Enjoy Tokyo! I read that Granta issue last year. It is the sum total of my exposure to Japanese literature, but i loved the issue.

Looking forward to your Japanese reads.

The Stranger's Child sounds unfortunately repetitive. I'll be following your recommendation since The Line of Beauty is on the pile.

Hi Wandering Star! I'll also be looking forward to following your reading this year. Just stopping by to star the thread for now.

>3 ELiz_M: I have read All She Was Worth and I thought it was really excellent. As a result I tracked down another Miyuki Miyabe book, Crossfire, which was also a crime novel with a theme of the treatment in Japan. I didn't like it as much as All She Was Worth though because it was less subtle, and there was a thread of vigilante-ism in it which I wasn't comfortable with. I'd love to get recommendations for other books though.

Hello Dan, Paul and Fledermaus!

>7 wandering_star: I think you have a lot of my favorites on your shelf already.

Let's see... I liked Sujata Massey's Rei Shimura mysteries more than those by Akimitsu Takagi, because I enjoyed Rei's outsider perspective on Japanese culture.

Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey is fun, and Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb is an interesting, if somewhat distressing, memoir.

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburō Ōe is often compared to Lord of the Flies and it is interesting to contrast the two. Perhaps a more modern, reality-TV influenced version would be Battle Royale by Koushun Takami.

Apparently, I enjoyed Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, although I don't remember much of them.

The Sea of Fertility is a tetralogy by by Yukio Mishima and covers events from 1912 to 1975, through the eyes of Shigekuni Honda. Each book takes place approximately 20 years apart. The first is beautiful, the second is very good, the third is odd, and he fourth is compelling. I enjoyed the time-scale and used the series to get a sense of Japan's 20th century history. However, I much preferred The Sound of Waves.

2. The Condition Of Ice by Christopher Burns

This is an LT recommendation - from Jargoneer's 2013 thread.

It's not easy to describe the impact of this book. On the surface, the focus of the story is the ascent of a mountain. We see the ascent through the eyes of Ernst, one of the climbers - the other is his childhood friend Hansi.

Hansi was involved in a mountain rescue after a climb went wrong. It shook him so much he determined to take on the hardest challenge he knew - to be the first to conquer the sheer north face of the Versücherin, a mountain whose name means 'Temptress'. Ernst agrees to join him - but when he tells his lover Jean he is leaving, she in turn resolves to leave her husband and go with him. She hasn't realised, however, just how dangerous the climb is; especially as Hansi, obsessed with the idea that there are other climbers getting ready to try the ascent, won't be put off by forecasts of bad weather.

The description of the climb takes up almost half the book, interleaved with flashbacks to the events which brought Ernst there. It is gripping and vivid. But as well as the story of adventure, there is so much to think about here - the nature of courage and heroism, betrayal and trust, and why people can be attracted to risk and danger. Ernst and Hansi aren't just racing against the next group of climbers - there is also a sense of a race against time with the shadow of Naziism overtaking Europe, represented here by Max, a photographer who creates heroic imagery from climbers to inspire others to determined struggle. Ernst is deeply suspicious of Max and the approaches he makes to both Jean and Hansi. But he worms himself into their group, and after the climb there he is, taking photographs that Ernst can never bring himself to look at again.

In addition to this, the writing is excellent - very simple and unflashy, but almost a masterclass in how to create an emotional mood through simple description of the environment.

When Jargoneer reviewed this 18 months ago there wasn't a single copy of The Condition of Ice on LT, and even now there are only three. This is a real pity - the book deserves to be read.

Once or twice I had found myself apparently cragfast, trapped on the face without any means of escape. Always I had managed to control my nerves, and always I had found a way. My confidence was such that I became euphoric. I sought to maroon myself on the rock, to manouevre my body into a position where, balanced on my toes and with my fingers in the narrowest of ledges, I could not see where to go next. At such moments I would experience both elation and calm. I knew that if I let it the fear of falling would tug at me like something dark and unmanning, and inhabit me with panic. I kept fear at bay by a princely confidence in my own abilities and destiny. In an extraordinary, unquestionable way, I was in harmony with both the rock and myself.

>8 ELiz_M: ooh, lots here I haven't heard of - thanks for the recommendations!

3. Collecting by Miranda Wilson

An ER book.

At the age of 69, Walter has invited his son and family to move back into his house. It's not a very comfortable experience for any of them - Walter feels increasingly unwelcome in his own home, his son William is stressed because money is tight and his daughter-in-law Dolores feels trapped by her new life as a mother. But one day Walter's collection - tiny items which he has found in the street, a lost sequin, a fragment of duck egg, a robin's claw - is "discovered" by a family friend who works as an art gallery assistant, and Walter is invited to exhibit them in a trendy East London gallery. He enters this new world with a mixture of excitement and apprehension.

There are three strands to the story - Walter's own feelings as he is put into increasingly unlikely situations (such as being dragged off to a club and given drugs by a group of much younger, female artists); a fairly gentle parody of the modern British art scene; and Walter's relationship with his son's family. Of them all I found the first most interesting - it's hard not to hope for the best with Walter, as he oscillates between delight and embarrassment. I didn't hate the art-world parody but it didn't engage me, and I couldn't really see the point of the gormless son and unhappy daughter-in-law.

Overall though I didn't really know what to make of this. For example, Walter is mostly a sympathetic character. But occasionally there are hints that he may be an unreliable narrator. Or is it just the author making a point about the difference between the way we see ourselves and how others see us? I spent too much of my reading time being puzzled with this and other questions about the writer's intentions.

Walter had always secretly bemoaned the fact that human relationships wouldn't obey the same rules as engineering. He had tried to design sound and lasting structures with friends and family, and had put a lot of thought into his way of being and the effect that it had on others, yet the relationships would shift and bend and reveal weaknesses that threatened the whole in a way he never envisaged.

4. The Twilight Years by Sawako Ariyoshi

The first of my Japan reads. Sawako Ariyoshi was a popular writer in the 1960s and 70s, many of her books dealing with social issues.

The Twilight Years focuses on Akiko, a woman in her 40s. She has managed to combine a full-time job with her family responsibilities - until, at the start of the book, her mother-in-law dies suddenly, and the family realise that she'd been looking after an increasingly senile husband. Akiko takes on the role, receiving little help from her husband - some more from her teenage son, but as he is studying for college exams, she doesn't want to over-burden him. The challenge of looking after Nobutoshi grows as his condition deteriorates. Even though Akiko's employers are sympathetic and let her take some time off, she finds that everyone else simply assumes that she will be the one to take on the old man's full-time care.

Although rather depressing, this wasn't at all a boring read. The events make Akiko and her husband consider their own mortality, their gradual departure from Japan's tradition, as well as the different expectations of their generation, the younger ones and the ones that came before. We also see how this is a wider social problem, affecting many other familes - for example, one of Akiko's younger colleagues confides that she and her siblings will one day be responsible for their parents' care, and that she has not yet discussed this subject with her fiance.

I also enjoyed the depiction of daily life in Japan in the 1960s - this is a very realistic novel. And I wondered how much these social attitudes have changed - I was surprised to see Akiko working so successfully in the 1960s, admittedly as an office assistant - and I am sure that in today's ageing Japan there are many more facilities for the elderly.

'No home will admit someone like that because they're terribly short-staffed.' 'Then what am I to do? Do I have to look after a senile old man whom even a nursing home would reject?' As soon as Akiko had uttered these words, she felt deeply ashamed of her hysterical outburst. The social worker, however, was completed unperturbed. 'There's really no solution to this problem. It tears many families apart. The wife simply has to cope as courageously as she can.'

Hello! I wasn't around for the second half of last year so had completely missed news of your move to Japan - how exciting! What are you doing there? Incidentally, your Japan TBR list includes one of the very first books I read for my Read Around the World challenge, Snow Country; it was utterly magical.

Hi Rachel! I am just here for a few months covering a gap which opened up in our office. I'm trying to make the most of it - went to Kamakura last weekend.

The big Buddha is one of those sights which is stunning despite the fact it's very touristy and you've seen pictures of it before.



But my favourite non-guidebook site was this adorable garden where all the peonies have been given winter shelter.



I love peonies!

5. The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel

I need to be in the right mood for short stories, so I generally work my way through a book of them a little at a time. This book, I devoured like a box of dark nutty chocolates. Perhaps that was because the ten stories included a lot of variety in tone and approach, although they all share Mantel's dark wit.

The first story, Sorry to Disturb, is a glimpse into an unhappy period of the narrator's life, told through the story of an awkward acquaintanceship. The Long QT is a very short story, almost a long joke, and one of several stories where the last sentence upends your expectations of what the story is about and makes you turn back and read it again. (One of these stories, incidentally, leads you to believe it's a realistic, social-observation sort of short story and reveals brilliantly at the end that it is about a particular kind of supernatural creature - not saying which one because I don't want to spoil the twist). After these, we return to the realistic social-observation stories, such as Offences Against the Person in which a teenage girl finds out about her father's affair.

It was all a novelty to me. I knew men had dealings with their secretaries. I imagined there were sub-species of adultery going on, up and down John Dalton Street, Cross Street, Corn Exchange, but we never did matrimonial, or if we did the clerks locked the files away from me, so my most recent take on male duplicity came from the novels of Thomas Hardy. The 1960s were behind us, the era of free love, but it had not dawned in Wilmslow, from where we commuted on weekdays on the crowded 7.45. I guessed why Nicolette had moved across the Square. It was more discreet for a senior partner to keep an affair extra-mural. The Kaplans must be in on it. Repaying a favour, like the time they sent over a spare stapler when ours came apart in my hand.

Highly recommended.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher sounds like one I would enjoy. I already have it on my wishlist, but you have pushed it further up the "have to get this" list.

Those are fabulous peonies. However, the idea of winter shelter for them in a place like Kamakura strikes me as really funny. I realize that means they can have varieties that would not otherwise be possible, but it did generate a needed laugh on a real winter's day.

Funny about The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. I had never heard of it and then saw it in the library this weekend and grabbed it right away. Definitely a good one.

Peonies are my favorite. They don't hold back.

I've got The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher on my read-soon list. Good review.

Great photos of the peonies and big Buddha!

I have The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher on my wishlist (if the miserable b**** were still alive perhaps some devious quip might've been appropriate...) - so am glad to read that you liked it.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher too tempting

You'll probably like the story then Paul!

6. A Symphony of Echoes by Jodi Taylor

A TIOLI challenge to read a book about time, combined with an exhausting week - what better excuse to read A Symphony of Echoes, the second in the St Mary's series about a group of historians (not time travellers, please) and our rebellious protagonist Madeleine "Max" Maxwell. Max narrowly escapes a series of terrible fates and witnesses historical moments including the last hours of Jack the Ripper, the assassination of Thomas a Becket, and the hanging gardens of... Nineveh, apparently. You see the value of having historians that can time travel?

I could do without the doom-laden foreshadowing and the romance is barely believable. But in fact the book is a bit less clunky than the first in the series, and just as much fun.

This was Kal's last jump. Her lifelong ambition - to see Jack the Ripper. Full of overwhelming confidence and conceit, and certain no 19th century monster could take on two modern historians armed with attitude, curiosity, and an overdeveloped sense of immortality - we'd gone looking for him.

And we'd found him. A figure rearing up suddenly out of the fog; right up close and more than personal; an ill-defined shape smelling of blood and decay and reaching out - for us. Suddenly the chase was on and we were running. Running, although we didn't know it at the time, for more than our lives.

>1 wandering_star: What a great Japan list! I just read Kawabata's Snow Country - I arrived there because I read Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk, a travel book about his year in Japan, in which he recommends Kawabata. I'm looking forward to reading your review of the book (I loved it, but I haven't written my review as yet. Have you read anything by either Banana Yoshimoto or Eiji Yoshikawa? Musashi is on my reading list for this year, and I'm looking forward to it.

>23 reva8:

Reading Yoshikawa's Musashi is a great adventure, and an even greater adventure is his Taiko. Most seem to have an opinion as to which they like most but it depends on if you want more story telling of one person (Musashi), or more of a an epic tale of different states at war (Taiko). Taiko was my favorite. If I could reread Taiko from the beginning without the memory of having read it before, I would be so happy.

Yoshimoto... I'm less of a fan. She writes very well but her stories are a bit too simplistic for me. But many people do love her work so you can't really go wrong.

I haven't read any Yoshikawa - but I will have to look out for it. I will read Snow Country this month.

I have read several books by Banana Yoshimoto but not for some years. As far as I remember, I liked them but never really understood why, as they have lots of traits which normally annoy me (whimsical style etc).

>25 wandering_star:

That's a great way to describe my reaction to reading Yoshimoto. I don't leave with a bad taste in my mouth per se, but I also can't understand why I like the books.

>24 lilisin: I'm so glad you said that! I read Yoshimoto's Kitchen after it was highly recommended to me, and I did not enjoy it- I find that I have to struggle to understand her, and it isn't a fulfilling effort (like reading Chauncer, or something of that ilk). She seems purposefully obtuse, which is a difficult game to carry off well. I'm looking forward to Musashi, though, and have added Taiko to my list.
>25 wandering_star: I'll be keeping my eye out for your thoughts on Snow Country!

I've just been to see a wonderful film called National Gallery. It is indeed a documentary about the National Gallery in London, but unlike any I have seen before. There is no editorial/voiceover at all. There are shots of people talking, but they aren't talking to or for the camera.

So you get a lot of shots of the pictures themselves, and of people looking at the pictures. There are sequences of gallery guides talking about the paintings, people copying the paintings or in a life drawing class held at the museum, pictures being restored, people being interviewed in the gallery about an exhibition or a piece of art. There are exhibitions being put up, paintings being hung, the museum being cleaned and rearranged for the next morning's visitors. There are a couple of excruciatingly funny sequences in some internal meeting discussing whether the museum should get involved in an event being organised in Trafalgar Square. And a rather wonderful explanation of how Rubens' Samson and Delilah would have looked in the original context it was painted for.

All this without any context at all - so there is one sequence which seems to be about two foreign curators who have come to look at a picture with a view to borrowing it for an exhibition they are organising, but you have to work all that out.

What I thought was most remarkable was the way that the tone of the film modulated. So it started off fairly light - a few shots of people falling asleep in the gallery sofas, or looking a bit bored - later had me in awe of the amount of care, knowledge and thought that goes into everything behind the scenes, from the way that the gallery guides worked to get visitors to really see and understand the art for themselves, to the amount of care, skill and expertise that goes into preserving and understanding the pictures - and finally ended up with a sense of transcendent beauty.

>28 wandering_star: I will keep an eye out for this documentary! Is it recent? British? Did you see it on TV or in a movie theater?

ETA: is it this movie? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3720794/

Yes, that's it!

>28 wandering_star: That sounds fantastic

>28 wandering_star: I have to agree! It sounds like the sort of film that the BBC series 'Arena' might show (perhaps they will?). I really like the sound of it - will definitely try to catch this.

Just did a bit of rudimentary research and see that the director - Frederick Wiseman - was last year awarded the 'Lifetime Achievement Award' at the Venice Film Festival, the first time a documentary film maker has won such an award.

