wandering_star in 2021, part 2

63. Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

A rather mind-boggling book about fungi. It’s pretty hard to summarise - each chapter has a book’s worth of information, and sometimes it’s the kind of information which makes you rethink things you thought you knew.

Plants are only able to grow on land because for tens of millions of years, fungi served as their root systems (until plants evolved their own roots) and even now fungi serve as extensions to many plants in a way which makes it hard to say where one entity ends and another begins.

Fungi are able to break down rock, crude oil, various plastics, TNT. A population of fungi at Chernobyl may be slowly cleaning up the site. The shaggy ink cap mushroom will dissolve into liquid if you leave it in a jar, but can grow through asphalt or lift a paving stone - producing enough force to lift an object weighing 130 kilograms.

Incidentally, the illustrations in the book are drawn with deliquesced ink cap mushroom - and Sheldrake is also planning to turn the book into food and drink with the aid of fungi - he writes that he will grow oyster mushrooms on it, and ferment a mashed up copy of the book into beer. This is perhaps indicative of the way that thinking too much about mushrooms can seriously change the way you view the world.

All pretty incredible - and brought to life by Sheldrake’s eye for a good story and ability to write pretty lyrically.

A heap of Piedmont white truffles, Tuber magnatum, sat on the scales on a check-patterned rag. They were scruffy, like unwashed stones; irregular, like potatoes; socketed, like skulls.

Incidentally this book reminded me a lot of I Contain Multitudes, which explained the profound role played by bacteria - like fungi, an unseen presence with major effects.

64. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

Kristallnacht. Two men, old friends who fought beside each other in WWI, are discussing the sale of a business. The business owner is Jewish - his friend, former employee and prospective future owner of the business is not, and is driving a hard bargain. Then there comes a hammering on the door, and Otto slips out by the back way before the thugs outside can break into his flat. For the rest of the story, he goes from place to place looking for somewhere that he can feel safe. (The original title of the novel is ‘The Man Who Took Trains’).

This book was written at the end of 1938 by a German Jew who had managed to leave Germany three years earlier. It’s fantastic at conveying the sense of fear and threat - not just against Otto but anyone who doesn’t go along with the prevailing wind of the times (there is an excellent scene in a train carriage, where Otto for once is not the one under scrutiny, which highlights how quickly things could turn ugly).

It’s an incredibly uncomfortable read - it’s almost like reading a thriller in terms of the way that the story grips, except that you know that the horror is true. It’s not a long book, and it’s fast-paced, but quite gruelling to get through.

Newsboys were hawking their papers, and Silbermann had the impression they were doing a brisk business. For a moment he considered buying one for himself but then decided against it, since he figured the news was bound to be bad, and almost certainly hostile, at least as far as he was concerned. He would undoubtedly be experiencing it all firsthand soon enough.

65. Little Constructions by Anna Burns

This is the book that Anna Burns wrote before Milkman, her Booker-winning novel which was notable for the way that she used language to highlight the things that weren’t talked about - almost writing around the gaps caused by people not being able to talk frankly about the conflict in Northern Ireland and the people who fight it. It’s really interesting to read Little Constructions after reading that, as it’s an earlier and I think less successful version of the same thing - so you can see how her skill developed.

In Little Constructions the people that can’t be scrutinised are not paramilitaries but a gang of local hard men, the Doe family - but the underlying theme is the same, the impact on a society of ignoring the violence within it. This book also has a much more madcap tone, an absurd dark humour which reminded me a bit of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.

In Milkman, the violence that everyone is working so hard to ignore is so suppressed that it changes the language around it. Here, the violence is visible and explicit, juxtaposed with the response of the people trying not to see it: such as the elderly women at a bus stop talking animatedly about completely invented gossip so they don’t have to acknowledge the fact that one of the thuggish Does is assaulting a woman who had been waiting for a bus and failed to respond to his chat up lines; or the teenage girl, daughter of the same Doe family, who comes home to find the body of someone who’s been beaten to death, and her only deviation from her normal routine is that after she’s had a cup of tea in her bedroom, she washes up in the bathroom sink instead of going back downstairs.

I’m specifying these acts of violence because I think otherwise talking about the madcap tone might undersell how grim some of the events in this book are. I can understand that Burns might have adopted this tone as an additional distancing measure from the events of the story - but it becomes increasingly discordant.

It also makes the story extremely confusing - the timeline hops back and forth, sometimes years, in the middle of an episode; the narrator tells you about something happening and then that this is not in fact how it happened; and every single member of the Doe family has a name beginning with J. An even bigger problem with the book is that it goes over the same message again and again, with little in the way of real plot - and the more often it repeats its theme the less impactful it is. It’s a pity really, because sometimes it’s brilliant. If the book was half the length it would have been more powerful. (I also thought Milkman could be shorter, for similar reasons).

Of course, the Ordinary Decent Folk were back outside amassing. Now the point was, were they amassing out of approbation or out of disapprobation? One can never tell with amassments, not until someone starts the applause off, or at least throws that first stone.

stopping by your new thread. I enjoyed these three posts. I'm not sure I have heard of The Passenger, but it stands out as fascinating relic. Glad to read about it here. And enjoyed the insight into Anna Burns earlier novel. (And, not to neglect post 1, fungi are cool.)

>3 wandering_star: Vivienne just put this book on my wishlist, and you would have done the same. I listened to Milkman, and loved it. I’m trying to decide if listening is the way to go for this one as well.

>3 wandering_star: Really interesting. I was not planning to read Milkman but I might reconsider my position after reading your review.

>2 wandering_star: And The Passenger seems really interesting, and exactly the type of book I am likely to read. Thanks for putting this on my radar!

>1 wandering_star: I have Entangled Life on my bookcase. Sounds fascinating!

>1 wandering_star: I have this one not only on my theoretical pile, but on my desk as one of my summer/fall reads. Also because I LOVE the cover and it makes me happy to gaze on it.

>1 wandering_star: Taking a book bullet for Sheldrake's Entangled life.

Noting all three books for various reasons. Excellent reviews!

>1 wandering_star:
I'm looking forward to Entangled Life. I gave it to my daughter for Christmas and I need to remember to pull it off her shelf. I got super interested in mushrooms after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Hello everyone and welcome to my new thread! It is lovely to see you here. And sorry/not sorry about the book bullets...

66. Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee

There were so many edges, edges everywhere. It’s just you never know where exactly the edge is until you tip over it.

Chance is a girl growing up at the end of the line. Her out-of-work mother has been given some money to leave the city and go to Margate, where many other rootless people have also drifted. Anyone with any means left the town after the big floods started coming - so there are lots of empty houses, but little in the way of social services. And when, after an eye-catching local protest, the government cuts them off completely, things start getting even worse. Chance has to grow up quick to look after her family - a loving but self-destructive mother, and tiny baby brother - but she can still find adventure and occasional beauty in the streets - particularly after she rescues from violence a young woman who has come to the town from outside, and the two become close. At the same time, a rabble-rousing populist politician comes to Margate and his team ply the townsfolk with free drinks and talk about pride. Although Chance is suspicious of his politics, she's persuaded to become one of his advocates, encouraging her friends and neighbours to go along with his ideas - until things change and she feels terribly betrayed.

Dreamland builds this near-future dystopia out of trends which are actually happening - the fact that many people without resources wind up in former holiday resort towns around the edges of Britain; global warming and the sea level rise that will follow; and the most unattractive end of populist politics. Chance is a great character - credible and sympathetic as someone who is trying to do her best in unbelievably tough circumstances. The book is really, really good - and really, really bleak. So I don't know if this is a recommendation, exactly! What I do know is that I DEFINITELY need to read a cheerful book next, after these last three.

Great reviews, here. I, too, am fascinated by The Passenger, given when it was written and by whom especially. Such eyewitness testimonies are ever more crucial as events recede in time.

My wife read Little Constructions and liked it well enough. She had read about Milkman and was keen to read that, but decided to read Burns' earlier novel first. So she read them both and had more or less the same reaction you did to Little Constructions, good but nowhere near as good as Milkman, which she insisted I read and which we both thought brilliant.

Entangled Life looks fascinating.

>14 rocketjk: Thank you! I really do think Milkman is a remarkable work, I am glad you both thought it was good.

67. The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart

It turns out I don't have much 'cheerful' reading in my library - most of my relaxing reading is crime novels, and I don't have much light-hearted stuff. However, this book hit the spot perfectly - an absorbing read which had nothing to do with any of the problems of modern life.

It's the third in a series of books reimagining the story of King Arthur, which tries to find a route through the myth which does not rely on magic (Merlin has second sight, but most of his legendary accomplishments are due to skill rather than magic). Book Two ended with Arthur being acclaimed king - this volume takes us through many years of his reign, achieving peace and security against the Saxons and imposing his power against the enemy within.

One of my favourite things about this series is the way that it portrays the country at a time of change - where the ruins and memories of Rome are still there, which is gradually moving towards Christianity.

My book has an afterword in which Stewart talks about coming to the end of her Arthur stories - although there are actually two more books in the series, which I imagine she must have decided to add later.

I went softly forward over the broken pavement. I knew what I would find; a shrine full of dust and cold air, like the abdicated temple of Mithras at Segontium. But it was possible, I told myself, as I trod up the steps and between the still massive doorposts of the central cella, that the old gods who had sprung, like the oak trees and the grass and the rivers themselves—it was possible that these beings made of the air and earth and water of our sweet land, were harder to dislodge than the visiting gods of Rome. Such a one, I had long believed, was mine. He might still be here, where the night air blew through the empty shrine, filling it with the sound of the trees.

68. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

And… back to slightly traumatic reading, with this gripping novel set in 1950s Mexico. Sassy socialite Noemí is sent off by her father to check up on her cousin Catalina, who hasn’t been seen since she very suddenly married and moved to her new husband’s rural family home. Catalina has sent a couple of very strange letters to her uncle, but when he’s contacted her house, her husband insists that nothing is wrong. Noemí’s father tells her that if she can sort this out, he’ll finally agree to her wish to go to university. So off she sets, to a crumbling, mouldy mansion. The family who live there certainly have eccentric habits - but perhaps these can be explained away by the fact that the father of the family, who is slowly dying, is a tyrannical patriarch who wants to hang on to the customs the family brought with them from Britain. Or perhaps they can’t…

The house, so quiet, with its curtains drawn, was like a dress lined with lead. Everything was heavy, even the air, and a musty scent lingered along the hallways.

This was great. Gripping, atmospheric, and maintained a good balance quite far into the book of what might possibly be going on - there are a couple of possible supernatural options, a couple of options based on human nastiness, and even a potential option where nothing bad is happening at all. Also: so intense that I periodically had to have a break between chapters.

