Books and reading – Page 4 – From Pyrenees to Pennines

Six Degrees of Separation: from India to the Arctic

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s Six Degrees of Separation Challenge invites us to start with a favourite Lonely Planet travel guide. I rarely use physical guide books any more, but one old friend I won’t be parted from, even though I’m unlikely to travel there again is their guide to South India. This was my bible when, newly retired, I spent a month there, largely solo, in 2007. My travels there began my blogging career, though on a different platform.

I’m taking an easy option for this month’s post. I’m whizzing us to six different countries or regions via a book set in each of them.

We’ll start not in Asia, but in Africa: Nigeria. Blessings, by Chukwuebuka Ibeh. Obiefuna is the elder son of a couple who had long waited for a child. He’s doing well at school, but isn’t the football-playing, loud and gregarious lad his parents expected. The arrival of a live-in apprentice arouses unexpected feelings in the boy, and his father catches them heading towards an intimate moment. We follow Obiefuna’s adolescence as he’s banished to a strict Christian seminary. We watch him grow into young adulthood where his homosexuality is always a source of shame, even danger in Nigeria’s deeply homophobic society. Obiefuna is a sensitively drawn and rounded character, whose future is uncertain as the novel ends. A compassionate, understated and beautifully written book.

I’ve chosen Happiness Falls by Angie Kim, because this too has a young person as its main protagonist, but her family, besides being American, is also of South Korean heritage. This story, ‘narrated’ by Korean-American Mia is hard to categorise. A young adult, she lives with her parents, her twin brother John and her younger brother Eugene who is both autistic and a sufferer from a rare genetic disorder, Angelman syndrome which leaves him unable to communicate verbally, and with severe motor control difficulties. Mia is very bright, intense, prone to careful analysis and scattering her writing with footnotes. She recounts the family drama in which her father disappears while in the park with Eugene, who arrives home bloodied and distressed. What’s happened? It’s complex, high octane stuff. And while I probably wouldn’t survive for ten minutes in Mia’s company face to face, she’s an engaging, thoughtful narrator with a passion for forensic detail and analysis. Provocative, heartfelt, compelling.

Another book with a family drama at its heart is by the Swedish author Alex Schulman (transl. Rachel Wilson): Malma Station. This was a book I had to finish and stand back from before I could appreciate it. Three sets of people are on a train heading towards Malma. We begin to learn their stories. And we begin to realise that these three sets are not travelling at the same time – years separate them. Yet these sets- father-daughter; wife-husband; daughter are all related. And the story slowly unfolds of how damaged they each are, and how this damage has passed – multiplied even – from one generation to another. It’s a tough, emotional read, with unlikeable characters whom we slowly begin to understand.

A story about a woman who’s a cemetery keeper in France – yes really – is a complicated family drama too. Fresh Water for Flowers, by Valérie Perrin (transl. Hildegarde Serle). Violette Toussaint had a childhood passed from foster-carer to foster-carer. Illiterate as a young adult, she taught herself to become a skilled reader. She married the sexiest man around, and had an unhappy marriage. The couple were level crossing keepers for many years, then they – and ultimately only she – became a cemetery keeper in the Bourgogne. It’s here that she gets over the tragedy that befell her, and finds friendship and meaning in life. There is a complex web of characters to become immersed in – or not. I think I’ll have to read it again, as I didn’t enjoy this book as much as its many devoted readers.

Now to another woman with a difficult life. Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville. Another work of fiction? Not quite. Dolly was born in the 1880s, at a time when women knew their place and had to stay there. But during Dolly’s life time, with two world wars forming part of it, things began to change. Enough to make her dissatisfied with her lot. But by sheer hard work and cussedness, she got herself and her husband on in life. It didn’t make her as easy person to get along with. Dolly was Kate’s grandmother, and this book is heavily based on the known facts of her life. An interesting exploration of the life of a woman during a period of huge evolution and change, written with sympathy and some understanding of a somewhat bitter, difficult individual.

Finally, another story – a true one – of a woman with a difficult challenge. Austrian Christiane Ritter wrote an account of her year in the Arctic in A Woman in the Polar Night (transl. Jane Degras).In 1934, Ritter, a painter, left her ordinary life with a teenage daughter to join her husband in his life as trapper in Arctic Spitsbergen. It turns out to be as cold and inhospitable as we all imagine, and twice as primitive. Seals have to be caught and processed: birds too, and these fatty unfamiliar meats form much of their diet. Husband and Norwegian friend and housemate are often out trapping, looking for animals whose fur they will sell. That’s enough to tell you what much of this book is about. It’s tough in this unforgiving climate. But it’s beautiful too, and Ritter dwells on this. Straightforwardly yet engagingly written, this book offers an insight into the strange world which she chooses for a year to inhabit, and leaves reluctantly.

I wouldn’t presume to connect my experiences in India with Ritter’s in the Arctic, but being a woman travelling often alone is what links us. The advantage I had was in owning a guide book. The Lonely Planet Guide to the Arctic wasn’t available then.

And next month? Our chain will begin with Stella Prize 2024’s long listed The Anniversary, by Stephanie Bishop.

