Rachbxl 2024

Showing up for another year!

After several years of on-and-off unsatisfactory reading, last year I read 59 books, a lot more than in recent years. More importantly, I enjoyed my reading last year much more than I have for a while and feel a renewed enthusiasm for it. There were also a couple of major (unplanned) changes in my reading, both of which contributed to the general upturn. Firstly, I’ve wanted for years to read more non-fiction (or any NF at all), but whenever I tried, whatever the subject, with very few exceptions my mind would wander within paragraphs, never to return. However, in late August I felt an unexpected urge to read NF, and I haven’t stopped - 19 NF books last year. The other change is how much I read in French. I have lived in French-speaking Belgium for over 20 years and am married to a French speaker, with whom I speak French. Although I’d previously read a fair amount in French, in recent years I haven’t wanted to do so, for no particular reason. That suddenly changed at exactly the same time that i started reading NF (in fact, much of the NF I read was in French), opening up a whole new world of local bookshops and libraries.

As ever, I have no reading plans for the year, though I’d like to think I’ll read a few TBR books. I like being sucked down rabbit-holes with my reading so should any present themselves I’ll happily succumb.

Books read this year:

1. One Last Time by Helga Flatland (Norway, translation, 2020)
2. One Life: My Mother’s Story by Kate Grenville (Australia, non-fiction, 2015)
3; Riambel by Priya Hein (Mauritius, 2022)
4. The Orchard by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry (Armenia/Russia, 2023)
5. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (Russia, play, 1904)
6. Taormine by Yves Ramey (France, in French 2022)
7. The Children's Bach by Helen Garner (Australia, 1984)
8. Chicken Health for Dummies (non-fiction)
9. Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens by Gail Damerow (non-fiction)
10. Armadale by Wilkie Collins (UK, 1866)
11. Miss Marte by Manuel Jabois (Spain, in Spanish, 2021)
12. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (USA, 2022)
13. Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania/UK, 2020)
14. Raconter la guerre by Françoise Wallemacq (in French, non-fiction)
15. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (USA, 2018)
16. All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (Canada, 2014)
17. The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death under Soviet Rule by Igort (graphic novel, non-fiction)
18. Dear Life by Rachel Clarke (non-fiction)
19. Literary Life Revisited by Posy Simmonds (cartoons)
20. Stolen by Ann-Helen Laestadius (Sweden, translation, 2021)
21; The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Malaysia, 2023)
22. Antarctica by Clare Keegan (short stories, Ireland, 1999)
23. My Soul Twin by Nina Haratischwili (Georgia/Germany, translation, 2011)
24. Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken (non-fiction)
25. The Skeleton in the Cupboard by Alice Thomas Ellis (UK, 1988)
26. Something Might Happen by Julie Myerson (UK, 2003)
27. Abroad in Japan by Chris Broad (non-fiction)
28. Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao (translation, non-fiction)
29. The Figurine by Victoria Hislop (UK)
30. The Fury by Alex Michaelides (UK/Cyprus, 2024)
31. The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak (Turkey, 2021)
32. Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout (USA, 2021)
33. Penance by Eliza Clark (UK, 2023)
34. The Hike by Lucy Clarke 5UK, 2023)
35. The Long Way Home by Louise Penny (Canada, 2014)
36. The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout (USA, 2013)
37. My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout (USA, 2016)
38. The Treatment by CL Taylor (UK, 2017)
39. The Bastard of Istanbul (Turkey, 2006)
40. Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout (USA, 2017)
41. Just One Thing by Michael Mosley (non-fiction)
42. Held by Anne Michaels (Canada, 2023)
43. Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout (USA, 2022)
44. You Are Here by David Nicholls (UK, 2024)
45. August Blue by Deborah Levy (UK, 2023)
46. En agosto nos vemos by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia, 2024)
47. Lazy City by Rachel Connolly (UK, 2023)
48. L’Arabe du futur volume 1 by Riad Sattouf (France/Syria,graphic novel, 2014, in French)
49. L’Arabe du futur volume 2 by Riad Sattouf (France/Syria, graphic novel, 2015, in French)

Saving this post to note down the very loosest of ideas (definitely not plans!) for my reading.

More Eduardo Halfón
More Margaret Kennedy
Helga Flatland

Happy New Year, Rachel! I didn't want to post earlier, because I was unsure if you were done setting up. I hate to barge in and mess up peoples threads. Anyway, I am glad you are back for another year of Club Read. You know I will be falling along no matter how much or how little you post. More Halfon sounds great. Which have you read so far? My favorite was Canción, but I liked The Polish Boxer and Monastery too. I think the only other one that has been translated into English is Mourning.

Happy New Year Rachel. So glad you had a good reading year. I need more Halfon too.

>4 labfs39: Hi Lisa, happy new year to you too! The only Halfón I’ve read so far is The Polish Boxer, which I read (and loved) years ago. All the recent love for it oil CR (you included) reminded me that I have been meaning to read more ever since. A good excuse for a trip to the Spanish bookshop near work some day soon…!

>5 dchaikin: Hello Dan, good to see you. Yep, my reading really worked out last year after a shaky start. Hoping my winning streak continues for a while yet.

Yesterday I finished my first book of 2024:

One Last Time by Helga Flatland
Translated from the Norwegian by Rosie Hedger

A great way to start my reading year. I hadn’t heard of Helga Flatland when I pulled this off the shelves in Waterstones in Brighton last week, but I will be reading more by her.

60-something Anne lives alone on what used to be the family farm, faithfully visiting her husband in the nearby nursing home where he has lived for years since being debilitated by a series of strokes. Anne receives a cancer diagnosis, and is told by her doctor that there is little hope of a cure. She tells her family, her daughter Sigrid, with whom she has a prickly, brittle relationship, and her son Magnus. Sigrid, herself a doctor, is at a crisis point in her relationship with her long-term partner, and is struggling to accept the way her almost-grown-up daughter has become close to her birth father, despite the fact that he walked out on Sigrid when Mia was a baby and has only just returned. Not much actually happens in the novel, and the things that in another writer’s hands would be big events (a family trip to France, for example, to satisfy a wish Anne feels she should have to see Paris) somehow aren’t, because Helga Flatland is all about the little stuff. She zooms in on tiny details, the way people react to each other, the way relationships can turn on a word said or unsaid, on a look, and she does it brilliantly. She is an astute observer of people, and at times I cringed at what I read as I felt found out - those impatient thoughts you tell yourself it’s ok to have about your elderly mother because nobody knows? Helga Flatland knows.

>7 rachbxl: Making note of this one.

That's really interesting about how your reading has shifted. Looking forward to seeing what you read this year, especially from the francophone world.

>7 rachbxl: interesting. New to me. And congrats on getting off to a good start. Sometimes I really enjoy these “little stuff” novels and other times I don’t seem to get along with them.

Hello Rachel and happy new year. Great to see your thread here, I am looking forward to seeing where your reading leads you to, and I'm glad you found your reading enthusiasm back!

>7 rachbxl: Helga Flatland knows. That sounds worrying.

I will definitely read something by Helga Flatland this year. I think my library has A Modern Family.

>8 RidgewayGirl: I'm quite sure that the shift in my reading, both towards NF and towards reading in French, has to do with my Dad's death in August. He was a great NF reader so that part's easily enough explained - reading NF myself is a way of feeling connected to him. The French bit is trickier but I think it's because of him too; he'd lived for over 20 years in France and although his spoken French wasn't bad (idiosyncratic, but effective), he had never managed to read a book in French despite repeated attempts. His death also made me think about to what extent he had held himself back by not getting involved in French-speaking activities because he felt his French wasn't good enough - he ended up lonely and isolated because of it. My French is much better than his and I would have said that I don't think twice about doing things in French...but I realised that that wasn't true for reading, and that I have excellent libraries and bookshops around me that I wasn't making full use of for myself (I used them for my daughter). Anyway, I see both parts of the shift in my reading as a kind of gift from Dad.

>9 dchaikin: Strangely enough, I didn't even realise that this was a "little stuff" novel until well after I'd finished it because Flatland turns the little stuff into big stuff (and maybe it is?) That's what really fascinated me here.

>10 raton-liseur: Happy new year to you too! Great to see you here.

>11 baswood: Doesn't it? Seriously, it's as if she has a bright torch she shines into the reader's darkest corners. Uncomfortable but quite impressive.

>12 japaul22: I look forward to seeing what you make of her. I'll definitely be reading more.

>13 rachbxl: What a nice tribute to your Dad (and a nice gift he gave you).

>13 rachbxl: that’s beautiful. ( and what our reading raccoon said)

One Life: My Mother’s Story by Kate Grenville

Kate Grenville is a writer whose work I’ve really enjoyed over the years, but more recently she’d slipped off my radar until I came across this book in a National Trust second-hand bookshop during my visit to the UK last week. As the title suggests, One Life is Grenville’s reconstruction of her mother Nance’s life, written after Nance’s death on the basis of her notebooks and input from family and friends. In many respects Nance was a very ordinary 20th century Australian woman, living a very ordinary 20th century Australian woman’s life, complete with all the limitations placed on women at the time. In that sense her story is universal, and the details could have been less than riveting in the hands of a less gifted storyteller. Not here, though - Grenville’s engaging style had me unable to put the book down. And then there are the parts where Nance’s story is anything but ordinary - she’d wanted to become a teacher, but her tyrant of a mother (herself uneducated) put paid to that (waste of time - female teachers were paid half what their male counterparts earned, and had to stop work on marriage) and sent her off to Sydney to train as a pharmacist. Train she did, although she hated it, working in a pharmacy every afternoon and all day Saturday, attending classes every morning, one of 3 or 4 women in a sea of men, graduating with top marks. Twice in her working life she opened her own pharmacy, an extraordinary thing for a woman to do at the time, and was hugely successful (the second time she made enough money in under a year to fund the building of the family home), but was thwarted on both occasions by lack of childcare (childcare being entirely her responsibility and nothing to do with her husband, of course). At a loose end during the school day after she’d had to give up her second pharmacy, she built the family home she had financed.

This was a quick read, hugely enjoyable. What a beautiful tribute from Grenville to her mother, and what a record of Nance’s life and times.

>17 rachbxl: Great review, Rachel. I really should read The Secret River. It's been on my shelves forever.

>17 rachbxl: great find and great review.

>17 rachbxl: What a great review, this is going straight to the wishlist.

I also have The Secret River on my TBR shelves, though only since 2016 which is practically yesterday.

>17 rachbxl: Great review! I've red and liked several books by Kate Grenville, but had not heard of this one.

>17 rachbxl: Glad to hear that Grenville is still writing good stuff. I think I've read it all but this new one.

Happy reading 2024, Rachel. You are off to a good start.

Happy new year, Rachel, already enjoying the reviews.

>18 labfs39:, >19 dchaikin: Thanks.

>19 dchaikin:, >20 rhian_of_oz: If you enjoy The Secret River I recommend Searching for the Secret River as a follow-up - it’s Kate Grenville’s account of how she came to write The Secret River, which I enjoyed almost more than The Secret River itself.

>20 rhian_of_oz: I’m with you! 2016 in TBR terms is no time at all ;-)

>21 arubabookwoman: Thanks. I’m not sure I’d have sought this one out, despite having enjoyed other Grenvilles, so it was a happy find.

>22 avaland: I’m delighted to discover that I have several more to read, written since I took my eye off the Grenville ball. Since One Life i(2015), she’s written a further 4 since then that I haven’t read, a mixture of fiction and NF - I’ve got some treats in store.

>23 Ameise1:, >24 LolaWalser: Thanks! And the same to both of you.

Riambel by Priya Hein



Riambel, published in 2023, is the first novel by Mauritian writer Priya Hein, who has lived for years between Germany and Mauritius. I hadn’t heard of her when I found this book in Waterstones on my recent trip back to the UK (recently I’ve been trying moderately successfully to read more books that come into the house instead of letting them get comfy on the TBR shelves). I don’t tend to set much store by book covers (or so I like to think, anyway), but I freely admit that I was swayed by the beautiful front cover of this book - I learnt at the end of the book that it’s by Mauritian artist Mila Gupta, who aims to capture the beauty of Mauritian nature in her work.