>17 wandering_star: This sounds really good. I snapped it up when it went on sale this year, and I'm looking forward to it.

I read the Stewart Merlin books years ago and remember them fondly. I keep thinking I should reread them.

You have great comments about your books; they give me a clear picture of the book. I'm not sure about Mexican Gothic; I've heard wildly varying comments.

When I last posted on this thread it brought me right up to date with my reviews. I felt quite proud of myself... but have clearly slipped since then.

69. A Swim In A Pond In The Rain by George Saunders

This book is based on a course that George Saunders teaches to aspiring writers - close readings of seven Russian short stories. Saunders pauses the first short story a few times, to ask us the readers questions about how we are responding. After that, we read the story first, then Saunders offers his comments on it.

I got so much from reading this. The stories that Saunders has chosen are not plot-heavy, and I think that if I just read them on their own, I would feel that nothing had really happened in them. His commentary definitely helped me to see and appreciate new aspects of the stories. I also like the fact that his commentary is opinionated - it doesn't aim at being neutral. I certainly didn't agree with everything he said, but his thoughts are those of someone who has read and thought about the story many, many times, and it was interesting to test my responses against his.

In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We’d better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.

70. Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud

This book follows the lives of three Trinidadians - Betty, a young widow, her lodger, Mr Chetan, and her son, Solo. Mr Chetan lodges with Betty for many years, until he is almost a member of the family - he certainly becomes a father figure for Solo. But both Mr Chetan and Betty have secrets, and eventually when the now-adult Solo learns one of them, he flees the island and winds up living with an uncle in New York.

I found this quite charming while I was reading it - Betty and Mr Chetan are great characters - but I only finished it a couple of weeks ago and find it has left less of an impression on my memory.

What you want? I’m doing homework.
Go in the garden and cut some seasoning, please.
Why you can’t get it?
I’m not asking you again. I want a dozen chadon beni leaves and two-three pimento peppers.
He rolled his eyes and turned to go. When did the devil switch my darling doux-doux for this rude man-child?
And bring a bunch of chive too, please. Oh, and some thyme. A good handful of thyme.
It’s a lucky thing I wasn’t in a hurry because Solo like he was waiting for the herbs them to grow.
Here.
He dumped a sweet-smelling bag on the counter. All from my garden. I love that.

71. Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

I have not read enough Alice Munro. These short stories were absolutely brilliant. Having just read the Saunders, I maybe paid a bit more attention than I normally would to what information was being shared, and where that made you think the story was going. I certainly concluded that these are all stories which start quite a long way away from where they end, build slowly, and end devastatingly, often with something at the end of the story which makes you question everything you thought you knew of where the story was taking you so far.

The stories are very hard to summarise, but my favourite, "Fiction", is available here (unfortunately in a rather annoying PDF format), and the most devastating one, "Wenlock Edge", is here.

Falling. That suggests some time span, a slipping under. But you can think of it as a speeding up, a moment or a second when you fall. Now Jon is not in love with Edie. Tick. Now he is. No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.

72. Liquid by Mark Miodownik

I bought this because I loved the same writer's Stuff Matters. Miodownik is a materials scientist and in Stuff Matters he took a pop-science look at ten substances - glass, graphite and so on. In this book, he does the same for liquids. The structuring device for Stuff Matters was a photo of him sitting in a roof garden, having a cup of tea. In Liquid, he is on a plane, and the liquids include jet fuel, seawater, saliva and so on.

I did not enjoy this anywhere near as much as I liked the previous book - although it's possible this is because I had much higher expectations. Or maybe there is less variation between liquids? That seems unlikely. Anyway I found myself making much fewer notes on this one.

In a stormy ocean, it’s hard to determine length because all the waves are jumbled on top of each other; a rough, stormy sea looks like a moving morass of angry water. When the storm ends, though, the waves carry on their way, and because they all have different wavelengths, they also have different speeds. So, as the waves travel across hundreds of kilometres of ocean, they separate out into sets, based on which ones are moving at similar speeds. Within the sets, the waves align so that they run parallel. Eventually, each set will arrive at the coast in an ordered and regular pattern. Thus the crash of waves on to the beach is essentially the sound of a storm that’s come from very far away. That beautiful, hypnotic rhythm is all thanks to the complexities of ocean dynamics.

Enjoyed these. Love the last quote from Liquid. I’m very interested in that Saunders book.

73. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

This book often crops up on lists of classic early thrillers (it was first published in 1939). My copy is from a series called 'Crime Masterworks'. It's even been published as an NYRB Classic. So I was expecting something like The Thirty-Nine Steps - the kind of thriller that set the template for what has come after.

That's not what I got. In fact I think the reason that Rogue Male is still talked about today is that it's not like any other thriller out there.

It starts off as a pretty standard man-on-the-run type thriller. A man, apparently more or less on a whim, has been caught to assassinate an unnamed European autocrat. He manages somehow to escape from the consequences of this act, and gets back to England - but even there, the regime's security men seem to be on his tail, and he has to continue to try and evade them.

This gets him into a very difficult and uncomfortable situation, which goes on for an extremely large part of the book - and a lot of detail, to the extent that I found myself thinking this was basically 1930s torture porn. When I think of the book now, this is the section that comes most vividly to mind. I didn't find it particularly enjoyable reading, until it was redeemed by two things - the fact that, trapped in his predicament, our narrator admits to himself what exactly led to him being on that hillside with his rifle aimed at the dictator's head; and the eventual denouement, which of course is all the more satisfying because escape had seemed so impossible.

So - not at all what I expected, but unusual enough to stick in the mind.

74. Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson

A completely delightful and fascinating history of 'kitchen technology' - how cooking methods and tools have changed through time, and the social causes and consequences of this.

One fact which has really stuck in my mind is that the lengthy cooking times for vegetables in Victorian cookbooks would not have produced veggies as mushy as we assume from the recipe (45 minutes to boil carrots) - because of the misapplication of science, it was believed that food should not be cooked above a slow simmer because it was a waste of energy, as the water is no hotter at a slow simmer than a rolling boil. For similar reasons cooks were encouraged to cram the vegetables closely into as small a saucepan as they would fit. And finally, the varietals of vegetables a hundred years ago were much more fibrous than the ones we eat now. So we should stop thinking of the Victorians as eaters of tasteless mush...

Ready-ground sugar is a far more labour-saving invention than sliced bread. Traditionally, sugar came in a lump or loaf, conical blocks ranging in size from 5lb to 40lb. It was ‘nipped’ into smaller pieces using sugar nippers. In order to convert it into something to be used in cooking, it needed to be pounded – once more in the trusty mortar – and refined through a series of ever-finer sieves.

>26 wandering_star: Thanks for reminding me of this book. The title has caught my eye as I've come across it. Looks like one I should find a copy of :-)

>26 wandering_star: Ooh, that sounds good, thanks.

>26 wandering_star: Consider the Fork sounds like an interesting read. I've added it to my Kindle wish list.

I suspect that there were many sugar nipper induced serious injuries throughout history.

>26 wandering_star: This sounds interesting and my local library has it. I've resisted requesting it immediately but it's definitely on the wishlist.

>27 Nickelini:, >28 karspeak:, >29 kidzdoc:, >30 rhian_of_oz: Glad you like the sound of it!

>29 kidzdoc: I'm sure you're not wrong! There's certainly plenty in the book about the dangers of an open hearth (apparently a lot of cooks in rich households worked naked until the 16th/17th centuries when enclosed chimneys and fire grates were introduced - female staff had to stay in the dairy and scullery so they wouldn't set fire to themselves).

75. Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

This was an unplanned re-read of one of my favourite books from a couple of years back (2017, according to LT). I heard the author discussing the book on this BBC podcast, which made me think it might be fun to read again, and as soon as I read the first page I was pulled into the book as effectively as I had been the first time.

The story is about a young man who arrives from London into mid-18th century New York, a town much smaller than the one he is used to, with a bill for a sum of money so large that the merchant it is drawn on refuses to pay up until proof of its authenticity can be sought from London. In the meantime, everyone in New York is fascinated by the story of this young man and what on earth he will use the money for. In particular, every political faction is on the alert, suspecting that the money is to support their enemies.

I did remember the reveal about who Richard Smith actually is and what he plans to use the money for - although I had forgotten that we find out the former about halfway through the book (it's also spoilered in the podcast). This added something to my appreciation of the book rather than taking away the suspense. I did also enjoy it more because of having recently listened to the author talking through some of his choices.

76. Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda

Linked short stories, featuring characters and tropes from Japanese mythology, making a living in the modern world. Delightfully deadpan.

After I read it I found out a bit more about some of the characters and their original stories - for example, a character who was, in traditional tales, a toad-riding avenging princess, now spends her time keeping women safe from predatory men in public places.

In most of the traditional stories, these women have been treated badly, or are being punished for their non-conformity, so there was a lovely, positive feminism in the fact that they are now able to live happy lives in the modern world (I wanted to say 'normal' lives but it's a bit odd to use that word to describe someone in love with a ghost, or who is able to generate supernatural power using her body hair...).

>33 wandering_star: This sounds wonderful. Kinda makes me think of The Fox and Dr. Shimamura (even if they do not really sound very similar but still).

Yes! There is also a fox-spirit woman in Where the Wild Ladies Are. The Fox and Dr Shimamura looks very interesting.

>35 wandering_star: Apparently supernatural female Japan and foxes need to always be in the same sentence :) Oh well - on the hold list in the library it goes (how fortunate that a place just opened...) :)

It is short and being written from a German author makes it different from the pure Japanese explorations - there are influences from both sides and the addition of early modern psychiatry/psychology into the mix (which is more like chasing ghosts than real medicine sometimes...) makes it an unusual way to look at both topics. It is also short and I found it interesting :)

>33 wandering_star: you find the most interesting books! On the wish list with this

77. Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett

I used to enjoy Terry Pratchett a lot when I was a teenager, but haven't read him for many, many years - I think partly because I started to find the humour a bit same-y, and partly out of a sense that he was maybe a slightly embarrassing author to be a fan of. Anyway recently someone I respect made a case that he was better than his reputation, so I picked this up from the library. It's the story of a girl who is accidentally given the powers of a wizard, and how she manages to take advantage of that in a world where all wizards are men. And I enjoyed it - some of the jokes were kind of groanworthy but some were good, and smuggled in clever observations. It was a quick read - in fact, as I was reading an ebook, I didn't realise that the story was almost over and felt it ended rather abruptly. I can see why I used to like them, and would definitely read another if I was in the mood for something funny.