>28 wandering_star: ohh, one of my favourite places in London. When I was working at the university, I made a conscious effort and ticked off having visited every room in the gallery, but there were some I'd go an see over and over again. I do hope that ends up on the TV- sounds like something BBC4 might show...

>15 wandering_star: I've been waiting for The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher to come out in paperback, as I have so many other books on the TBR, but I'm glad to learn how good it is. I read a previous collection of Mantel stories, and while I enjoyed them I think she generally needs the scope of a novel.

Yes, I hope it ends up on TV - I have told friends and family to look out for it. I agree it's most likely to be BBC4 ;-)

7. Before I Burn by Gaute Heivoll

A house is burning at night. It is the first few minutes, before people have been alerted. All around there is silence. There is only the fire. The house stands there alone and no one can save it. It has been left to its fate, to its destruction. The flames and the smoke are being sucked up into the sky, or so it seems; there are creaks and groans, like distant responses. It is frightening, it is terrible and it is beyond comprehension. And it is almost beautiful.

Another LT recommendation, this time from avaland. The narrator of Before I Burn is an author who has decided to write a book about a series of fires which took place when he was a small baby - ten in the space of a month. He goes back to his family's home and starts to talk to the people who still remember those days; but what emerges is not a portrait of the arsonist but of the community which he came from, close-knit, taciturn, and with all emotions buried far below the surface.

We see all the arsonist's actions, but only his actions - we aren't told why he did what he did. There are things for us to interpret - all external facts, such as the fact that he was the fire chief's son, that he refuses to talk about his time in the army, or that when everyone was speculating about why the fires were happening he described the perpetrator as "a madman".

But the only emotions we are told about are those of the narrator as he is growing up, and as a result we almost borrow these emotions to understand the arsonist - perhaps, like the narrator, he never felt that he fitted in, he believed he had let his parents down. Perhaps, though, another person with another life would have drawn different conclusions about why he started to set fires. As the narrator says, "Who do we see when we see ourselves?"

Sounds like a very interesting psychological exploration.

8. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

The first line is: The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. And I started reading this book sitting on a train with snow falling outside. It's not very often that you get that sort of serendipity!

I finished the book sitting on another train at the end of the weekend, and even though I was in a public place I had to wipe away a few tears. The story of an unhappy love affair between a Tokyo playboy and a geisha in an out-of-the-way resort was very poignant.

This emotion comes almost despite the disaffected narrator. Early on, he tells Komako that he doesn't want to sleep with her because once he has done so, he will become bored with her. This doesn't happen - but something still stops him from forming a real emotional connection.

The writing is almost musical, in the sense that themes keep recurring - a particular image or description. This is more impressionistic than realistic writing, as the repetition builds up a particular emotional mood. It also conveys changes in mood subtly - in his first two visits, the image of cleanliness often occurs to Shimamura when he looks at Komako; but in his third and final visit, this is no longer the case. Why is this? Perhaps because her hope of a better life - with him or without - seems to have been dashed.

Unfortunately during the final visit Komako starts to be a bit too manic pixie dream girl, which I found a little tiresome. But despite this, I thought it was remarkable to have a book by a man and from a male point of view which yet managed to convey how trapped and without options Komako was. I wonder if a modern book would be able to do the same thing.

She talked on happily too of movies and plays she had never seen. She had no doubt been starved all these months for someone who would listen to her. Had she forgotten that a hundred and ninety-nine days earlier exactly this sort of conversation had set off the impulse to throw herself at Shimamura? Again she lost herself in the talk, and again her words seemed to be warming her whole body.

But her longing for the city had become an undemanding dream, wrapped in simple resignation, and the note of wasted effort was much stronger in it than any suggestion of the exile's lofty dissatisfaction.

9. The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

I thought I'd give half an hour to this book while I had my bath. At one point I realised that the bath water had gone cold, and I had to get out and try and dry myself while still reading. It was the early hours before I could put it down.

At the start of the book, Frances and her mother are waiting for their first paying guests - they are too well-bred to call them lodgers, and in any case that would bring home to them just how far their station in life has fallen. Frances is 26 - a rather spinsterish age in 1922 - and I expected a story about being trapped, with perhaps some unhappy yearning. But then Frances slips off to roll herself a cigarette, and I gradually realised that in some ways, she is much bolder than the first impression I had of her. However, despite the upheavals of the war, British society is trying to settle back into its groove - as Frances says, "One believed in... transformation. One looked ahead to the end of the War and felt that nothing could ever be the same. Nothing is the same, is it? But in such disappointing ways." Can Frances - and the lodger's wife Lilian who she becomes close friends with - escape the lives that they have been pushed into by their class and gender?

On the way to this story, the book spends time as a straightforward romance, and then a straightforward thriller - which accounts for why it was so page-turning. Perhaps if I had been reading it more slowly I would have noticed a few more negative things about it - for example, thinking about it later I wonder if Lilian is a bit two-dimensional, unlike Frances who is more complex. I was very pleased to have an optimistic ending but sadly I wonder if the two would be able to get past the social constraints they are under. But in the moment of reading, the story twists kept my heart in my mouth, and the well-described dreary post-war world keeps the two main characters in sharp relief.

She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn't a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments - these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous.

>39 wandering_star: I'll come back to read that review in a few days! I'm reading The Paying Guests now.

>39 wandering_star: I enjoyed your review of The Paying Guests.

Would you say that London itself was one of the characters of the book?

Is it clear which part of the city the book is set in?

>36 wandering_star: - Before I Burn sounds interesting - good review.

>39 wandering_star: - I thought I'd give half an hour to this book while I had my bath. At one point I realised that the bath water had gone cold, and I had to get out and try and dry myself while still reading. It was the early hours before I could put it down.I

I know what you mean about Waters' books - I had some "Uh oh, it's 4 am" moments when reading both The Night Watch and The Little Stranger. Sound like The Paying Guests is another addictive read.

Snow Country was one of my first LT-inspired reads, soon after I joined. Your review nicely captures the restrained emotions, set against the snow, which I found so haunting.

You've made me want to read The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and The Paying Guests right now!

>38 wandering_star: This is such a nice review: it captures almost everything I felt, too, when I read the book.
>39 wandering_star: I love anything Sarah Waters writes, but I've been holding out on reading this one (I'm hoarding it for a really bad). Glad to know its as good as it sounds!

>39 wandering_star:. I am adding The paying Guests to my TBR. I have it on my Kindle, and now know I should read it soon.

Such a great review of Snow Country. I'm very interested in it now. Not sute i'm as interestes in the Waters, but i do love that quote about the disappointment after WWI.

>41 Polaris-: Would you say that London itself was one of the characters of the book? Is it clear which part of the city the book is set in?

Frances lives in the suburbs - Champion Hill, which I've just looked up and discovered is a real place near to Denmark Hill. Right at the start of the book she thinks: "you'd never guess that a mile or two further north lay London, life, glamour, all that". Lilian's family live in Walworth, and the journeys that Frances regularly makes into town are to see a friend of hers who lives in Fitzrovia.

Your question has made me think that perhaps the role of London is metaphorical - the friend in Fitzrovia has successfully broken away from convention and lives with her girlfriend, so London could represent possibility and hope? Walworth could represent the unpleasantness you have to go through on the way there. (Nothing against Walworth, I used to live there, but Lilian's family are not very sympathetic to Frances). Or, perhaps, the fact that Lilian has actually not moved all that far?

The descriptions of London are place-specific. I was disconcerted by this: "There were no smart shops once she had crossed Oxford Circus. London made one of its costume changes, like whipping off a cloak; it became a shabby muddle of pianola sellers, Italian grocers, boarding-houses, pubs." Then I realised that this was pre-Blitz London!

>47 wandering_star: Sounds excellent!

London made one of its costume changes, like whipping off a cloak

- Now there's got to be a perfect way to express inter-war years London!

I'm another Sarah Waters fan, and I've also been saving The Paying Guests for a day where I can commit to nothing except reading it. I think my favourite of hers is either Fingersmith or The Night Watch.

I may have to read Fingersmith again - it's the only one of hers I haven't loved.

Incidentally, I went away last weekend to a place in the mountains with very deep snow (on the way back to Tokyo we went through the place where Snow Country is set - now a flourishing ski resort). I had a kotatsu in the room of my ryokan! Based around an electric heater, not a charcoal brazier as it would have been in the time of Snow Country. But it did help me to visualise some of the scenes in the book a bit better - it's like a low table with heavy skirts, and you can put your legs and hands into the heated area underneath. Toasty.

10. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Ancillary Justice is narrated by a spaceship. Well, the remnant AI of a spaceship which is currently inhabiting a human body. Justice of Toren was a warship of the mighty Radch empire, and like other Radch warships the ship's AI controlled a large number of 'ancillaries' - the bodies of the vanquished animated by the ships they serve on. Corpse-soldiers, as they are called by some of the empire's subject-peoples. Almost 20 years ago, a disaster split the body of our narrator from the rest of herself, and since then she - One Esk, segment 19 - has been trying to track down the person responsible. The book is told in alternating chapters, the lead-up to the disaster and the culmination of her search.

What are the things that I like best about reading science fiction? The sense that there is a fully-developed world, which I can work out from clues and asides scattered through the book - I don't want lengthy exposition, let me infer it from the way characters react to each other. (Iain M Banks is particularly good for this, I think). The use of extraordinary environments to ask important questions about human existence. And a cracking good story.

Ancillary Justice delivers all of these to a very high quality. The details of the way the Empire functions, and the different worlds it has colonised, are fascinating - I would love to know more. The themes of the book are around identity and choices/free will - for example, the ship and her ancillaries share a mind but do they share an identity? how does a warship built to implement the orders of an empire become able to go against that empire? and is there any value in taking a small personal step to fight against an all-powerful tyranny?

Delightfully for a language nerd like me there are also regular nods to the way that our languages filter our perceptions - 'Radch' for example means citizen but also civilised, so it's essentially impossible to say that people who are not Radch citizens are civilised.

And the story has everything - so many little stories at so many different levels, from personal friendship, loyalty, rivalry, to empire-wide political conspiracy, well-paced and with beautiful tying-in of loose ends. I listened to this on audiobook, very well read by Adjoa Andoh. I finished it at the start of a long train journey and just went back to the beginning and listened to it over again (on fast speed). It was just as good the second time around and lots of the little puzzle pieces fell into place.

I have now downloaded the second in the series, Ancillary Sword. Dilemma though - the final book in the trilogy doesn't come out until October. Should I listen to the second one soon or pace myself?

Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.

>51 wandering_star: Ancillary Justice is marvelous, isn't it? I particularly appreciated all the language-nerd stuff, but it really does just deliver everything. I went out and read the second book right away, myself, and am now impatiently tapping my foot waiting for the third.

Yes - I don't think I'm going to be able to hold out for long!

11. The Wisdom of Whores: bureaucrats, brothels and the business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani

Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist and public health worker specialising in AIDS prevention. In this book, she is writing about something she feels strongly about - the fact that huge amounts of money spent on tackling AIDS will do nothing at all to prevent further cases.

One of the reasons for this is that when AIDS first started to kill a lot of people in the West it was something which was ignored and misunderstood. Early AIDS campaigners had to fight for the disease to be taken seriously; for the rights of those infected (to dignity, confidentiality, continued access to jobs and services). They often knew more about the disease and the treatments than the majority of the medical profession. Their campaigning had positive results, including focusing people’s attention on the rights of the people living with an infectious disease. But even now the approach to AIDS prevention is influenced by this beginning, in ways that don't always apply. For example, the principle of peer education works best among gay men: but "Being infected with HIV does not glue people together if their backgrounds are too disparate. Mony said that support groups for HIV positive women in Cambodia often broke down because infected housewives didn’t want to talk to infected prostitutes. ‘If a woman starts telling her story and it is clear she was a sex worker, you can see the faces of the others change. They blame {the sex workers} for infecting their husbands. So they think: I’m infected because of her,’ she told me." Similarly, sex workers that Pisani worked with in Indonesia saw each other as competition and were less inclined to listen to or give advice.

Similarly, to reduce the stigma around AIDS and to get more money from squeamish donors, a narrative has grown up that AIDS is a development issue.

If HIV is spread by ‘poverty and gender inequality’, how come countries that have plenty of both, such as Bangladesh, have virtually no HIV? How come South Africa and Botswana, which have the highest female literacy and per capita incomes in Africa, are awash in HIV, while countries that score low on both – such as Guinea, Somalia, Mali and Sierra Leone – have epidemics that are negligible by comparison?

The idea that AIDS is 'about' development has led to huge amounts of the money available for AIDS prevention being spent on education programmes for the general population. In the countries where HIV has jumped from high-risk groups into the general population, this makes sense. But there are relatively few countries where this is the case.

For the same amount of sleeping around, you now have a greater risk of getting infected with HIV if you use a condom every single time you have sex in Swaziland than you do if you never use a condom at all in China ... The likelihood of a condom bursting is tiny, but where close to one in two of your potential lovers is infected with HIV, as in Swaziland, the combined probability of burst condom plus infected partner is still higher than the likelihood of chancing upon an HIV positive heterosexual partner in China. In fact, it is higher than chancing upon an HIV positive prostitute in China.

So that's a chunk of cash wasted. Pisani's organisation was once given a huge sum for AIDS prevention in East Timor, a country with a tiny incidence of HIV. She jokes that it's enough money to send every prostitute in the country to Harvard.

And why has HIV jumped into the general population in certain countries? It's all to do with with the predominant sexual practices. Take three men who have all had five sexual partners in the last year. One has had five girlfriends, one after the other, and been faithful to each one while they were together. One is married, regularly sleeps with one of the women who works at his favourite bar and has the occasional trip to a brothel. The third has a wife and four regular girlfriends who he sees from time to time. Only the last is seriously likely to spread HIV - because you are at your most infectious when newly infected yourself; and because his girlfriends have other boyfriends who they sleep with often enough to infect them. Some countries where this sexual pattern is common have managed to tackle AIDS, by being very frank about what is causing the disease to spread. But orthodoxies of all kinds can stop this from happening:

‘OK honey, you have a good time at the conference in Durban,’ says a cartoon businessman, before texting his secretary: ‘The wife has gone to Durban. Come over tonight and roll in the sack with me.’ His secretary texts back to reject him: ‘I am no longer your rollover.’ Pretty tame. But within weeks, the Swaziland National Network of People Living with HIV and AIDS had organized a march on parliament and got the campaign, called ‘Secret Lover’, taken off the air. According to a press release issued by the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS: ‘A new government-sponsored HIV prevention campaign in Swaziland uses insulting language to target HIV-positive women and suggests that they are the cause of the spread of HIV.’

There is plenty more of this but I am too depressed to go on. In the end the book becomes something of a howl of anguish. The problem seems so insurmountable, and there is no reason to think it is getting better. Some countries have successfully reduced HIV - but many more are at the early stages of an epidemic and are making all the same mistakes again.