Riambel is a short novel written in fragments. The main narrator is a teenage girl, Noémi, who is forced to leave school, where she’s doing well, to go and work for the local rich (white, French-Mauritian) family her mother works for. Unlike generations of their ancestors Noémi and her mother aren’t slaves…but they are little more, subject to the unreasonable and often unjust whims of their employers, treated like disposable objects. The novel is a howl of anger at generational slavery and its repercussions today, and reading it was like having icy water thrown over me. In amongst Noémi’s fragments are fragments narrated by a kind of chorus of long-gone slave women, as well as recipes for the food they made for themselves. I found it all very powerful, with the exception of two passages which let the novel down - in one a teacher, and in the second a white volunteer at the school, lecture Noémi’s class at length about the injustice of racism and social inequality. The lectures themselves feel forced (for the benefit of the reader, just in case they happened to have missed the point so eloquently and elegantly made by the rest of the novel, rather than for the pupils), and Noémi’s verbatim recollection of the lectures feels unnatural. That aside, this is a really impressive debut.

*****************

Riambel is published in the UK by The Indigo Press. I hadn’t heard of them, but as the blurb sounded interesting (“Guided by a spirit of internationalism, feminism and social justice, we publish books to make readers see the world afresh, question their behaviour and beliefs, and imagine a better future” ) I had a look at their website…which led me on to my next book, Between Dog and Wolf (US title The Orchard) by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry.

>20 rhian_of_oz: This books sounds interesting, and from a part of the world I know very little about (except that Le Clézio has the Mauritius nationality (obviously from the wealthy white, French-Mauritian side).
Between Dog and Wolf/The Orchard has been read by a few CR readers, including Lisa (labfs39) I think, so that's a book that raised quite some interest at the moment.

>27 raton-liseur: Ah, I didn’t know that Le Clëzio has Mauritian nationality but it makes sense - one of the cover blurb quotes is from him. He is chair of the Prix Jean Franchette (for literature from the islands in the Indian Ocean, named after a Mauritian poet), which Riambel won in (I think) 2021. If you’re interested in other Mauritian writers, Natacha Appanah writes in French. I find her books to be variable, but when they are good they are outstanding. I like the ones set in France (where she now lives) less, but I’ve really enjoyed several set in Mauritius and/or Mayotte - Le dernier frère and Tropique de la violence in particular.

>27 raton-liseur: Interesting - I can’t find any mention of The Orchard/Between Dog and Wolf on LT other than my own. If anyone else in CR has read it I’d be interested in their thoughts on it. I’ll be back with my own comments soon, but not until I’ve finished Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard which I rushed off to read immediately when it became clear to me just how much The Orchard is based on it.

>26 rachbxl: Excellent review, and a book I have now added to my wishlist.

>27 raton-liseur: Nope, not me.

>26 rachbxl: You've raised my interest in both books you mention here, the one you reviewed and the one newly purchased. I followed the links to Amazon (and the cover for Riambel is indeed beautiful--I hope you post it), and both books were fairly inexpensive Kindle deals, so I bought them.

>25 rachbxl: I think I need to rediscover Kate Grenville. Noting Searching!

>26 rachbxl: excellent review. Sounds fantastic. I’ve read le Clezio’s The Prospector, and this might be interesting in light of that novel.

Looking forward to your next review

>28 rachbxl: I've actually read Le dernier frère by Nathacha Appanah, but did not really connect with the story and the writting, but I know I should try another book by this highly praised author.

>29 labfs39: Sorry... And now I can't find who mentionned it a couple of days ago. My mistake...

>31 dchaikin: Le Chercheur d'or/The Prospector is a Le Clézio I have not read (actually, this sentence seems to imly I've read a lot from him, which is not true.), but it sounds interesting, I keep an eye to see if I find it in a second hand bookshop one of these days.

>30 arubabookwoman: I’ll try to come back and post a photo of the cover of Riambel this evening. I hope you enjoy both books when you get to them.

>31 dchaikin: I’ve not read any Le Clézio (but now that I’m reading in French again I have no reason not to!), and having read your comment and investigated a bit, I’m now thinking that The Prospector might be interesting in light of Riambel.

>32 raton-liseur: I find that I either connect very strongly with Appanah’s books, or I just don’t, and when I don’t I sometimes can’t even finish them. The ones I’ve connected with I have loved.

>32 raton-liseur: Mmm, I think it was me! I’ve mentioned it several times these last few days, including on your thread, I think ;-)

>33 rachbxl: Wait... So I informed you that you were reading Between Dog and Wolf/The Orchard???
Isn't this slightly embarrassing?
Sorry for that!

>34 raton-liseur: ;-)

>32 raton-liseur: >33 rachbxl: Le Clezio's better books are really fun and The Prospector is my favorite of those I've read.

I've updated >26 rachbxl: - the cover of Riambel is there now (stunning work by Mauritian artist Mila Gupta).

The Orchard by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry
UK title Between Dog and Wolf

A glorious example of a ricochet read (thanks, raton-liseur - I know it wasn't your term originally but you introduced me to it). Between Dog and Wolf is published by the same small independent publishing house as Riambel and I liked the sound of what I read about it on their website. I found a library copy available immediately (meaning that I read a book with the American title, The Orchard, which I think is a better fit).

Before reading the book not only had I read the blurb on The Indigo Press's website, I'd also followed a couple of links to interviews with Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, and one to a clip of her talking about the book, her first novel. I'm glad I did that as I got more out of the novel as a result, though I wish I had read Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard first too, as The Orchard turned out to be more heavily influenced by Chekhov than I had realised. I read The Cherry Orchard immediately on finishing the novel, and things made more sense - not that it's impossible to read the novel without, but I got a better understanding of why certain things happened. The Afterword also clarified for me that events in The Orchard are based on Gorcheva-Newberry's own experiences during her childhood and adolescence in the USSR - part of the "perestroika generation"; this, too, helped me understand why certain things happened as they did (the most far-fetched of incidents turned out to be the most realistic, sadly).

Anya and Milka meet as very small children. Classmates and neighbours, they soon become inseparable friends, with Milka almost an adopted second daughter for Anya's parents (there's an unspoken understanding that something is not quite right at Milka's home with her mother and stepfather). They spend long summers together at Anya's family's dacha, complete with its small orchard, just outside Moscow, and as they get older they navigate their changing bodies and changing feelings together, soon forming a foursome with 2 boys from school, Petya and Aleksey (the former a likeable nerd, the latter a likeable almost-scoundrel who later, thriving in the new post-perestroika Russia, becomes involved in the sale of Anya's family dacha). Like the girls, Russia, too, is changing (as it is changing in The Orchard, as the country hurtles towards perestroika. Throughout this first part of the novel I struggled to connect with it. I really wanted to, but it was as though I was seeing the characters through tinted glass. I felt like I was waiting for it to get going and I wondered if I should put it aside. And then, suddenly, just when I least expected it, get going it did. The second half of the novel takes place 20 years later. Anya has been living in the USA for 20 years and hasn't been back, until now. At this point it all came alive and made the first half come alive in retrospect, and it's a wonderfully poignant exercise in looking back and trying to grasp what's no longer there.

I learned after reading it that Gorcheva-Newberry had spent years working on a short story about her friendship with a girl in her neighbourhood - the story of Anya and Milka - without ever been happy with it. It was only as she attended a performance of The Cherry Orchard more recently that she had the idea of imposing the structure of the play on her story and turning it into a novel. Obviously her freedom as a writer is therefore limited twice over - by the need to "follow" Chekhov and by the need to tell her story as it happened. I realised that some of the points I thought were a bit wooden were actually the result of one of these restrictions, or both. However, once I understood more about the story Gorcheva-Newberry was wanting to tell, and after I'd read The Orchard and had a better idea of what she was trying to do there and why, I minded less about the artifice. In a nutshell, the novel didn't quite work for me on its own merits as I was reading it, but once I had finished it, and even more once I had extra information gleaned from interviews and the Afterword, etc, Anya and Milka got right under my skin (Petya and Aleksey still didn't, but they did once I had read The Cherry Orchard, which helped me understand Gorcheva-Newberry's characters better. Reading it and The Cherry Orchard has been an enriching experience.

I really enjoyed this post and all your exploration beyond but about the book.

>38 rachbxl: What a review! It really adds to it to have all the added information you provided. I think that seeking this information is often a measure of how much of an impression a particular book made on the reader.

>39 dchaikin:, >40 SassyLassy: Thanks. I find it interesting that if I’d picked up The Orchard because it caught my eye in the library, say, I don’t think I’d have finished it. I certainly would have missed much of what it’s really about. I’m glad I came to it via the publisher’s website instead, the crucial thing being that there was a link on the site to a YouTube clip of Gorcheva-Newberry talking about her book, which I watched immediately. It was because of that clip that I persisted, because I realised that there was more to it than what I could get without further research. So I happily fell into the rabbit hole and was particularly glad that it led me to:

The Orchard by Anton Chekhov

Other than one or two stories over the years - but really one or two, no more - Chekhov was a big gap in my reading. I assumed his work would be difficult to read, even though those one or two stories weren’t, and were in fact really enjoyable. During lockdown I watched a production of Uncle Vanya on BBC4 (a hybrid film/theatre version of a production at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London which was interrupted by lockdown), and it brought me joy for days afterwards (part of that was certainly the lockdown effect, but let’s give Chekhov some credit too). Yet still I didn’t read any Chekhov. I’m grateful that my experience with Gorcheva-Newberry’s book propelled me into The Orchard; what I found was imminently accessible and again, a joy.

Taormine by Yves Ravey
(Not translated into English?)

I picked this novel up the other day because the book I really wanted to read was upstairs and I was too lazy to go and get it. I chose this one from the nearest bookshelf on the basis that it was short and therefore wouldn’t interfere for too long with the other books I was reading, and indeed its brevity turned out to be welcome.

As the novel opens, a childless couple whose relationship is at breaking-point have just arrived in Sicily for a holiday which may or may not save their relationship. Their flight was delayed, and then it took ages to get their hire car, and now, tired, they’re heading for the hotel some distance away and they’re a bit lost but the man feels they should see the sea - they’re on holiday! - so turns off the main road on to a track which can only lead to the sea. Except it doesn’t, the area is one big building site, though there is at least a snack bar so they have a coffee, but the waiter is unfriendly…and so on. Yves Ravey does an excellent job of piling up the little details to create a realistic situation - the little disappointments and frustrations of the first day in a new place, it’s not how I expected, actually it’s probably partly me in that I’m expecting things to work like they do at home but I can’t admit it’s me so I’ll be low-level cross with this new place, and I feel a bit stupid because i don’t know how they do things here, but rather than admit that I’ll snap at my wife, etc etc. And then as they get back into the car it starts to rain. It rains so heavily that visibility is reduced to zero, and on top of that it’s getting dark. As they drive back up the track the car hits something with a big crash. The woman wants to get out and look; the man, driving, decrees that they need to get on to the hotel - there are bits of building site debris all over the place, not surprising they hit something, but it’s done now, the car’s still running so are they really going to get out in this downpour and see something they can’t do anything about right now anyway? And anyway, he wants this holiday that he’s organised to work and he’s not going to let a little bump in the car stand in his way…

…and that was where they lost me. The husband is a morally ambiguous character, but, until then, interesting - he justifies his choices in what I think is a realistic way although most of us perhaps prefer not to admit it. Interesting too in the way he contrasts with his wife, whose moral compass at first seems to be in full working order and who comes across as someone who generally has it together, unlike her husband. After they fail to investigate the bump, a really interesting story could have followed but I immediately realised that given we were already halfway into the 110 pages, I wasn’t going to get what I was hoping for. Instead the couple embark upon a mad jaunt in which he feverishly tries to cover their tracks, and she goes along with him as lies lead to more lies and one inexplicable decision leads to another. Before they know it they are in way above their heads, and don’t forget that this is Sicily, after all, so let’s pull out all the tropes - mafia! Migrants! People smugglers!

The End. (It just sort of stopped, and I actually checked that I wasn’t missing some pages!)

I hadn’t read anything by Yves Ravey before this, but I believe he’s quite popular (and certainly in the first half of Taormine I could see why - I was excited at the thought of having found a new source of not-too-taxing between-books books). Just before Christmas I read a book by another popular new-to-me French author, Marek Halter (because the subject, the Jewish community in Shanghai, was of interest to me), and Taormine makes me want to repeat what I said about Halter’s book - in both cases I felt like I had read the latest offering from a prolific and very successful writer who knows how to please his fans with a tried-and-tested formula…but I’m not one of those fans so both books left me wanting more.