All my illustrations this month, apart from the Indian photo, which is my own, come from Pexels. With thanks to the photographers Emmanuel Slope, Kindel Media, Koolshooters, Efrem Efre, Pat Whelen & Kristaps Ungurs.

100s of Books, 1000s of Books Revisited …

Here’s a post I wrote at the very end of February 2014, shortly before we moved from France back to England….

Hundreds of Books, Thousands of Books …

Facing the task of packing and moving our library, I was reminded of that wonderful book I used to read with my children, Wanda Gag’s ‘Millions of cats’.

‘Hundreds of ~~cats~~ books, thousands of ~~cats~~ books and millions and billions and trillions of ~~cats~~ books’.

Oddly, I no longer have the book, though I hope one of the offspring has. ‘Oddly’, because I seem to have most of the others that have accompanied me through life. Both of us is incapable of downsizing when it comes to books. Till now.

We realised that much of what we own has remained unopened since the day it arrived in France and probably for some years before that: our days of writing essays about mediaeval history are long gone. We realised something had to change. Jettisoning them was unthinkable. And where in France could we re-home so many books in English?

By chance, I was browsing on the web one day, and realised that many of these old faithfuls have a value. They could be sold. So that’s what we’ve decided to do. But it’s really not about the money. It’s about knowing that these books will end up with someone who has chosen them and wants them, rather than in some charity shop where, as we know from experience, some would simply moulder or even be thrown before reaching the shelves, even though many would be snapped up.

So…… we now have three kinds of book. The central core: books we can’t think of doing without – mainly reference books and other much-used non-fiction, with some of our best-loved fiction. The second kind, the saleable ones, are now boxed up to send to England. And the last, and smallest group: the ones we’ve decided to do without, and which have little apparent value. We’ve opened doors to all-comers who want to browse, and we’ve probably re-homed about half. There are still some 450 still remaining. They’re heading to Amnesty International in nearby Castelnaudary, who raise funds by selling to both English and French customers. We know how excited we get when we get the chance to browse a new collection of English books, so we hope they’ll be a good money-raiser for them. (Addendum, 2024. When they were collected, by a woman with her two teenagers, she filled her boot, the empty seats, and even slotted books in and about her passengers’ bodies. They finally drove off, the back axle nearly grinding the road beneath)

Come and look at some of our books – rejected and selected.

You can tell how long I’ve had this one: it was priced in pre-decimal days, before 1972, so even many British readers may have difficulty in deducing that this scholarly work of non-fiction cost me….. 57 ½ p.

This book was given to me as a leaving present from work back in the mid ’70s. It was a good read then, but even more so now as a history of the area we now live in.

A modern classic describing thirty years of the history of our own little corner of France.

This book belonged to my grandfather, a man who died long before I was born. Beautiful marbled end papers such as this often came as standard in the 19th century.

And finally, a book which though incomplete, is a real piece of history. It includes handwritten recipes for making ink, polish, peppermint cordial, stove-blacking. Here’s how to keep your brass and copperware in tip-top condition.

It includes just one newspaper cutting. By snooping around on the net and looking for this particular (and unsuccessful) cure for cholera, I surmise it comes from the 1820s.

Surely even the most die-hard minimalist will forgive me for keeping this book firmly among the family treasures?

And now the books are packed. Every single one – apart from a few bedtime stories for the next three weeks. One room done, seven to go.

And back in England, we realised we really did have to continue the downsizing. It took weeks and weeks. Some we sold, but most went to Oxfam books, and we still regularly get updates telling us how many have been sold and how much they’ve raised. The featured photo shows that we are running out of space again …

Six Degrees of Separation: from Tom Lake to Meadowland

Kate’s: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t read the starter book, Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, which is set in small-town Michigan. Here’s how Book Browse summarises it: ‘Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart’. It sounds to me as though it also reflects upon how in the end we are alone, even if living in an established family or community.

Kent Haruf’s Plainsong is set in small town Colorado. This beautifully written, spare, stark book takes as its theme the loosely intermingled lives of various abandoned souls who live in the imagined town of Holt, Colorado. There’s teenage Victoria, pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend; Tom Guthrie, whose wife has retreated into deep depression, leaving him with the care of his young boys, Ike and Bobby; the elderly McPheron brothers; infirm Iva Stearn. These isolated people display dignity and stoicism in their difficulties, and struggle towards some sense of connection and community. Holt seems a pretty bleak town, and the landscape that surrounds it too. Haruf’s descriptions are always understated, always telling. His characters maintain their privacy, whilst allowing us to care about the ultimately optimistic conclusion of the book.

From a bleak town to a bleak continent: let’s go to the Arctic with Christiane Ritter: A Woman in the Polar Night. In 1934, Ritter, a painter, left her ordinary life with a teenage daughter to join her husband in his life as trapper in Arctic Spitsbergen. It turns out to be as cold and inhospitable as we all imagine, and twice as primitive. Home is little better than a shack, the stove is primitive and unreliable, and all fuel needs to be found and collected by them, The same applies on the whole to food. They have only a few basic supplies. Animals and birds have to be caught and processed, and these fatty unfamiliar meats form much of their diet. Husband and Norwegian friend and housemate are often out trapping, looking for animals whose fur they will sell. That’s enough to tell you what much of this book is about. It’s twice as tough as it sounds in this unforgiving climate. But it’s beautiful too, and Ritter dwells on this. Straightforwardly yet engagingly written, this book offers an insight into the strange world which she chooses for a year to inhabit, and leaves reluctantly.