He came walking through the thunderstorm and you could tell he was a wizard, partly because of the long cloak and carven staff but mainly because the raindrops were stopping several feet from his head, and steaming.

78. Geisha in Rivalry by Nagai Kafu

First published in 1918, this is the story of a - I was going to say a love triangle, but it's a much more complicated geometrical shape than that!

It's about a relationship between well-off playboy Yoshioka, and a woman called Komayo. The two had been lovers many years ago, when Komayo was a young geisha. Later she married, but her husband died when she was still young and she has just returned to Tokyo and her former work, rather than staying a country widow with inlaws who don't understand her.

Yoshioka is attracted, both by the echoes of his earlier love affair, and the sophistication of being the sort of man who takes up an older geisha with a story, rather than just chasing the newest, prettiest one. So he becomes her 'danna' (a formal financial relationship) - abandoning Rikiji, the geisha he'd previously been spending most time with, to do so.

But Komayo is wary of tying herself down after what happened with her marriage, and furthermore quickly falls head-over-heels for a famous actor, and starts a personal relationship with him - one of her choice rather than for financial gain, in fact she gives him money rather than the other way around.

Her other danna is fine with this - "He says there's no fun in keeping a geisha who doesn't go in for buying the love of an actor now and then" and even sends a gift to the actor - but when Yoshioka finds out he is angry, and this gives Rikiji an opening to seek revenge on Komayo.

Look, I'm tying myself in knots trying to explain the plot, and this is only a fraction of it. And at the same time, I don't think this is a book to read for the plot, but for the atmosphere and life that it describes. Nagai was consciously writing at a time of social change and there are characters in the book who bemoan the modern world and how much less sophisticated behaviour is now - but from this distance, it all seems rather complex and picturesque. That said, it was interesting to see how the women in this novel were given a lot of agency, and not just to fight over men, in fact often looking for ways to preserve their own independence.

Autumn, which had arrived in an instant, made itself clearly felt in the refreshing color of the sky and the leaves of the willows, in the echoing clatter of geta in the midnight streets, in the tinkling bells of the jinrikisha, and in the chirping voices of the crickets that began to sound busily from the rubbish boxes in the alleys.

79. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

On the subject of women trying to live within narrow social boundaries...!

At the start of the play, Hedda Gabler is just returning from her honeymoon, and moving with her new husband George Tesman into what he thinks is her dream house. He's hugely stretched his finances so that she can live there - but it's all all right because he's going to be made a professor any day now - isn't he? We soon learn that Hedda has always been bored by him, and over the long honeymoon that boredom has turned to almost-loathing - but from a wealthy family herself, she has been hoping that the professorship will mean that she can continue to have the glamorous life that she is used to. She's also desperately frustrated by the restrictions of small-town society, but because of that longing for glamour and independence, is not quite brave enough to do anything that will pull the walls down around her. Instead she tries to find someone else who will - to her, their self-destruction looks like an act of bold selflessness. One potential target is her former lover Eilert Løvborg, a brilliant drunk who has straightened himself out (under the influence of one of Hedda's schoolfriends) and is about to publish a book which could make him a better candidate for professor than George.

This is a play which gives you a lot to think about. There is clearly a critique of the restrictions and narrowness that were placed on women's lives at the time, but at the same time Hedda does some quite monstrous things - and not all of her motivations are good ones that have gotten twisted - for example there is jealousy of the frumpy schoolfriend who had this transformative effect on Løvborg.

80. The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L Sayers

Another Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, following on from reading Gaudy Night at the end of last year. A re-read from my teenage years, and this misled me as I thought I remembered one of the main twists in the mystery and so interpreted various clues the wrong way!

I always find it a bit hard to review golden age murder mysteries because I feel that people either like the genre, in which case they have probably already read this one, or it's something they are not interested in at all. It's not really about the plot - although this has a good, twisty one, and an atmospheric (if very dated) setting of a village in the Fens, with a large church and a vicar who is slightly obsessed by bell-ringing (the nine tailors of the title are a peal of bells).

So perhaps I'll just say that I enjoyed this and I expect I will read it again (hopefully without leaving such a long gap as I did between now and the first time I read it!)

Glad you enjoyed revisiting Pratchett. I thought I had read it recently, but only if 2006 counts a recently. (I think my guess was about ten years off). Enjoyed these other posts too and the female independence theme. Your comments on Hedda and the Geisha’s caught my imagination a little.

>40 wandering_star:

It would be interesting to compare Hedda with Nora of A doll's house, if you're familiar with it? I haven't paid much attention to Ibsen since schooldays but as it happens I was thinking about delving again just yesterday, as I was reading about Edvard Munch--more precisely, reading Munch's direct statements about the meaning of his paintings, and the misogyny startled me. I mean, I wasn't surprised by its existence, it's a well-known trope of his work, but I didn't expect it would be verbally expressed quite so heavily, crudely. Anyway, got me thinking about the roiling of the new age and the New Woman in Norway/Scandinavia etc.

I'm also planning to read Pratchett since I acquired almost all of the Discworld series last year. I had read a few haphazardly--enjoyed all of them but simply adored Small Gods and Lords and Ladies.

>43 LolaWalser: Thanks, a good tip - I possibly saw A Doll's House in a TV production many years ago, but don't remember much about it - I will read it.

81. The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Jacob, a washed-up young writer (great first novel, two indifferent ones, no more ideas) is eking out a living teaching creative writing. One day, his most obnoxious student tells him the plot of the novel he is writing. It's brilliant - would clearly be a runaway breakout success. But he never sees that the book has been published and one day he discovers that the student died suddenly shortly after graduating his course. You can maybe guess what happens next...

I had a bit of a rollercoaster experience with this book. At first, I thought I had spotted that something quite interesting was going to happen, and was engaged and excited. When that thing didn't actually happen I got disappointed and started to pick holes in the story (for example, the famed plot at the centre of the story does have a Gone Girl-level twist, but the extracts of Jacob's book, which are included in the story, do NOT seem to me like they would create a bestseller). In the final third I got over my grumpiness and enjoyed this for what it was, a competent thriller with a clever idea for a story. (Although the final twist was so obvious that I assumed it was a red herring for the reader and there would be one more twist to come).

82. The Falconer by Dana Czapnik

“What do you wanna be, Lucy?” “The Falconer.” He sits up and squints at me, suddenly focused. “You want to raise hunting birds? You don’t even eat meat.” “No—like the statue in Central Park. It’s not of someone famous, it’s just some kid at the height of his powers standing on top of a mountain, commanding nature, releasing a bird into the wind without any fear.”

Lucy Adler is a teenage girl, living in New York. She's a serious student, but also a fanatical basketball player, which means that she's caught between tribes at her school with no real friends - apart from her oldest friend Percy, who she quietly adores even as she watches him chase and then dump the pretty girls.

This is a great portrait of a teenage girl, showing what it feels like on the inside. Lucy is sometimes obnoxious, sometimes yearning, always wanting to be herself, or at least to figure out what that means.

83. Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History by Anna Aslanyan

This book starts with the Potsdam Proclamation (26 July 1945), which demanded the surrender of Japan. At a press conference, the Japanese Prime Minister said he thought the Japanese government should mokusatsu the proclamation. He later said they intended this to have the force of 'no comment', but the literal translation is 'to kill with silence' and the US interpreted it as 'to ignore' or 'to treat with silent contempt'.

From this opening, and the book's subtitle, I thought that this would be a book about how international divides can be hampered by language barriers and reduced by good interpreters. There is a bit of this, but it's in a rag-bag of other content, covering literary translation as well as interpretation and going well outside the topic of international relations. There's nothing wrong with that, but I would perhaps have enjoyed the book more if I'd approached it expecting a series of essays rather than a coherent whole.

There is certainly a lot of interesting anecdote here, with histories of early interpreters and translators and the roles they played, sometimes spies as well as go-betweens. One Jesuit translator in 1860 added some provisions into the Chinese text of a treaty he'd been asked to check against the French version (to permit Christians to practise their religion in China and to give French missionaries property rights). It was interesting to see how interpreters deal with cultural interpretation too, particularly in jokes (one example from someone who was interpreting between Berlusconi and Putin for a TV documentary: At one point the presenter asks, ‘Where do you both get your endless energy from?’ I see Berlusconi smile, and my heart sinks because I know there’s something coming up. And sure enough, he goes, ‘Oh, we just use these special suppositories before work.’ It’s actually quite common in Italy, I mean suppositories, but I know the Russians might have a bit of a problem with that, and so I take a plunge: ‘Oh, we just take three special magic pills before work.’ Incidentally, this version wouldn’t work in Italy: here pills are usually associated with junkies.).

There is also an angry, and shocking, chapter about the appalling quality of translation which is on offer in the British court system - to save money the translation work was outsourced and now uses unqualified interpreters, with obvious knock-on effects on access to justice: "a slave gang trial was adjourned because the interpreter who had worked on the case could no longer afford to attend; ... a man who tried to steal £600 worth of groceries was held in custody for forty-eight hours before an interpreter could be found."

I've had Geisha in Rivalry on the shelf for years, but I've been avoiding it, because I somehow had the impression it was a dry nonfiction history. It sounds immensely readable, and now I think I'll try to get to it soonish.

84. A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker

The Don’t Forget Normal list included: street festivals, Renaissance fairs, amusement parks, supermarket runs, movie theaters, malls in December, talking to strangers in a waiting room. We debated whether some of those were things we actually missed, but decided they all went on the list. Just because something had needed improvement didn’t mean the solution was to cancel it entirely.

Well. This book was published shortly before the pandemic, but is quite prescient (and has come up with some details that ring true in our world, such as greeting someone with ‘do you hug’, which I said to a friend this week). At the same time there are a couple of hmmm.... moments, like the description of “the politicians who wielded restriction in the name of freedom and safety” as 'front page villains' - which has a different impact now than I think the author would have intended.

The story is that, some years in the past, a series of terrorist attacks followed closely by a pandemic have led to a world where almost everything is done online. A super-corporation which controls almost every aspect of the economy will sell you a connected Hoodie (TM) through which you can go to work, hang out with friends, watch sports and concerts. Rosemary isn't fully into the Hoodie world - she can't afford the most up-to-date kit - but she believes unquestioningly that the outside world is much too dangerous. But then a job opportunity almost falls into her lap...

This book is essentially a plea for experiencing real things - from music gigs to the sea. In a way it made more sense before the pandemic, when it might have seemed there was a real risk of people getting more into doing things online than in real life. I think now we do all know much more about what we miss from the non-online world. That said, this was a fun enough read with a good heart, and is particularly good about the pleasure of listening to music.