My comments are almost longer than the book itself, but then I always find it easier to talk about books I haven’t enjoyed when there’s a particular reason rather than just a feeling of “didn’t work for me”.

Enjoyed your review of Taormine. There are many books where you feel that the author starts with a good idea, writes well and then lurches into familiar trope territory.

>42 rachbxl: Your description of the beginning sounds exactly like me at the beginning of a holiday! Too bad it didn't pan out.

>42 rachbxl: I too related strongly to your description of the beginning of the book: we rented a car at Charles de Gaulle, got lost on the peripherique because the exit we wanted was under construction, my ex put a large denomination bill in the toll booth and coins spewed out with such enthusiasm that the man in the car behind us got out to help collect them all, our three-year-old started crying, I was hangry, we stopped at what we thought was a mall hoping for a food court, but it was a multilevel home goods store, bought what food we could find, and hours later got to Giverny. No unidentified bumps though! Although later in the trip, my ex did back the rental car into a post.

>42 rachbxl: This author does not ring a bell, but your summary makes me think I've heard of this book before. I did not bother reading it, and won't bother after reading your review either.
Love the reason why you chose to read this book!

>42 rachbxl: up to the mafia part, and maybe not checking the bump, very relatable.

Fabulous review of Taormine, Rachel. I was eagerly following along with the story as you narrated it, and I felt a great sense of disappointment when the last half was so disappointing.

>43 baswood:, >44 FlorenceArt:, >45 labfs39:, >46 raton-liseur:, >47 dchaikin:, >48 kidzdoc: I keep coming back to Taormine and to how good that first part was and to how it went spinning off and lost me. Babelio (French book-chat site) is full of ecstatic reviews of it, but mainly from readers who are dyed-in-the-wool Yves Ravey fans who say in their reviews that they know what to expect in a Ravey novel and that with Taormine he hasn't let them down. I guess we just look for different things in a novel.

The Children's Bach by Helen Garner

I could do with a better system for keeping track of who my recommendations come from, but I think I have Kate to thank for putting Helen Garner, very well-known in Australia, it seems, on my radar. My one regret with this very short novel is that I didn't read it in one sitting, or two at a push. Instead I got distracted and let it spin out over several days. I still very much enjoyed it but it's such a focused, subtle novella where every word counts and what isn't said is as important as what is - as well as being told in a non-linear way that's confusing if you dip and and out - that I would have got more out of it from reading it in a different way, but that's my problem, not the book's.

I can't very well give plot details because there isn't really a plot. Nor can I talk about the main character, because there isn't one. I recall saying in my comments on another book I read recently that I felt like I was watching events and characters through tinted glass, and I didn't like that. Here I had the same feeling, and I loved it. The characters in the novella are a group of normal people in 1980s Melbourne, and what happens to them is life. They come into focus for brief moments and then drift away again, and Garner does nothing to make them stay. She doesn't give details, she doesn't entice us in with dramatic scenes...she just describes, in her laconic, elliptical way, what's going on in those brief moments when the characters are fully present. The focus becomes clearer as all of the characters move towards a crisis point in their respective lives...and then the focus slips again as their lives go on. I've been wrestling for a few days with what to say about The Children's Bach, and I'm not happy with my comments because I've made it sound too clever for itself, inaccessible, which it isn't. It's just not quite like anything else I've read for a very long time, but that's no bad thing.

>50 rachbxl: I don't know this author either, but your review is intriguing: no plot, no main character... but a story that works for you.
I like the image of watching events and characters through tinted glass. I'm with you: somtimes it works for me, sometimes it does not and it's difficult to pinpoint why it does or doesn't.
There are few books by Helen Garner in French, so I would have to read here in English. I'll have to think twice about it...

>50 rachbxl: Intriguing!

>51 raton-liseur: It's really short and not half as difficult as I've made out - even in French you'd need your wits about you to try to keep track of which character is doing what, so that wouldn't be any worse in English...give it a go!

>52 FlorenceArt: Not the most helpful review, I know, but I was at a loss!

>53 rachbxl: No, it was very useful to me. I think plot is overrated anyway, but probably that’s just me, I am plot challenged because I tend to forget as fast as I read.

>53 rachbxl: Nice try! Same as you, I try to let interesting reviews percolate before jumping on the book... And finding the book in English might prove to be a bit challenging, but I shall see.

>54 FlorenceArt: plot is overrated anyway. I love the way you put it. It would make a nice opening sentence for a thread in CR! (Although I am among those readers who do love a good plot, even if plot is not all what matters!).

>54 FlorenceArt:, >55 raton-liseur: I think I'm somewhere between the two of you. I love a good plot when I'm actually reading, but not at the expense of everything else, and it's not essential (and whilst I might enjoy the plot at the time, like you, Florence, I forget the details all too quickly). But plot details are really not what I react to when I read comments or reviews of a book.

>55 raton-liseur: I would offer to send it to you to push you a bit further along the road to temptation, but fortunately for you it was a library ebook ;-)

>50 rachbxl: your review has me interested.

>56 rachbxl: On the plot question, I think my position is close to yours.

fortunately for you it was a library ebook ;-) Phew... Joking aside, it's very kind of you to have thought to send it to me.
And this leads me to a question. You live in Belgium, right? Where do you get library ebooks in English from? I read few books in English so don't want to pay a huge fee for this (in France, the library fees I pay are between 0 and 10 euros...), so if you have any suggestions, I am all ears (eyes).

>58 raton-liseur: My local library network has some English books, but early in the pandemic I realised that I was going to need something more so I started looking around for a library in an English-speaking country which would accept me, albeit for a fee (until the pandemic I had relied on 2 good libraries to which I have access through work, which both have physical books only). I found several with astronomical membership fees for overseas readers, but then I found Queens Public Library in New York where I have full borrowing rights for ebooks (and magazines and newspapers) for - I think- $50 a year. I don’t know if it would be worth for you, but for me it definitely is.

>59 rachbxl: Yes, it seems the Queens Public Library is quite popular for overseas subscriptions, I rad about it earlier as well. Knowing that I read 1 or 2 books in English per year, $50 would be on the expensive side for me. Too bad... But I'll keep it in mind in case I increase my reading in English. Thanks!

Chicken Health for Dummies by Julie Gauthier and Rob Ludlow

I’ve been keeping a few chickens for several years (“I”, not “we”, since nobody else in the family is interested in anything other than eating the eggs), and I until recently I’d only ever dipped occasionally into my chicken keeping books in an “I suppose I should, just in case” kind of way as they had never had any particular problems. Around Christmas I was seized with the desire to find out as much about chickens as I can so I’ve been reading my existing collection of chicken books cover-to-cover (and possibly adding new ones to my collection), and I’ve been really enjoying doing so. Chicken Health for Dummies is the first I’ve actually finished (I’m reading several at once, in different rooms). I haven’t read any other dummies’ guides but I understand that the engaging, slightly humorous style is typical - which isn’t to say this book isn’t stuffed with useful information.

My new knowledge has been timely, as after several problem-free years I suddenly found myself dealing with a poorly chicken (or maybe it’s just that ignorance was bliss?) Unfortunately my new expertise didn’t save us a trip to the vet’s, but I did at least know for sure that I couldn’t help her myself.

>61 rachbxl: My daughter raised chickens when she was young and we lived in Washington, all different breeds, so we had different colored eggs. One chicken was descended from an egg Colin Firth had brought over from England. :-) I was amazed at the different personalities the hens had. Much more interesting than I had ever imagined and inspired me to only ever buy free-range eggs. Although our Labrador retriever was a dear about small animals friends and would let the chickens ride on his back and would snuggle with the guinea pigs, my daughter's German shepherd is much too prey driven to allow us to have small animals now.

Caught up with your reading and I did have a laugh when I got to the Chicken Health for Dummies ...

>62 labfs39: How has it taken me so long to reply? Where on earth did the last month go? Anyway, chickens certainly are little characters, which explains why the one of mine that's been sick is still alive - I keep hearing my late grandma's voice in my head, "wring its neck and get it in the pot!", but when she has a name and identifiable characteristics I can't do that...

>63 avaland: Ha! It's not my usual fare, is it? I've finished another in the meanwhile.

>64 rachbxl: Time does seem to be whizzing by these days. Glad you are doing well. We could never eat our hens either, but did enjoy the eggs.

Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens by Gail Damerow

I particularly enjoyed the bits that are irrelevant to me and my chickens and spent some happy reading moments discovering the whole new world (to me) that is breeding show chickens. I don't know why I found it so fascinating as it is really not something I have the slightest interest in doing!

Armadale by Wilkie Collins

Recommended by SassyLassy as a good first Wilkie Collins (thanks again).

The plot is preposterous and requires almost permanent suspension of disbelief. Several characters have the same name and at times it was hard to work out who had done what to whom. It's wordy and goes into ridiculous detail. And I loved it, all 700+ pages of it. I didn't exactly zip through it, and sometimes I put it down for days at a time, but always knowing I would come back to it soon, and whenever I did it felt like going back to an old friend. I'm really pleased to have got to Wilkie Collins at last, and I am looking forward to reading more by him.

Miss Marte by Manuel Jabois
(in Spanish - not translated into English?)

A few weeks ago I popped into my local Spanish bookshop with 2 aims, firstly to pick up something by Eduardo Halfon other than El boxeador polaco (The Polish Boxer), and secondly, to have a chat with the owner and get some recommendations. I failed on both fronts - they didn't have any Halfon, and the owner was busy with other people the whole time I was there. So instead I browsed, and came away with 2 books, one by an author I know, which I haven't yet finished, and this one, which I hadn't heard of.

Miss Marte starts with the wedding of two young people being disrupted by the discovery that the bride's toddler daughter has disappeared. This is in Galicia in the early 1990s. 25 years later, in the present day, a young prize-winning journalist, Berta Soneira, has decided to investigate the disappearance, which was never resolved. She arrives from Madrid and hooks up with a local journalist to act as her fixer. This man is the narrator, who goes on to write a book retelling the accounts given by local people and filmed by Berta Soneira for her TV documentary, which was never aired. So the book we read is a book written by the local journalist about an investigation into a long-dormant disappearance...but this local journalist isn't neutral, since he's also one of the people interviewed for the documentary, having been a close friend of the groom at the time. That perhaps sounds confusing, but I enjoyed the effect of the different layers of perspective - is what appears to be the truth actually the truth? Who can say?

This book was a lovely surprise and I fell in love with it a little bit. We're never sure what happened because things go in and out of focus, and the setting - small-town coastal Galicia - contributes to this, the fog rolling in off the sea and obscuring the view, the rain making it hard to distinguish things clearly. It's almost a magical environment, where things happen that couldn't happen elsewhere - and the title character, Miss Marte, aka Mai, the bride, a mysterious young girl who blows in from nowhere, has her magic too (there's a mention of Macondo at one point, and there's a definite whiff of magical realism here). I read an interview with Manuel Jabois in which he said Miss Marte isn't a comic novel but it does have elements of humour, and the gentle humour is something I really appreciated, all the more so as it took me back to my own years in northern Spain, right at the time of the disappearance. I lived in a town on the Camino de Santiago, which wasn't the big thing in the early 90s that it is today. There's a bit in the book where the narrator recalls that whenever he and his friends saw an outsider in the village they would immediately accost them with, "Are you doing the Camino?" That made me laugh out loud, it's such a beautiful observation and reminded me of something I'd forgotten - that's exactly what people used to do in the town where I lived too, confusing tourists who were generally there to see the cathedral and had little idea of what "el Camino" was. Interesting how that little comment anchors the narrative to a certain time - the Camino's popularly has soared since then, and it's unlikely that any visitors now would be unaware of it.

>68 rachbxl: What a lovely review. Sounds like it invokes a sense of place very well.

>67 rachbxl: So happy and relieved that you enjoyed it. I was somewhat apprehensive, to say the least, when I started your review, but then a huge smile. Read on!

>68 rachbxl: Envy you being able to read in Spanish. There are so many interesting authors.

>70 SassyLassy: Oops, sorry about that! I can well imagine how you felt on reading the first couple of lines... I really loved the way Collins built a whole world peopled by such vivid character (even if they do all have the same name!) - my mind keeps going back to it and them.