Pisani writes well. She is passionate, no-nonsense, and doesn't over-generalise. There is some great gonzo stuff at the beginning when she arrives in Indonesia to do field research for the first time, and all her easy assumptions collapse. And above all, she is sympathetic to the lives of the people in high-risk groups that she is working with - their decisions might be stupid, but they are stupid in a way that is human and understandable.

Leticia was infected with HIV by her pimp. ‘And then I buried him.’ She now works as an HIV prevention counsellor, but she is not optimistic about persuading sex workers to use condoms with their intimate partners. ‘Everyone’s got to make a difference between work and home life.’

But overall reading this book left me feeling powerless, frustrated and angry.

If the topic sounds interesting you might like Pisani's TED talk - it was this that made me want to read the book in the first place.

>53 wandering_star: But overall reading this book left me feeling powerless, frustrated and angry.

I can see why from your excellent review -- it would me too.

Excellent and thought-provoking review. Will you post it on the book's page?

Thanks! I have done so.

>51 wandering_star: Just catching up on your thread! This is an interesting review of Ancillary Justice - I just read Anniemod's review of it as well, and it's interesting that you both have such different takes on the book. I really want to read it now. As for read it now or pace yourself - it's the eternal dilemma. I'd go with pacing!

>53 wandering_star: This is a great review - sounds like a thoroughly depressing book, though. I did watch the TED talk, thank you for the link.

>53 wandering_star: - A great review. It's interesting to me to read this review of Pisani. I read her book on Indonesia last year (Indonesia etc.). She really goes all out, all though I didn't love the wide yet incomplete-feeling spectrum covered. But this is a different kind of topic.

(ETA i'll check out her TED talk)

>57 reva8: Thanks - I have just been and read Anniemod's review. I had not really thought about the contrast between the gender-blindness and the Radch's imperial expansion, that's a very good point. But I don't agree that the social inequality is skimmed over, or that you don't get a rounded view of the Radch - you may only have the one narrator but you certainly see that other characters have a different view of the empire, including someone like Seivarden whose perception changes over the course of the book. I didn't find the gender thing over-done, either. But I do think that a good reader can really bring out nuances in a book, and the reader here, Adjoa Andoh, definitely did that - eg good use of different accents to differentiate the different social/ethnic groups.

>58 dchaikin: Indonesia etc. is now on my wishlist - but I can imagine what you mean about 'incomplete-feeling' if it is anecdotal like the first part of The Wisdom of Whores.

Oh dear, I have quite a backlog of reviews and many of the books are too interesting for a quickie review. Oh well, step by step...

12. How to Speak Money by John Lanchester

John Lanchester is a novelist, but this is a non-fiction book about economic and financial terms and what they mean - most of it in the form of a lexicon. In the essays which top and tail the lexicon, Lanchester explains why he decided to produce such a book. Partly it was an offshoot of a novel he was writing about the financial crisis - he had to teach himself this language and he wanted to share that. But even more, he believes that it is important that ordinary people understand the language well enough to engage in the discussions about it - the jargon didn't arise as a form of obfuscation, but it has that effect if people think that the issues are too complicated for them to understand. Lanchester points out that speaking the language doesn't mean that you agree with a particular point of view - economists argue with each other all the time - and a lot of the discussions are really about things like different values, which we could all get involved in if we could just get past the language barrier.

The details of modern money are often complicated, but the principles underlying those details aren’t; I want this book to leave you much more confident in your own sense of what those principles are. Money is a lot like babies, and once you know the language, the rule is the same as that put forward by Dr Spock: ‘Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.’

In order to help us do this, Lanchester has produced a lexicon which is clear, readable and witty (there's an entry on the difference between bullshit and nonsense - the first is exaggeration, a normal part of life and especially of sales - the second is trying to persuade people of things which could never be true, and is dangerous).

It's also nice to read someone who is sceptical of neoliberal ideas without being ranty. In fact, because he is not defending a particular school of thought, Lanchester is able to point out that all the models have something wrong with them. They should be seen as explanatory guides, aids to understanding - but because of the bitter and politicised debates, they have become rigid laws.

It has to be said that if you don’t appreciate the miraculous power of markets, their astonishing ability to match buyer and seller, to meet needs, to find prices which clear themselves of goods, to satisfy wants that consumers didn’t know they had, to create livelihoods in an astonishing proliferation of nooks and niches and specialisms and crafts and skills – if you don’t appreciate those things then you’ve probably never really ‘got’ economics, and you are also missing out on something of the wonder and variety and complexity of human culture. Having said that, if you think that markets are magically the solution to everything and have some kind of mystical inherent ability to always be right and to self-regulate in all conditions, all weathers, all extremities and despite all unforeseen circumstances, well then, you are probably a neo-liberal economist.

So, in the book itself, you get the difference between macro- and micro-economics; you get the deep weirdness of the whole concept of money itself; you get some interesting history (the controversy in the US about the whole idea of having a central bank!); and some jawdropping statistics (the property stock in the London borough of Wandsworth is worth only slightly less than the entire stock of Northern Ireland). And I learnt a lot about the financial terminology and what it means - the definitions weren't always as comprehensive or useful as they might have been in a dictionary, but reading the book and thinking about the contents has left me feeling much more confident about what I do and don't know, and having enough baseline knowledge to go off and research more where that is necessary.

13. Showa 1926-1939: A History of Japan by Shigeru Mizuki

I've had a run of excellent books, so was probably due a dud. I'm sorry it was this one, a graphic novel memoir of the author's childhood in pre-war Japan which I had been looking forward to reading.

The book interweaves the history of the era with stories about the author - but I didn't find either element particularly satisfying.

Perhaps because it is written for a Japanese audience who would know the events better, I found the history a little confusing - I felt that I was told about the sequence of events but without enough context to understand what they meant. I did get a clear sense of the domestic turmoil and the growing fervour of militarism in society - the author's mother supports it, while the elderly neighbours are concerned - but I need more information on how it all happened.

As for the episodes from the author's childhood, they were rather bleak and sometimes a little disturbing - fights with neighbourhood gangs (and disgusting hazing when his gang loses), family financial troubles and deaths, disaffection from school. It may well have been the truth about his life, but I didn't get a sense of him as a person.

Not terrible, but disappointing.

14. Weapons of Mass Diplomacy by Abel Lanzac

Another graphic memoir(ish) set in the run-up to a war - this time, though, it's satire. The book is narrated by a young speechwriter to the French foreign minister, and following the minister as he works to prevent the US pushing the UN Security Council to declare war on a fictional country. And did I mention that the author was speechwriter to Dominique de Villepin at the start of the Iraq War? But the focus of this story is office politics rather than grand politics, and would probably appeal to fans of The Thick Of It. I found it very funny.

The young speechwriter starts off completely out of his depth - he is constantly being asked to write speeches about areas of policy he knows nothing about, having those speeches torn to shreds or rewritten behind his back, and having to navigate the various egos and turf wars between the senior diplomats. Despite his confusion, he comes to love the work and his boss.

The Foreign Minister, Taillard de Vorms, is a larger-than-life figure, infuriating to his staff and yet inspiring loyalty. He frequently storms into rooms accompanied by the sound effect DÖÖM and is given to dropping mystifying statements and then tearing strips off those staff which don't act on them.

I've made a note of How to Speak Money. I'll give it a go once I finish listening to Capital (which is estimated to be mid-2020).

I have read some essays by John Lanchester and do like the way he explains things, not sure I could cope with How to Speak Money

>61 wandering_star:

You know, Shigeru Mizuki is an author I keep thinking I want to read every time I read a synopsis of his works. Particularly the one called Onward Towards our Noble Deaths which I've been turning around for years. But that work in Japanese is particularly difficult to find (only found it once and it was attached to a collection of all his works which cost over 100 dollars). And when I've picked up his other work at the book store I suddenly get uninspired. Perhaps I just wasn't in the mood for a war story. Or maybe I just have to read that one and see how I feel. Or else read it in English.

>63 RidgewayGirl: Hah!

>65 lilisin: I am actually more interested now in reading his fantasy manga, than one of the more serious works. They don't seem to be translated into English but they are available in French... maybe I will see if I can get hold of one.

15. Stories Of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang

I suppose the best way to describe Ted Chiang's short stories is science fiction, although that's not always quite accurate.

The first story in this collection, for example, is a vividly imagined depiction of the Tower of Babel. So tall that it takes months to climb, and many people who live on its upper reaches never dream of visiting the ground. They lived inside the damp mists of clouds, they saw storms from below and from above, they harvested crops from the air, and they never feared that this was an improper place for men to be.

In another story, the earth is periodically visited by angels, who perform miracles but also create devastation: how would society respond to this phenomenon?

The very best story is called Story of Your Life. It plays with science fiction tropes so that you think you know where it is going, and then blossoms out into something much bigger and more interesting. Aliens have made contact with earth, and a linguist is asked to study them and learn their language. At the same time, she is struggling with her truculent teenage daughter. Aha, the reader thinks: all stories about meeting aliens are actually about learning about ourselves, and here she is trying to parse her daughter's changing personality from the occasional deciphered comment. Not super-original, but well written. And then gradually you realise that there is something else going on here, and the story turns into a question about knowing the future and the impact that has on free will. But even here it's not one of the usual answers. Instead, the story points out that we constantly do things even though we know the future negative consequences. We fall in love, knowing that our hearts will be broken. We have children, knowing that they will grow up and away from us, and blame us for the things which are wrong in their lives. We may know the future, but we still choose the path which will lead us there.

I’ll pick you up and carry you under my arm to your bed, you wailing piteously all the while, but my sole concern will be my own distress. All those vows made in childhood that I would give reasonable answers when I became a parent, that I would treat my own child as an intelligent, thinking individual, all for naught: I’m going to turn into my mother. I can fight it as much as I want, but there’ll be no stopping my slide down that long, dreadful slope.

I had a similar effect when I read The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling (which can be read online here) - at first I thought it was just a story which extended into the future the current trend for recording everything about our lives, but then it suddenly turned into something much more complex.

The weakest story in the collection is Seventy-Two Letters, which imagines a Victorian England with golems (and various differences from our universe, such as the second law of thermodynamics being reversed). Unfortunately, that one reads as if Chiang came up with the concept for the setting but not a story to go with it, so just wrote until he ran out of steam.

However, the collection as a whole is thoroughly worth reading.

The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles by KJ Hannah Greenberg

Oh my good god.

This was an Early Reviewer book, so I felt that I had to give it a decent go. If it wasn't for that, I'd have ditched it at the author's preface, one line of which read By using brief tales to vivisect marriage, family units, friendship, and passing fancies, we can: reify our ideas, celebrate the meaning we assign to our mentations, and explicate some of the responses we have to our notions' actualizations. (Seriously, publisher - what were you thinking?).

If I'd made it through that, page one of the first story would have once again made me hurl the book from me, as someone is trying to write a speech for a wedding and we hear "he meant to scribe that.... he penned that..." I thought it's sometime at school that you learn that you don't need to stretch desperately to find different words to describe the same simple action.

However, given the responsibility to review the book, I decided I had to get through 10% of it. This would have taken me to p24. I couldn't quite manage it. I did make it through to p22, the end of the fourth story in the book. What made me finally stop? It wasn't the fact that on a single page of this story, the main character was described as "the matron... the professor... the scholar... the intellectual". I could just about get through that by this point. No, it was the fact that at the end of the story I realised that I didn't have a clue what the point of the story was. Not that I understood it and was rolling my eyes because it was so irritating - as with the previous three stories. No, I just didn't get it at all.

If only it was possible to give a book a quarter star.

>68 wandering_star: by the sounds of things you deserve a well done for getting as far as you did. And despite the attractive title, that's one for the pile to be used as fire lighters.

>67 wandering_star:
My only problem with Chiang is that he does not write enough stories... :) The guy has a way with words and concepts that is mostly unparalleled amongst the current writers. And he is virtually unknown outside of the field because he had written a handful of stories only - 14 at last count since 1990 when he wrote Tower of Babylon and won the Nebula with it (and those 14 stories had won a total of 4 Nebulas, 4 Hugos (not all of those matching) and a long list of other awards). Two of his newest ones (after the collection) are available online if you want to check them: http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_lifecycle_of_softwar... and http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_f...

I liked your review - I may disagree on some points but I enjoyed reading it. I like Seventy Two Letters - it reminds me of a lot of Victorian Novels that go on and on and forget to build a story (and I like Victorian novels) but I can see how it can unsatisfying for most readers.

>68 wandering_star: Congrats for reading as much as you did - this sounds like a really bad book.

>67 wandering_star: Very interesting review of Stories Of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang. I am adding it to my wish list!

My immediate reaction to your review of Stories of Your Life and Others was to go "Ooh, I'm adding that to the wishlist!" Then I realized it was already there. I wonder what made me add it last time?

I have to say, the bits you quoted of The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles made me laugh. But probably only because I'm not the one who had to read it.

Thanks for the sympathy from everyone ;-)

>70 AnnieMod: thanks for the extra info! I had been wondering why there was only one book of his stories available. I suppose given the amount of thinking that must go into them, he can't just knock them out.

16. A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan

Dragons!! Dragons and intrepid Victorian lady explorers!!! Dragons, intrepid Victorian lady explorers, and a blessed absence of twee!!!

I loved it.

>73 wandering_star: That and a full time job. Less talented writers quit their jobs and become full time writers but he does not seem to wish to. On the other hand this way he can craft his stories the way he wants and not worry about making a living out of it. :)

It seems that 2 more of the post collection stories are also online: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ and http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a.html
So only two are not readily available online or in the collection. I need to go and reread some of his stories...

Ooh thanks - look forward to reading those!

Catching up. There is a copy of A Natural History of Dragons in the house, my wife's, but I didn't know anything about it.

I added How to Speak Money to my wishlist. Your review is really good. I encourage you to add it to the book page.

Thanks Dan, I have done so!

I won The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles in the ER thing too, but it never arrived. Poor me, evidently. Good for you for trying!

>67 wandering_star: Thank you for the review of Ted Chiang's book. As I was reading it I vaguely remembered having read a story by him and not being very impressed. I found it from your later post, it's Exhalation. But that was at a time when I was reading a lot of free e-books, and most of them were just not very good, so maybe I missed something because of prejudice. I downloaded the other two stories you linked to, and maybe I should even re-read the first one.

>67 wandering_star: What little Ted Chiang I've read has been excellent. I kept trying to get hold of that book for ages and could never find it. I'm glad your review has reminded me, since I've just found out it was finally released on Kindle a few months ago, so I'm grabbing that straight away.

17. Ten Cities That Made An Empire by Tristram Hunt

It's going to be hard for this review to do the book justice, given how full it was of fascinating information. It's a history of the British Empire, with a focus on the way that definitions and structures of that empire changed, told through the stories of ten cities, each of which represents the empire's centre of gravity at a particular time: tea-party era Boston; Bridgetown whose sugar-cane money and slavery "funded the acceleration of the British Empire, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the Royal Navy"; Dublin; Cape Town (vitally important to provision and support British troops fighting the French for influence in India); Calcutta; Hong Kong; Bombay; Melbourne; New Delhi; and finally Liverpool to look at the impact of the end of empire.