Here’s another book about a woman alone: The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, by Vendela Vida. This book is written in the second person, and it distances us from a protagonist who wants to stay distant. She’s a young unnamed woman who’s come – fled perhaps – from Florida to Casablanca. Checking into her hotel, her backpack with all her important documents is stolen. The police ‘find’ it, but it’s not hers, the woman whose documents it contains is not her. But she accepts it. In many ways, losing her given identity suits her. She soon changes her identity again… and again. Her need for anonymity runs deep, perhaps partly from her wish to escape her own face, disfigured by teenage acne. Perhaps because of what we come to know of her story – no spoiler alerts here though. Through what little agency she has, she time and again shifts the ground beneath her feet. This is a novel of profound unease and bewilderment, and distancing our heroine from us by simply calling her ‘you’ is a part of that bewilderment. An unsettling reading experience – recommended.

Nahr is another isolated woman, who tells her (fictional) story in Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World. A powerful story, told by Nahr, a Palestinian woman in solitary confinement for an unnamed act of terrorism. Her time in the Cube, as she calls her cell is recounted in short chapters interleaved with longer accounts of her life thus far. Much of her early life was spent in a Kuwait ghetto where many Palestinian refugees, dispossessed by the Gulf War fetched up. After an unsuccessful school career, Nahr works hard at menial jobs to save up so that her brother can avoid her fate by going to medical school. She meets an older Kuwaiti woman who blackmails, prostitutes but also loves her, propels her into high-end prostitution. Marriage to a freedom fighter saves her reputation – and his – but he’s a closet homosexual who soon deserts her for his lover. I don’t want to reveal more of the story, but eventually she returns to Palestine and finds close relationships and a political awakening that changes her life forever. This timely read, detailing the brutal legacy of Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine is both powerful and thought-provoking. Though it is of necessity one-sided, it should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand recent Palestinian history. The shock waves of recent events continue and escalate.

Isolation seems to be developing as a bit of a theme here. Here’s isolation of a completely different kind. Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. Six astronauts (two of them are cosmonauts), all from different countries, some male, some female, orbit the earth in their International Space Station. We visit them for one day only, as they travel 16 times round the globe. We experience with them the wonder of this journey: the brush-stroke beauty of the landscapes they view from afar, as well as tiny detail – headlights, fishing boats. We accompany them as they go about their often mundane daily experimental tasks. Or using the treadmills that are part of their daily routine. Or we see their sleeping bags, billowing in weightlessness: the spoons they eat with, attached by velcro to the cabin wall. We perceive aspects of their life back on earth – children, a loveless marriage, a trusting partnership. The book moves through the spectacular and the ordinary, distance and intimacy and invites us, the readers, to wonder too.

Wonder at the earth? Let’s look at Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field, by John Lewis-Stempel. An utterly absorbing account of a year in the life of an English meadow. From harsh January, through the months in which warmth and life returns, to busy summer and autumn and back to chilly dormancy again, John Lewis-Stempel notices and absorbs everything. He sees birds, insects, animals and plants in microscopic detail. He relishes smells, tastes and sights. He enters fully into the life of his traditional meadow, one that may have existed for many hundred years. A celebration of traditional country scenes, leaving the reader with a campaigning zeal to preserve the rich variety of life it contains if sympathetically managed and left to itself. As he himself says: ‘To stand alone in a field in England and listen to the morning chorus of the birds is to remember why life is precious.’

Isolation seems to be a theme here. Will that continue next month, when we’re invited to start our chain with a favourite travel guide?

My first five photos come courtesy of Unsplash: Alexander Andrews; Levartravel; Vince gx; Annie Spratt; Gallindo Bailey. The final shot is my own.

Six Degrees of Separation: Nine Lessons to The Farmer’s Wife

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month, I have to begin where I left off last time, with Nicola Upton‘s Nine Lessons. I described it here, so now I’ll confine myself to saying it’s a detective story set in Cambridge.

So. To another detective story set in Cambridge, and one I read a long time ago. I’m always up for reading Kate Atkinson, but it took me a while to try the Jackson Brodie series. Then I read Case Histories. In many ways I enjoyed this unusual approach, in which several different lives and families from Cambridge are introduced, long before a crime becomes apparent. Yet inexorably and inevitably they come to the attention of private detective Jackson Brodie. I found some of the characters stereotypical: mad-as-a-hatter cat-lady; eccentric middle aged sisters and so on – there are more. Jackson solves everything, inevitably, but more by luck than judgment. There were so many characters I got somewhat muddled. I seem to be damning this book, yet at the time I turned the pages easily.