>67 rachbxl: >68 rachbxl: a good streak. The Spanish books sounds terrific (if i read Spanish)

>72 dchaikin: Hello Dan. Yes, a good streak, and it continues. I'm enjoying it.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

The right book at the right time. I came back from a skiing holiday last week with a heavy cold, and I wanted an easy, fun read, but an easy, fun read which credited the reader with a modicum of intelligence - and that's what I got.

Elizabeth is a scientist...but a female scientist in 1950s America has it tough, suffering not just at the hands of men (often less intelligent, less competent, less everything, but male) but also of women too - how dare another woman step out of line? Who does she think she is? Elizabeth doesn't fit the mould, and she (almost) doesn't care what other people think. Why can't she do what men do? She tries to forge ahead regardless. I liked Elizabeth from the outset, though she's prickly and doesn't read social cues, but I also had a problem with her from the outset: could a woman like this actually have existed in the 1950s? She has an awareness of the sexism, the inequalities, her lack of rights, that I'm not convinced by. Of course, there were women who had exactly that awareness and fought for women's rights decades before the 1950s, but as Elizabeth lives in her own little bubble I'm not sure she's one of them. Elizabeth struck me from the start as having more of a 21st century mindset, which bugged me a bit but I read on because I was enjoying Bonnie Garmus's funny, fresh voice so much (this is her first novel)...and then I realised that for me at least, it was exactly this clash between the 21st century mindset and the 1950s reality (not that long ago, after all) which made the book so effective because it shows just how ridiculous - how farcical - the situation of women was (I'm not saying it's perfect now, but what a long way we've come). There were a couple of other possible anachronisms which made me raise an eyebrow, and there was also a highly improbably dog (I can't say a talking dog, because he's not, but a dog whose very human thoughts are transcribed) that I should have hated, and some rather-too-convenient plot twists, particularly at the end, but somehow none of it spoiled my overall enjoyment.

>74 rachbxl: I also had a problem with her from the outset: could a woman like this actually have existed in the 1950s
I understand where you are coming from, but i think many “ordinary “ women were aware of the need for gender equality in the 1950s and earlier. I remember my mother who was not formally educated talking about her actions in those dreary times. She joined a group which fought for women’s rights. Suppressed people are aware they are suppressed no matter what period.

I enjoyed your review. I didn’t really understand what Lessons In Chemistry till I read your review. You’ve revived my interest in the book which I’ve been putting off reading.

>75 kjuliff: I don’t think my comments in >74 rachbxl: were as clear as they might have been (it was my third attempt to post as the first two versions disappeared, and each attempt got more and more telegraphic! I’m glad you got something from my post, Kate, as by the time I managed to post it felt like there wasn’t much of my original thoughts left). There certainly would have been a lot of the kind of awareness you mention in the 1950s, I agree, but my (probably unclear) question was really about whether Elizabeth herself could have had that awareness rather than if someone with that awareness could have existed. I didn’t find the package that is Elizabeth convincing in that sense. I’ve tried to explain what I mean in several different ways but I keep getting straight into spoiler territory and as you might read it I don’t want to do that (and it’s too late on a Friday night for me to go and check how to hide spoilers!) Read it and then we’ll talk ;-)

>76 rachbxl: I think I understand what you are saying Rachel. Guess I’ll have to read the book now! ;)

I do understand though how difficult it is to get your thoughts across in a review. I’ve tied myself in knots many times, reading what I’ve typed and knowing it’s not quite right. One problem is that there’s no way to save a post without publishing it. I have lost posts and had to rewrite them countless times.

>74 rachbxl: I’m sorry you lost two drafts. Your review provides an interesting perspective, a sense of the author’s play. Not sure this book is for me, but I would want your take in mind if I read it.

>78 dchaikin: I can quite confidently say that this isn’t a book for you, Dan ;-)

>79 rachbxl: Rachel, why are you confident that Dan would not like that book?

BTW since I replied to you I thought about my comments ( >75 kjuliff: )and I think I was wrong. I should have understood your point as I had the exact response in my review of Small Pleasures. I don’t know why I didn’t empathize with your point, but mea culpa.

Hi, Rachel!

>74 rachbxl:

I've heard so much about this book that reading it seems superfluous... I even caught an interview with the author. Must say I was most impressed that she took on studying chemistry in order to be able to write about it, I'd have assumed someone with that background.

I will say the choice of the 1950s is a little surprising, sexism in science is still going strong. It was only some ten? years ago or so that a chem Nobel publicly said women in a lab were a distraction.

>81 LolaWalser: Hello Lola! Now that’s interesting (that Bonnie Garmus studied chemistry to write the book) - it’s not like there are little nods to chemistry here and there, the book’s full of it. I’m in no position to say whether it’s convincing or not but it did strike me when I looked Garmus up that there was no chemistry in her bio, whereas (to this layperson, anyhow) what’s in the book goes beyond a layperson’s knowledge. Actually - as a former rower myself - it was the rowing I was interested in when I looked her up because there’s also a lot of technical rowing stuff in there, and yes, she’s a keen rower. I’m really selling this book now, aren’t I? Lots of chemistry, lots of rowing details…somehow Garmus pulls it off, though. It’s been a few weeks now and I really can’t remember much about the book itself, it faded quickly. What I do remember, though, was my sense that Garmus had a blast writing it and her enthusiasm was infectious. Really not one of the best books I’ve read recently, but I can forgive it many things because I enjoyed the ride so much. Somehow I hadn’t heard anything about it at all when I read it, which helped as well. (As for the 1950s setting…the rest of the plot wouldn’t work if it were set any later, I think).

I'm hopelessly behind with my comments on books read. Really enjoying my reading though, so I'll take that and live with the backlog. Jotting down books I've read recently before I forget, hoping to come back and comment on them later...

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Raconter la guerre by Françoise Wallemacq
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death under Soviet Rule by Igort

Hi Rachel! Some interesting reading, as always. Would you give the Igort graphic work a thumbs up? If so, I will look for it.

>84 labfs39: Hi Lisa! On balance I would recommend it, yes. I did find it quite bitty, piecemeal, though - but then, it's called "Notebooks", after all, ie it's more a collection of thoughts or snapshots rather than something linear. It's also worth noting that it's 2 completely separate notebooks published together, the Ukrainian one looking at the Holodomor, and the Russian one at Anna Politkovskaya's life and death. The purely factual parts are unlikely to go beyond what you already know, but the parts I liked best were the personal accounts of people who told their stories to Igort.

>85 rachbxl: Sounds worth a peek, onto the list it goes!

I hope spring has sprung for you. My daffodils (the ones that survived the April snowstorm) are finally blooming, and I wake to the sound of birdsong. It's still freezing some nights, but the days are in the high 40s low 50s and sunny more often than not. I'll take it!

>86 labfs39: Spring has sprung here too, a little while ago now. The daffodils (my favourite flower) are just about over (every year I take a photo of them to send to a Guatemalan friend who now lives in Mexico, and who fell in love with daffodils when she lived in the UK), but the tulips are in flower now. I've got 2 pots of tulips on the patio, visible from the living room, and they make me smile every time I see them. It's a beautiful spring day today, sunny but chilly (it froze last night), but generally what we've been having is rain, rain and more rain. To get to work I cycle along tracks through fields to the station, and every day I have to get togged up in full waterproofs whether it's actually raining or not, because there's no avoiding the huge muddy puddles right across the path (Peppa Pig would love it). By the way, I was thinking of you and your daughter earlier this week when our new Araucana chickens started laying their beautiful blue eggs. My daughter had the first two tiny ones fried on toast for breakfast this morning.

>87 rachbxl: When I studied in France, I got around by bicycle, but did not have the proper rainwear. I didn't realize how cold and rainy it could be. I ended up getting pneumonia! I'm still nostalgic about the biking though, and when I took my daughter to France when she was 10, we did a lot of bike riding.

I have been thinking about chickens (and guinea pigs) lately and wondering if I could keep some. Unfortunately, I think my daughter's German Shepherd would be a little too enthusiastic about the idea. I'm probably just waxing nostalgic in my dotage. But both chickens and guinea pigs had surprising amounts of personality. I enjoyed when my daughter had them.

My father used to raise chickens. He'd buy a few dozen chicks every spring. It turns out that the time of year when you buy chicks is, at least in northern Vermont, too early in spring for the chicks to be put outdoors in the chicken coop. If you put chicks in a cold coop overnight, what you find in the morning is a small mountain of chicks in the corner of the coop, trying to stay warm, with all the chicks at the bottom of the mountain having been smothered to death.

So for the first few weeks of their lives, the chicks had to live indoors with us. We cleared out the dining room -- a room that we only used at holidays, when there were more family present than could be seated at the kitchen table -- covered the floor in several layers of newspaper, and laid 2x4s across the entrance to the room to keep the chicks from escaping. (All you need is a 2x4, baby chicks being notoriously bad at pole vaulting.)

Turns out that chicks peep pretty much non-stop. Twenty-hours a day. All day. Every day. And my bedroom was directly above the dining room. No one ever longed for spring nights to get warm more than I did during chick season.

>89 KeithChaffee: Gosh, that reminds me of the year we got a single chick, which I, in all my three or four year old wisdom named Peep-Peep. As you say, the peeping is constant (I can't imagine with a whole batch of them!) My parents quickly found P2 a farm that "adopted" it.

>89 KeithChaffee:, >90 labfs39: I really fancy the idea of raising chicks but as soon as I think about the practicalities I go off the idea - so this year once again we got a couple of point-of-lay pullets who went straight into the outdoor coop!

Dear Life: a Doctor's Story of Love, Loss and Consolation by Rachel Clarke
Non-fiction

Rachel Clarke, a former current affairs journalist, is a palliative care doctor, and this book is about death, dying, end-of-life care and loss. Sounds bleak? Maybe - but I will be surprised if I read a more uplifting book this year. Clarke decided relatively late to follow her beloved father into medicine, driven by a desire to help people and make a difference (that's the one thing, she tells us, that you shouldn't say when interviewing for medical school). Dear Life recounts her path to the hospice in which she works, caring for terminally ill patients (and, I would say, their loved ones) and most definitely making a difference to them, by minimising their pain and discomfort, yes, but equally importantly by making sure that their last days are as full of life as the patients wish them to be, be that with a big event like a last-minute hospice wedding (complete with white dress, wedding cake and flowers) or with a relatively simple thing like moving a patient's chair and opening the double doors so that he could see the trees, the birds, the sky, and be in touch with nature. There is so much humanity here, so much compassion, and it moved me to tears on several occasions. Clarke is self-deprecating and modest and is at pains to point out that the humanity comes from her patients and that she receives as much as she gives - but what a lot she and her colleagues give. Her relationship with her GP father is a thread running through the book, and when he is diagnosed with terminal cancer she finds herself having to step out of the doctor's role and into the daughter's...and even here she is humble and manages to resume work after her father's death with a new understanding of what family members endure. I see Rachel Clarke has written 2 other non-fiction books, one about life as a junior NHS doctor, the other about her experience during the Covid pandemic, and I will seek them out because she writes so well.

Literary Life Revisited by Posy Simmonds

The original Literary Life came out about 20 years ago, a collection of the Literary Life cartoons that had appeared in The Guardian on a weekly basis over the previous two years, cartoons in which Posy Simmonds lampoons the pretensions of writers (and readers!) Literary Life Revisted is a bigger collection of Simmonds’ work. It’s a beautiful book physically, lovely thick paper and robust covers, a joy to have in my hands. And the cartoons…some are one-offs, whilst others bring back the same setting and characters every now and then (an independent bookshop and its staff and their attempts to bring in “real” customers (as opposed to those who duck in to get out of the rain and drip over the books), the pseudo advice column in which a doctor helps floundering writers fix their atrocious sex scenes, etc). The cartoons are charming, witty, often savage, wry. Unfortunately this was a library book so I read it quickly, and I don’t think that does it justice. This is a book to dip into and savour every now and then, then put aside.

>92 rachbxl: This sounds like a lovely book for when I am in the right mood.

>93 rachbxl: I'm tempted by this one, and I love beautifully made books. Have you read Tom Gauld's literary cartoons?

>93 rachbxl: I love love love Posy Simmonds—when I was drawing and cartooning regularly, I always used to look at her work and wish mine had just a little of that self-assured look—but haven't read that one. Onto the list it goes.