When I think about the British Empire I tend to think of the last few decades - grandiosity and direct rule, covered in the New Delhi portion of the book. The first surprise for me was how far back the story started - Oliver Cromwell overseeing the conquest of Jamaica, for example. "The Bridgetown Assembly – established in 1639 – was the third-oldest parliament in the British Empire after those of Virginia and Bermuda."

I also hadn't been aware of the ways in which the way Britain thought about its empire had changed and evolved, and the different structures which underpinned it. For example, after the Boston tea party, "Britain’s grand strategy for more direct imperial control came grinding to a halt"; Ireland had a period of relative autonomy as a result. After the fall of Yorktown fear that Ireland would go the same way led to a new constitution with "an unprecedented degree of legislative independence"... but less than two decades later French invasions along the Irish coast (and the wider military situation in Europe) led to calls for a constitutional union between Britain and Ireland, and the imposition of direct control from Whitehall.

Similarly, ideas about what empire ought to look like fluctuated, from a maritime trading network built around commercial outposts, to permanent colonisation of territory. The whole story is repeated in the history of Britain's involvement in India: "Behind these tussles ... was a more existential disagreement about the nature of Empire, between an East India Company which saw India as an economic venture necessarily accompanied by political consequences and Wellesley, who saw the British presence as fundamentally political with economic consequences." And the moral justification for empire at different times oscillated between the economic (free trade and capitalism) and the political (liberty, enlightenment). "The diamond and railway magnate Cecil Rhodes set the tone in southern Africa by declaring, in his 1877 ‘Confession of Faith’, that it was Britain’s duty ‘to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory’ because ‘we are the finest race in the world and … the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race’."

Hunt is also interested in the cities as cities, and what the urban landscape tells us; for example, the Georgian terraces in Dublin, now a tourist sight but as recently as the 70s seen as a physical symbol of colonial imposition; and of course the design of New Delhi as a visual sign of the Empire's might and history.

Fascinating, and a pleasure to read.

The Chiang stories sound pretty interesting. I think he might be the guy that a friend was talking about - he works at Microsoft even though he's something of a cult author, but he tries to keep a low profile so people won't bother him.

That sentence from The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles is cringe-inducing. It sounds like you gave it a fair shot though. Who is the publisher? Might be one to avoid.

>82 wandering_star: Ten Cities that Made an Empire sounds like a very interesting book. I think I'll wishlist it.

>83 DieFledermaus: - yes, that sounds like him.

I don't have my copy of The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles any more but the publisher listed on LT seems to be a vanity press. I wonder if the ER link-up is something that they offer?

I agree with >84 FlorenceArt:. It does sound fascinating, but along the lines of "too many books, too little time," I think I'll make do with your review.

18. The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R King

This isn't the first Sherlock Holmes homage I've read. Hell, it's not even the first Sherlock Holmes homage I've read which starts with a child running into an older Holmes beekeeping on the Sussex Downs. But it's a pretty charming one. The twist here is that the other character is a young woman - as intelligent and observant as Holmes, but bored and unloved (she is an orphan, living with an aunt). Holmes takes her under his wing, and together they start to unravel mysteries and solve crimes. There is a lot of heart in the relationship between the two of them, and I really enjoyed reading it.

I think the last Holmesian book I read was Anthony Horowitz's The House Of Silk, which was told in the voice of Dr Watson (it's supposed to be a case where the crime was so scandalous that it couldn't be published in the lifetime of the protagonists). I preferred this one - it felt like a slightly fresher take.

19. The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

The author of this book is an Iraq war veteran and a poet. Looking up his bio I found an interview in which he said that one of the reasons he wrote the book was that people kept asking him what it was actually like out there, in Iraq.

Sometimes it succeeded. One very memorable moment in the book is when our narrator is being driven back to his mother's house, and looks over into a field by a river where he used to relax and swim. Almost unconsciously, he finds himself assessing the field for where the best cover would be in a firefight.

I pictured myself there. Not as I could be in a few months swimming along the banks beneath the low-slung trunks and branches of walnut and black alder trees, but as I had been. It seemed as if I watched myself patrol through the fields along the river in the yellow light, like I had transposed the happenings of that world onto the contours of this one. I looked for where I might find cover in the field. A slight depression between a narrow dirt track and the water’s edge became a rut where a truck must have spun its wheels for a good long while after a rain and I saw that it would grant good cover and concealment from two directions until a base of fire could be laid down which would allow us to fall back.

This is a great image about the way that the soldiers' experiences in the war can stop them from returning to the normal lives they had before. I will remember it. But too often the very poetic descriptions didn't work with the content of the writing. The soldiers feel disconnected from the world around them, and inure themselves against human feelings; and when our narrator is back in the US, he cuts himself off from everyone and everything. Somehow, this made the beautiful descriptions seem very out of place. If a soldier is focusing everything he has on staying alive, will he stop to describe the way the wind blows on a leaf? Maybe, in fact, he will: but it took me out of the disconnected mood the author was trying to create.

Sometimes too the poetic-ness (?) led to metaphors which I just couldn't understand:

I focused for what seemed like hours on crests becoming troughs, troughs tilting to become whitecaps, all of it seeming like the breaking of some ancient treaty between all those things that stand in opposition to one another.

A pity; I wanted to like the book, but in the end found it a bit of a struggle.

20. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

This was an enjoyable read, of course. I don't think it will ever be my favourite Austen: I understand all the reasons why Fanny is so retiring and passive, but I still wish she wasn't. And the sudden tying up of loose ends all in one go at the end was frustrating. But, on the other hand, there is the monstrously horrible character of Aunt Norris, perhaps one of Austen's vilest creations; and towards the point while I was wishing for a different ending, I felt that I was rebuked by Austen herself when she commented, "Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself."

I've been enjoying the excellent tutored read thread as I read Mansfield Park. It's really interesting to see the analysis of the underlying themes and how these are brought out.

21. Broken Harbour by Tana French

Tana French writes intriguing, twisty mysteries set in Ireland. Since at least the second book (came out in 2009), there's been a background theme about the impact of the financial crash. In this book, the murders take place in a semi-derelict housing estate where the money ran out halfway through the building. The developers took what they'd got and skipped town, leaving behind jerry-built houses too far away from anywhere to be a viable community. The community was supposed to be Brianstown - but the original name of the place was Broken Harbour - a suitable name for somewhere so desolate.

The murders - of a whole family - are horrifying, but even creepier is the state of the house the victims are found in, beautifully decorated and kept up, but full of huge holes in the walls with cameras pointed at them. The real twist, though, is that we are told from the very start that this was a case that went horribly wrong. So when the detectives start to piece the case together, I was trying to work out not whodunnit, but how things could possibly go so wrong. It's an unusual but effective way of creating suspense.

I didn't like this quite as much as French's first two books, In The Woods and The Likeness - both of which are absolutely brilliant thrillers. In this one there were two coincidences involving the detective, and two involving the murder case, which reduced the impact. But it's still very worth reading.

If you’re good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fibre of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.

All caught up!

What an interesting and wide ranging set of titles you've been reading. Ten Cities that Made and Empire looks like a good one for me. I'd like a book too on some of the UK cities that colonialism and trade, and later the industrial revolution made into important centres: Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow, possibly Southampton, come to mind.
I haven't read any Tana French but she looks like a good escape for some of this summer's road trips.
Congratulations on being caught up!

You've done some interesting reading! I really enjoyed Broken Harbour when I read it last year and I look forward to more Tana French.

>87 wandering_star: I have read several of Laurie R. King's Holmes books and thoroughly enjoyed them, for the same reasons you did. There is an authenticity to King's rendition that is very appealing.

>92 SassyLassy: As it happens, the author of Ten Cities that Made an Empire has also written about British cities: Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City. I've wishlisted it!

I wishlisted Ten Cities that Made an Empire after reading your post.

>95 wandering_star: Thanks for that recommendation w_s. I thought there was a book out there, but couldn't recall the title and was hoping/thinking you would know!

I'm caught up now and enjoying your reviews.

Same here! Enjoying your reviews and have wishlisted the Ted Chiang and Tristram Hunt books.

>82 wandering_star: I'm enjoying your reviews. I too, have wishlisted Ten Cities that Made an Empire. And I agree, French's In the Woods was much stronger than Broken Harbour.

Quite a lot of reviews to catch up on! They might end up fairly short.

22. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

Genteel poverty and equally genteel goings-on in a small English village. Light, but with a lot of humanity. As with my recent reading of Dickens, I listened to the audiobook and read the book as well. That wasn't necessary to get a grip on the story, as it's fairly simple. But the reading by Prunella Scales is brilliant! It really brings out the humour, much of which I might have missed if just reading the text. I particularly liked the delightful nosiness/gossipyness of the Cranford ladies, and all the excuses they come up with to justify it.

Miss Pole was always the person, in the trio of Cranford ladies now assembled, to have had adventures. She was in the habit of spending the morning in rambling from shop to shop, not to purchase anything (except an occasional reel of cotton or a piece of tape), but to see the new articles and report upon them, and to collect all the stray pieces of intelligence in the town. She had a way, too, of demurely popping hither and thither into all sorts of places to gratify her curiosity on any point - a way which, if she had not looked so very genteel and prim, might have been considered impertinent.

23. The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

Fantasy; a magical library joins multiple parallel universes, and its librarians have to travel to different worlds to save books which only occur in that universe. I really love the premise; the execution was great fun, but there was not quite enough there for me to want to read more books set in this world.

‘Behold!’ Silver raised his hand. Fire flared round his fingers dramatically, then leapt to strike the alligators in burning orange whips. It fizzled. There was no other word for it. The flames drooped and went out as if they’d been doused with cold water, leaving the alligators to rumble forward undeterred. ‘Damnation!’ Silver swore. ‘They have been armoured in cold iron! Johnson! My elephant gun!’

24. Do No Harm:Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh

An interesting but troubling memoir by Marsh, a brain surgeon. It tells the stories of some of the operations he has done, and through this considers what it means to be a doctor, what your responsibilities and responses are when your patients want you to make them better, and offer them certainty, and you don't know if you can do either. Marsh demonstrates a lot of humility and honesty in talking about some of his cases which did not end up well, and the way these haunt him. I found it quite difficult to read at times - the operations can be a bit gruesome and reading the book forces you to face up to mortality - but I think I am glad that I have read this.

Every time I divided a blood vessel I shook a little with fright, but as a surgeon you learn at an early stage of your career to accept intense anxiety as a normal part of the day’s work and to carry on despite it.

Apparently there are two documentaries about him, extracts from which are on YouTube (someone told me this; I haven't looked yet) - their titles are Your Life in Their Hands and The English Surgeon (about his work in Ukraine, which he talks about in this book).

25. An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth by Chris Hadfield (audiobook, read by author)

Like many people, I became aware of Chris Hadfield through the lovely video of him singing Space Oddity on board the International Space Station, where he was commander. Disappointingly, this book was rather short on that sort of wit and whimsy; boiled down to its essentials, it's a rather stodgy book about how humility and hard work will help you get ahead. Now there's nothing wrong with that message, and Commander Hadfield himself is obviously a remarkable and admirable character. But I was frequently reminded of something in Mary Roach's much funnier Packing For Mars where she explains that an astronaut is a strange mixture of a high-achieving hero prepared to face death to extend the range of human knowledge, and someone who needs to be meticulous, calm, patient and able to tolerate boredom. There's even a whole section telling people they should aim to be a neutral influence:

In any new situation, whether it involves an elevator or a rocket ship, you will almost certainly be viewed in one of three ways. As a minus one: actively harmful, someone who creates problems. Or as a zero: your impact is neutral and doesn't tip the balance one way or the other. Or you'll be seen as a plus one: someone who actively adds value. Everyone wants to be a plus one, of course. But proclaiming your plus-oneness at the outset almost guarantees you'll be perceived as a minus one, regardless of the skills you bring to the table or how you actually perform.

I'm not saying this is bad advice - in fact I think more people should follow it. But I was expecting something zingier.

(That said, I listened to the first couple of hours of the audiobook on a boat ride which was the most terrifying travel experience of my life - at one point the boat pitched hard and several people screamed, and a woman across the aisle from me put on her lifejacket. I was grateful for Hadfield's calm and air of competence.)

26. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

This book advocates the use of simple checklists to make sure that the right processes are adopted - particularly in Gawande's field, surgery, where he leads a project which dramatically reduces the number of complications. I picked this up because it related to the previous two books - Marsh also talks about the dangers of seeing the surgeon/doctor as infallible, and Hadfield (of course) about the necessity of following checklists.

Although the topic is medicine, this read like a standard business book - the kind which have one idea and tell multiple stories about how well that idea has worked. I am convinced by Gawande's arguments, and he writes well. But I don't think that what was originally a magazine article really needed fleshing out to book length.

All learned occupations have a definition of professionalism, a code of conduct. It is where they spell out their ideals and duties. The codes are sometimes stated, sometimes just understood. But they all have at least three common elements. First is an expectation of selflessness: that we who accept responsibility for others—whether we are doctors, lawyers, teachers, public authorities, soldiers, or pilots—will place the needs and concerns of those who depend on us above our own. Second is an expectation of skill: that we will aim for excellence in our knowledge and expertise. Third is an expectation of trustworthiness: that we will be responsible in our personal behavior toward our charges. Aviators, however, add a fourth expectation, discipline: discipline in following prudent procedure and in functioning with others. This is a concept almost entirely outside the lexicon of most professions, including my own. In medicine, we hold up “autonomy” as a professional lodestar, a principle that stands in direct opposition to discipline.

27. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

A collection of short stories, linked by the fact that a woman called Olive Kitteridge appears in all of them. In some she is the main figure - in others, she appears on the periphery.

During the time I read the book I also watched the mini-series, in which Frances McDormand plays Olive. The mini-series mainly covers the stories in which Olive is the main character.

To be honest, I preferred the mini-series. In both Olive is a sharp and often dislikeable character, but in the mini-series it seemed clear that this was because she was fundamentally unhappy and frustrated - too clever for her life as a high-school teacher in a small town, and unable to get past that cleverness and make genuine friendships with people less smart than herself. In the book there seemed to be less reason for her crankiness. Or perhaps all this is because McDormand is such a good actor.

“You know what Mrs. Kitteridge said in class one day?” Julie asked. Winnie waited. “I always remember she said one day, ‘Don’t be scared of your hunger. If you’re scared of your hunger, you’ll just be one more ninny like everyone else.’ ” Winnie waited, watching Julie do her baby fingernail once more with the perfect pink polish. “Nobody knew what she meant,” Julie said, holding her nail up, looking at it. “What did she mean?” Winnie asked. “Well, that’s just it. At first I think most of us thought she was talking about food. I mean, we were just seventh graders—sorry, Doodle—but as time went by, I think I understand it more.” “She teaches math,” Winnie said. “I know that, dopey. But she’d say these weird things, very powerfully. That’s partly why kids were scared of her. You don’t have to be scared of her—if she’s still teaching next year.”