Let’s try Kate Atkinson in different form in Shrines Of Gaiety. She takes us to 1920s London, to a place of hedonistic gaiety where Nellie Coker is queen of a whole series of nightclubs, each appealing to a different kind of pleasure-seeker. Her family is essential to her enterprise and the story, with two Cambridge educated daughters (a Cambridge link again!) and a twit of a son in the mix of six. Add in a Yorkshire librarian on furlough, two young Yorkshire runaways, police officers who are variously dutiful and bent and you have a complicated and atmospheric Dickensian yarn. I enjoyed it: This is Kate Atkinson after all, but I also found it a little wearisome and forced, with not all the characters well-developed. I read through it quickly and with some enjoyment, but also feeling somewhat cheated of Kate Atkinson at her best.

From one form of public entertainment to another. Kenneth Wilson’s Highway Cello. It’s an account of Kenneth Wilson’s decision to load a cello onto the back of a trusty old bike and cycle from his home in Cumbria, via England, France and Italy to Rome, playing to impromptu audiences in town squares, and lightly-planned concerts in homes, halls and cafes. In among this part of the tale, he discusses the whys and wherefores of his trip, and always with a light touch. It’s an uplifting, amusing and undemanding book, the perfect accompaniment to a holiday: that’s why I’ve only just read it. Though it’s a couple of months since he came to our local Little Ripon Bookshop, played his cello and read from his book with verve and good humour.

Wilson ends up in Rome. Another British writer, Matthew Kneale lives in Rome. And he wrote a pandemic diary, The Rome Plague Diaries. I loved it. Having many years ago lived in Italy, though not in Rome, this put me back in touch with many aspects of Italian daily life and culture. It also revived memories of Lockdown – not unwelcome ones: I was one of those who actually relished many aspects of it, because of where and how I’m able to live. If you’ve enjoyed Kneale’s writing; if you love Italy, I recommend your reading this vivid account of a resilient city going through yet another test of its mettle.

The only other story I’ve read set during the pandemic is Sarah Moss’ The Fell. I read it when I was self-isolating with Covid, probably in early 2021. Kate and her teenage son, living in Cumbrian fell country were quarantined at home. Kate, frustrated, eventually goes out, to get up there on the moors, at a moment when there won’t be a soul about, and be back in time for tea. Except she isn’t. She gets disorientated, and falls … This story is told in stream of consciousness through the voices of Kate herself, her son Matt, her neighbour Alice, and mountain rescuer Rob. And frankly it got as tedious as Lockdown itself. The ending was suitably shocking, inconclusive and cliff-hanging, which redeemed it somewhat, but I doubt if this book will wear well.

So I’ll finish with another book set in the Cumbrian countryside: Helen Rebanks’ The Farmer’s Wife: My Life in Days. I met Helen Rebanks (wife of the more famous James, of The Shepherd’s Life fame) at another author-event at the Little Ripon Bookshop and found her sparky and interesting. I didn’t feel the same about her book. She details the hard slog of being a farmer’s wife and a mother in an unforgiving, if beautiful part of England. The book is interspersed with recipes, all of which can easily be found anywhere, and at the end are store cupboard hints which I doubt are of much help to her probable readership. An interesting enough but slightly disappointing read.

I’ve just read through this post, and see it has a slightly grumpy tone. It was slightly hastily thrown together today after our long journey back from Spain and dicing with farmers’ blockades in France, so I can’t claim to have given it too much thought. Next month, when the starter book is Ann Patchett‘s Tom Lake, Must Try Harder.

All images except the one of Kenneth Wilson cycling off with his cello in tow, which comes from the press pack on his own website, are from Unsplash, and are, in order, by Vlah Dumitru; Cajeo Zhang; Spencer Davis; Jonny Gios and George Hiles.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow to Nine Lessons

Kate: Books are my favourite and best

This month’s starter book is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. I understand it’s a saga spanning thirty years in the lives of two friends who design video games, so doesn’t appeal to me. So I’ll go with the saga aspect of this book to find my first link.

It’s Bournville, by Jonathan Coe. Here is a state-of-the-nation novel, a family saga centring on the matriarch of the family, Mary, whom we meet as a child celebrating VE day and drop in on over the years until her death – alone – from an aneurism during the Covid pandemic. Her close relations – and other characters too – drop in and out of this novel. Families, Brexit, racism, attitudes to homosexuality all feature. So many threads, almost as if Coe were ticking off ‘issues’ to incorporate into his story. Nevertheless, this is an involving and enjoyable read.

Bournville begins on VE day, so I’ve chosen a book which focusses on the latter part of WWI in the UK, Lissa Evans‘ V for Victory. It’s a witty and engaging war time yarn. I gather this is a follow up to an earlier book, but that fact I hadn’t read it – or even heard of it – didn’t matter at all, as the characters were fully fleshed out. There are two strands to this story. One follows Winnie, ARP warden, who’s plump, sensible, with a husband who’s away fighting the war, and a glamorous twin sister who is neither plump nor sensible. The other follows Vee, who keeps herself solvent by running a boarding house whilst also raising her 15 year old orphaned nephew, that it turns out is not her nephew. This is a book that brings the sheer boredom, drudgery and beigeness of the last year of the war to life: a period when it looked as though the war MIGHT end, but with no real signs in everyday life of its doing so – especially as bombs continued to do their worst in London. Nevertheless, it’s an easily read and involving novel.