When the last chord rang, she played it again. And again. And again, and again, until a low battery warning appeared. It didn’t matter; the song was part of her now. She would never hear it without thinking of the beach, the gulls, and the absolute, boundless joy that started at her chest and expanded outward to fill her entirely when a song connected perfectly with a moment.

85. Lady Fanshawe's Receipt Book: An Englishwoman’s Life During the Civil War by Lucy Moore

The 'receipt book' of the title is a book which was kept by one Ann Fanshawe, a gentlewoman whose life was thrown into upheaval by the English Civil War. It contains recipes - some for food (including the earliest surviving recipes in English for 'icy cream' and 'chocelaty pottes' (hot chocolate)), but also a lot for medications - of which Ann has marked the ones which worked, and crossed out ones which didn't ("I have found good experementalley of this medicin"). It was a precious object for her - one of the few things she took with her when she left the family home and was willed on to her daughter, who added her own updates in it.

As well as talking about the receipt book, Moore draws on the memoir that Fanshawe wrote (for her son, rather than for publication) to tell a remarkable story. Ann's husband and father were both active on the royalist side, so she was sometimes a refugee, fleeting the fighting or going to Europe to seek support for their cause.

Other women in a similar situation were left in England, where they begged and borrowed money either to support the cause, or for their husbands to live on as they worked for it. Ann travelled with her husband but was no less helpful. When Cromwell's army took Cork, Ann managed to pack up Richard's papers (along with all the portable household valuables) and get out of the city. When Cromwell discovered that the papers had vanished he reportedly raged: 'it was as much worth to have seized the papers as the town'. (At this time, by the way, Ann was pregnant, as she often was - although she lost the baby during or shortly after the flight).

Just a few months later, while sailing for Spain, their ship was approached by a Turkish galley. Ann and the other women were sent belowdecks (if the other ship could see women on board, they were more likely to think the ship had a rich cargo, and try to board it). Ann borrowed a cabin boy's jacket, tucked her hair into his cap and snuck up on deck, 'as free from sickness and fear as, I confess, from discretion'. On the return journey, they sailed into a hurricane and were shipwrecked and washed ashore.

This was a fascinating read, not just for Ann's life but also all the other evidence available about women at the time. Moore describes the 16th and 17th centuries as a "scribbling age", including work by women. The Queen's court featured "a group of clever, ambitious women who acted as intelligencers, spies, campaigners and fundraisers, not always in the queen’s interest". There is also an overlap between the sort of household experimentation evidenced in the medical recipes, with early scientific experimentation, which some women were involved in too. It is sad that once the civil war was over and the court returned to frivolity, the more 'serious' roles available to women also eroded away.

Childbirth linen was precious, handed down from mother to daughter, and often had great sentimental value. A year earlier, a desperate Lucy Heath wrote to a friend from Oxford that everything had been taken from their sequestered estate, even ‘denying so much as might bury my deare babe I have now newly lost and to this is added this time when I most neede them being big with childe the takeing away of all my lennin even to my very baby clouts and mantels all of which I confess I much more prize in regard they were the gift of my deare mother’.

86. Pavane by Keith Roberts

An alternative history, which takes place in a world where the Reformation was not successful. Queen Elizabeth I was assassinated, and as a result the Spanish invasion of England succeeded and in the contemporary (1960s) time the novel is set in, the Catholic Church still dominates the world. One major impact of this is that technological innovation has been held back - electricity is heard of, just about, but is not in general use. Social change too has been slowed.

According to Neil Gaiman, who introduced this edition, a pavane is a stately court dance, and the book is divided into six 'measures' and a 'coda', like a piece of music. The stateliness is apt - the individual stories are each quite long and the events they describe are in many ways less important than the picture of the world that they slowly build up. As the stories unfold over several decades, the novel gradually builds up a picture of English society - and of resistance to the heavy hand of the Church. I think the stories alternate between one which is mainly about world-building, and one which moves the narrative forward.

It took me some while to get used to the pace of the book, and figure out what it was trying to do. I was then wrong-footed again at the end, as in the Coda appears to argue that all the brutality of the Church (which is clearly depicted through the novel) was probably justified. It suggests that the story of the book is what happened after our world ended in nuclear armageddon and history was then rewound to try again.

Pavane comes recommended by Gaiman and Jo Walton (another fantasy writer I rate). It's an unusual book, and perhaps that's why it has influenced them. There are definitely some interesting things about it, but I think the only reason I managed to finish it is that I was listening to it on audiobook in the car, in a week with several long drives.

87. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

Great Circle tells the story of an imagined female aviator in the US in the 1920s-1940s, interspersed with the story of a contemporary film star who is starring in a film about her life. The two women have a few things in common - both orphaned at an early age and brought up by an uncle - but the thread that links their stories is the limitations that are imposed on women, and both of them, in their own ways, are looking for ways to escape these limitations.

I loved this book for most of it, although it started to drag a bit at the end - it felt like the author didn't really know how to finish the book and just kept going in the hope that something would happen.

When you’re a movie star, you’re basically a good-looking dingbat running around with headshots, but people don’t see the dingbat. They see the sum of the characters you’ve played: someone who’s time-traveled, who’s saved civilization, who’s been chosen by a beautiful, powerful man as the object of his undying devotion, who’s been rescued from terrorists by her father, Russell Crowe. You take on weight and consequence. It’s like the dance of a thousand veils except with every role you’re putting on another veil, concealing yourself. Still, the effect is more seductive than a striptease.

88. The Viper by Christobel Kent

Mystery, set in contemporary Italy. Two bodies are discovered in a building on a mountainside - one, a local man, and the other a foreign woman who forty years before had headed up a commune in the nearby village, much resented by the villagers.

Back then, there had been an anonymous message to the police that the commune were abusing children, and Sandro Cellini, now a private detective, had been the younger policeman on the case. He's brought back in to help the police with these new murders. But finding out what happened involves remembering parts of his own past that he is troubled by, too.

What a treat to discover a new mystery writer that I like! This turns out to be the final book in the Sandro Cellini series, so I'll be going back to the earlier ones.

89. All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski

A manor house, East Prussia. It used to be surrounded by its own land, but the owners had to give up some of this for a housing development. The family do their best to ignore that fact though, as they try to ignore all other unpleasant things such as ugliness and poverty - and the growing numbers of refugees fleeing westwards, for it's 1945, and the sounds of war are getting closer.

Many of the chapters in the book focus on people who interact with the family as they pass through the village - the first an academic who is amazed that so close to the war zone this family is still eating from fine china and silver cutlery. This gives us an early introduction to the family's general cluelessness about the situation that may soon be facing them. He is not the first visitor to warn that it would be advisable to get rid of the Hitler images in the house, before the Russian forces roll through.

This was a really good picture of the paralysis of decisions when things are changing so unimaginably. The von Globigs are not the only family who spend too much time wondering about where to go and what to take with them, and to squander chances for survival because they can't imagine what is coming. Other people on the road, too, have dithered about how to protect an old manuscript or a precious collection.

They had been on the road for ever and a day, or rather three days, leaving everything behind. The teacher had left his collection of Stone Age artefacts from the village behind: his stone axes, scrapers and blades. All neatly numbered. His wife had left her pretty garden, where she grew dahlias every year, stocks, hollyhocks, phlox, systematically laid out in order of rotation and their requirements for light and shade.

I read this in early September and it was hard not to think about those fleeing from Afghanistan - packing and repacking their suitcases, trying to decide what is most necessary, only to be told that they cannot take anything they can't carry in their pockets.

>54 wandering_star: An amazing book that sticks with you.

>54 wandering_star: & >55 SassyLassy: Yes, extremely powerful. Kempowski's own story is fascinating, as well.

Hmm. The reviews I've read of Great Circle have not been encouraging, and it seems that the novels by writers from the US chosen for this year's Booker Prize shortlist are decidedly inferior in quality. I would like to finish the shortlist in advance of the award ceremony on 3 November, so I'll probably read it while I'm in Lisbon.

All for Nothing, on the other hand, sounds very interesting.

>57 kidzdoc: Yes, that's interesting. I was loving Great Circle and set for a five-star review for the first 3/4 of the book. But I was expecting an ending which would pull the book together, rather than just end. I also find that now, a few weeks later, I can't remember much about it, other than the personalities of the two main women (who are great characters, especially Marian).

>58 wandering_star: Thanks for those thoughts about Great Circle. The completist part of me wants to read this novel in advance of the Booker Prize award ceremony on 3 November, and I probably will, but there are several longlisted novels that I'd rather read ahead of it and Bewilderment, in particular An Island by Karen Jennings, which is great so far, The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris, and China Room by Sunjeev Sahota. Regardless of what I decide to do I'm all but completely certain that A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam will get my nod to win the Booker Prize.

>59 kidzdoc: I just found your new thread and am now even more excited about reading The Fortune Men - my library hold came in this morning - and very interested in A Passage North.

>60 wandering_star: Great! I'll post reviews of A Passage North and An Island later this week.

>54 wandering_star: Making note of All for Nothing. Excellent review.

>54 wandering_star: Noted here too. It's a slice of WWII history that fascinates me—who knew what was happening politically and what it meant, who didn't know, who knew but didn't know what to do with that information. The past few years have gotten me thinking more about what that would be like. Thanks for the good review.

90. Every Seven Years by Denise Mina

This is from a series of "bibliomysteries: short tales about deadly books". It would probably have helped if I'd known that before reading it - because in that context, it's a clever little short story. Without that context it's a slightly odd mystery (and my confusion wasn't helped by the fact I was expecting a full-length novel - one of the problems with ebooks!)

91. The Survivors by Jane Harper

Jane Harper is one of my favourite detective story writers, I think. She doesn't have a regular detective - instead, the common feature in her books is the Australian countryside, whether that's the arid outback of her first novel, set in a farming village during a severe drought, or the dense brush of her second novel, in which a team-building weekend ends up in murder. The Survivors is set in a beach-side surfing spot, which is so tourist-dependent that the local police have decided it's only worth posting an officer there during the season. The story takes place right at the end of the season, when one of the seasonal workers, a young waitress, is found dead on the beach.

The title, the Survivors, refers to a statue in the town which commemorates a shipwreck many decades ago. But it also refers to some of the characters in the story, who survived a terrible storm in which some of the townspeople lost their lives. And when you see the word 'survivors', it's hard not to think of the phrase 'survivor's guilt', which also plays an important role in this story.

I think one of the reasons I like Jane Harper's crime novels is that people's behaviour seems realistic. I find too many others amp up the thrills at the expense of credibility. I started (and quickly abandoned) one recently where it was discovered that a serial killer had been carving letters into the names of his victims and the letters spelt out the name of an ex-police officer who was off the force because she had taken revenge on a criminal who had targeted her sister. Eyeroll. Even one of the ones I enjoyed and reviewed favourably this year had a sequence at the end where someone completely pointlessly put themselves into danger towards the end. None of that in Jane Harper - just a look at what kinds of situations might make someone desperate enough to commit a terrible crime.