28. The Long Ships by Frans G Bengtsson

Wonderfully imagined Viking epic. The adventures are swashbuckling, but the real joy is in following our hero pretty much all over the known world - captured and taken to Muslim Spain, harrying Ethelred the Unready's England, settled down in Scandinavia, and making a final adventure into Rus (I am fascinated by the Volga Vikings, who I only recently found out about, so I was particularly pleased by this section). A pity that the terrible things which happen to the women are not treated as serious abuse; but then plenty of (enemy) men are beaten, beheaded and worse and it's all just what happens in wartime... As well as the travels, a very interesting theme is the coming of Christianity, and how people react to this. There are conversions at the point of a sword, or in return for a large bag of money - which eventually become a kind of real faith. I found these both funny, and a plausible depiction of how a new religion might spread - you could set the same things centuries later in a village in Africa or Asia, and they would still ring true.

The Bishop read grace, King Harald having commanded him to be brief about it, and then they drank three toasts: to the honour of Christ, to the luck of King Harald, and to the return of the sun. Even those of the company who were not Christians joined in the toast to Christ, for it was the first of the toasts and they were thirsty for their ale; some of them, however, made the sign of the hammer over their tankards and murmured the name of Thor before they drank.

It's great to catch up with your reading, and I'm a big fan of The Long Ships.

Yes, I thought the TV mini series of Olive Kitteridge was excellent.

>108 rebeccanyc: It may have been your recommendation which got me to read it!

>109 baswood: Frances McDormand is such a great actress. Good supporting cast too.

29. Old Man's War by John Scalzi

Science fiction: humankind is colonising distant planets, and at the age of 70 you are given the option to be physically regenerated and join the Colonial Defence Force. No-one quite knows what the physical regeneration means, because once you join the CDF you never return to earth. In the story we follow a small band of new recruits to the CDF.

For some reason, I think maybe the rather retro cover, I hadn't realised that this was quite a recent book - so was pleased that it was funnier and easier to understand than I was expecting. But overall, it was a lumpy combination of several things - a pastiche of military stories, a lot of alien fighting, and a love story - none of which had quite the impact that they needed to. The military pastiche was quite funny but tended to go on too long, the alien fighting was a bit boring and the 'what does it mean to be human' bits felt bolted on, and the love story had everything required except the emotions.

30. Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

A strange little novella about a woman who falls in love with a sea-monster. It starts wonderfully - the woman's unhappiness is beautifully and economically drawn (the only kindness in her life comes from small interactions with the gardener) and it makes perfect sense that she should be the one to see the gentleness behind the monster's hideous exterior. The romance and her explaining of the human world are lovely too.

"And am I your secret vice?" she asked.
"No, my secret vice is avocados."

Unfortunately I don't think this was completely sustained, and the book ends in a way which is at once over-dramatic and predictable. I almost wish that it had spun off completely into fantasy rather than remaining dragged down by real life.

I would say that I'm caught up now, but I don't want to jinx things - that's the last thing I said before my long break from LT....

I like Mrs. Caliban quite a bit. It's one of the rare books I've reread a few times. It has an odd charm to it.

I've caught up with all of your reviews. I think I liked the book Olive Kitteridge more than you did. I thought she was a great character, and Frances McDormand played her perfectly. I also am a big fan of The Long Ships. I am pretty sure it will be in my top five this year. It has been years since I read Cranford, but I remember loving it. Did you ever see the mini series that the BBC did? It was very good. You've reminded me that I would like to get back to Gaskell.

Another fan of Frances McDormand (and Richard Jenkins) in Olive Kitteridge. I thought it was excellent.

31. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

I was inspired to pick this up after listening to an excellent podcast about the California Gold Rush. Did you know that between 1848 and 1851 the amount of gold coinage in the US increased twenty-fold? Gold was discovered in California not long after it became conclusively part of US territory in the wake of the Mexican-American War. That would be an interesting counterfactual history.

Anyway, the podcast also had a lot of fascinating stories about the number of people from across the world who made their way to (and perhaps their fortunes in) California and it made me want to read some fiction set there. I couldn't come up with any from the TBR but thought a goldrush story from New Zealand might hit the spot instead.

And how it did! There are lots of great reviews of this book on LT. Unfortunately I liked it so much that I read it at breakneck speed, so I don't have anything very intelligent to say. I loved the setting (with people gathering from around the world, fortunes being made and lost), the intricate structure of the story and the way that it unfolded. I missed a lot of the details that have gone into the book - for example, I only realised when reading other reviews after finishing the book that each chapter is half the length of the previous one; and a lot of the zodiacal stuff passed me by as I sped through the pages. I would certainly like to read it again - quite an accolade for a book as long as this one - and will give all these factors more attention next time.

What had Balfour said, hours ago? "A string of coincidences is not a coincidence"? And what was a coincidence, Moody thought, but a stilled moment in a sequence that had yet to be explained?

>115 NanaCC: I haven't seen the miniseries but imagine it would be good fun. What Gaskell would you read next? I have a couple of others and would like to read more.

>118 wandering_star: The only other Gaskell I've read was North and South. it was excellent.

I have a "Works of..." On my kindle, so I should just pick one.

Unfortunately I liked it so much that I read it at breakneck speed, so I don't have anything very intelligent to say.

Oh, you make me laugh! Glad you enjoyed it.

>117 wandering_star: I meant to mention in my previous post, that I think part of the feeling of rushing to the end of The Luminaries has to do with the fact that the chapters get shorter. I felt that I was rushing to see how it ended. As for the astrology, I really don't know much of anything about astrology, so I decided to ignore that aspect, and it didn't hurt the story at all. I'm sure for someone with an understanding, it would have added another layer of enjoyment to a story that was already excellent.

Enjoyed all your new reviews. That's good inspiration to read The Luminaries. I didn't like Olive Kitteridge, the book. So the show hasn't appealed.

>117 wandering_star: Lovely review of The Luminaries. I really want to read this one.

I've been meaning to read The Luminaries too. Maybe a summer read . . .?

32. Out by Natsuo Kirino

The cover of my copy of this book shows blood swirling round a plughole. Other covers tend to feature some combination of a woman's face and a sharp kitchen knife. Based on this, I was expecting disturbing and shlocky horror, similar to Ryu Murakami. But - for the first half of the book at least - that's not what I got.

Instead, I was reminded of a couple of books with more of a social commentary edge. Most surprisingly, one of these was The Twilight Years, which I read in January. Like the protagonist of that, one of the main characters in Out is trapped by her family, between the decrepit and incontinent older generation and the selfish and materialistic young ones. The other book Out reminded me of was Miyuki Miyabe's All She Was Worth - like this, a crime novel written in the aftermath of the boom years ending, featuring characters whose lives are straitened as a result. I'm curious to know whether books like this are still being written, given the economic stagnation that's lasted from then to now. I'd love to hear from Japan lit fans on that.

Later on it did get shlocky. Although I was expecting it, I was still disappointed - I had much preferred learning about our protagonists' daily struggles and how these were challenged by an extreme event. But I also wonder, if the reader was looking for something really eye-popping, would they have been happy ploughing through two or three hundred pages of story before things really kicked off?

They called her Skipper, and she did, in fact, run the line. The role kept her going, helped her survive the dreary work; it was her one source of pride. But the painful truth was that there was no one to help her. Instead, all she had was her pride, goading her to keep working no matter how hard it was. Yoshie had wrapped up everything personal that mattered in a tight package and stored it away somewhere far out of sight, and in its place she had developed a single obsession: diligence. This was her trick for getting by.

33. Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys by Viv Albertine

This memoir is divided into two parts - Viv Albertine's life as guitarist in seminal all-girl punk band The Slits, and then what happened afterwards.

The first part is incredibly vivid and artless. You get a sense of really pushing the boundaries. It's exciting but fraught - punks might have looked like crazy messes but "everything you do in life is meaningful on a political level. That's why we're all so merciless about each other's failings and why sloppiness is derided ... all of us are very vocal in our damnation of any hapless person who crosses our path who hasn't thought rigorously about life." People were really trying to live in a new way - and there is a huge amount of energy in this section. Not to mention truly astounding outfits.

I'm scared, but I go anyway. That should be written on my gravestone.

But it's not easy - the women in the band struggle to get their voices really heard and understood. In the end that energy dissipates and the band falls apart.

"Side Two" is a longer journey, told in a more reflective way. Viv gradually gets over her depression at the loss of the band and the dawning of the materialist 1980s, and becomes a filmmaker. She marries, goes through a real struggle trying to have a child, and one day realises that she has become so focused on making life good for her child that she has no space for herself. Can she pick the pieces up and start over again? A scene I found particularly moving is when the instructor in her weekly ceramics class suggests that she tries to express herself in her work. I'm horrified. I'm surprised at the vehemence of my response. "I don't want to express myself! I'm sick of expressing myself! I've expressed myself to death! I just want to make nice brown pots to put in the living room."

"Side One" is much more exciting and vivid, and transported me into a world I can only imagine. (I am sure that I would have been terrified of punks if I'd been around at the time). But unexpectedly I found a lot to think about from "Side Two" - how would I live if I really wanted my life to express my self truly and honestly? It's not an easy process for Viv Albertine, and probably for anyone - but at least she had the experience of doing it fiercely during her younger days, and that could be a touchstone for her later on in life.

A word on the style. Even while I was reading Side One I was struck by the artlessness of the writing style, and thought that this could not possibly be the 'real' voice of the older, more sophisticated woman writing the book. Even more so when I got to part two which is written in such a different way. But there is a point later in the book where Albertine talks of her happiness in tapping into the authentic voice of her younger self, and then I understood it.

>126 wandering_star: - i just posted on this last night in my thread. Fun book. I think you got more out of the second part (side 2) than I did, although it had value for me too. Regarding the artlessness, i thought side 1 came across as sincere, so that didn't bother me. But i did wonder how she recaptured so much in that language that clearly isn't her present.

>127 dchaikin: thanks for pointing me back to timjones' review - I think that was what made me want to read this too, but when I looked for it recently I couldn't remember what thread it was on. I think the line about the emotional cost of independence is spot on.

I've really enjoyed catching up with your reading. I've never read any Gaskell (been on my mental 'I should' list for years), and I'm constantly on the look-out for good audiobooks; Prunella Scales might just hit the spot.

Like Colleen, I think I liked Olive Kitteridge (the book) more than you did, and I thought Olive was a great character (though I remember initially taking against her, then revising my opinion in the light of things I found out about her as the book progressed). The mini-series had completely passed me by, though; I must find that. Especially if Frances McDormond is in it...

Another glowing review of The Long Ships - I was already intrigued, but you've pushed me over the edge now. (Actually it was the mention of Muslim Spain, a time and place which fascinates me, and has done so for 20 years now, like no other).

And as for The Luminaries, I've been hesitating over that one - but honestly, I can think of no greater accolade than 'I liked it so much that I read it at breakneck speed'. Who needs intelligent comments after that?

Are you still in Japan?

That's a nice multimedia set of recommendations... I think you will enjoy all of them.

I'm just packing everything up in Japan; returning to the UK at the start of June. It's been a great stay.

34. The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch (unabridged audiobook, read by Michael Page)

This fantasy novel is set in the city of Camorr, where peace is kept by a secret alliance between the Duke and the Capa - the ruler of the city and the king of the underworld, respectively. Locke Lamora, our antihero, grows from beggar to thief to conman, serving the Capa but actually working for his own gang, the Gentleman Bastards, and for the love of the con-trick. As the novel starts the Gentleman Bastards are planning a heist - they are scornful about the risk of ripping off both the Capa and the nobility at the same time, but they have no idea of the real danger which is lurking round the corner.

It's a well-imagined world, from the ornate descriptions of the city (which reminded me both of China Mieville's Bas-Lag and of the crenellations of Gormenghast) to the intricate plot. But partly because of this, it's a very long book (22h+ of listening). Does it hold the reader's attention? Going by the number of enthusiastic LT reviews, it does for many people. But not entirely for me.

The structure is that the modern-day heist story is interleaved with the training of Locke and the other Bastards. Fairly standard to have two timelines, but I think normally when a book does this it's for one of two reasons: either the earlier timeline has a reveal which illuminates something about the second timeline; or it's to manage the pacing, with the timelines peaking at different times - sort of ababAbAbaBaBABAB, if you see what I mean. Here it's more like AbAbAbAAbbAAbbAAbbAAbb, with the earlier timeline being used almost exclusively to spin out the cliffhanger of the later story. Once I spotted that, it became quite predictable: NOW characters in peril > THEN long scene of swedging > NOW swedging > NOW escape > NOW characters in even greater peril > THEN swedging etc.

Part of my job involves editing other people's writing, and I would love to be given the manuscript of this book and told to cut at least 1/3 of the length. I think there is a gripping and well-imagined book buried in there... But if this hadn't been an audiobook I am not sure I would have managed to finish it.

Well-read, by the way.

>131 wandering_star: This book has been on my wishlist for a while, with a status of "not really sure I want to read it but I should probably try a sample some day". That day may not be very close, after reading your review.

Hello! For most of the time since I last posted I have been in China, with plenty of time to read but no real opportunity to update this thread (I think LT must use some google-based wiring as it was extremely difficult to load any pages). So this is going to be more of a list of reading than proper reviews

35. Outsider in Amsterdam by Janwillem van de Wetering, 1970s mystery. A bit dated (attitudes to women etc) but quite enjoyable reading.

De Gier closed his eyes and dreamed. How many hours had he spent in bars? Listening, chatting, acting. And meanwhile the eternal search ... Easy now. Talk to the girls. Listen to the girls. Wait for a little fight to break out, a nice argument. Stir it up a little. Whoever gets angry talks. Whoever gets jealous talks. Whoever's pride is touched talks.

36. The Elements of Eloquence: how to turn the perfect English phrase by Mark Forsyth. Despite the subtitle this is essentially a glossary of different rhetorical methods, which is unlikely to improve anybody's communication style. However, it does quote some lovely bits of writing to illustrate its points, from Shakespeare and Milton to Raymond Chandler ("She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.")

37. A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth L Ozeki. Oh dear. A terrible turkey. I only stuck with it all the way through because I really liked the author's first book, My Year Of Meat. Not recommended.

38. A Second Chance by Jodi Taylor - the third in the St Mary's series of books featuring time-travelling historians. As much fun as the first two.

39. Bullfight by Yasushi Inoue, a rather strange novella set in Japan immediately after WWII, telling the story of a newspaper trying to organise a bullfight. A good sense of the mood of Japan at the time, but otherwise I was a bit puzzled by this.

40. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie. I loved the first book in the series, and while this was different in structure and style, I really enjoyed it as well.

41. The Mystery of Mercy Close by Marian Keyes. It seems, looking at my LT records, I haven't read any Marian Keyes for ages. I do like her books, though - they are shelved as chick lit but are about real women struggling with real problems, not just sex and shopping. This one is about a private eye who has fallen on hard times after the financial crisis.

So when the crash hit, I was one of the first things to go. Private investigators are luxury items and the It bags and I came out of things very badly. Nowadays, if husbands are playing away, the women don't want to know, because hanging on to their husband as their finances roller-coaster up and down (but mostly down) is their only chance of saving themselves. Anyway, no one could afford to split up because overnight their family homes were worth nothing. Sticking together had suddenly become the name of the game.