These Days by Lucy Caldwell is another war time book. I raced through it. It’s an engaging story about a middle class Belfast story dealing with WWII, recently and shockingly arrived in their home city. Audrey is a clever office worker, walking out with a young GP. Lucy, slightly younger, is an a Air Warden, awash with emotions over a first love affair that must of necessity stay secret. We meet their parents and kid brother Paul, and become as consumed as they do by the four days of unrelenting bombardment of their home city. Involving, nuanced and thoroughly well told, this is a book I couldn’t put down.

A change of mood, and a change of war – WWI. Held, by Anne Michaels. I’ve not long finished this, and it’s far too early for me to have digested this book and taken from it what it has to offer. This is a poetic, evanescent story. Well, stories. It begins with John, lying wounded on a WWI battlefield. Then memories and thoughts take us to his first meeting Helen, his wife: and to their love, their struggles and to some of his career as a photographer. We move many times in this book – not just geographically, but in time. It’s a bit of a kaleidoscope: an image realised quickly disappears to be replaced by another. All seem to be linked by trauma, by pain, because being in war zones is a common thread throughout the book – the book is held together by recurring motifs. This book is fluid, luminous, and I’ll need to read it again to begin to understand it properly. And I want to.

Held was a homogenous whole, whilst being a collection of vignettes. Roman Stories, by Jhumpa Lahiri is a set of stories of people unconnected to one another, though all focussed on the city of Rome. Not the tourist hot-spots, but the less-regarded areas where people actually live. Often people with difficult back-stories, or whose origins are not in Italy. None of the characters described here feels completely at home. Their difficulties in being assimilated and accepted are both hinted at and described. All her characters seem to be in some measure of mental pain. Lahiri is an American academic who loves Rome. She now writes in Italian and self-translates. I wonder if this is what gives these stories a somewhat detached air? I ended the book feeling somewhat uncomfortable. Is this what Lahiri intended? Probably, yes.

I’ll conclude my chain with a story that links a group of people who had all gone their separate ways having been students, many years ago, at Cambridge University. Nine Lessons, by Nicola Upson. This is the first book I have read in this detective series following DI Archie Penrose and Josephine Tey as they collaborate in a spot of crime-solving. I have not yet read any of Tey’s work, though now I feel encouraged to do so. Nor have I read any MR James, yet he is central to the book’s plot. Many years ago, a group of his students at Cambridge used to gather to enjoy his readings from his own ghost stories. Now, slowly but surely, the members of the group are being killed off – and in each case, a clue from the stories provides the key to solving the mystery. Cleverly constructed, with well-realised characters, this is a series to relish.

And this final book, whilst not being a saga, connects characters over a period of many decades. And therefore conveniently links back to the starter in this chain.

Next month, we’re invited to start our chain with our last book of this month, or with the last book we’ve read. Why not join in?

Photo Credits:
Bournville: Adam Jones, Unsplash
V for Victory: GetArchive
These Days: Wikimedia Commons
Held: Julia Pure, Unsplash
Roman Stories: Anton Fineas, Unsplash
Nine Lessons: Bogdan Todoran, Unsplash

My Year in 2023: a Work of Fiction

I seem to be going all bookish on you at the moment, despite the fact that mine is not a book blog – or an anything else in particular blog, quite frankly. Here is a bit of fun doing the book-blogger rounds, in which participants address themselves to various questions by answering them with a title from among the books they’ve read in 2023. Here’s mine.

In high school I was Homesick.

People might be surprised by Everything the Light Touches.

I will never be Super-Infinite.

My fantasy job is How to Build a Boat. 

At the end of a long day I need a Perfect Little World.

I hate being Down and Out in Paris and London .

I wish I had A Meal in Winter.

My family reunions are So Late in the Day.

At a party you’d find me with  The Secret Barrister.

I’ve never been to Western Lane.

A happy day includes The Mad Woman’s Ball.

Motto I live by: Give unto Others.

On my bucket list is: The Epic City.

In my next life, I want to have Nine Lessons.

You should look at Annabel of AnnaBookBel fame’s list, as it was her idea. And you might like to see how Karen at Bookertalk, Susan at A Life in Books, Cathy at 746 Books answered. Perhaps other bloggers you know have had a go – as you could too.

Featured image by Pixabel at Pexels.

Wanderlust Bingo

This year, I tried to read my way round the world. And to help me along, I played a game of bingo. Here’s how. You take the bingo card shown below, and attempt to cover each square with the title of a book you’ve just read.

Here’s how I got on. The stars represent how much I’ve enjoyed the book (out of five). The scoring here is quite high – these are among my year’s Best Books. Other star ratings are available, and visible on some other – less successful -choices this year.