Also she just keeps getting better. I think this is my new favourite of hers, taking over from The Lost Man, her third book. Hurry up, more please!

>65 wandering_star: I thought The Survivors was really fun—agreed on the fact that her characters' motivations are believable, which is what I think makes a thriller thrilling.

>65 wandering_star: Agreed, I really liked this one. Force of Nature was the only one I didn't love and it was because I didn't find the characters' reactions realistic.

92. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

I read this book in early September, and have been very stuck on reviewing it. I think it's because I wanted to like it more than I did and I feel a bit mean to be critiquing it.

The backstory is that Brosh's first book, Hyperbole and a Half, was like nothing else - a combination of a crazily over-the-top hyperbolic hilarity, and a very profound and moving description of her depression - probably the best ever description I have read of what it actually feels like to be depressed. Her publisher then announced that the second book would be out in 2015 but it didn't in fact appear until 2020, presumably because Brosh was having difficulties producing enough material.

Solutions and Other Problems covers stories of Brosh's childhood weirdnesses, the breakup of her marriage and various self-destructive behaviours. There's a lot of pain here so as I said, I feel a bit mean to say that it's not as funny or profound as I was expecting. (I don't normally have this sort of feeling about a review but Brosh's books are so personal.) It does have some bits which are as good as anything in the first book, and I think maybe when I read it again I will like it more, because my expectations are different.

93. Follow This Thread by Henry Eliot

A book about mazes and labyrinths - including the Greek myth of Theseus and the labyrinth, Borges and his labyrinth, and the history of mazes around the world.

There are plenty of fun facts in the book but what makes it special is its layout - a red thread leads you through the pages, sometimes taking up half a page or more to loop itself into an image which relates to the text on the page, and the text itself sometimes turns away from the horizontal so that you have to turn the book sideways or upside down to keep reading.

94. Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag

Appa is a quiet man who lives in his own world, heading out somewhere like clockwork every morning and evening. If he dies without a will, his assets will be divided equally between me, my sister, and my mother. Our only fear now is that he might lose his mind with age and become ruinously entangled in some philanthropic enterprise. So we try to keep him in a good mood, making sure he doesn’t lose his taste for food or develop other ascetic tendencies. We steer him clear of thoughts about the futility of life and so on.

A novella about an Indian family who go from abject poverty to comfortable middle-class wealth. It is narrated by the son of the family, who turns out to be no good at business so is paid a salary but asked to stay away from the company offices, so he sits in his favourite cafe and tells his story to the sympathetic waiter. Through this we see the ways that becoming rich has not made the family happier, or into better people.

This was an interesting story but ultimately didn't work for me. I think with an unreliable narrator it needs to gradually dawn on you what is not being said, so you go back and think about the reality that underlies the story, so I would have preferred this to be more subtle. There is also a twist at the ending which is supposed to show the extent to which the family will go to protect their comfortable ignorance, but seemed quite a break from what had gone before.

95. Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson

In the future, many jobs are done by humanoid bots - dentistry, for example, although not doctoring because humans expect empathy from doctors but not from dentists. The narrator of this story, Jared, is indeed a bot dentist. As programmed, he works when he needs to and powers down when he doesn't. He observes humans, but mainly to notice how illogical they are compared to the perfect rationality of a bot. But one day, he starts to be troubled by something not in his programming - an awareness of how many more dental treatments he will provide before he comes to the end of his serviceable life. His one human friend tells him to go and watch some movies - old movies, that is, for all modern movies are about bots turning against their human overlords and eventually all having to be wasted by the human hero. Moved by the films he watches, Jared starts to develop human emotions.

When I first started reading this, I enjoyed it but expected it to start grating on me at some point. The jokes that Jared makes about human behaviour are the sort which raise a chuckle of recognition, but they aren't exactly ground-breaking.

I knew those data points about Dr Glundenstein because sometimes after our evening clinics he invited me into his consulting room across the corridor ‘to shoot the shit’. ‘To shoot the shit’ means ‘to patiently listen while a human drinks alcohol and complains about their concerns and grievances’. Nonetheless, I always cheerfully accepted the invitation. When a human invites you somewhere, the polite thing to do is to accept. Unless they are inviting you for the sake of politeness itself. On those occasions, the polite thing to do is to decline!

Rather than starting to grate, however, the character of Jared grew on me more and more, and I enjoyed this book all the way to the end - it is a sweet, gentle, funny read, and sometimes that's exactly what you want.

96. Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

This book uses the science fiction trope of the multiverse to examine alternative interpretations of historical events. Its direct inspiration is the fact that in 1903, Joseph Chamberlain suggested to Theodore Herzl that a Jewish state could be established in the territory which is now Uganda. Apparently, an expedition was sent to scope out the possibility, but reported that it was not a viable option. In Tidhar's story, the expedition leader has a cautionary vision of the Holocaust, and as a result the plan is put into action, creating 'Palestina' in East Africa.

At the start of the novel, a pulp writer Lior Tirosh returns home to Palestina from his normal residence in Berlin. But many things are strangely unfamiliar to him. Odd, time-slippy things happen and the reader begins to realise that Tirosh is somehow an accidental bridge between two of the multiverses. There are others, too, who can move between the multiverses, and echoes between them - during Tirosh's visit, a huge wall is being constructed in Palestina because of the ongoing attacks carried out against the state by the original inhabitants of the land.

There are really interesting ideas behind this novel, and some of the scenes are terrific - a standout for me was the one where the reader finally realises that Tirosh is flickering between two worlds without realising it. But the plot is not strong enough to hang this on. There are too many false leads which end up going nowhere, or that make no sense once you look back on the story as a whole.

“History is not one thing,” an instructor told you. It was spring, and the air was filled with the humming of bees. You had become better at holding the visions at bay controlling them, so that at times it seemed to you that you could simply slip, from one reality to the next, almost without trying. “It is a tapestry, like an old Persian rug, multiple strands of stories criss-crossing. Some are strong, central. Some fray at the ends. or fall off altogether. The places where they meet we call a crosshatch; they are peopled by shadows and doubles. They are places not to be trusted. Stories get muddled easily there.” “I don’t understand,” you said, and the instructor said, “You will have to go there.”

97. Darwin's Ghosts by Rebecca Stott

A fascinating look at the precursors to Darwin, whose close observation of the diversity of the natural world led them to glimpse elements of what we now know as natural selection.

From the ancient and early modern world we meet Aristotle, carefully studying the natural world around him; the ninth-century Basra polymath Jahiz, who inspired by Aristotle, wrote the Book of Living Beings, which “came close to a theory of evolution and natural selection that would not be matched for another thousand years”; Leonardo da Vinci, who was fascinated by the fossilised remains of oystershells on Italian mountaintops and who conducted his own experiments with live cockles to test out some of the theories of how they could have ended up there.

Later on, understanding grows at a faster pace, although it also has to contend with the fact that it is overturning religious certainties, and so science is closely tied up with radical politics. (In case we thought science denial was a new thing, in 1790 the library and laboratory of amateur chemist Joseph Priestley was attacked and ransacked by rioters who disliked his outspoken support of liberal reform).

This book is full of fascinating stories. It also demonstrates nicely the way that science is inspired by, and develops from, its predecessors - from the earliest days. (The Caliph that Jahiz worked for once dreamt a conversation with Aristotle, and as a result was inspired to try and gather the writings of Aristotle from all over the known universe. These works were brought to Baghdad and translated in a building which became known as ‘the House of Wisdom’. Later these same works were taken back to Europe, translated again, and became a source of inspiration to thinkers there).

I've often thought about how it could be that Darwin and Wallace came up with the same idea independently, at around the same time. It turns out (and is obvious once you think about it) that they were both building on the same gradual developments in scientific thinking. Darwin himself wrote a note on a later edition of On the Origin of Species giving credit to his predecessors.

98. Outlawed by Anna North

An alternative Western story, set in a world where disease has killed so many that procreation is the first, if not only, responsibility of all women, and anyone who cannot - or worse, won't - reproduce is treated with great suspicion. Ada, our heroine, is learning from her mother to be a midwife, but when town gossip causes suspicion to fall on her, she realises that no pregnant woman will ever let her near them again - and worse, that if she sticks around life might get tough for her sisters too. Eventually she falls in with a gang of outcasts like her, and starts to prove her worth to them.

At this point I was expecting a wish-fulfilment romp, with the gang finally getting their revenge on the world which has rejected them. That's not what happened - which was both more interesting and less satisfying than a romp would have been!

I did enjoy reading this - although I was slightly surprised to see it turn up on an end-of-year best list (NPR book concierge).

Lo kicked my left heel. I lost my balance and stumbled forward into the wardrobe, clinging to the coats to keep from falling on my face.
“Sorry, little colt,” said Lo, laughing. “But you see what I mean now. Your weight’s all in your right foot. Men stand with their weight on both feet equally.”
With both feet planted I felt both too heavy and too casual, a big clumsy kid about to barrel down a hill.

99. Travelling Light by Tove Jansson

A collection of short stories, most of which seem in one way or another to be about the burden that human interactions place on each other.

Most of them are pretty naturalistic, and fall into a mental category I have of short stories where nothing really happens. I know that usually something does happen which changes the main character, or the relationships between the characters - but I don't find this kind of short story very satisfying (one reason why I felt like I got a lot out of A Swim In A Pond In The Rain).

A few of the stories had a more surreal edge, and I preferred these - such as the title story, in which someone boards a ship, delighted to be getting away from their daily life - but there are hints that he is actually getting away from something more sinister; and the final story, "Shopping", which was my favourite - it starts with a woman doing her daily chores and gradually it's revealed that she is living in a post-apocalyptic world, foraging for food and avoiding the terrifying creatures who are wandering the world - but yet all the way through it remains a story about the woman and her husband, and what would be ordinary daily life if the outside world was still ordinary.

Grandma sailed above all this like in a painting by Chagall, dispensing a sort of general benediction as she moved about the room dropping small pronouncements here and there. But I noticed she took care not to introduce anyone by name. Not the slightest suggestion of failing memory – just introduce yourselves, dear friends. Oh, to be as free as Grandma!