Huge chunks of anxiety began to break free inside me and rise to the surface, like an iceberg calving. Everything looked ugly and pointy and strange, and it was like I was living in a science fiction film. As if I'd crash-landed into a body that was similar to mine, and on to a planet that was similar to earth, but everything was malign and sinister. It seemed like all the people around me had been replaced with doppelgangers. I felt very, very not safe. Uneasy was the most accurate description of how I felt, uneasy to the power of a million.

42. The Snowden Operation: inside the West's greatest intelligence disaster (Kindle Single) by Edward Lucas. I think there is a book to be written about the other side of the Snowden story - a well-argued, serious consideration of the damage that might have been done by the leaks, and the long-term consequences of the way that espionage agencies work. This is not that book; instead it rehashes allegations about Snowden and hints at potential consequences, without really bringing out strong evidence on either.

43. Le sommet des dieux (vol 1), Jiro Taniguchi - a fascinating manga about mountaineering, focused on a legendary Japanese mountaineer.

44. The Steam Pig by James McClure - a mystery, set in 1970s South Africa, featuring a white detective and his partner, a black sergeant. This is an unusual pairing for the time and the two police officers take advantage of people's perceptions (what another LT reviewer has called 'playing boss and boy'). Very interesting, although not always straightforward to work out what was going on, and very dated attitudes on gender.

45. Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh, the final instalment in the Ibis Trilogy. I loved it as much as I loved the first two.

46. Sharpe's Triumph and 47. Sharpe's Fortress by Bernard Cornwell. Formulaic but fun. Each book is like an episode of a TV show so this was the bookish equivalent of binge-watching.

48. The Ocean at the end of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, audiobook read by the author. A re-read (re-listen?) - oddly enough, the two things which I remembered most strongly from first time round turned out to be very minor parts of the story.

>133 wandering_star:

Wow, lots of new reads! I haven't read Bullfight yet (because it's way too expensive especially considering its size) but Inoue used to be one of my favorite authors so I recommend reading one of his other works (like Shirobamba) which are absolutely beautiful.

And I only use the words "used to" because I haven't read his books in at least 10 years but when I did I used to gobble them up. I haven't, however, touched his more nonfiction works.

Thanks, I will look out for that. Have you read the Jiro Taniguchi? Amazing visual images, and quite fascinating to think about the early days of Japanese mountaineering.

>136 wandering_star:

I haven't heard of it at all but reading a review of it, it certainly sounds interesting. However I'm a bit confused as the LT review says it is a five book series when the only Japanese version I could find is a single 295 page book. I think I'm going to have to do more research into this or find a French copy (as the Jpn copy also seems like it'd be difficult to find).

>137 lilisin:

Aren't you still in Tokyo? You can find them on amazon.co.jp. They are even available for Kindle! Look for 神々の山嶺 or even for Taniguchi's name: you can type it in romaji and Amazon will translate it to kanji and kana for you, that's how I found them.

Enjoying catching up with your reading! I liked Outsider in Amsterdam and have been busy reading the entire series, but I agree it's dated with respect to women. I guess I took that in stride.

>138 FlorenceArt:

Thank you.
The first time I tried typing in Taniguchi's name (into a Japanese version of LT) only one book popped up but typing in the title I was finally able to find the book, so thank you. Still don't know when I'd get to this series but it's definitely on the map now in case I ever stumble upon it.

I have been quiet for some time because I am reading Anna Karenina. I am really enjoying it - it's much more vivid than I was expecting. I'm even enjoying what I think of as the 'how to be a good Russian' parts. I really wish I understood a bit more of the political background!

49. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

As always, I find it difficult to 'review' books like this, so I will talk about how I experienced the book rather than a proper review.

I spent all of July reading this. During that time I mentioned to half a dozen people that I was reading it. Two people said that Anna Karenina was their favourite book; two asked me if I was going to read War and Peace. I don't think I've ever had that sort of response before, no matter how "classic" the book I was reading was supposed to be. It made me wonder what it was about the book which created that sort of reaction.

I certainly found the book much more vivid in its emotions than I expected it to be. This is the case not just for Anna in her doomed love affair, but also with the Tolstoyan personality of Levin, her brother-in-law, whose story forms a counterpoint to that of Anna's. Both of them were tremendously emotionally changeable in ways that felt to me very modern - or at least, like something I would expect from a modern writer rather than a 'classical' one.

As well as appreciating the storylines about the relationships between the people, I quite enjoyed all the "how to be a good Russian" stuff. I think that having a better understanding of the political dynamics of the time would have helped to make sense of the debates which go on through the book - although some of the messages are extremely clear, such as the very negative impact of women having very narrow social roles.

Overall, though, I think I will have to ask my friends what it is about Anna Karenina which makes it their favourite novel.

I love Anna Karenina and I love War and Peace better, but I wouldn't say either is my "favorite" book (because how could I have a favorite?). I guess I love Tolstoy's characterization and breadth.

Interesting review of Anna Karenina. It's been on my shelf for quite a while, but I can't quite bring myself to start it yet. Maybe it's one to cosy up with on the dark winter nights.

I find it difficult to 'review' books like this

It would be daunting indeed. I've read this three times, the last time for the (then) new translation, but luckily it was pre LT, otherwise I would have found myself in exactly the same situation. "Vivid" is a good word for so much of it.

I had also not anticipated that it would be so funny.

Oblonsky’s tendency and opinions were not his by deliberate choice: they came of themselves, just as he did not choose the fashion of his hats or coats but wore those of the current style. Living in a certain social set, and having a desire, such as generally develops with maturity, for some kind of mental activity, he was obliged to hold views, just as he was obliged to have a hat. If he had a reason for preferring Liberalism to the Conservatism of many in his set, it was not that he considered Liberalism more reasonable, but because it suited his manner of life better. The Liberal Party maintained that everything in Russia was bad, and it was a fact that Oblonsky had many debts and decidedly too little money. The Liberal Party said that marriage was an obsolete institution which ought to be reformed; and family life really gave Oblonsky very little pleasure, forcing him to tell lies and dissemble, which was quite contrary to his nature. The Liberal Party said, or rather hinted, that religion was only good as a check on the more barbarous portion of the population; and Oblonsky really could not stand through even a short church service without pain in his feet, nor understand why one should use all that dreadful high-flown language about another world while one can live so merrily in this one.

50. City of the Dead by Sara Gran

After a month of Anna Karenina I decided to 'reward' myself with a quick-read thriller. I think this was an LT recommendation at one time. Claire DeWitt, self-styled the greatest detective in the world, returns to New Orleans a couple of years after Hurricane Katrina to work on a missing persons case dating from a day or two after the storm.

Claire is a hard-bitten, gun-toting, drug-smoking PI, hitting the mean New Orleans streets and holding her own with young thugs, homeless winos and drive-by shootings. Yet despite this she (of course) hangs on to her humanity. He reminded me of everyone I knew in New Orleans — scared of everything he shouldn’t have been and accepting what should have terrified him.

What really lifted this book above the crowd for me, though, is the (fictional) nineteenth-century detective manual that Claire swears by, Détection by Jacques Silette. This is a surreal, philosophical work, which Claire quotes from at length. “Only a fool looks for answers,” Silette wrote. “The wise detective seeks only questions.” One of Claire's former colleagues became so immersed in Silette that he could not continue to do his work. Interviewer: So how has your discovery of Silette changed your approach to solving crimes? Murray: (Long pause.) I think that now I’m more interested in seeing how my mysteries solve me.

I would love to read more of Silette, but the tone seemed an odd fit with the deep noir of the crime story. I won't be buying the next in the series, although if I happened to spot it on a friend's bookshelf I might just borrow it...

51. The Little Red Guard: a family memoir by Wenguang Huang

Every time I start a memoir about growing up in China during the 1970s, I wonder whether the world really needs another one. But generally they win me over, and this is no exception.

The particular focus of this memoir is the dynamics within the family and the tensions between traditional culture, personal desires and revolutionary orthodoxy. Huang's grandmother was downtrodden before the revolution but blames her bad fate rather than thanking the Communists who ended her suffering. His father is an upstanding Party member with a good record and a quiet cynicism about politics, who keeps a secret stash of 1950s magazines about his beloved (but forbidden) Chinese opera. Huang and his sister, meanwhile, are firebrands who have not yet learnt to question what they are taught, although their family elders set them on the right path.

When I was in elementary school, Grandma constantly embarrassed me in front of my friends. My elder sister and I participated in different kinds of after-school music performances and parades to promote the latest Party policies. Grandma would wobble outside and look for us. When we appeared, she let us have it in her richest Henan accent. "You goof off outside after school, doing this revolution and that revolution, but never bother to come home and take care of your brother and sister. What kind of crap is that?"

Most obviously, these tensions play out through Huang's grandmother's desire for a burial and traditional funeral, when the Communist government was effectively forcing people to be cremated instead. Huang's father wants to be a good son, but he also has responsibilities to his children - their futures look bright because of his own Party membership and good political background. The story is told lightly - there's an entertaining segment when the grandmother considers turning Muslim so that she can avoid cremation, saying sadly that she will miss pork and that she'll have to overcome her nausea at the smell and taste of mutton. But the dilemmas are real and serious. It's easy to see how they can create tensions and hurt within the family, whether that's the young denouncing the old for their backward beliefs or Huang's parents constantly over whether it's worth the risk to their children's futures to give the grandmother what she wants.

I really enjoyed reading this and would recommend it to anyone interested in the period, or in family memoirs.

I'm always interested in anything set in or near New Orleans, and you've certainly piqued my interest with City of the Dead by Sara Gran.

52. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

This novella is in two parts: the narrator, Tony Webster, first tells us about his early adulthood, and in particular a friendship that he had with a rather distant, cool young man called Adrian which ends when Adrian starts dating Tony's ex-girlfriend Veronica. All this happened at a fairly formative period of life, and the events are re-opened many decades later when an unexpected event brings Tony back into contact with Adrian and Veronica and what happened to them after the friendship ended.

It's also a book of two parts in terms of what you get. The theme of the book is memory and how it is distorted, and there are also many comments in the first part of the book about the nature of youth, and of growing up. These observations are beautifully expressed.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives - and time itself - would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernable.

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to use that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient - it's not useful - to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also - if this isn't too grand a word - our tragedy.

However, the story that this thoughts are yoked to is not, in my view, quite up to the job. I understand that Tony is deliberately plodding and uninteresting, to show that any one of us could have unknowingly triggered dramatic events. But the events are really so dramatic that it's hard to believe that Tony should genuinely feel responsible for them, even if he may have been the first pebble which set off the avalanche. And so when I finally got to the reveal at the end of the story, it felt like a damp squib - really, the whole story was built on this leading to that??

53. A Nice Change by Nina Bawden

This is an extremely light and gentle social comedy about a group of Brits thrown together by the fact that they are staying in the same hotel in Greece. There is an MP, his lawyer wife, and (by accident) his ex-lover; a slightly mysterious pair of tall, elegant twins; an equally mysterious (but from the other end of the social spectrum) husband and wife, who may or may not be planning to return to the UK at the end of the trip.

The format of the story reminded me a bit of Skios, a zingy farce set on a Mediterranean island - I read this last year and enjoyed the way that the farce was put together, and the laughs it gave me, but I wouldn't suggest that otherwise it was a weighty read. This was like a lighter, gentler version of Skios. It was so fluffy that I think it'll mark the end of my post-Anna Karenina 'easy reading' - I'm ready to get my teeth into something proper again now!

Nice review of The Sense of an Ending, Margaret. I loved the experience of reading it, in a café in Holborn on a rainy Sunday afternoon, but I hardly remember anything about it. I'll have to give it a second try, to see if I get anything out of it.

The Sense of an Ending also didn't do it for me. Damp squib sums it up entirely.

>150 wandering_star: >153 AlisonY: Damp squib

Ha ha! I remember being blown away by The Sense of an Ending, although at this point I remember very little about the book at all. Not such a good sign, I suppose.

>150 wandering_star: >154 Nickelini: I feel the same way about The Sense of an Ending - I know I loved it, but I can't remember why.... Interesting how that happens sometimes, and how sometimes the reverse happens; I read Brooklyn by Colm Toibin when it was first published and remember it as though I loved it, but my comments from when I read it suggest that I was quite frustrated with it at the time.

54. The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

My Brilliant Friend, to which this is the sequel, was one of my stand-out reads of 2013. It was the story of the close friendship and yet rivalry between two girls growing up in a poor district of Naples. They are both clever and have ambitions beyond their poor neighbourhood, but at the end of the first book Lila, sharper and more driven than our narrator Elena, marries a young man from the neighbourhood - making many of the neighbourhood girls jealous, crowning her attractiveness over Elena, but cutting off so many of the possibilities which she seemed to have been fighting for. Although the book ends with the celebration of the wedding, it also comes as a shock because we expected Lila to want more than a conventional successful match.

In this book, then, we see Lila coming to terms with the consequences of her decision. She is just as passionate, driven and ready to fight for what she wants - but she is not so sure anymore what exactly that is. She seems lost, trapped. With her energies and passions no longer directed at a particular end, Lila becomes self destructive, sometimes trying to break the restrictions imposed on her, sometimes deliberately taking those restrictions and using them to push the boundaries of what she can do.

My Brilliant Friend was about children growing up - and we also saw the many social changes of postwar Naples. In The Story of a New Name we realise the limitations of those social changes, or at least the fact that they haven't penetrated to this very working-class neighbourhood. For Lila and Elena, this book is about becoming adults - with new responsibilities and fewer possibilities to break away. They each seek escape in their different ways - one through marriage to someone with enough money to take her out of the old poverty; the other through study and education. But have they ever, can they ever, really make it away from their roots?

There is a theme which is almost body horror - a vivid image of Lila's husband trying to have sex with her on their wedding night, when suddenly the body of his father, the money lender and black marketeer, emerges from within his young body; and later, when Elena thinks about getting older, she suddenly imagines the body of her lame mother, and of her father, emerging from her. I found this interesting in the context of these young women's changing bodies and what that means for their role in society, and throwing ironic light on the way that Lila uses clothes as part of her armoury.

Most of this book is as good as My Brilliant Friend. There is a longish segment at the end, though, when the two young women are not together. Elena has finally escaped and is studying in Pisa, just as Lina's situation becomes even more bitter and restricted. Their stories are told consecutively, and the book really loses much of its dynamism as the two women are not testing themselves against each other.

Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? Would Lila be misshapen like Nunzia? Would Fernando leap from her delicate face, would her elegant walk become Rino’s, legs wide, arms pushed out by his chest? And would my body, too, one day be ruined by the emergence of not only my mother’s body but my father’s? And would all that I was learning at school dissolve, would the neighborhood prevail again, the cadences, the manners, everything be confounded in a black mire, Anaximander and my father, Folgóre and Don Achille, valences and the ponds, aorists, Hesiod, and the insolent vulgar language of the Solaras, as, over the millenniums, had happened to the chaotic, debased city itself?