>93 rachbxl: I think Posy Simmonds received the main prize at the Angoulême festival last year. I had not heard of her. I should look her up at the library.

>94 labfs39: Yes, you’d have to be in the right mood for Dear Life, but I think you’d enjoy it if you were, Lisa (I use the word “enjoy” deliberately).

I don’t know Tom Gauld so I’m off to look him up.

>95 lisapeet: I lack vocabulary for talking about cartoons (and graphic novels) but I can see why you say it’s self-assured. Some of my favourite cartoons in this book were one single frame (? (I told you I lack vocab ;-) ) enlarged to fill the whole page, and with minimum words. I kept turning back to them to marvel at how much Simmonds says with so little. Now I want to read Gemma Bovery. Do you still do any cartooning, Lisa? What a great skill to have. It’s school holidays here, and my 10-year old is spending her days producing her own cartoon strips. I did the same at that age but mine were always flat and lifeless (I’ve never been able to draw), whereas my daughter manages to put life into her drawings - I’m quite envious (as well as a bit “are you sure you’re my child???”)

>96 FlorenceArt: That’s right, Simmonds won the main Angoulême prize, which is indirectly how I came to read Literary Life Revisited - thanks to Angoulême there was an article in Le Soir’s cultural section about Simmonds recently, and it mentioned this book (has a French translation just come out, maybe?) A few days later I went to the library at work and there it was, Literary Life Revisited - book serendipity.

>97 rachbxl: I don't draw comics anymore really... that feels like such a different life. But I recently got a copy of Lynda Barry's Making Comics because I thought it would be fun to get back into, or at least have a smoother path between eye and hand the way I used to when I drew constantly. I had just gotten back into a good drawing practice at the end of 2022 when everything went south (ridiculous work stuff, husband health stuff) and I feel like I need to kick myself in the ass (there's a cartoon for ya) to get back there again, because it made me so happy.

Great review of Dear Life, Rachel; that definitely goes onto the wish list, and I'll be on the lookout for all of her books. I was also greatly impressed by With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Kathryn Mannix, another British palliative care specialist. She read the glowing review I posted on Facebook, and after she learned that I was a pediatric hospitalist (hospital based pediatrician) who shared an office space with the Palliative Care team in the hospital we began to communicate with each other. I met her during the 2017 or 2018 Edinburgh International Book Festival, where I attended her talk, got her to sign my book, shared lunch with her, and attended a talk by Karl Ove Knausgaard about one of his books. I thoroughly enjoyed spending part of a day with her, and I was impressed with her sensitivity and compassion, which seems to be an essential element of palliative care physicians and advanced practice providers (I'm still good friends with one of the former palliative care nurse practitioners, thanks to Facebook).

ETA: Ooh, the Free Library of Philadelphia has two copies of Dear Life that no one is reading, so I just requested a copy of one of them.

>98 lisapeet: I hear you! I know how easy it is to stop doing things that make us happy - music, in my case - and not to come back to them even though we know they'll make us happy again. In the last couple of years I've joined an orchestra once again, and more recently a choir, and I get such a lot out of them both. But yes, it took a huge kick in the ass to get out there and do it. On Saturday evening I played in a wonderful concert and it made me think again how glad I am that I gave myself that kick.

>99 kidzdoc: Hi Darryl. I have to say that I thought of you as I read Dear Life as I thought it might be one for you. What a nice story about Kathryn Mannix!

Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius
Translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles

I came across this during a trawl through the library's e-book collection of translated fiction and thought it looked interesting, though I hadn't heard of the novel or the writer. Ann-Helén Laestadius has already published several YA novels, and this is her first adult novel. She's of Sami descent herself, and the Sami people and culture are at the heart of Stolen, offering a glimpse into a world I know little about. The novel opens with 8-year old Elsa witnessing the slaughter of her reindeer by a local - non-Sami - man. He sees her watching and gestures to her that he will kill her, too, if she speaks out. Fearing for herself and her family, she stays silent, and the increasingly gruesome killing of her community's reindeer (they are reindeer herders) continues for years. They all know who is responsible but the police turn a blind eye, just another example of how the Sami are treated. In the second half of the novel Elsa is an adult who determines to change things.

There was a lot I liked here - Stolen reads like a love-song to a disappearing world and a disappearing way of life, and the people and places Laestadius describes are very real. I did find it a little lengthy, and I got a bit frustrated with unnecessary detail and explanation (please don't tell me AGAIN that Elsa inherited her grandmother's short legs - I was paying attention and I got it the first time), but I wonder if that's a hangover from YA writing. The translation reads for the most part very smoothly...but almost too much so, in that to me it sounds so American that I half-think it was set in some snowy wilderness in the USA, rather than in northern Europe (at one point one of the characters takes some Tylenol; I wouldn't bet my life on it, but I think it unlikely that Tylenol be the painkiller of choice (or even available) in Sweden). The smoothness of the translation is regularly interrupted by Sami words, including all the chapter headings (at least, I assume they are Sami but there's never any mention or explanation of them, they're just there) - some were self-explanatory (I soon worked out that gatki is a form of traditional dress, for example), but others I had no idea about. Not necessarily the translator's fault since I assume the Swedish original is peppered with Sami words - but maybe the average Swedish reader is a little more familiar with at least some of these words than the average reader of English? I don't know.

Anyway, on balance I'm glad I read this. I believe Laestadius has another adult book out soon, this time about the "nomad schools", schools set up by the Swedish authorities to force Sami children into the system, and I'll be on the look-out for an English translation coming out.

>101 rachbxl: I'm interested in reading about the Sami culture, I wonder if there are other better books out there that have been translated into English? Will have to do some research. I'll keep this one on the back burner for now.

>102 labfs39: I read an interview with Ann-Helén Laestadius in which she mentions a couple of other books written by Sami women (as opposed to outsiders writing about the Sami) - I'll try to dig up the titles for you, I noted them down somewhere.

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

Despite - or perhaps because of - having loved both The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists, I didn't rush to read this, and even glowing reviews didn't do much to push me towards it. I think this was because I knew The House of Doors was "about" Somerset Maugham, which put me off for two reasons. Firstly, I know nothing about Somerset Maugham and haven't read any of his work, and secondly, I have a thing about (by which I mean against) novels which take a real person as one of their characters (I know, I know, I've enjoyed several of them, but I always think I'll hate them). My library hold kept coming up and I kept putting it off, but I told myself that if the hold came up again to coincide with my holiday last week, I'd read it then. Come up again at the right time it did, and no sooner had I started to read than I was hooked. Spellbound, in fact, and I remembered that that's what I love about Tan Twan Eng's writing; he weaves magic with words and carries me away to different worlds that I never want to leave. It doesn't matter whether he's writing about Somerset Maugham or a Japanese garden, it has the same effect on me. In contrast with Stolen, my previous read, this novel whizzed by all too quickly ("am I halfway through already?" as opposed to "am I still only halfway through?")

>104 rachbxl: I have been putting off House of Doors too, fearing it wouldn't live up to his previous two novels, and, well, Maugham. I'm so glad to read your review and know that it held up for you.

>104 rachbxl: I understand about novels with real people in them. I still haven’t read Wolf Hall because of that. Also, I hate Maugham. And I’ve never read any Tan Twan Eng, so I guess I don’t know what I’m missing.

>105 labfs39:, >106 FlorenceArt: in the end I don't think it matters whether Maugham in The House of Doors is Maugham or not, unless you're a Maugham fan anyway. There's another plotline which is based on a real (though not famous) person too, though I only realised quite late on that it wasn't entirely fictional and I don't think that affected my reading. Interestingly, though I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, it hasn't made me want to go and find out more about Maugham OR read any of his work. I'm happy just to leave him in the novel.

>106 FlorenceArt: Yes! Someone else who hasn't read Wolf Hall! (and for the same reason!) There aren't many of us around... As for Tan Twan Eng, I've really enjoyed all 3 of his novels but if you want to read any I would suggest starting with either of the other two rather than this one.

>108 Ann_R: Thanks ;-) Yes, we do have chickens - we've had a very small flock (currently 5) for a few years now. Wolf Hall...I've tried twice and not got very far on either attempt. I assume I'll try again at some point as I want to see what all the fuss is about (even my Dad, who read a lot of non-fiction but as far as I know very little fiction, loved it). Interesting that you say you found it tough at first; maybe I should persevere a bit longer next time.

Antarctica by Clare Keegan

I initially picked up this collection of Keegan's short stories several months ago, but I read the first page of the first story, "Antarctica" and knew I didn't want to read it right then. Back to the library it went. I borrowed it again recently and dived straight in. I'm glad I waited, because read at the right time I think "Antarctica" is perhaps one of the best short stories I've ever read. A married woman keeps wondering what it would be like to sleep with someone else but has always stopped short of any action. Off she goes for a couple of nights in a hotel in the city. I won't give away the plot; I'll just say that Keegan's deceptively simple style and her uncanny understanding of what makes people tick are used to devastating effect. I "knew" that nothing bad was going to happen because come on, this isn't some gothic horror story, but at the same time I couldn't shake off an awful sense of foreboding...and yet despite my instincts Keegan still managed to shock and surprise me. The ending was like a punch in the stomach. I also particularly appreciated the last story, "Passport Soup" (which isn't to say that I didn't like the stories in between, just that the first and the last were my favourites).

>110 rachbxl: Yes the short story “Antarctica” is one of the best short stories ever. Like you the ending took me by complete surprise. Not just because how the story was constructed, but I think it was most un-Keegan like. I can’t remember what “Passport Soup” was about. But yes all there stories are good. But none as good as the brilliant “Antarctica”. I wish she would like more like this.

>110 rachbxl: I bought that collection recently and I'm eager to get to it, even more since this rave (and a few others' here).

>111 kjuliff: That’s it - un-Keegan-like. As I read along with this increasing feeling of dread I kept reminding myself that this was Keegan, she doesn’t do whatever it was I was dreading. But she did.

>112 lisapeet: Lisa, it was the raving about this collection in CR that made me get it out of the library again the other week. I think you’ll like it.

My Soul Twin by Nino Haratischwili
Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins

Published in German in 2011, this has now been translated into English following the success of The Eighth Life (for Brilka). I was delighted to find it in the library as I would happily read anything more by this author, having enjoyed The Eighth Life so much.

My Soul Twin is a very different kind of novel, much smaller in scope and more intimate. The main character is 30-something Stella, a not-particularly-successful magazine features writer who lives in Hamburg with her husband and their small son. Her comfortable bourgeois life comes crashing down with the return of Ivo, her “kind of” brother (Stella’s family is full of relationships that defy conventional labels). Not a blood relation, Ivo is the son of the woman with whom her father was having an affair, who was unofficially adopted by Stella’s family after his mother’s death, and Stella hasn’t seen him since their disastrous relationship as a couple smashed apart. We know from the start that a childhood secret binds Stella to Ivo, but we only find out what it is right at the end. The novel starts in Hamburg then about halfway through shifts to Georgia. Ivo is an investigative journalist and is working on a story there, and begs Stella to join him (they are not Georgian and have no connection to Georgia, so I found it a bit puzzling). Once in Georgia the writing really starts to sing. The Hamburg part was quite flat and colourless, but maybe it was meant to be a reflection of Stella’s monotonous bourgeois life? I found a lot of things about this novel quite baffling - the ease with which Stella turns her back on her son (we keep being told how much she misses him, but to pop off to Georgia for months because this kind-of brother, who has already wrecked her life more than once, turns up again and begged her to?), the hold Ivo has over Stella, how Ivo unearthed the story in Georgia (a story which was to bring healing to himself and Stella, if only Stella would listen to it)… In short, it doesn’t stand up to The Eighth Life, but I kind of liked it anyway, despite finding Stella infuriating. I like Haratischwili’s writing style, particularly when she writes about things she cares about (as well as the Georgian part, I really liked the family scenes at her “kind of” aunt’s house on the Baltic Sea - they really come alive), and whilst Soul Twin certainly won’t be on my list of top reads of the year (or even the quarter), I enjoyed it. Another of Haratischwili’s books, Juja, has now been translated into English, and I will certainly read it at some point.

>114 rachbxl: Your review reminds me that I have been meaning to get that chunkster, The Eighth Life.

>113 rachbxl: Glad I was not alone on this. I too kept thinking - it’ll be ok, this is Keegan. She tricked us all.