100. This Thing of Darkness by Harry Bingham

Fourth in the series of crime novels focused on DC Fiona Griffiths. I do enjoy these, and this one lived up to my expectations. Although I said in my review of The Survivors that I prefer realistically plausible crime stories, this series is often about crimes of conspiracy - although they are the sort of conspiracies that do happen, where powerful people exploit and hurt the weak to get themselves more money. And DC Griffiths, even when she has been put on some low-key cold cases while she recovers from the events of the previous book, always has an eye out for powerful people like that. And she loves to work meticulously through the details. So when she spots something odd about two, apparently unconnected, cold cases - one which was thought to be an accident, another a suicide - she follows the trails as far as they will go.

Something else which could be a cliche is the troubled, loner detective. Fiona Griffiths has recovered from a rare psychiatric condition, and is still someone who does not enjoy casual human interactions - but somehow this is handled in a way which works well. For example, as the series goes along she gets to know and work with her colleagues better, and they come to appreciate her more and help her to work in the way that suits her - contrary to the standard process whereby the detective's self-destructive behaviour becomes increasingly extreme.

My job, and Creamer’s, is to take notes. I hope Creamer is better than I am, because I keep forgetting to write, preferring to stare at the men opposite. Nice suits, nice shirts, nice manners. And somewhere close, a river running ankle-deep in blood. I feel the presence of the dead men, Moon and Livesey, quite acutely at times like these. Too acutely, a constant pressure. It’s like those no-pull dog harnesses, which twist the animal around if they start to pull on the lead. The stronger the investigative scent in the room, the more I feel tugged sideways.

101. The Misses Mallett by EH Young

EH Young is a writer who was very popular in the 1920s and 30s but has more or less been forgotten since then. This is the second of her books that I have read, after the excellent Chatterton Square, the last book she published.

The Misses Mallett of the title are two middle-aged sisters, Caroline and Sophia, their young half-sister Rose, and their niece Henrietta. Henrietta's father Reginald was the family's prodigal son, a tearaway who married a working-class woman, and who dies in poverty, after which the sisters bring Henrietta to live with them.

Coming into the household, Henrietta disrupts a family group which has fallen into long-established patterns - Caroline constantly tells grandiose stories about her and her sister's glory days, the times they were the jewel in the room at parties, and all the men who fell at her feet; Sophia thinks quietly of a man she did love in the past, but never speaks of him because this would clash with her sister's self-image; and Rose rides around the countryside, dreaming of a man who would match up to her, while periodically being proposed to by a nearby landowner (and her childhood friend) Francis.

The move upturns Henrietta's life too - she goes from being a poor young woman who has to work hard to make a living, to being a comfortably-off lady of leisure, with the time and resources to decide how she wants to live her life, but at the same time the discomfort which arises from the change in her fortunes.

I found this book rather reminiscent of Elena Ferrante in the way that Young closely examines and dissects the emotions that women have about each other, and about men.

There were some things about the book that didn't quite work for me - Caroline is played for broad comedy for much of it, which clashes a bit with the subtlety of the rest of the novel, although by the end we do see that there is more to her story. And the men who come into the story are pretty rubbish and not worth the emotions and thought that the women give them! Despite this, I strongly feel that EH Young is a writer who should be better known.

And what was she, standing there? A negatively virtuous young woman, without enough desire of any kind to impel her to trample over feelings, creeds and codes. If she died that moment, it would be said of her that she was beautiful, and that was all. Reginald, with his greed, his heartlessness, his indifference to all that did not serve him, would not be forgotten: people would sigh and smile at the mention of his name, hate him and wish him back. She envied him; she wished she could feel in swift, passionate gusts as he had done, with the force and the forgetfulness of a passing wind. His life, flecked with disgrace, must also have been rich with temporary but memorable beauty. The exterior of her own was all beauty, of person and surroundings, but within there seemed to be only a cold waste.

>76 wandering_star: I’ve read all of the Fiona Griffiths books and enjoyed them all (even if their not the most believable plots, as you say). I enjoy the South Wales locations, as that’s my home patch, and Fiona’s Dad reminds me so much of my Dad (excluding the fact that my Dad wasn’t a gangster, of course).

>78 SandDune: glad to hear it!!

102. The Inner Room by Robert Aickman

A short story published as one of those handbag-sized books. I bought this because I heard a discussion about Aickman as a writer of eerie, folk-horror inflected stories, which intrigued me - but at the same time I am quite wimpy about horror and didn't want to buy a whole book of his stories without testing whether I could take them!

This story, about a strange doll's house, has an effectively eerie build-up, but slightly fizzles out at the end.

Two rooms on the ground floor remained before I once more reached the front door. In the first of them a lady was writing with her back to the light and therefore to me. She frightened me also; because her grey hair was disordered and of uneven length, and descended in matted plaits, like snakes escaping from a basket, to the shoulders of her coarse grey dress. Of course, being a doll, she did not move, but the back of her head looked mad.

103. The Electric Woman: a memoir in death-defying acts by Tessa Fontaine

A memoir by a young woman who runs away to join the circus - specifically, the US' "last traditional traveling sideshow", the World of Wonders. At the time she does this, her mother is suffering from the aftermath of a massive stroke, and so the story of how Fontaine learns to swallow swords, eat fire, and - just as difficult - come to fit into the travelling troupe, is interspersed with a description of what is happening to her mother, and memories of her childhood.

I had always assumed that there was a trick to things like sword swallowing. It turns out there isn't - except that you have to go through a lot of pain to develop the ability to do it. Fontaine writes well about this, as well as the history of the sideshow and the strange attraction it has for people. I was less interested in the story of her mother - I don't tend to read 'misery memoir'-type things - so I did skim those sections, but was fascinated by the insights into the sideshow life.

Chris has decided it’s time for me to swallow swords. It’s one of the only acts I haven’t yet learned, but we all need to know every act in case anything happens to anyone, the Giant says. It feels good to put the blade in my mouth. But good isn’t quite the right word for how it feels to have the metal inside—it isn’t complicated enough. It feels dangerous and important, one of the pinnacle sideshow acts. And it hurts.

104. Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

Every foreigner who lives in China - every Chinese-speaking one anyway - has their set answer to give to taxi drivers when they ask your opinion of China, a set answer which is designed not to get you embroiled in a political argument. I used to fulsomely praise the achievements of the Chinese people (not the government). One of my friends told me that she would always answer, "It's very big, isn't it", which was apparently greeted by the cabbies as if it was the most insightful comment ever! Because of this, I was attracted to the title of this book of short stories set in contemporary China.

Not the best reason to pick a book up, but fortunately it paid off this time! I enjoyed these stories, which show China from a range of perspectives, including the urban and the rural, the poor and the rich, and above all people finding their way around a changing world. There is a political undertone to many of the stories, in particular those which are more allegorical than realist, such as the lovely "New Fruit".

The fruit had a taste marvelous and rare, sweet with an underside of acid. We lined up for blocks to buy it from street peddlers. We exchanged bites, though never satisfactorily. What tasted to me like the look of freshly arranged sunflowers in a green vase might taste to you like the way your daughter’s tiny socked feet sounded romping down the hall.

>82 wandering_star: And I saw this morning that Obama listed this as one of his books of 2021!

Enjoyed catching up on your reviews. Another few titles onto my list...

105. If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

A pretty grim look at what it is like to be a young woman in South Korea, told through the lives of four women who live in the same block - Ara, a hairdresser, and mute since an incident in her childhood; Kyuri, who has gone through extensive plastic surgery to be able to work in the very top hostess bars; Miho, a young artist who grew up in Korea but met her high-society Korean boyfriend at college in the US; and Wonna, an older, married woman, unhappily childless, who chose the flat in this building in order to be around the young lives of the other residents.

All four have come from poor backgrounds, so in addition to the pervasive misogyny and sexism, they are also struggling against snobbery in trying to make their way in modern Korean society.

There is not much of a plot - it's really more of a slice of four lives, with an attempt at an upbeat, women-supporting-women finish tacked on at the end (slightly unconvincingly given the grimness of what has gone before). But it clearly has a strong point that it wants to make, and does so pretty powerfully.

The second time, at the lunch, she asked me gentle questions about my family, questions that showed she knew all about me already and I shouldn’t attempt to gentrify myself. “So, how old were you when you last saw your parents?” “And your uncle, he ran a…taxi restaurant?” (with a shudder). And the kicker, “It’s just so wonderful how there are so many opportunities these days for people like you, isn’t it? Our country has become such an encouraging place.”

I could have looked hurt or angry, I know, but I settled on chirpy as my default state a while ago, because I remembered something Ruby said to me once back in New York.

“Rich people are fascinated by happiness,” she said. “It’s something they find maddening.”

106. Good Riddance by Elinor Lipman

When Daphne's mother dies, she specifically leaves her daughter an old high school yearbook, from the school where she was a teacher. She had made a point of going back to all the reunions and adding notes on her former students. But Daphne is puzzled by the bequest and throws the book out. It's only when her neighbour picks it up from the recycling and declares that she wants to make a podcast about it that Daphne starts to look at why her mother might have left it to her - and discovers something so amazing that everyone else in her life tries to steal the story to use for their own creative pursuits.

This book was funny and sweet but kind of thin - I enjoyed reading it, but two weeks on I struggled to remember enough about it to write this review.

107. Working on a Song: the lyrics of HADESTOWN by Anais Mitchell

I saw Hadestown - a musical retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice - on Broadway last month. It was so good! I had listened to the soundtrack already several times but it was fantastic to see the performance, and put the story together.

I had the songs in my head for days afterwards, and so picked up this book, which not only publishes the lyrics but explains the evolution that they went through, as the show went from off-off-Broadway to performances in London and Canada before achieving its final form. The songwriter Anais Mitchell walks us through how she took on critiques from the cast, crew and reviews, and honed the work. It is really interesting to see this creative process, what she started out trying to do, and how she found out what worked and what didn't.

In some cases, a small change can make a big difference to how something is received. For example, Mitchell talks about a problem they had in which early audiences found Orpheus hard to like. When he first meets Eurydice, the song he sings about his feelings for her came across as swaggering and arrogant. In the final version, when he is about to talk to Eurydice, Hermes advises him, "Orpheus, don't come on too strong..." - and with that simple framing, when Orpheus walks up to her and sings "Come home with me", the audience see him as a sweet, impractical dreamer rather than an entitled bro.

I was also really interested to see how Mitchell gradually enlarged the musical from a love story of two people towards a narrative which is about fighting for a better world, despite the odds - one of the things which gave the show such power for me.

The only downside for me is that when I saw Hadestown in the theatre, I was so emotionally engaged (I think because of the long pandemic break from anything like this) that I pretty much started crying whenever the music went into a minor key - and I brought this emotional memory into reading the book so I slightly sobbed my way through it, which limited where I was able to physically read it! I don't think others would have this problem though...