55. Adventures in Human Being by Gavin Francis

I bought this after hearing the author on the Radio National (Australia) books podcast. It's a book of essays, each one taking a different part of the human body from the head down to the feet. The essays look at that particular body part through literature, anatomical and medical history, individual cases and so on.

Gavin Francis has a poetic eye in the way that he describes the body:

If the central retinal vein is blocked, the resultant scarlet haemorrhages are described in the textbooks as ‘stormy sunset appearance’. I sometimes see pale retinal spots caused by diabetes, and they’re reminiscent of cumulus clouds. In patients with high blood pressure the branching, silvered shine on the retinal arteries resembles jagged forks of lightning ... I couldn’t have looked into Borges’s eyes with an ophthalmoscope: the vault of his retina was collapsing, and clouds of cataract forming in his lens would have obscured the view.

He also has a wide-ranging approach to the literature and art he refers to. Jacob wrestling the angel illustrates the essay on the hip; the essay on the shoulder refers to wounds suffered by soldiers in the Iliad, and Leonardo's Last Supper illustrates the essay on facial expression (which also contained a remarkable fact, that when dissecting a face the doctor can tell from the development of the facial muscles whether people had a tendency to smile or frown when alive). There is also more modern art and literature - a memorial built in Scotland for organ and tissue donors, or a poem about the poet's experience of having an operation:

"The Halving" by Robin Robertson

General anaesthesia; a median sternotomy
achieved by sternal saw; the ribs
held aghast by retractor; the tubes
and cannulae drawing the blood
to the reservoir, and its bubbler;
the struggling aorta
cross-clamped, the heart
chilled and stopped and left to dry.
The incompetent bicuspid valve excised,
the new one – a carbon-coated disc, housed
expensively in a cage of tantalum –
is broken from its sterile pouch
then heavily implanted into the native heart,
bolstered, seated with sutures.
The aorta freed, the heart re-started.
The blood allowed back
after its time abroad
circulating in the machine.
The rib-spreader relaxed
and the plumbing removed, the breast-bone
lashed with sternal wires, the incision closed.

Four hours I’d been away: out of my body.
Made to die then jerked back to the world.
The distractions of delirium
came and went and then,
as the morphine drained, I was left with a split
chest that ground and grated on itself.
Over the pain, a blackness rose and swelled;
‘pump-head’ is what some call it –
debris from the bypass machine
migrating to the brain – but it felt
more interesting than that.
Halved and unhelmed,
I have been away, I said to the ceiling,
and now I am not myself.

My one caveat is that often the stories of individual medical cases are not terribly interesting and don't add anything to the essays. But overall, this was a good read.

>156 wandering_star: Nice review of the Ferrante. I read My Brilliant Friend earlier this month and quite enjoyed it. I have the second book on my Kindle, so will get to it before year end.

Excellent review of The Story of a New Name. I thought that this was a stronger book than the first and ended up starting the third book right after finishing this as I was so involved in the girls' story. I'm waiting eagerly for the fourth book, which will be published in English in September.

Your comments on the body horror are interesting. Lena's relationship with her mother is so fraught and she is so fearful of becoming her mother.

Last night I went to see "Three Days in the Country" at the National Theatre (one of the nice things about being back in the UK!).

It's an adaptation of Turgenev's A Month In The Country, done by Patrick Marber who I think is a great playwright. (I'm seeing his The Red Lion next month, also at the National.)

We join an aristocratic Russian family plus their hangers-on at a great estate in the country. Everyone has been used to being quietly unhappy in their own way (very Russian!) until a handsome new tutor arrived a month before. In these three days, the new emotional dynamics come to a head, and at the end of the play, all the relationships have been shaken up.

I don't know the original play, but the adaptation manages to bring a note of French farce to the Russian tragedy, and impressively, manages to make that a combination that works well, highlighting the ridiculousness of love as well as the pain.

Mark Gatiss was great in what could have been a bit-part of a washed-up rural doctor - including one scene where he did the best job of acting drunk that I've ever seen (usually it ends up being a bit over the top).



It's the start of a long weekend of culture as I am heading up to Edinburgh for the Fringe.

Have fun at the Fringe!

Yes - hope that Edinburgh is a good experience.

Nice review of Three Days in the Country, Margaret. I'll see if it's still on at the NT next month.

Have fun at the Fringe! I look forward to your comments about it.

The Fringe was such fun! And we were really lucky with the weather, which was warm and mostly sunny all four days.

A quick run-down of what I saw:

Friday

A one-man show called "Going Viral", about a mysterious epidemic of unstoppable crying, with some of the science around viruses mixed in. This was an enjoyable show but thinking about it afterwards I would have liked the ideas to be a bit more developed. For example, there was a mini-theme about governments and decision-makers lacking empathy because they aren't susceptible to the crying epidemic. It would have been interesting to take these ideas a bit further.

A two-hander, The Human Ear, about a woman whose long-lost brother returns to the fold - or does he? I have seen this theatre company before and they do some very interesting things - in this piece they did a lot of flashbacks, marked by changes in the lighting but with the actors switching seamlessly into the different time period. I don't think their scripts match up to the inventiveness, but interesting to watch nevertheless.

A dance performance, showing the connections between bharata natyam, belly dance and flamenco. This was in a tiny venue, with three dancers. First they took turns to dance - with a short 'handover' on stage where they danced together in a way that you could see how similar gestures were done in the different styles. Then all three of them were on stage together, each dancing in their own style. I loved this - particularly the belly dancing as I've never seen really good belly dancing before, only the stuff you see in restaurants.

Finally, a one-person performance adapted from A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing. This was clearly an incredibly impressive piece of acting - one person, on stage for 90 mins telling an incredibly gruelling and emotionally exposed story. Unfortunately, at 10.30 at night (and with no preparation for the subject matter) I didn't have the mental energy to engage with it. I might have enjoyed it more in a different context.

Saturday

"Fiction", a play listened to through headphones as you sat in a darkened room. I think it was meant to produce a sense of alienation and then play on your inner fears and phobias. I thought it was rubbish but everyone I went with found it genuinely immersive.

A one-woman show, "Bette Davis Ain't For Sissies", focused on the night when Bette lost out to Vivian Leigh/Scarlett O'Hara for the Best Actress Oscar. Not bad, but it seems that there are more interesting parts of Bette Davis' life to focus on...

"Our Ladies Of Perpetual Succour", a National Theatre of Scotland adaptation of Alan Warner's The Sopranos which is a book I enjoyed very much. The story of a group of teenage girls, travelling to Edinburgh for the day to represent their convent school at a choir competition (but really to get off the leash and have a wild time in the big city) is told with gusto by a group of young actors, who also play all the characters that the girls encounter during the day. The twist in this production is that it's a musical, with songs supplementing the action. This meant a great opening scene, where the girls stand in choir formation and angelically sing "Lift Thine Eyes", before breaking formation, pulling out cigarettes and pouting. This production was my highlight of the festival.

"Mwathirika", a puppet performance by an Indonesian troupe which tells the story of a family affected by the anti-communist purges of the 1960s. Almost unbearably poignant - at one point my sister whispered to me 'this is the saddest thing I've ever seen', and I got very choked up.

We had been planning to see some late-night comedy after Mwathirika but just didn't feel able to deal with the abrupt change of mood.

Sunday

A performance of Tennessee Williams' The Confessional, with the action transposed to a pub in Essex. The main story of this play is a woman breaking up with her lover after he has cheated on her, but we also see into the lives of assorted drunken flotsam whose lives revolve around the pub. This was my low-light - partly the play itself (which I'm tempted to say is deservedly little-known), partly the very uneven acting, and partly the fact that unlike everything else we saw, there was nothing interesting or innovative in the staging (other than the conceit that the audience were all drinking in the pub where the action took place.

"Balletronic", Cuban rock ballet (sounds like something from an automatic generator of Edinburgh Fringe Festival events!) - I really enjoyed this, although I am no connoisseur of ballet.

In addition to this, we caught up with friends, climbed Arthur's Seat, visited the Scottish Malt Whisky Society for some tasty whisky, and generally had a tremendous time!

This morning I had a couple of hours to kill before my train and accidentally stumbled on the venue for the book festival. I wish I'd found it before as it was a lovely space to relax (although I don't think I'd have had any time to go there over the weekend...)



I was there at the wrong time for any events but had a good poke around the bookshop and came away with...

....a couple of books from Scottish small presses, Silma Hill and The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space

...Gifted: The Tale of 10 Mysterious Book Sculptures Gifted to the City of Words and Ideas, a book about the lovely story of the detailed and meticulous book sculptures that a mysterious artist left anonymously around Edinburgh. (If you haven't heard about this before, there is lots online about it, eg here

...a signed copy of A Brief History of Seven Killings, which I've been meaning to buy for a read-along with the excellent audiobook version.

The Fringe sounds really interesting - enjoyed the reviews.

Great summary of the Fringe events you attended, Margaret!

Envy you your weekend in Edinburgh and at the Fringe. Those book sculptures are amazing.

I just read of a pilot project in Scotland that would give all children library cards: From 7 September, every baby registered in the Glasgow area will be given a library card by the registrar. What a great initiative.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-34048868

Quite a bit to catch up on and not much mental energy to write reviews...

56. Operation Pax by Michael Innes

This 1951 thriller is a slight departure from the usual cerebral Appleby mysteries - beginning when a man stumbles into a terrifying conspiracy and has to flee for his life, although being an Appleby book it does manage to end up in the depths of the Bodleian Library. Fun.

57. Stone Mattress: nine tales by Margaret Atwood

Little bit of a mixed bag, this. The first three stories were interlinked - and good - which meant that for the rest of the collection I was expecting to loop back to these characters. Perhaps if I was editing this I would have put them at the end. The rest include a couple of rather eerie pieces, a story featuring the characters from The Robber Bride, and a couple of stories I'd already read in the New Yorker. But despite the mixed-bagginess, it's always a pleasure to read Atwood's writing.

The implication is that Constance has failed to be prepared, which in fact is true. It’s a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.

58. Deep Sea and Foreign Going by Rose George

Subtitled "Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate", this starts off almost like a piece of travel writing, only the strange culture here is that on board a huge container ship. And it's an extremely foreign culture - George repeatedly makes the point that because ships slip between nations and jurisdictions, life is incredibly hard and dangerous for the mariners and there is no recourse if bad things happen: "the sea dissolves paper", as she puts it. The modern age has not improved this situation - if anything, it has made shipboard life harder now that a ship can be loaded and unloaded in no time at all, meaning that the mariners spend ever less time in harbour. Before boxes*, he would wonder if he had time to go ashore for dinner. Now he wonders if he has time to get a newspaper.

*=containers

George also touches on some big issues - piracy, climate change, the impact of shipping and other maritime pollution on whales. Sometimes the connection to shipping was a bit tenuous, but she writes well, and with a passion - she is scathing about the fact that Harvard Business School listed Somali piracy as the best business model of 2010, completely ignoring the human costs involved.

59. Faithful Place by Tana French

One of the things which make Tana French's crime novels so good is that as well as the actual crime and the solving of it, there is always a twisty way that the crime pulls on the personal story of the detective involved - often on the things which have damaged them in the past - yet in ways that always manage to surprise you. This adds a further layer of tension and of stakes in the story. This is the book where the detective's history is most directly involved in the crime - the victim was his girlfriend and love of his life, and he had thought for twenty years that he'd been dumped and she had disappeared to England. Until one day a house is being demolished and the builders discover a hidden suitcase...

Normally I enjoy danger, there’s nothing like it to focus the mind, but this was different. This was the earth rippling and flexing underneath me like a great muscle, sending us all flying, showing me all over again who was boss and who was a million miles out of his depth in this game.

In other updates... last weekend I went to Sutton Hoo, where a tremendous Anglo-Saxon treasure, a boat burial of a great chieftain, was discovered in the 1930s. We took a guided tour, and I was fascinated to learn that the treasure had almost been looted in Tudor times (but for the fact that a farmer had dug a ditch across the bottom of the boat, so the looters dug in the middle of the mound and missed the treasure by inches) and that the stories told in The Dig, which I read in 2012, had been based closely on real life.

There is also a second-hand bookshop on the site where I managed to pick up some great pulpy books - look at these amazing covers:



At the theatre, I have seen The Red Lion by Patrick Marber (who adapted the Turgenev I saw a couple of weeks' back, also at the National Theatre). This is a three-hander, set in the changing rooms at a football club and featuring an ageing club volunteer, the cocky wide-boy manager, and an up-and-coming star. It's about masculinity and loyalty and in the end the need for identity, as the audience come to realise that each man in his own way is dependent on the identity that the football club gives him. Very good.

I also went to a play called Absent - I'm not even sure if play is the right word to describe it; it was a promenade event in which the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall was turned into a budget hotel and the audience (in our own time) walked from room to room piecing together elements of the story of the "absent" woman at the centre of the piece. The story itself was pretty thin, but the staging was clever and interesting - in one room you realised you could step into a mirror, in another there were clues to be found almost underneath the floorboards. I think the experience was exemplified for me when I found myself listening at a door, not sure if the whispers that I could hear were part of the story or whether they were just more audience on the other side of the wall!

>170 wandering_star:

Those are great covers. Reminds me of the old French paperback covers.



A lot more enticing for reading!

Harvard Business School listed Somali piracy as the best business model of 2010

I had to read that twice. The book (Deep Sea and Foreign Going, which touchstones to "Ninety Percent of Everything") sounds quite interesting.

>171 lilisin: yes, they are very similar! Those are great covers too.

>172 dchaikin: astounding, isn't it. (I think 'Ninety Percent of Everything' is the US title.)

>172 dchaikin: - yes, yes, but that was 5 years ago. What are the prospects now?

(I joke, but I actually am not a fan of the pirate motif in popular culture because of the realities of piracy).

>169 wandering_star: Deep Sea and Foreign Going sounds really interesting. Wherever did you find this title?

life is incredibly hard and dangerous for the mariners and there is no recourse if bad things happen

When Vancouver had the World Expo in 1986, a shipload of Chilean workers on a cargo ship that happened to be in the harbour at the time walked out--they weren't officially allowed to be off the ship, but conditions were so bad, and with the global focus on Vancouver I guess they thought they'd take their chances. Journalists filmed the squalor they found aboard, and I always remember the camera shot of the Kraft salad dressing bottle the sailors were using that had an expiry date of 1973 (13 years past).

Wow. I can see why you remembered that. I am afraid the same sort of thing is probably still going on - one of the things that George says is "when I read a story about something that happens at sea, I wonder how many multiplications of the incident you would need to make to get the true figure of what happens in the wild place out of sight."

I got it because I really enjoyed her other book, The Big Necessity (which is about shit - she makes a point of calling it this because she feels it's a subject which people shy away from and hedge around with euphemism).

>176 wandering_star: Oh, I've heard of The Big Necessity (maybe from you). I want to read that one.

I watched a very good documentary about shipping a few weeks ago, but it can't be as thorough as a book on such a huge subject. I will wishlist Deep Sea and Foreign Going. I also still have to finish reading L'homme qui a vu l'ours, a collection of essays by Jean Rolin who has a fascination for the sea life. The book contains several essays about the world of shipping.