It seems I haven't posted in a whole quarter! Various things have kept me from LT, not least the hassle of trying to deal with my dad's (chaotic) affairs from a distance (next week it will be a year since he died), and the knock-on effect it's had on me in my own life and my own home - I have spent the last couple of months ruthlessly de-cluttering our house. Books too. I had a big clear-out of books a few years ago, but it's gone even further now that I've discovered that one of the libraries I use at work will happily take any and all books - any they can't add to their collection get put out in the corridors on a "help yourself" shelf and (as the librarian put it) the vultures descend rapidly. So now whenever I visit the library I take a bag of 5 or 6 books with me and it gives me great satisfaction to know they're going to a good home.

I haven't stopped buying books though! I'm just back from a wonderful few days in London introducing my daughter to her "other" capital city. Yesterday we spent a happy hour in Daunt Books, which I was delighted that she fell in love with (selfish delight, I mean, because the fact that she was happy to poke around gave me browsing time ;-) ). The original Marylebone Daunt's is my all-time favourite bookshop, and I felt the familiar thrill of anticipation as I entered - what rabbit holes will I fall down this time? So much to learn, so many lives to live. I came away with a nice little haul (applying my usual rule in an English bookshop - I don't waste luggage space on something I've already heard of and could therefore order online):

Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao (I read half of this on the Eurostar home - written by a Taiwanese woman who went to live, originally alone and later with her Spanish husband, in the Sahara with the Sahrawi people in the 1970s, just because. Fabulous stuff).
Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew by Avi Shlaim
The Making of the Modern Middle East: a Personal History by Jeremy Bowen
Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food by Fuschia Dunlop
National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History and the Meaning of Home by Anya von Bremzen
The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser
Ponti by Sharlene Teo

As this list shows, I'm still feeling the pull of non-fiction (only the last 2 are fiction). I'm going where it takes me (though there's still nothing like a really good novel, just that I can't always find something to hit the spot).

Earlier in the week I had already acquired Jesmyn Ward's Let us Descend, breaking my "I've heard of you so I won't give you luggage space" rule because I had arrived in London with nothing to read (I did it on purpose, so I could buy a book or two on arrival). And while I was in Waterstones I also bought Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days (because I might not have been in the mood for Jesmyn Ward so I needed a back-up). I've started Let us Descend and I'm enjoying it every bit as much as I expected.

My bookshelves are in disarray after over a year of renovation work at home, and after my various culling expeditions. My LT library no longer bears any resemblance to my actual library. I've got a quiet week ahead of me work-wise and I'm feeling the call to start putting my books in order...

Oh, I have read the odd book since I last posted, though not that many. Here's what I remember though there are probably others (there are also various unfinished books as I've been struggling to get into things):

Ultra-Processed People: The Science behind Food that Isn't Food by Chris van Tulleken
The Skeleton in the Cupboard by Alice Thomas Ellis
Something Might Happen by Julie Myerson

>117 rachbxl: It's so nice to hear from you, Rachel! I admire your ruthlessness with book culling. I am trying to do something similar with children's books and failing miserably. If I don't remove them from the house immediately, I find myself pulling them back out of the donation bag!

Sounds like a fun trip to London and Daunt's. Great selection of purchases. I'm particularly looking forward to your impressions of Stories of the Sahara, Three Worlds, and Ponti.

>119 labfs39: I've become ruthless with my culling of everything (on a slightly different note, I even culled a chicken, but only because she was very poorly). I'm so sick of other people's stuff, and I've realised that whilst my books are not "stuff" to me, they are to everyone else. I listened to an audiobook a couple of years ago called The Swedish Art of Death Cleaning - I wasn't interested in the subject, I listened to it because i had just finished another audiobook read by Juliet Stevenson and at that point I would have listened to ANYTHING else she read; this was available at the library so I borrowed it. Apparently "death cleaning" is a Swedish concept and it's not morbid or gloomy (the translator explained that they had settled on "death cleaning" but weren't happy with the term) - it's about putting one's affairs in order with a view to making it easier on those who will have to clear up after us, and it's something that can (should) be engaged in at any stage in life, not just by the elderly. It spoke to me in a way that other books about letting things go (Marie Condo, etc) didn't, and the idea has stayed with me. I tried to get my dad onboard with it, but I understood that it was too late, and whereas until then I had found it an interesting concept but one for which I was way too young, having to deal with Dad's clutter (I used to laugh that he had never thrown out a single piece of paper, but the last laugh was on me because it turned out to be true - handwritten payslips from 1960, anyone? 1959 speeding fine?) made me determined to get on and reduce my own clutter right now (I thought it was fairly limited, but actually...) My husband had loads of stuff, not really his own but because his family have a less-than-endearing habit of treating our house as a repository for all those family "treasures" that nobody actually wants but that nobody wants to be the one to throw away - fortunately he has been so shocked by the volume of stuff Dad left me to deal with that he's become ruthless too and has got rid of almost everything that's not actually ours (in his case I doubt it will last so I've been striking while the iron's hot!)

>120 rachbxl: Interesting. You have me thinking about the boxes of "stuff" I brought from Washington, but which have remained in unopened boxes for the last 7 years. Can't be that important, right? I really should confront them down in the cellar where they simply take up space.

I've got so many books on the go (and I'm about to start several more, I can feel it, after a trip to a great bookshop in Genoa this afternoon) that whilst I've been reading, I don't have much to show for it in terms of books finished. Just this one:

Abroad in Japan by Chris Broad

I confess that I was glad to see the back of this one. I wondered if I should just give up on it but it was so easy to read that I thought I may as well see it through. I'm sorry I felt like that because I think there's a good book in there.

I had never heard of Chris Broad (I bought the book because my daughter spotted it in a London bookshop on our recent visit and suggested I buy it and read it as preparation for our (she hopes) forthcoming trip to Japan ("forthcoming" in that she wants to go and doesn't pass up on any opportunity to sell the idea to me); this was the first bookshop we went in, but having visited others later I realised that this book was piled high in a prominent position everywhere we went (which would have put me off, but it was too late)). It turns out that he is a successful YouTuber, being behind the most popular foreign YouTube channel about Japan (that sounds fairly niche to me, but apparently not). The book is the story of his first 10 years in Japan. He started out fresh from university as an English teacher on the JET scheme and was sent to a small-ish town in a remote province where there were few foreigners. I enjoyed this part for the insight into Japanese culture as seen by a newcomer, and for the self-deprecating stories about his early days in the classroom (having spent a couple of years fresh out of university teaching English abroad myself, there was a lot I could identify with). Right from the start he had been making little videos about his new life from his tiny flat and putting them on YouTube, though it seems that this was a very minor hobby at first and he had no thought of making money from it. After a couple of years teaching he decided to move to a bigger city and attempt to make a living from his YouTube channel...and that's where he lost me because it felt to me that the book lost direction and started jumping around from one anecdote about a film project to another without any clear purpose other than to fill the required number of pages. To make things worse, I found Broad increasingly annoying. At one point he describes himself as a loudmouth of a "British dickhead", and that's exactly how he comes across in this second part. To be fair to him, though, I went to check out his YouTube channel, also called "Abroad in Japan", and the video I watched (about a trip on a new Japanese sleeper train) was fun and informative and he wasn't a dickhead at all. I probably won't watch any more because YouTube's not my thing and life's too short, but I think perhaps YouTube is a great medium for him in a way a book isn't.

Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao
Translated from the Mandarin by Mike Fu

Sanmao was a Taiwanese woman who loved to travel, and whose passion for the desert (ignited by an article in National Geographic) led her to live in what was then the Spanish Sahara, in the 1970s, just before the Spanish lost control of the territory. This book is a collection of articles about her life there that she wrote for Taiwanese newspapers at the time. From what I understand she gained quite a following in Taiwan and China, and the articles were published there in book format soon after, though only translated into English recently (and translated so well that most of the time I forgot I was reading a translation at all, an epic feat on the part of the translator given the double lens of "foreign-ness" (a woman from a culture I know little about writing in her own language about life in a place I know nothing about, but where she, too, was an outsider)).

Sanmao sounds like she was something of a force of nature, and I'm not sure that the people she came into contact with in the desert, be they local Sahrawis or Spanish, knew what had hit them. Ruled by her heart rather than her head, she jumps in time and again without checking or thinking about consequences, often with very funny results. She doesn't shy away from laughing at herself, or at her long-suffering but equally impetuous Spanish husband, José (having been in love with her for years without her reciprocating, he took a job in the Spanish Sahara purely because of her love of the desert in the hope that she would come along, and it paid off) - they sound like quite the pair. For example, finding themselves chronically cash-strapped because of their love of food and their generosity as hosts, combined with their inability to budget, or to take a decision and stick to it, they decide to venture into the fresh fish business. They spend hours one weekend fishing, which turns out to be much harder than it looks, ending up exhausted, sweaty, stinking of fish and bad-tempered. Because of their lack of business acumen and their lack of a plan, they don't get a good price for their fish when they sell it to the local hotel. Sanmao is a gifted storyteller and even if it had stopped there it would have been a good yarn. The killer detail, though, is that they decide they're too tired to cook dinner for themselves and wind up paying through the nose to eat their own fish at the hotel, wiping out all their profit from the day and then some.

Sanmao would be a hopeless anthropologist - she gets far too involved and expresses frank opinions about people and about the local culture. She's not at all objective - why should she be? Instead she tells us in her fresh, direct way about the society in which she has landed and about her life in it and what she thinks about it. I imagine that some readers might be bothered by her lack of political correctness (her criticism of the local people for the lack of hygiene, for example) and by the way she interferes with things that are none of her business. These things didn't bother me because it seemed that both sides are guilty, but both sides keep on coming back to each other to get to know each other better.

This caught my eye in a bookshop - I hadn't heard of Sanmao but as I flicked through it I was immediately drawn in by her fresh, spontaneous way of telling things. I really enjoyed it.

>123 rachbxl: How interesting. Everything about it seems dichotomous (island-born, desert-living) and quixotic. It sounds like a fun read.

>124 labfs39: Unfortunately (because I like your idea of a dichotomy) she was born in mainland China. Her family moved to Taiwan when she was 6, and that seems to have been where she identified herself with. Quixotic (lovely word!) the whole thing certainly does seem to have been, though. I do wonder what the reality was - were she and her husband really as happy-go-lucky, reckless, even, as she describes them? I suspect she exaggerates because she knows she tells a good story that way. Anyway, it was a great little surprise of a book which has left some vivid images in my mind. One thing I forgot to say in my last post is that the chronology is odd, but as long as you bear in mind that these were originally separate newspaper articles, not a book, it works.

>123 rachbxl:

Fascinating! I'm strongly drawn to such characters. Definitely will look for it.

I'm yearning for a comfy chair and a good book I can get lost in (actually I don't even care if it's not good, as long as I can lose myself in it). Nothing's quite working at the moment though, just when I need it. My lovely Mum died a few weeks ago, only 13 months after Dad. Dad's death was a huge loss but not really surprising given his health problems (he survived almost 20 years with a transplanted heart and could have succumbed to any old infection or virus during that time, we knew that). But Mum...she seemed to be as fit as a fiddle (she wasn't, in the end) and I thought she'd be around for years yet. Fortunately we still have my stepdad, who has been in my life for over 40 years.

I've read a couple of things recently, and I've dipped into various others that I may come back to.

I finished this:

The Figurine by Victoria Hislop
Having enjoyed a couple of Victoria Hislop's books in the past, I had high hopes for this as a book to get lost in but it didn't quite do it, I think because whilst I enjoyed the story there was a lot about the novel I found frustrating - too much telling, not enough showing. For me it would have worked better with Helena as a first-person narrator, instead of the omniscient narrator constantly explaining what Helena thought and felt. Helena is a great character, but I think I would have felt more connected to her in the first person; the narrator acted as a kind of barrier. Maybe Helena's voice would have made the other characters come alive more as well, as I felt that some of them were quite wooden, falling neatly into one of 2 camps - the Goodies and the Baddies. And then there are the lectures on Greek history (the 20th century military coup and the generals as well as ancient history) and Greek culture. I know that Hislop has received awards from the Greek government for the promulgation of Greek culture (I paraphrase as I can't recall exactly what the award was for), but whereas other books of hers I've read (The Island (and the wonderful children's adaptation Maria's Island), Cartes postales from Greece, The Thread) are gently infused with Greek culture and history, this time it was almost as if Hislop felt she had to work harder to prove herself worthy of the award and I found it quite heavy-handed. Oh dear, that all sounds very negative. It wasn't a bad book - I read its 500 pages in a couple of days - but it didn't live up to my hopes for it.