I know that Hadestown is—and this goes for any creative endeavor, I reckon—so much more than what meets the eye or the ear. What is seen and heard onstage is the blooming flower, but most of the plant is underground. Every line, verse, or chorus—every idea any of us who worked on it ever had, even the ones that never saw the light of day—they’re down there. They’re the roots of the plant, and the flower wouldn’t exist without them. The ones who bloom in the bitter snow bloom because they are supported from below by a thousand tries and failures.

There is a great Tiny Desk Concert featuring the stars - and Mitchell - performing some of the songs from the show, here.

>87 wandering_star:

Don't be ashamed of crying... :) It's the only classical "love story" that qualifies for "romantic". Where love is lost due to an excess of love, rather than time, pride, cruelty, corruption, rivalry etc. That of course is just one strangeness of this fascinating myth.

That's a really interesting comment and something I will have to think about more.

(That said, in the theatre I started crying well before anything sad actually happened....)

108. 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

This crime novel takes place in two timelines. In the first, a man and a woman start dating in early 2020, and when lockdown is imposed, they decide to move in together. In the second, 56 days later, the police have been called to an apartment block because of a terrible smell - and they find a single body inside. So we know the decision to move in together went badly - but we don't know how or why it ended up the way it did. As we follow the timelines - the couple getting to know each other, and the police gathering evidence about what happened - it turns out that both members of the couple had secrets in their past.

This book was much better than it needed to be. It has the kind of plot that would have sent it flying off the shelves even if the writing was clunky and the observations about the early days of COVID tired and clichéd. But in fact it is well written and observed, so that even the bits which aren't moving the story forward are enjoyable to read.

They don’t know what the other one does in times like this. Are they the kind of person who wears a mask before it’s mandatory and disinfects their phones and wipes their groceries down, or are they drinking cans in the park with friends on a sunny Saturday and sneering at anyone who tut-tuts as they pass? In between favourite movies and what they studied in college and where they hope to go this summer, they forgot to ask each other what kind of person are you in a global pandemic?

>90 wandering_star: This is one of those books I keep hearing about and think "I need to read that!" but then immediately forget about. Your post says this is a MUST READ. I think I don't own it because of a publication issues more than a "hmm, do I buy this available book or not?" issue. (checking book accounts . . . yeah, it's not in paperback until next year. . . that's why I haven't read this yet)

109. Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park

Another slice of life in modern South Korea, this time from the perspective of a young gay man, a writer. Each section of the book is about a particular time in his life and another person who is important to him, whether that's his (female) flatmate, his dying mother or one of his boyfriends.

I did not find this especially engaging but I realised from reading the afterword that the author was writing about something which was often ignored or hidden away, from a time slightly later on when the environment for gay men in Korea had improved.

He would invariably call after midnight, and I would leave Umma sleeping in her hospital room as I took a taxi to his place. The side effects from the Lasik surgery I'd had made the lights from the five hundred-odd streetlamps along Olympic Boulevard bleed into one another as the taxi zipped by, and the whole world looked like the inside of a dream.

>91 Nickelini: Yes do! I even feel I might read it again - although the story is so memorable that maybe I would remember the twists, whereas with a lot of crime novels I forget the ending so the second reading is similar to the first.

That reminds me that I recently read an article about what it is like being a Booker judge, and they said they end up reading the shortlisted books three times (to decide the longlist, to decide the shortlist, and to decide the winner) which is why comedy and crime novels don't tend to win.

>93 wandering_star: oh that sounds hard … maybe I don’t want to be a Booker judge ;)

>94 Nickelini: it did sound like a bit of an ordeal!

>90 wandering_star: Ooh BB!

110. Not So Quiet by Helen Zenna Smith

This book is a cry of rage against the horror and hypocrisy of war. The narrator, Helen Zenna Smith*, has gone out to the battlefields of WWI France as a volunteer ambulance driver. (In fact I learnt from an afterword that she was part of a scheme under which young women of genteel backgrounds paid to be sent out to the Front). She talks vividly about the horrifying scenes which she deals with every day, of wounded, crazed or dying men, and the grim circumstances in which the soldiers are treated and the ambulance drivers work.

Almost worse than the battlefield though is the fatuous jingoism of those at home, like Smith’s mother and her neighbour, competing ferociously with each other over whose family is doing more for the war effort, each desperate for their son to go out to France first. In one long section, the narrator is on duty after a big bombardment, and angrily imagines describing the scenes around her to her mother:

Take a good look at them ... The heroes you will sentimentalise over until peace is declared, and allow to starve for ever and ever, amen, afterwards. Don't go. Spare a glance for my last stretcher, ... that gibbering, unbelievable, unbandaged thing, a wagging lump of raw flesh on a neck, that was a face a short time ago, Mother and Mrs Evans-Mawnington.

This was first published in 1930, and even so long after the war, one UK reviewer suggested it should be burned (though it also won an award in France as 'the novel most calculated to promote international peace'). Some parts of it have not aged too well - some of the class attitudes, and a subplot in which another of the ambulance drivers, whom Smith admires and looks up to, is responsible for the sending home in disgrace of two other girls who, reading between the lines, are in a relationship with each other. However, I still think it is an eye-opening and worthwhile read, particularly in these times when jingoism is on the rise again.

*Helen Zenna Smith is actually the pseudonym of the author, whose real name was Evadne Price. She did not herself work as an ambulance driver but wrote the book after being asked to write a patriotic version of All Quiet on the Western Front - Price read the book and became angry at the commission, and made contact with a former ambulance driver, who shared her diaries from the war.

After this I really needed a light read so I turned to 111. The Christmas Egg by Mary Kelly, one of the British Library Crime Classics series of older crime novels.

This was published in 1958, so well after the Golden Age of crime fiction, but would be a good read for anyone who enjoys that kind of crime novel - the story revolves around the death of an elderly White Russian princess and the theft of the jewels she brought with her when she fled her homeland, and features an urbane sleuth, many engaging side characters, a good puzzle of a plot and a great car chase through a blizzard. Exactly the escapism I was looking for!

After Majendie’s blazing fire and soft carpets, the street seemed colder than before. Nightingale shivered. Majendie was an old fox as well as a hamster. All that blinking bonhomie; that exaggeratedly fragmented, dated, affectedly preserved manner of speaking; all of it a fence to baffle the casual observer from a glimpse of his cunning, even ruthless, pursuit of business. It was like a false limb, in the use of which he had from long practice grown so proficient that it was literally second nature.

>97 wandering_star:
>98 wandering_star:

Both of these sound so interesting. Where do you find your books?

>99 Nickelini: I think I heard about Not So Quiet on the Backlisted podcast - not as the main topic, but mentioned when the presenters go through what else they have been reading that week. I'm not sure about The Christmas Egg - I have it as a Kindle book so possibly it was one of the Kindle deals of the day, and I bought it because I quite like those British Library Crime Classics.

112. At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop

Well, the light reading didn't last for long. This is another book about the horror and hypocrisy of WWI, this time focusing on a group of Senegalese soldiers fighting in the French army.

The book starts blisteringly, with two vivid, unforgettable chapters. The narrator, Alfa, talks of the painful battlefield death of his childhood friend Mademba, and his own regrets that he did not put Mademba out of his misery, as he begged him to do. In the next chapter he talks of the horrifying way he avenges that death. His comrades initially cheer his exploits but then as he continues with them, start to fear and hate him.

Don’t tell me that we don’t need madness on the battlefield. God’s truth, the mad fear nothing. The others, white or black, play at being mad, perform madness so that they can calmly throw themselves in front of the bullets of the enemy on the other side. It allows them to run straight at death without being too afraid. You’d have to be mad to obey Captain Armand when he whistles for the attack, knowing there’s almost no chance you’ll come home alive. God’s truth, you’d have to be crazy to drag yourself screaming out of the belly of the earth. The bullets from the enemy on the other side, the giant seeds falling from the metallic sky, they aren’t afraid of screams, they aren’t afraid to pass through heads, flesh, to break bones and to sever lives. Temporary madness makes it possible to forget the truth about bullets. Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister.

But when you seem crazy all the time, continuously, without stopping, that’s when you make people afraid, even your war brothers. And that’s when you stop being the brave one, the death-defier, and become instead the true friend of death, its accomplice, its more-than-brother.

For me, however, all of the power which is built up in the first two-thirds of the book dissipates in the final third. One more shocking thing does happen - but it is pointlessly shocking in a way that the initial violence was not. It felt to me a little bit that the author could feel the momentum of the book slipping away and wanted to do something to pump it up again. But the book has won numerous awards so this may be a minority opinion.

113. Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor

This book starts with something of a bait and switch. The first part takes place in Antarctica: a team of three scientists become separated from one another during a terrible storm. One is carried away on an ice floe, another has a stroke. The emergency rescue arrive in time to find the latter man and evacuate him to hospital - but not the first, who dies.

I expected the rest of the book to be about the consequences of what happened in the storm - but in fact it is about Robert, the man who has the stroke, and how he and his family deal with his condition - particularly his wife, suddenly and bafflingly being landed with the responsibilities of looking after him, keeping him safe and trying to help him towards recovery. Of course, the story does also touch on other people's need to know what happened - the legal elements of the inquest and possible liability, but also the more emotional need to know of the third man in the expedition team. This is resolved in the most unexpected and moving way.

The use of language is one of the book’s strengths - most notably when Robert has the stroke and the storytelling from his viewpoint comes out in fractured prose.

We trek among to the Head, the Priest, here, and back around, behind, the normal-east side to averagely - here - and landfall we, re, we, re claim we cover. Luke was looking at him. With a something expression. Instubborn. Subordinate. That type of language was discouraged these days. You sure you’re okay, Doc? Rubbed his face. It was sure where he’d fallen. Sore. He was sure.

But language sometimes doesn’t work for other people, too - as when his wife is trying to tell an old friend that she had been thinking of leaving him, but cannot now - but she cannot make herself actually say the words, leaving him. And of course, even if you have the words, there are things which words cannot communicate.

I only heard about this book because my sister lent it to me - I can't recall anyone else talking about it, which surprises me. I think it is one of the best books I have read this year.

114. Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty

This is the first time I've read anything by Liane Moriarty. Is she always this good?? I really enjoyed this book about nine people who meet at an exclusive spa retreat, which promises that they will be different people when they leave. But the charismatic owner of the retreat has decided to try launch some rather experimental treatments this time...

It took me ages to decide how to describe this book but then I hit on it - it's a sort of thriller version of Marian Keyes. Like Keyes' novels, this is warm, wise and funny, a book which manages to have an ultimately positive worldview without being cloying. It also manages to be funny about the way that people judge each other from their appearances, without being cliched.