Once in a while a story about sailors and the conditions they are forced to live and work in makes the news, but for the most part we are happy to forget about this and just enjoy the goods they are bringing to us.

>170 wandering_star: - Enjoyed reading about Absent. I've always wanted to go to one of those immersive theatrical experiences. Sleep No More was going when I was on a trip to New York, but you had to book for very specific times and getting there was a hassle.

60. Silma Hill by Iain Maloney

This is one of the Scottish small press books I picked up at the Edinburgh Book Festival bookshop. The story takes place in a Scottish village in the eighteenth century, on the cusp of the Enlightenment.

Reverend Burnett is a bad-tempered man who feels superior to his superstitious village congregation, and yearns to be accepted by scholarly society in Edinburgh. His chosen study is antiquities; so when one of the villagers, digging peat, comes across a strange and ancient icon, he takes it up to the manse. But soon afterwards, the villager is dead and his daughter is having eerie dreams and carrying out feats of supernatural strength. To deflect suspicion or out of genuine resentment, the villager's family start to point fingers at the minister's lonely daughter.

In different hands, this could have been a great story. Unfortunately, the writer is not very good at 'show, not tell', especially on major and implausible plot points like the village turning against the Minister's daughter (why her and not her father? We're told that her dead mother was beautiful, kind and loved, and she is much more part of the village than her father). It would have been so much more horrifying in the hands of a writer who could give us a creeping sense of how the village is gradually turning against her. I also think it would have been better if the writing left room for doubt about whether the mysterious events were caused by supernatural means or whether it was just hysteria. These would have added uncertainty and therefore suspense to the story.

Overall, a bit of a missed opportunity.

He had assumed no one would give credence to the old woman's mad tales of witches and demons, but it seemed that while he had been using the pulpit to promote rationality, she had been using the streets and the inn to manipulate support. After decades bringing the parish into line, he had allowed it to slide back into chaos. Being a minister was a full time position, he reminded himself, not just for Sundays.

61. The Tropic of Serpents by Marie Brennan

I think that when I reviewed the first book in this series I said something like, "if the idea of a Victorian lady adventurer + dragons appeals to you, you'll like this book; if not, not." Basically the same applies here, except for the important problem of Insufficient Dragons. The first dragon turns up a third of the way into the book, and the only significant dragon action (and indeed, lady adventuring) takes place in the second half.

Fortunately, the second half is fun and gripping enough to make up for the extremely slow start.

62. Molly Fox's Birthday

A woman stays in the house of an old friend while that old friend is away. A day passes. She thinks back over the two decades of her relationship with that friend, Molly Fox, and another friend who was at university with both of them. Not much to build a story on, you might think, but this was tremendous - an engaging story of the dynamics within friendships but also an examination of what humans are. Where does the self come from? Is it made of memories, of the things that we gather around us, do we create it from will power? The narrator is a playwright, Molly an actor, Andrew (the third friend) someone who has transformed himself from his poor Belfast origins into a poised and mellifluous television art historian; so another theme is realness, authenticity and artifice, and what this means in terms of the self. Even though we create our selves, is our self still real? Do we choose what to remember and what to forget?

I couldn't put this book down. Possibly the best read of the year so far. (I'm reasonably sure it was an LT recommendation a couple of years ago, thank you to whoever it was that reviewed it so positively then).

One of the strange things about really old friendships is that the past is both important and not important. Taking the quality of the thing as a given - the affection, the trust - the fact that I had known both Molly and Andrew for over twenty years gave my relationships with them more weight and significance than friendships of, say, three of four years' standing. And yet we rarely spoke to each other of the past, of our lives and experiences during that long period of time. To do so would have been in many instances mortifying. Andrew once said to me, "You have the most extraordinary memory," to which I replied, "I'm very good at forgetting things too," and he responded, without missing a beat, "I'm glad to hear it."

>182 wandering_star: Wow, that sounds like a great read! Going to look it up now and probably wishlist it.

>182 wandering_star: Last year I read another book by Deirdre Madden, Time Present and Time Past, and was so impressed by it I bought another, The Birds of the Innocent Wood, which I have yet to read. Sounds like Molly Fox's Birthday is great too.

Noting Deirdre Madden. Enjoyed your reviews.

Time for a book purchasing update! Yesterday was my birthday. I had to work in the afternoon (I've spent the last eight or nine weeks planning a massive event, which has been taking place this week - finishing today). So my birthday plan was to go to one of my favourite brunch places, which happily is very close to one of my favourite bookshops, Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street. The event has been rather stressful but ended up going well, so I had a double reason to celebrate/treat myself.

I did make it to Daunt Books (missing Darryl/kidzdoc by a day!) but in the 24 hours beforehand I'd accidentally bought a vast quantity of other books.

On Friday evening I dropped into Judd St Books, a discount/remaindered bookshop which always has interesting things on sale. I got:

The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura (wishlist)
Random Violence by Jassy Mackenzie (a series I hadn't heard of before, but looks interesting - set in modern-day South Africa, and published by Soho Crime who publish a lot of interesting crime from other countries
Notes for a War Story by Gipi (wishlist)
The Best American Comics 2010, 2011 and 2012 (only £5 each!)
The Best American Mystery Stories 2013 because I am currently reading an earlier BAMS and really enjoying it
Bedtime Stories (a nicely bound anthology of short stories from classic to modern)

Just a short walk from Daunt I stopped in at the Oxfam bookshop, and found:
Where Do Camels Belong? by Ken Thompson (wishlist)
The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov (wishlist/LT recommendation)
The Evening Chorus by Helen Humphreys (I'm a sucker for proof copies in charity shops!)
and a couple of guidebooks.

So by the time I got to Daunt Books I felt that I had to be quite selective. I ended up with two books:

Uncommon Ground: a word-lover's guide to the British landscape by Dominick Tyler - a list of unusual words which describe features of the landscape, ordered by which part of the UK they come from, and accompanied by beautiful photographs. Swag is a dip in the ground caused by subsidence, glyder a rock-strewn peak in Wales, holloway a path which has been used by so many people their steps have lowered the surface of the land.

The Tea Lords by Hella S Haase, from the Southeast Asia shelves downstairs, a Dutch writer born in Indonesia writing a story about colonial Java. I was looking for a book suitable for the Reading Globally autumn theme of translated women writers, and this looked interesting.

Happy birthday! Looks like a great book haul!

Happy birthday and congratulation on your successful event! That was certainly worth a double book haul.

Happy birthday and congrats on your excellent book buying!

I listened to The Thief on audio and quite enjoyed it! The end may leave some readers frustrated, but didn't bother me.

Random Violence is also one of the better Soho Crime books I've read recently. Jade de Jong is an interesting character and I am saving the next book in the series for when I am stressed and need a good, gripping read.

Happy birthday! And great book haul!

Happy birthday. Love a good book spending spree!

Thanks all! Especially >189 ELiz_M: for the boost for Random Violence - I'd never heard of this series or the book before so it's nice to have a positive recommendation.

63. The Best American Mystery Stories 2003 edited by Michael Connelly

I've been dipping into this on and off since June. I'm a big fan of the "Best American Short Stories" anthologies, but this is the first time I've tried one of the mystery collections. It's an incredibly high-quality collection, and I think many of the stories here would raise no eyebrows if they appeared in a non-genre anthology. Yes, in all of them a crime happens, but several of the stories are about the impact on ordinary lives of an encounter with a crime, and the way the shock shakes one up so that all the bits of life settle back down in a slightly different place.

There is a huge range of styles and approaches. There's a take on Dashiell Hammett (based on the historical fact that Hammett served with the US Army in Alaska) and one on Holmes (an actor playing Holmes uses the authority of his role to solve a crime). Almost all full-length crime novels are about murder, but here there is also fraud, arson, conspiracy, pickpocketing, and bank robbery - there is even, in the story which is likely to stay with me the longest, decades of guilt over a crime which turns out not to have taken place.

There are only two stories I didn't like, and one of them was well-written, it's just that I found the misogyny of the narrator disturbing. That makes this one of the highest overall quality short story anthologies I have read.

in the 24 hours beforehand I'd accidentally bought a vast quantity of other books

Love that idea of "accidentally" purchasing books. It seems to be a situation visited on all of us.

Happy belated birthday!

Ugh. Have just seen a terrible production of Measure for Measure at the Young Vic.

I suspect the play is on one of the A-level syllabuses this year, as there is another production on at the Globe. I can understand why the theatres want to put on plays from the syllabus as they get guaranteed school parties, but then they suffer from a terrible temptation to try and make the play "accessible" to 17- and 18-year-olds, which all too often seems to mean sticking in a bit of hip hop in a poorly thought out way.

The particularly frustrating thing is that it wouldn't be too hard to make the play very relevant. The story is that Vienna is ruled by a dissolute duke, who decides one day that the city needs to be cleaned up. Because he has been part of the decadence, he can't clean it up himself - so he appoints the most righteous man he knows as his deputy and disguises himself as a friar to see what happens. The deputy, Angelo, starts off by arresting a bunch of people, and sentences to death one Claudio for fornication. Claudio's sister, Isabella, is about to become a nun; she begs Angelo for forgiveness and - suddenly overcome by lust - Angelo offers to spare Claudio's life if Isabella agrees to sleep with him. Isabella is horrified and says that she will tell the city what he has asked, but Angelo tells her that no-one will believe her. Isabella goes off to talk to her brother and the disguised duke steps in to suggest a solution. After that the plot gets a little bit weird, but there is plenty here which is resonant today - men's power over women's bodies, moral hypocrisy, the abuse of power - you could set this in an ISIS- or Handmaid's Tale-style extremist puritanical society; I would even be tempted to see if it was possible to make Angelo a tabloid editor sanctimoniously stirring up moral panics.

Instead, what do we get? There's one character, a woman previously engaged to Angelo who dumped her when her family's fortune was lost in a shipwreck. She still loves him (um, because plot?). When she is introduced we get a lengthy burst of Alanis Morissette's 'You Oughta Know' (both cliched and out of date - that album's 20 years old, so unlikely to appeal to the schoolkids). One of the comedic characters is played by someone apparently channelling Woody Allen. Oh, and when the curtains go up the stage is heaped with blow-up sex dolls, which the actors have to push their way through. The sex dolls continue to be part of the stage business, for example in a fight between two characters where they pick up the sex dolls and start hitting each other with them.

Sigh.

Oh dear

>195 wandering_star: Oh.

Well then. Measure for Measure was my least favourite of the plays I studied, but I don't think hip hop and blow up dolls is what it needed.

>195 wandering_star: maybe not...

64. John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk

An English village, not long before the English Civil War. A woman lives there with her young son. She is a 'wise woman', who the villagers come to with their worse ailments, but her knowledge also makes them suspicious, and with puritanism spreading across the land fingers are pointed to her as a witch. She teaches her son about the days before religion told us that life should be hard and the relations between men and women shameful, and quietly makes arrangements for him to be taken in as a kitchen boy at the manor house, after she is gone. From kitchen boy John works his way up to cook, but now the Civil War is here and the kitchen staff have to accompany their lord to war, while the lord's headstrong daughter is left to defend the manor from the Roundheads.

There is a lot in this book that I ought to have liked. I'm interested in the civil war, in food, in the theme of pleasure/hedonism vs puritanism/religion, and I've enjoyed the ambition of Norfolk's earlier books. This one, unfortunately, did not engage me. The themes were a bit buried, perhaps, and I couldn't make myself really care about the characters or what happened to them. Not a terrible read, but nothing very special - except perhaps for the descriptions of the food of the time, which turns out to have been incredibly ornate:

A great flood of aromas swamped the noise, thick as soup and foaming with flavours: powdery sugars and crystallised fruit, dank slabs of beef and boiling cabbage, sweating onions and steaming beets. Fronts of fresh-baked bread rolled forward then sweeter cakes. Behind the whiffs of roasting capons and braising bacon came the great smoke-blackened hams which hung in the hearth. Fish was poaching somewhere in a savoury liquor at once sweet and tart, its aromas braided in twirling spirals.

65. Orfeo by Richard Powers

At the start of this book Peter Els, a composer and music teacher in his 70s, has his home raided by Homeland Security. The story then splits into two timelines - Peter’s life up to that point, and the way that he responds to the raid.

Powers uses this story to think about music, and by extension Art: What is it for? To soothe, to move, to be beautiful, or to challenge, disturb and shock? Is it timeless? Art aspires to be outside time but the production of art is deeply rooted in the trends and events of its own time - and so is the consumption. The way a piece of music is heard is intricately linked to what else is happening, both in the time it is listened to and the life of the listener. He will love this music to death. In a few more years, he’ll snort at its sentiment and mock its stirring progressions. Once you’ve loved like that, the only safe haven is resentment. For most of the last century, too, the way someone consumes and appreciates art has been used to signal belonging to a particular tribe - and the changes of fashion have been speeding up. That was the curse of literacy: Once you started writing music down, the game was half over. Notation touched off a rush to uncover every trick hiding out in the rules of harmony. Ten short centuries had burned through all available innovations, each more fleeting than the last. The accelerating vehicle would one day have to hit the wall, and it was Els’s luck to be alive at the moment of smash-up.

I thought this was a wonderful book. I really liked the writing, which is vivid and full of metaphor even when not writing about music, such as this description of a summer party: Thirty yards out, kids swarm a plywood float lashed to empty oil drums, like ants massing a melting sugar cube. Shore-hugging uncles fish beer bottles from an ice-filled zinc trough and open them on the trough’s handle. Aunts and worse stretch out on beach blankets in a suntan assembly line. I liked the way that it was full of ideas and the way that they echoed and rippled through the storyline. Throughout the book there are periodically stand-alone lines, separate from the rest of the text. Towards the end of the book it becomes clear what these are (tweets that Els sends to explain what he did, while he is on the run), so after finishing I flicked through the book again to read them in sequence. As I did so, I spotted further patterns within the text, like stepping back from a Monet painting.

Incidentally, several of the LT reviews say that this book wouldn’t work for someone without a good knowledge of classical music. I don’t think that’s true - I am like one of Els' students, for whom music was her North Korea—an unfathomable country that refused her a visa. She heard no more in the average masterpiece than a person might see in a pile of soggy cardboard.

It’s not a book for everyone perhaps, but finding a book like this is why I read.

>200 wandering_star: I've read three books by Richard Powers. They are wonderfully difficult and layered. I enjoyed The Echo Maker a lot and found Galatea 2.2 fascinating (but much of the philosophy/theories were beyond my comprehension). Gain was more accessible and insightful.

I love the Orfeo/Eurydices story and, thanks to your review, am even more interested in reading Powers' novel.

>200 wandering_star: How intriguing! I have never had much interest in music and I'm trying to change that now. I may add this book to my wishlist.

>200 wandering_star: I was frustrated by The Echo Maker and have avoided Richard Powers because of that, but others have recommended Orfeo to me as well.

I think I got a sense of how challenging Powers can be from your review. He's on my some-day list.

I have now got Orfeo on my wish list. Enjoyed your excellent review.

I've started a new thread for the final quarter of the year: come and join me here.