The Fury by Alex Michaelides

I only read this last week but I remember very little about it, other than that this too is set in Greece and that I found the narrator very irritating (I don't think that's a criticism; he's an interesting character but not one I'd want around me). It was entertaining enough whilst I was reading it but it's all gone already. I remember having the same happen with Michaelides's The Maidens.

So sorry to hear about your mum, Rachel.

>127 rachbxl: you could try In the Winter Dark by Tim Winton - it got me out of my recent stuckness.

I'm sorry to hear about the death of your mother, Rachel.

>127 rachbxl: I am so sorry about your Mom. Hugs!

>127 rachbxl: I'm so sorry to hear about your mother, Rachel. That's a hard year.

>127 rachbxl: Difficult times, indeed. Sorry to hear about your Mom. Take care.

Oh, Rachel, I'm so sorry about your mom. You've had a rough year. I hope you can find more books to lose yourself in as you process all that's been happening. Take care of yourself.

I'm so sorry to hear about your Mum. Sending lots of comforting vibes.

>130 LolaWalser:, >132 kidzdoc:, >133 AnnieMod:, >134 japaul22:, >135 raton-liseur:, >136 labfs39:, >137 Ameise1: Thank you.

I’ve found the book I needed, one that’s bigger than me and my current state: The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. It’s exactly what I needed. I started it last night and will finish it this evening.

>139 rachbxl: I read this book back in 2022. I am not really a fan of Elif Shafak, but it's good that you the book that was just right for you those days!

>139 rachbxl: I have that one sitting on my read-sooner-rather-than-later bookcase.

>139 rachbxl: I really liked that book. And I just got off the library wait list for her new book, There are Rivers in the Sky.

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

My first Elif Shafak, but certainly not my last. I was tempted by her new one, There are Rivers in the Sky, in a bookshop a few weeks ago, but as I'm on on economy drive I decided to try the library instead. I added my name to the inevitable waiting list, and at the same time saw that The Island of Missing Trees was available immediately. It felt like a sign from the book gods so there was no ignoring it - and it was indeed the answer to my "someone give me a good book!" prayers. I loved it.

The narrative switches between 2010 London with 16-year old Ada grieving for her mother, and 1970s Cyprus, where Ada's Turkish Cypriot mother and Greek Cypriot father met as teenagers and fell in love. As the novel opens Ada's father is burying a fig tree in his north London garden in advance of a severe snowstorm - as someone who has spent his life studying trees, he knows that this is the best way to protect a fragile species from a harsh winter, and this, as we will see, not just any tree; it's a cutting from an old fig tree in a tavern in Cyprus which played an important role in the illicit courtship of Ada's parents. And not just any tree because this tree is none other than the narrator of parts of the book. When I realised this I'll admit that it was a bit of a turn-off; tricks like this so often fall flat on their face. Not there, though - it really works. Shafak has the fig tree, which has stood for decades (centuries?) and has seen and heard it all, narrate the sections which provide the historical background, the backdrop to the forbidden relationship between two young people from different communities. Particularly if I think back to The Figurine where I complained that the history lessons were a bit heavy-handed (strangely enough - I certainly didn't plan it this way - some of the history lessons in the two books are the same), this is a stroke of genius on Shafak's part - I learnt a lot about 20th century Cypriot history without feeling that I was being lectured. The tree parts weren't my favourite bits (I preferred the wonderful stories involving the characters, both in London and in Cyprus), but there were effective not just as a vehicle for the background, but also as a means of conveying the relative calm permanence of nature, as long as humans allow, compared to the frantic, often destructive, behaviour of humans.

>143 rachbxl: Nice to hear that you like Shafak's writing style. Here's what I've read from her so far:
The Architect's Apprentice (5 stars) and The Flea Palace (4 stars).
There are Rivers in the Sky I packed in my younger daughter's advent calendar. I hope that I can read it when she has read it.

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

This was another answer to my "someone give me a good book!" plea, this time not from the book gods but from a friend. I didn't mean to read it immediately - I had other things on the go - but I read the first page and just carried on. I hadn't realised it was a Lucy Barton book (it turns out to be the third), for which I'm glad; I haven't read the first two, and had I known I wouldn't have jumped in with this one. As it happens it works fine as a stand-alone, but I now want to go back and read the others. Lucy, in her early sixties, is mourning the death of her beloved second husband, and spending a lot of time with William, her first husband and the father of her two adult daughters. That's it, really, in terms of plot. But the characters, the insight..! Actually no, it's really only the character of Lucy, plus the odd flash of insight into another character. I read an LT review which complained that Lucy is the only developed character, that all the other characters are mainly in the shadows...to me that's the whole point. We are all the only developed character in our own life. Everyone else is in the shadows, mainly, with the odd bit of insight on our part throwing them into the light for a short period before our focus drifts off again. Marvellous.

>144 Ameise1: I've gone on the waiting list for all the Shafak e-books my library has, but I don't think that includes either of those. This week I'm going to visit both of the physical libraries I use at work to see what they've got...

I'm curious about the advent calendar now - please tell me more about it!

>146 rachbxl: Here is the link where I wrote about the book advent calendar and who gets what.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/363133#8658864

>147 Ameise1: Thank you! That's a lovely idea (I might steal it). Until last year I did an advent calendar of books for my daughter (she's 10), a new book every day - not that I buy 24 books every year for it; it's the same ones that come out year after year, all with a Christmas theme, mainly picture books with a couple of story books mixed in. Last year she asked that we get them all out on 1st December so she could dip in and out at will, and I think we'll be doing that again this year - it's a nice way of doing it too, but it means we've lost our advent calendar tradition.

I also loved The Island of Missing Trees and I actually just finished There are Rivers in the sky. I didn't like it as much as The Island of Missing Trees, but it's definitely worth reading. They have things in common - in Rivers, water is the element that draws bigger themes together, sort of like the fig tree in IoMT. And there's a lot of focus on how human conflicts affect the innocent.

I will keep reading her books, for sure. She has a lot to say and she's adept at weaving a lot of threads together to say it.

>148 rachbxl: You could buy an Advent storybook with 24 stories. This is available for all age groups. They have a picture for each story or sometimes a window picture where you scratch something up every day until a shining picture hangs in the window on the 24th. I have read these Advent calendar books to my daughters for years. I also used to do this as a teacher. There are countless wonderful books like this. So you would have both. You would have your books and a new shared experience.

>143 rachbxl: Good to know you liked this one; it's sitting on my read-sooner bookshelf. I have only read Shafak's Bastard of Istanbul, which touches on themes of memory and the Armenian genocide. I liked it, and have been meaning to read more by her.

>145 rachbxl: I had the same experience with Oh William!. I had somewhat studiously avoided reading Strout, as she did not sound like someone I would like. Then my book club selected this book one month, so I sat down grudgingly to read it. Immediately, for some unknown reason, I was deeply into the story and read it through. It was an interesting discussion at the group later, but many had read the two previous books, giving them more insight. As you say though, it stands alone very well.

We are all the only developed character in our own life. Everyone else is in the shadows, mainly, with the odd bit of insight on our part throwing them into the light for a short period before our focus drifts off again. - loved this

>150 Ameise1: Nice idea, I shall look into it. I wasn't aware of these books - thanks!

>151 labfs39: I went on a specific mission to the library today - I didn't have much time, and I went only to the 'S' fiction shelf, for Shafak and for Strout. I found several of Shafak's novels and several of Strouts, and I came away with The Bastard of Istanbul and My Name is Lucy Barton - very happy. It's suddenly turned cold and miserable here, and I'm feeling pretty cold and miserable myself (apart from missing Mum badly, I'm also suffering the after-effects of my Covid and flu booster shots, one in each arm yesterday); a weekend curled up with a good book or two sounds like just the thing.

>152 SassyLassy: Interesting that you had the same reaction to Oh William!, Sassy. It came to me in a pile of books passed on by a friend, and I picked it up with a view to putting it straight to the back of the queue - I read a line or two just to confirm that feeling - but as soon as I started reading I was drawn in. I've become really curious about Strout now and have gone straight on to The Burgess Boys, which is quite different but also extremely readable, and, like Oh William!, full of startling little flashes of insight into what makes people tick.

Penance by Eliza Clark

I have the greatest admiration for this book without actually having enjoyed reading it. No, that's not fair - I really enjoyed the first third, the rest much less, but the book itself is such an achievement that how much I enjoyed it (and I'll explain why I didn't) hardly matters.

A decade ago, 16-year old Joni was murdered by 3 of her schoolfriends in a small British coastal town. Now disgraced tabloid journalist Alec Z. Carelli (an anagram of Eliza Clark - if, unlike me, you spotted that right away you might start to wonder what's afoot) is trying to redeem himself, as he announces in the introduction, with this true crime book which aims to get to the bottom of what really happened to Joni, based amongst others on hours of interviews with those involved and their families and members of the community, letters exchanged with the perpetrators and observation of the area where the events took place. The book uses transcripts of true crime podcasts, diary entries and letters, blog entries as well as Carelli's own narration...which may or may not be reliable.

Reading this book was like walking on quicksand; I could never be sure if the ground would hold beneath me. What's true? What isn't? And at what level? Is this book fiction? Entirely? Did any of it really happen? It reads so much like a true crime investigation that I didn't always know, and for that I take my hat off to Eliza Clark, one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists - not an entirely comfortable feeling for me as a reader, but that she could pull it off is impressive. Next, even if we establish that it's fiction, how truthful is the narrator? Or the people he interviews? It sometimes felt like one big game of Murdle - some of these people are lying, some of them are lying all the time, some of them are lying some of the time...but who, and when?

So what didn't I enjoy? As I said, I liked the first third or so. The investigation looks at one girl at a time, perpetrators, victim and another girl who police initially thought was involved, and researches her world. The sections on the first girl or two I found extremely readable, but then I started to struggle because it veered off into territory that I'm so unfamiliar with that I found it hard going - reflecting these girls' interests, it was all about reddits and sub-reddits and I can't remember what else exactly but other online communities which for all I know are now obsolete anyway. I had to look a lot up and it was very enlightening (enlightening per se, but also in terms of showing me how vast is my ignorance) but didn't make for a very smooth reading experience. At times it felt like reading in a language I don't quite master, there were so many words I didn't understand.

The Hike by Lucy Clarke

Well-written, well-paced fun for a complete change of pace. If a murder is your idea of fun, obviously. This is what I believe is called a destination thriller, set in a remote mountainous area of Norway, where a group of 4 30-something women friends go for their latest girls' holiday, a 4-night wild camping hike which has disaster written all over it from the word go. Quite what form that disaster would take was a surprise, perhaps not always credible but I didn't mind as I was enjoying the ride and the suspense.

Like at least one other member of CR, I get a kick out of finding unexpected links between the books I read. One of the main characters here is called Joni, not a common name...but also the name of the murdered girl in >154 rachbxl: Penance.

>155 rachbxl: You got me with that setting. And my library has it, so on the wish list it goes!

The Long Way Home by Louise Penny

There I was, casting around in desperation to find a good book, and all the time I had the next (in terms of where I'm up to with the series) Inspector Gamache on my shelves. It did not disappoint; it was cosy and charming and touching and made me want to move to Three Pines, all the usual stuff. The last time I read a Three Pines mystery the use of commas irritated me so much (I forget why exactly but I do remember that I kept having to read bits several times to work out what was meant) that I swore I'd never read another and tried the next as an audiobook...but I don't really do audiobooks so that didn't work either, and I thought that was it for Inspector Gamache and me. Last weekend I decided to be brave and give The Long Way Home a go, and I'm pleased to report that the commas didn't bother me at all.

>156 japaul22: I should say, then, that it’s made-up ‘Norway’, to make the topography fit the plot. You’re better placed than I am to judge whether it’s at all convincing as Norway (having been AWOL for months I only just read about your trip today and saw your photos - sounds/looks amazing).

>158 rachbxl: Good to know! I'm certainly no expert on Norway, so I think it will still work for me in a fun way. It was a fantastic trip!!