“I don't get the obsession with strangers, her first husband, Sol, once said to her, and Frances had struggled to explain that strangers were by definition interesting. It was their strangeness. The not-knowing. Once you knew everything there was to know about someone, you were generally ready to divorce them.”

115. Likes by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

This is a lovely short story collection. Bynum has a particular skill in making two different worlds merge seamlessly so you can't see the joins. This is most notable in two short stories which blur the line between contemporary life and the world of fairytales - "The Erlking", in which a child with her mother at a school fair spots a mysterious but compelling stranger, who her mother can't seem to see, and "The Young Wife's Tale", which is about a modern marriage but is also in some ways a fable. Following this, the story "The Bears" does not refer explicitly to fairytales but there are hints, including in the title, that you could see the story not from the narrator's viewpoint but as if she is in fact Goldilocks, wandering into someone else's house and consuming what they own. In another story, "The Burglar", a storyboard which a TV writer is putting together merges with something which is happening at the same time to his wife.

The other theme of the stories is relationships - childhood friendships, a marriage, a friend's marriage - and how small things can have a mysteriously big impact. These stories seem to ramble around, but end very satisfyingly.

Imogen’s father didn’t complain about driving them to the video-rental place, where the decision-making process was long and difficult, Mari going off on her own to comb through the old titles, in search of “A Taste of Honey” or “Billy Liar” or anything else about growing up working-class in the North of England, and Imogen and Bree tracking her down in the back of the store to say that the only black-and-white movie they would consent to watching was “Psycho.” Mari was in the thick of developing her sensibility, an essentially solitary endeavor, yet she liked doing so within earshot of familiar voices in the comedy section a few aisles away.

(from "Many A Little Makes", the longest story, available here (New Yorker, so might need a subscription).

>104 wandering_star: Bynum has a particular skill in making two different worlds merge seamlessly so you can't see the joins.
This is a great description of her writing, particularly the stories here. I really liked this collection a lot.

>97 wandering_star: That's an interesting book. I had never heard about it, thanks for the review!

>105 lisapeet: Have you read her others? Would you recommend? Madeleine Is Sleeping seems to be out of print in the UK but I am tempted by Ms Hempel Chronicles.

I still have four books to review, but I like to spend some of New Year's Day looking back over the previous year, and so as part of that I had a look back over my reading.

It has felt like a very good reading year, and my ratings seem to back that up. I had almost double the number of both 5-star and 4.5-star books compared to 2020.

That said, some of the books I read earlier in the year are less clear in my mind - this seems particularly the case for things that I liked because of the quality of the writing. I really like the kind of writing that conveys a lot of information in a few words, but perhaps that is easier to appreciate while you are reading it, than in memory. I’m also a bit surprised by some of the rankings - there are a few books which I don’t remember being great, but which I scored highly at the time.

Here are my best reads of the year.

Top three fiction (not counting short stories or crime, which are getting categories of their own):
- Lean Fall Stand
- Golden Hill - historical novel about the early days of New York. A re-read, almost accidentally - I heard an interview with the author about the book, and something he said made me want to re-read the start of the book. I did that and then couldn't put it down.
- Persuasion - although it always feels odd to put 'classics' into these sorts of ratings against contemporary books!

Top five non-fiction:
- A Swim In The Pond In The Rain - although this is a collection of short stories, I am putting it into non-fiction because I enjoyed and learnt from George Sanders' analysis of the classic Russian short stories more than I enjoyed the stories themselves!
- Entangled Life - about the unexpectedly rich world of fungi
- Lady Fanshawe’s Receipt Book - social history of the English Civil War, which touches in particular on the role of women and the history of food and medicine, through a close analysis of a handwritten book of food and medicine recipes kept by a Royalist family
- Consider the Fork - more social history, this time focusing on the technology around food, from forks to jelly moulds
- The Land Where Lemons Grow - beautifully written and evocative, almost a travel book, about citrus fruit in Italy

Top five crime/thriller:
- This Thing of Darkness
- The Survivors
- The Searcher
- Long Bright River
- Nine Perfect Strangers (if this counts as crime/thriller - there are crimes committed and police turn up; if not I could sub in Based on a True Story, a very meta story about someone who tries to steal the life of the book's author)

Top five short story collections:
- Likes
- Too Much Happiness
- The Office Of Historical Corrections
- Exhalation
- Land of Big Numbers

And special mention, for books which weren't the highest rated, but which I remember being interesting and would be most likely to recommend, seek out others by the author etc.
- Dreamland
- The Little Hotel
- The Liar’s Dictionary
- Mama Day
- Mexican Gothic

>107 wandering_star: I've read Madeleine Is Sleeping and Ms. Hempel Chronicles—it's been a long time but I remember liking Madeleine well enough and loving Ms. Hempel.

116. Things That Are: Encounters with Plants, Stars and Animals by Amy Leach

How to describe this book? It is a collection of essays about things in the natural world. But that doesn't really tell you anything about it. Yes, the essays contain facts about their subjects; but they are conveyed in the most poetical way.

The reason penguins don't place their egg at an easier distance from the sea is that their continent has meltable edges. Sorry the infant who stands close to sea, for spring may send it drifting off on a detached floe of ice; a straying acre bearing away a stationary, pear-shaped bit of fluff. How do you locate a wave?

I had never known that's why penguin colonies are left so far inland; and then you also have the vivid imagery of the fluffy chick drifting away.

Some of the essays also move from this poetical description of nature to talking about human nature, as with an essay about peas, and their inability to grow upwards without hanging onto an external structure, and the human need to find something to tether our personalities to; or the following sentence, which I love:

The man-of-war, for example, appears to be one individual, like Leo Tolstoy; but it is actually many individuals living together as a colony, like Leo Tolstoy.

When this worked for me, it was brilliant. So brilliant that I wanted to grab people and say, Listen to this metaphor, or Read this essay. It didn't always work - sometimes it was too whimsical or the connection felt too stretched for me; and I had to space out my reading of the essays as they were too rich to sit and read in one go. But I have never read anyone who writes anything like this, and that's a pretty remarkable thing to be able to say.

117. Moominsummer Madness by Tove Jansson

The first time I have read a Moomin book since I was a child. The story is pretty surreal. A great wave swamps the Moomins’ house, and as they are puzzling about what to do, another large house comes bobbing along the waters. At least, they think it’s a house, but it’s the strangest house you have ever seen - the reader knows it’s a theatre but the Moomins are puzzled by the props room full of wooden food, for example.

I can see though that for a child things in books don't have to be explicable - a magical world can exist on its own rules.

As an adult reading it I wondered whether some of the magical creatures are drawn from people Jansson knew in real life, like Misabel, who mopes constantly about not being included in fun but then doesn’t want to join in when she is invited.

It was a very charming read.

>110 wandering_star: OK, that image of the little penguin floating away is a heartbreaker. Book noted!

>111 wandering_star: I've loved rereading the Moomin books as an adult—not sure whether that's because they make up happy childhood memories for me or that they appeal to me at any age, but I really enjoy them still. And the art is fabulous.

>111 wandering_star:
Yes, Moomins are charming, aren't they. I read the first chapter of Comet in Moominland yesterday, and I will continue on, although there is something odd about the writing / translation. But a couple of years ago I read Moominvalley in November and it stuck with me in a haunting way, so I ordered more of the books. Some I read when I was young, some not.

>110 wandering_star: This sounds great. Noting.

>111 wandering_star: There's an excellent biography of Jansson, Tove Jansson: Work and Love which devotes a lot of time to the Moomin era, and yes, some are drawn from real people.

I haven't read any Moomins yet, but have read all the NYRB translations.

Finishing up the final reviews of the year.

118. Blitz Writing by Inez Holden

From Handheld, a small press which specialises in republishing out-of-print work, this volume brings together two works by Inez Holden, a woman with a fascinating life story (one Orwell biography, which mentions her as she was a friend and occasional lover of his, describes her as 'a dropout from the gentry' and she was deeply involved in bohemian life in London in the 30s and 40s as well as becoming a campaigning socialist writer).

The two works are 'Night Shift' (fiction, based on Holden's real experience working in a munitions factory during WWII) and 'It Was Different At The Time' (a memoir/edited diary covering her real life at the same period, which is more vivid but less focused than 'Night Shift').

'Night Shift' is a simply told story of the people who work in the factory, ordinary lives which are given significance by the fact that they could be lost at any minute through the Blitz. What I got most from reading these were the echoes of how people have dealt with the global crisis that we are currently in, from the emotional impact of listening to news which is constantly updated but never really changes:

The radio helps with regular news bulletins, and people ask each other, ‘What does the news mean? Is it better or worse or only a repetition of the last news with the hours of aeroplane takings-off, landings, and adjournments for lunch added?’

or the way that some people love to stir up gossip:

Ambrose told us about a man he had met in a pub down the road. It seemed that this man was one of the vast army who sustain themselves through the giving out of news and rumours. He was quite content to sit in the pub from opening till closing time getting into conversation with people.

(both these quotes are from It Was Different At The Time).

119. Constellations by Nick Payne

A play about a relationship between two people, or rather about all the different relationships that they might have had across different worlds in the multiverse. In some, they only meet briefly; in most of the ones we see in the play, they are in a relationship - but inevitably, more of the relationships end unhappily than happily, because there are many more ways for a relationship to go wrong than to go right.

I enjoyed it - cleverly done, and moving.

The staging in London this year played with the multiverse idea by having four separate pairs of actors play the couple on different nights. A couple of my friends were raving about this play, and I discovered it was watchable online until the end of November. I left the tab open in my browser and, of course, managed not to watch it before it was taken down. So that's why I had to read it instead.

And that was my last read of 2021! My thread for this year is here.

>115 wandering_star: I had never heard of Handheld before—what a neat collection.

>110 wandering_star: love these quotes.

>101 wandering_star: I found this book very hard to read and in this the author was successful in conveying the sheer horrific nature of trench warfare.

>102 wandering_star: I haven't read this one yet, but I've adored every single one of McGregor's novels that I've read. He knows how to use language.

>104 wandering_star: Skimmed your review of Likes as I have a copy, although I think I've already packed it and so it will be awhile before I read it.

>118 lisapeet: Yes, they have some interesting stuff - I have a few of their books, but the only other one I've read was Business As Usual which was an enjoyable read along the lines of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day and Miss Buncle's Book (all three are early 1930s light women's fiction).

>120 RidgewayGirl: I've only read this and Reservoir 13 by McGregor, but I thought both were very good. I've just looked at the synopsis of some of his others and am intrigued - he clearly likes to look at the repercussions over time of events which go unnoticed by many people. I hope Likes comes out of your boxes early on!