The links will take you to my reviews on Goodreads. I’m actively in the process of changing my book tracking to Storygraph. When I started recording the books I’d read, I was at first unaware that Goodreads was owned by Amazon. I’m a fervent Amazon Avoider, so it really is time to go, especially as the site is actually quite clunky.

Wanderlust Bingo

North America
Elizabeth Strout: The Burgess Boys⭐⭐⭐
Nordic
Roy Jacobsen: Just a Mother⭐⭐⭐
City
Elizabeth McCracken: The Hero of This Book (London)⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Western Europe
Donna Leon:  So shall you reap (Italy, Venice)⭐⭐⭐⭐
Far East
An Yu: Ghost Music (China) ⭐⭐⭐

Indian Subcontinent
Kiran Desai: Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (India) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Village
Barry Unsworth: Morality Play (14th century Northern England) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Australia
Kate Grenville: A Room Made of Leaves (New South Wales) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Island
Audrey Magee: The Colony (Island off West Coast of Ireland) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
UK (excluding Scotland)
Caleb Azumah Nelson: Small Worlds (London) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Mountain
Christopher Somerville: Walking the Bones of Britain (mountainous regions of Scotland; Pennines)⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Central America
Any suggestions?
Scotland
Douglas Stuart: Young Mungo (Glasgow) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Africa
Petina Gappah: Out of Darkness Shining Light (Central Africa: the route explored by David Livingstone) ⭐⭐⭐
Small Town
Jo Browning Roe: A Terrible Kindness (Aberfan, Wales)⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Caribbean
Any suggestions?
Beach
Sheila Armstrong: Falling Animals (Ireland) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
South East Asia
Kate Strasdin: The Dress Diary of Mrs. Ann Sykes (partly Singapore) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
River
Shelley Read: Go as a River (USA Colorado) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Southern Europe
Joseph O’Connor: My Father’s House (Rome)⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

South America
Dan Saladino: Eating to Extinction (Bolivia and Venezuela: a bit of a cheat as Saladino visits every continent in this book)⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Central or Eastern Europe
Lauren Chater: The Lace Weaver (Estonia)⭐⭐⭐
Sea
Karen Pinchin: Kings of their Own Ocean (Tuna, widespread)⭐⭐⭐
Middle East
Susan Abulhawa: Against the Loveless World (Palestine). I've hardly started this one, so no thoughts or ratings yet.
Polynesia
Eleanor Catton: Birnam Wood (New Zealand)⭐⭐

This great idea comes from Fiction Fan: you can read all about it on her site and maybe decide it’s for you too. At least one other blogging pal, Karen of Booker Talk has joined in the fun. Read all about it!

As this is my last post this year, it’s time to thank you all for reading and commenting, and for being part of such an engaging community. All good wishes for 2024.

Nicola Nuttall of Unsplash has provided my featured photo.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Kitchen Confidential to The Christmas Chronicles

Kate: Six Degrees of Separation

I read Anthony Bourdain‘s Kitchen Confidential quite a long time ago, and seem to remember not liking it – or indeed him – very much. But it’s given me my chain for the month. You’re not getting a single novel from me this time, not one. Simply a run-down of a few cookery books.

To ease you in gently, I will start with a book that – though full of recipes – is also meant to be read from cover to cover; the 1950s classic by Patience Gray: Honey from a Weed. I’ve only just got it out of the library, so I can’t really comment on it. The inside cover says that it’s a ‘passionate autobiographical cookery book; Mediterranean through and through, and as compelling as a first class novel.‘

Which leads me to one of the first cookery books I owned, one which was my cookery bible when I was a student in the late 60s and early 70s: Elizabeth David‘s A book of Mediterranean food. She wrote very readably and enticingly about ingredients which I was able to source on a student budget in multi-cultural Manchester, and cemented the love of cooking fostered by my mother when I was growing up. All the same, my only memory from that time of using one of her recipes was when I cooked an indifferent moussaka for a lecturer whom my then boyfriend and I were trying to impress. I’ve never really liked moussaka since.

Now I have different cooking bibles. Unsurprisingly, some are written by the cooks who contribute to the Guardian’s food supplement on Saturdays. I went through a phase of perpetually using Meera Sodha‘s East: ‘vegan and vegetarian recipes from Bangalore to Beijing‘. Try this one: Leek and Chard Martabak.

I like to keep cooking straightfoward these days. So Yotam Ottolenghi‘s Simple hits the spot. Recipes like his Puy lentils with aubergine tomatoes and yoghourt.

Yotam Ottolenghi came my way via the Guardian: Rick Stein via his television series. I recently found his India in a charity shop, and it seduced me because of its glorious pictures of food and street life . The recipes are pretty good too. How about Aloo dum: potato and pea curry with tomato and coriander?

But for my last book, I’ll choose another cookery book which can be read from cover to cover. And I’ll make it seasonal: Nigel Slater‘s The Christmas Chronicles. Nigel Slater is my sort of cook, in that he doesn’t go in for careful measuring. If you haven’t got this, use that. He’s keen to tell you what he doesn’t bother with. And licking the bowl out is part of the joy. Recipes here are interspersed with stories of his Christmases, and his greedily-anticipated preparations for them. I hope you made your Christmas cake at the end of October. But if you didn’t, here’s his.