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

Oh William! having come as such a revelation to me, I was straight off to the library for more Strout, and as My Name is Lucy Barton wasn't immediately available I borrowed this instead. Again, I loved it. I really like Strout's quiet, unflashy style and her very human characters. Straight after this I read My Name is Lucy Barton, which had become available, and I confess I'm getting the two books a little mixed in my head but I'm enjoying the feeling of being completely immersed in the world created by Strout (I've not seen it for myself yet, but I understand that she has characters from one book pop into others so maybe not being able to keep the two books straight isn't such a big deal). I enjoyed both of these books so much that I'll be reading more Strout as soon as I get my hands on it.

The Treatment by C.L. Taylor

A YA thriller which I read at the request of my 10-year old daughter, who had read it and wanted to talk about it with me. I set about it with trepidation, because what's wrong with Anne of Green Gables? I'm not ready for YA thrillers. My daughter kindly and considerately warned me about the "bad words" in The Treatment, which increased my trepidation (we're really careful about what TV, internet, etc, she has access to, but books aren't limited in any way) - what on earth had she got her hands on? I immediately read it to find out. I could see exactly why she hadn't been able to put it down - it's a gripping story about a teenager who sets out to rescue her brother, who has been sent to a secret academy for badly-behaved teens, where they receive a treatment to "correct" their bad behaviour and make them respectable members of society...but the sister discovers that the treatment is actually brainwashing and (non-explicit) torture. At first as I read I was disappointed - I want her to read those glorious adventure stories of my own childhood, lots of fresh air and freedom and lashings of ginger beer. Here it's all mobile phones and Instagram (neither of which my daughter has). In the end, though, I warmed to the book - it's a 2024 version of the adventure stories I enjoyed; the world has moved on. As for the "bad words", I was relieved and charmed to know that they were words that my daughter classifies as bad - given that the main character is 16 I think her language could have been a whole lot worse!

>161 rachbxl: I loved reading about your experience with a YA thriller. My niece is 8, and I'm dreading getting to that point. You handled it well, mama.

>162 labfs39: Ha, thanks. Unlike you I wasn't dreading it, but only because I hadn't seen it coming at all.

The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

I've been thinking recently about my reading choices, because whilst I always say I read in completely unplanned way, reaching for whatever I fancy next, I realise that that's not quite true, in that I do have some "rules", or habits, perhaps. For years now whenever I've discovered a new author and said "I want to read more of this writer", I've made a conscious decision not to do so immediately, even if that was what I really wanted to do (similarly, I rarely read books from a series back-to-back; I always tell myself I'll come back to the next one soon, but that turns into months or years, and then I think I often don't get as much out of the series as I might have done). I've never really known why I do this, but recently I've been wondering if perhaps it's an extended backlash against the way I had to read for my degree - read as much of one writer's output, plus secondary literature, as you possibly can in a week, write an essay, move on, attempt to remember it all a few months later in an exam. Since then I don't think I'd ever again read books by the same writer back-to-back, until very recently, because what started as a backlash had become almost personal rules. I had a bit of an epiphany recently when I realised that if I want to binge on a particular writer's work, I can...and there'll be no essay to write, and I'm enjoying my extended stay in the world of Elizabeth Strout immensely.

All of that to explain how I came to pick up The Bastard of Istanbul now. Having enjoyed my first Elif Shafak so much a couple of weeks ago (The Island of Missing Trees) I made a conscious choice to seek out more of her work immediately (this particular one simply because the library had it). I will say right away that I didn't like it half as much as the Missing Trees, but I'm glad I read it. It's an earlier work than The Island of Missing Trees (2006 as opposed to 2021) and it was interesting to see glimpses of the kind of writing I so much enjoyed in the later book. I found large parts of it to be painfully over-written (particularly the scenes in the first part with the Turkish family), whereas what I loved about The Island of Missing Trees was the beautiful quiet understatedness which allows the story to shine through and tell itself. This didn't stop me looking forward picking the book up again - like the later book, The Bastard of Istanbul tells a great sweeping family story against a backdrop of historical events which affect the characters' lives (in this case the Armenian genocide).

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

The second Lucy Barton book, but one which is only tangentially "about" Lucy Barton, in that she only appears in one chapter...or actually in one story, because the novel is more a collection of interlinked short stories, each adding more detail about individual characters in Amgash, Lucy's home town, usually characters whose names are mentioned in other books in the series. I love the effect Strout creates, building up her Amgash world, Lucy's original world.

Just One Thing: How Simple Changes Can Transform your Life by Michael Mosley

Including this one from several weeks ago for the sake of completeness. It's a compilation of the late Dr Michael Mosley's podcast series of the same name; each episode/chapter deals with one small thing which, if it were to become a habit, would make a big change to one's physical and/or mental health. Each section is only a couple of pages long and I dipped into the book over several months, having first picked it up in a bookshop having become curious about Dr Mosley after his untimely death earlier this year. I can't say I learned a lot from it, but only because I'm interested in this kind of thing so little of it was new to me. I like his conversational style and his humility, the way he puts himself on a level with the people he's talking to, no preaching, and I started to understand his popularity.

>165 rachbxl: you’re on a Lucy kick. I didn’t love this one, but glad you enjoyed it. Lucy’s 1st book was amazing for me

>164 rachbxl: enjoyed your thoughts on the why you’re reading what you’re reading. I listened to one Shefak, and struggled with how it was written. I should try another. But maybe not Bastard. P

>167 dchaikin: I certainly am on a Lucy kick, and I'm loving it. Anything is Possible was my least favourite so far, I think because part of what I like about Strout is spending time with her characters, and because this one is interlinked stories about different walk-on characters rather than being about Lucy herself I missed that here - whilst loving the idea of creating a more vivid background to Lucy's life by fleshing out the characters.

>167 dchaikin: Which Shafak did you listen to? I really want to read more now, because although I really didn't love Bastard it was interesting to see seeds of what was become the writing I so much enjoyed in The Island of Missing Trees. My various libraries have several, and I think I'll try another as soon as I've got through my current library books.

I’m curious how you find others books by Shefak. I listened to Ten minutes and thirty-eight Seconds…etc. i was maybe in a bad mood but it felt overwritten to me

>161 rachbxl: That's really interesting. Do you think there's any way that the "treatment" of the title could be read as referencing anti-LGBTQ conversion therapy?

>169 dchaikin: Ah, now that’s disappointing since 10 Minutes is one of her most recent (right before The Island of Missing Trees). Bastard was certainly over-written in parts - that was one of my major gripes with it - but Missing Trees wasn’t (to me, anyway). I was hoping that as her style developed the over-writing dropped off.

>170 rocketjk: Interesting. I hadn’t thought of that at all. It’s certainly not explicit but I think it could be read as referencing that.

>171 rachbxl: i’m just one silly reader. A lot of readers loved 10:38.

>172 dchaikin: Just one reader, for sure. Not that silly, though ;-)

Noting here what I've read recently before I forget - I'll try to come back with comments later.

Held by Anne Michaels
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
You Are Here by David Nicholls
August Blue by Deborah Levy
En agosto nos vemos by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I’m anticipating reviews. 🙂 I just bought Until August

>174 dchaikin: Oh, ok then ;-)

En agosto nos vemos by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I'm on the fence with this one. I've read just about everything GGM ever published and I've loved it all, starting with El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel) which I read at school aged 16, one of the first books I ever read in Spanish, but I hadn't read anything of his for years though I've been thinking of re-visiting old favourites. En agosto nos vemos wasn't published in his lifetime - he apparently said that it wasn't good enough, wasn't ready, but his heirs decided to revise it and published it some 10 years after his death. It's a slim little book, and interesting in that whilst it's not up to his usual standards, there are glimpses of his genius there - but there are also parts which read like they're written by someone else who is trying hard to be GGM and not quite pulling it off (perhaps that's true, maybe these bits were worked on later). I'm glad I read it, especially as it's really whetted my appetite for some re-reads, but if you're not already a big GGM fan wanting to be complete, I think you could give it a miss.

You Are Here by David Nicholls

I really need a better system for keeping track of where recommendations come from. Someone in CR read this very recently and enjoyed it, and that's why I read it. It was the perfect pick-me-up last weekend after a tough week. It's a gentle story about an unlikely attraction which grows between two 40-somethings who find themselves together on a coast-to-coast walk in northern England. There's no sex (or at least not this couple), very few swear words, the humour is gentle, and the ending isn't a cheesy happy one. I loved it, just what the doctor ordered.

>175 rachbxl: expectations calmed. But I’m still looking forward to reading this. (Thanks 🙂)

>176 rachbxl: terrific!

>177 dchaikin: I left this out of my comments on En agosto nos vemos but I’ll say it now, particularly since you and I have been discussing Shafak recently, Dan. When I first read Garcia Marquez the magical realism was fresh and new (and I was fresh and new too), though of course i’m not old enough to have been reading him at the start of his career when what he was doing really was innovative (he wasn’t the first, but he was at the crest of the wave with Cien años de soledad). Lots of others have tried to do it since, some very successfully (Rushdie, for example), others less so. When I read The Bastard of Istanbul recently there were various scenes, particularly at the beginning where she describes the Turkish family, where I felt Shafak was inspired by GGM and the Buendías (to name but one family) and wanted to create the same air of magical realism around them, where the real seems magical and the magical is real, but it didn’t quite work because it was overdone and came across as artificial (whereas to me GGM is anything but artificial). It bugged me. This ‘what would GGM have done?’ bugged me much less in En agosto nos vemos where it was -I imagine - a genuine question on the part of his heirs and the editor/family friend who completed the manuscript.

Very interesting. Im also a GGM completist. My feeling was that he didn’t overplay the magical realism. His writing is very disciplined. That element is really only an element of his writing, a tool he uses gently to expand things a bit. Anyway, now i need to read this soon with your comments in mind. 🙂

>178 rachbxl: Have you read The Madwoman of Serrano? It's a book by a Cabo Verdan author, and it reminded me of GGM, even though I've only read four of his works.

>180 labfs39: I haven’t read that one, no - noted!

Much Ado about Nada by Uzma Jalaluddin

Looking back at some of my old CR threads a few days ago I realised how often I say “I’d happily read more by this writer”, only to forget all about them. I was reminded by my threads that years ago I read and enjoyed Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last, a loose retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in a modern-day Canadian Muslim community that had been recommended by avaland/Lois. A library e-book of Much Ado about Nada was available so I read it immediately. This one is Persuasion in a 21st-century Canadian Muslim community, and it just as charming, though it brought me to the surprising (to me) réalisation that I have never read Persuasion, and though I did wonder at times what on earth feisty Nada saw in Baz, or at least in the younger version of Baz (it’s not hard to see what attracts her now, though the transformation is hard to believe!)

I’m managing to do lots of reading at the moment but don’t get round to writing reviews. Here before I lose track are my recent reads:

L’Arabe du futur volumes 1 and 2, graphic novel, memoir of a childhood on the Middle East, by Riad Sattouf
Lazy City by Rachel Connolly

>182 rachbxl: Oh, I have the same problem, including having liked Ayesha at Last and have probably finished my review of that book with a "I look forward to reading whatever Jalaluddin writes next." and then forgot about her in the ever-flowing river of new books. I've added her new book to my wishlist, thank you for reminding me of her!

I just saw your post in the other thread and am so glad you're liking Sattouf. I only have the first volume (they are sort of pricey and with seven? in the set it adds up fast) but I requested the rest from the library again so I can follow you and refresh the experience.

>184 RidgewayGirl: Going back through my old threads was really interesting (I didn’t look at them all but I’m hoping to go through the remaining ones over the next few days). There were some surprises, along the lines of “seriously, I read that? I have no recollection”, including one book I had just got out of the library last week but which my threads told me I’d already read. There were some cases where I’d said that I wanted to read more of an author’s work only to realise now that that train has left the station…but there were far more cases where I felt a little tingle of excitement as I (re-)added them to my wishlist. I feel like I’m going into the new year with some (whisper it) reading plans I feel really positive about.

>185 LolaWalser: L’Arabe du futur is glorious, isn’t it? To me, two volumes in, it’s the perfect graphic novel, so well done in the way it combines the personal with the backdrop of the recent history of Syria and the Middle East. I’ve borrowed volumes 3-5 from the library to see me through the next few days.

I wish you and your loved ones a happy and blessed festive season.