So that’s my chain. one in which most of the books I’ve chosen are capable of being linked with each other. It’ll be business as usual next month, with books where you can start at the beginning, and read until the end. Our starter book will be Gabrielle Zevin‘s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I happen to know our daughter’s read this, and I shall be able to snaffle it from her bookshelves when we go to visit the Spanish branch of the family early next month. Not in time for the next Six Degrees, but still …

Six Degrees of Separation: from Western Lane to The Lock-Up

Kate: Six Degrees of Separation

This month’s starter book by Chetna Maroo, Western Lane has only just been acquired by our library, so I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I understand though that it’s about eleven year old Gopi whose mother dies. Her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen in squash, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters.

This took me off at a slight tangent, something to do perhaps with ‘quietly brutal’. I remembered reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: the tale of a father and son trudging through post-Apocalypse America. This is a land where nothing grows, no small animals are there for the hunting: where communities and dwellings are deserted and long-since looted for anything that might sustain life a few more days: where other humans might prove peaceable, but might instead be evil and dangerous. This book is bleakly, sparely written. Conversations between father and son are clipped, necessary. No speech marks. Sometimes little punctuation. Every ounce of energy is needed for the business of staying alive. This book, in which nobody lives happily-ever-after will stay with me for a long time.

This linked for me with another book where a father is centre stage: The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton. As someone of dual heritage myself (half English, half Polish), born in the same period as Hamilton I was interested to read this account from a man with a German mother and Irish father. His story is told in a series of vignettes, which gradually provide a coherent picture of the family’s day-to-day life over the years of Hamilton’s childhood. His mother brings with her memories of her family’s anti-Nazi stance – yet in Ireland she and her family are called Nazi. His father insists on the family’s Irishness – which meant denying everything English in their lives. Both these threads isolate them all from their peers. They’re rather poor, though Hamilton’s father has all kinds of unusual and ultimately unsuccessful business ideas. This is an account of a young boy’s growth into adolescence and adulthood, trying to find a path towards the adult he thought he wanted to be. A sensitive and restrained and thought-provoking narrative.

Let’s move to a book with no father figure at all: Sisters by Daisy Johnson. July is utterly dependent on her damaged, controlling older sister September, to whom she is very close in age (the clue is in their names). Following some bullying of July in their Oxfordshire school, they move with their mother to the house in North Yorkshire that had once been the father’s family home. Sheela, the mother is also unstable – withdrawn and neglectful. The girls are widely considered ‘isolated, uninterested, conjoined, young for their age, sometimes moved to great cruelty’. Their behaviour is unsettling, often shocking, and makes reading the story a tense and unsettling experience. It leads towards a denouement that is both shocking and yet satisfactory, leaving the reader with a hope for better things.

Another book with families and relationships at the heart: The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell. Here are two stories: that of Lexie, 1950s university drop-out, who meets Innes, and leaves rural Devon and her family, to live the full bohemian London experience. And that of Elina and Ted, new (present-day) parents who after a horrible, dangerous birth, are struggling to adjust to their new very-far-from normal. Their exhaustion, Ted’s curious moments of disorientation, their differing expectations seem likely to destabilise their relationship. How do these two worlds collide and make a story? They don’t, not in the first half. Then hints get dropped, about the house and neighbourhood where all these characters lived. And despite the drip-feed of clues, the end, when it comes, is shocking , unexpected and entirely believable. I was involved from the first to last page.

This is getting a bit heavy. I’ll do what I so often do after a dose of mood-lowering reading and rush over to Venice to read a Brunetti mystery by Donna Leon. The plot hardly matters. It’s a few hours in the company of Commissario Brunetti and his entirely satisfactory family life that I’m after. Give unto Others is Leon’s latest book. And this post-pandemic tale is as usual a good one. It involves a former neighbour who comes and talks – unofficially – about some concerns she has about the business in which her husband and son-in-law have been involved. As ever, layers unpeel to reveal dark secrets and shenanigans. Tricky moral questions arise for Brunetti to wrestle with. How involved should he be? If you’re a Leon fan, you won’t need any encouragement to find out.

For my last book, I’ll choose to link with Brunetti by choosing another crime novel where the personalities are of just as much interest as the crime, and where human relationships are what count the most, The Lock-up by John Banville. We’re in 1950s Dublin, some six months after Banville’s April in Spain took place. A young woman has apparently asphyxiated herself in her car in a lock-up garage. It becomes apparent it’s a murder. As ever, though the whole of the book is on the surface an account of the efforts to solve the crime and find the perpetrator, actually, that’s not the reason to read it. Instead, it’s about the more-than-prickly relationship between DI Strafford and police pathologist Dr. Quirke, about the complicated love affairs both men have in 1950s Dublin, still under the somewhat puritanical stranglehold of the Catholic church. And this extends to its influence over police investigations as well as moral arbitration. It’s about the weather, the greyness of Dublin. And it’s about simply enjoying Banville’s luscious writing. So many reasons to read and appreciate this book.

So: families and relationships form the link between all my choices this month. Next month, perhaps it will be food, as the starter book is the culinary classic, Anthony Bourdain‘s Kitchen Confidential.

Three of my images this month come courtesy of photographers catalogued in Pexels. Tirichard Kuntanon illustrated the Cormac McCarthy, Dids the Donna Leon, Mike Bird the John Banville. The image for the Hugo Hamilton was from Wikimedia Commons.

Six Degrees of Separation: from I Capture the Castle to Morality Play

Kate W. – Six Degrees of Separation

Somehow, I didn’t read I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith when I was younger. And I’ve only just managed to source a copy, so I haven’t read it in time for Six Degrees. This is how it’s introduced in Goodreads. ‘Through six turbulent months of 1934, 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain keeps a journal, filling three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries about her home, a ruined Suffolk castle, and her eccentric and penniless family. By the time the last diary shuts, there have been great changes in the Mortmain household, not the least of which is that Cassandra is deeply, hopelessly, in love’.

That seemed to chime with a book I’ve just finished, Natasha Solomon’s Fair Rosaline. This is a re-interpretation of the Romeo and Juliet story from the stand-point of bit- character Rosaline. To be fair, the story of bereavement, infatuation, love and bereavement again zipped along, but even as a page-turner, the narrative quickly became increasingly unbelievable. The characters were something of a caricature and the language veered unconvincingly between the Shakespearean and more modern idiom. If you want a reasonably page-turning beach read, this could be for you. I made the link to our starter book because Rosaline could well have lived in a castle (though she didn’t). And she falls hopelessly in love.

One thing you’ll notice if you read Fair Rosaline is that a fair few characters die. So my next book is A Tomb with a View, by Peter Ross. This is an evocative, delightful and thought-provoking book. Yes, it’s about death and burial. But the variety of cemeteries, ways of remembering the dead and rituals Ross explores is astonishing. He’s clearly a sympathetic man to have around, and historians of ancient cemeteries, gravediggers, Muslim celebrants, natural burial enthusiasts, proponents of The Queerly Departed all willingly open up to him and bring their own special Final Resting Place to life. He visits graveyards, charnel chapels, cemeteries and so much more, animating them in a delightful tribute to these sites and those who work there and care for them. A book to read with – yes – enjoyment.

From death, to near death, in Maggie O’Farrell‘s I Am, I Am, I Am. This is not an autobiography, but a non-chronological exploration of the author’s 17 (seventeen!) brushes with death, each episode named for a different part of the body. Attacks at machete-point, nearly-road-accidents, a dreadful experience of childbirth: all these and more are graphically and tenderly brought to life. Most affecting is the last quarter of the book, where she describes her own debilitating and long-running experience of the after-effects of a virus: and then her daughter’s even worse experiences. It’s compelling, sometimes angry, often visceral. She’s graphic at describing pain, fear, despair. Impossible not to experience at least some empathy for O’Farrell and her experiences. And yet she’s still here, bringing her experience to bear on her other work, in which she brings fictional characters and their dramas to life, informed no doubt by her own experiences.

And now from one non-chronological memoir to another: Sandi Toksvig’s Between the Stops. Marvellous. I was suspicious of a book written by something of a National Treasure. It would play to the gallery, surely? I was wrong. This is part memoir, part political polemic from someone whose views I’m happy to share, part social commentary and part Interesting Facts About London and the many places she’s called home. She uses the device of a journey on her most familiar bus route, the Number 12 from Dulwich to central London to gaze out of the window and use the memory triggers she finds as she observes the scene there, or among her fellow passengers to introduce the story of her life in America, Denmark and England. She’s witty, compassionate, angry and introspective by turn, and always amusing, often laugh-out-loud funny. I loved this book.

My next choice also uses London as a starting point. The End We Start From by Megan Hunter is a powerfully unsettling novella. Here is a world descending into chaos and uncertainty just after the ‘author’ has given birth, in London. This is the story of a fleeing into the unknown from a city that’s no longer functioning following an unspecified apocalyptic disaster. Sparingly and beautifully written this is a short, eloquent and potent account of one woman’s fall-out from a not too unlikely future catastrophe. But one which does not finish on a note of despair, but of love.

Lastly, let’s go back to the 14th century: a time when England, like much of Europe, was turned upside-down socially by the predations of the Black Death, as well as by war, and it must have felt like the end of the world. Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play. Nicholas Barber, a young cleric who has abandoned his post and fallen in with a band of itinerant players tells his story. What brings this story its power is its power to immerse the reader in the life he’s – at least for the time being – chosen. This band of players live from hand to mouth, often cold, always dirty, always on the move and wondering where the next meal and billet is coming from. But they devise the idea of re-enacting a shocking murder that has just taken place in the community in which they find themselves, and discover that all is not as it seems. And add fear of the more powerful to their list of worries. An immersive tale, bringing the sights, smells, sounds, and mores of the 14th century to life.

Well. We have wandered about a bit. Each book links, if tenuously, with the next: but there is no common thread running through these choices.

And next month, Kate invites us to read as our starter book Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. Are you going to join in the fun?