Books and reading – Page 5 – From Pyrenees to Pennines

Six Degrees of Separation: From Friendaholic to Best of Friends

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 W: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s starter book is Elizabeth Day‘s Friendaholic. I haven’t read it, but apparently the clue is in the title: it’s an exploration of friendship.

I’ll start then with a book I’m just reading now. It’s Small Worlds, by Caleb Azumah Nelson. At its foundation are two things: the narrator’s strong friendships, deeply rooted in his wider family, and his love – their love- of music, which underpins all their moments of togetherness and happiness.

There’s a lot of dancing in Nelson’s book. So let’s go to Strasbourg in 1518, to a story based on a historically documented ‘plague’ of hysterical dancing: The Dance Tree, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, set in a time of famine, superstition, religious and moral outrage. This is largely the story of Lisbet, pregnant again having already lost nine babies in very early infancy, and beekeeper extraordinaire. Why has her sister-in-law Nethe been required to do penance in a religious community for seven years? Why have hundreds of women been dancing in a frenzy, for hour after hour, day after day? Why do yet more and more people join them? Here are family secrets, forbidden love, frightened and powerless women examined in a story rich in feeling and entirely readable.

I’ll take you to Glasgow now, to the recent past, to a city which seems to have had parallels with the Strasbourg depicted in the last book. Young Mungo, by Douglas Stuart. Mungo grows up on a down-trodden Glasgow housing estate, immediately post-Thatcher: fatherless, with an increasingly absent and alcoholic mother whom he adores, a clever older sister who looks out for him, and a violent, lawless older brother. Why, at the beginning of the story, does his mother send him away on a fishing weekend with two fellow alcoholics whom she hardly knows? We return throughout the narrative to find out more. Mainly, we are in the poverty-stricken community Mungo calls home. And it’s here he meets James, and discovers his sexuality. That’s bad enough, but in sectarian Glasgow, Mungo is Protestant, James Catholic … This is a story with a deeply rooted sense of place, illuminating and pacy dialogue, with sectarianism, violence, fear and deprivation at its heart, examining what it means to be male in such a society, and the risks attendant on being gay.

We’ll stay in Scotland, but lighten the mood, by picking up a copy of Borges and me: an encounter by Jay Parini. A romp of a read – a lightly fictionalised account of Parini’s encounter with Borges: a writer whose work I, like Parini, have never (so far) read. Jay Parini, an American, was a post-graduate student at St. Andrew’s University, dodging the draft to the Vietnam War. He’s going through young-man-angst about the subject for his thesis (his supervisor doesn’t seem keen on Parini’s choice of poet Mackay Brown), his draft-dodging and his (lack of) love life. When a friend of his, Alistair, is called out of town on a family emergency, Parini is called in to house-sit Alistair’s guest, the blind and elderly post-modernist writer Borges. Almost immediately, at Borges’ request, they embark on a road trip round Scotland for which Parini is expected to be Borges’ ‘eyes’. Shambolic and unpredictable, Borges is also a fount of dizzying literary talk. This is a trip to savour. A book which is a funny and wry account of an unlikely and thoroughly Quixotic journey: indeed Borges names Parini’s ancient Morris Minor after Quixote’s horse Rocinante. And it’s persuaded me too, that it’s about time I read some of Borges’ writing.

More men thrown together almost by happenstance: this is very much not a romp of a read. A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli. An account of three German soldiers whose task on a bitterly cold winter day during WWII is to hunt down Jews in hiding and bring them back to the Polish concentration camp where they are based, for an inevitable end. This unenviable task is better than the alternative: staying in camp to shoot those who were found the previous day. They’re friends simply through circumstance, so they talk about family – about the teenage son of one of them – and they find just one Jew. Is he their enemy, deserving his fate, or is he just like them, a young man doing his best to survive? What if they return to camp with nobody to show for their day’s hunting? As the men retreat to an abandoned cottage to prepare a meagre meal, their hatred and fear jostle with their well-submerged more humane feelings to provide the rest of the drama for this short, thought provoking book.

Let’s complete the circle by turning to another book whose protagonists’ family history lies elsewhere, as was the case with Small Worlds (Ghana) but whose home is now London. Kamila Shamsie‘s Best of Friends. This is a book of two halves. The first takes us to 1980s Karachi, and to the lives of two 14 year old schoolgirls. Zahra’s exceptionally bright and will do well. She’s less privileged than Maryam, who expects to inherit her grandfather’s successful leather business. An event takes place which comes in many ways to define their futures. Fast forward 40 years. The girls, now women are living in London, are successful and content. In many ways they are ciphers representing on the one hand liberal and inclusive politics, on the other successful entrepreneurship. Their strong friendship endures. Until the event from their teenage years comes back to haunt them. I didn’t quite believe in this and though the ending is intriguing, I was a little disappointed in this latest book from Shamsie.

So there we have it: a chain that explores friendship in its many guises. Next month? The chain-starter is the winner of the International Booker Prize: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov and translated by Angela Rodel.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Hydra to Purple Hibiscus

Goodness! I completely forgot that today is Six Degrees of Separation day. I’ll have to play catch-up.

This month’s chain-starter isn’t yet published in the UK, so I haven’t read it: Hydra by Adriane Howell.

I gather something bad has happened to the heroine as the book begins, so I’ll start with Dolores by Laureen Aimee Curtis. Dolores is a somewhat enigmatic character who fetches up at the gate of a convent – pregnant. The nuns take the young woman in, and she adjusts to their life while her mind slips back to the years before: to the assignations in love motels, sometimes to life back at home, to a boy called Angelo. Life happens to her, almost without her input. The nuns hadn’t known she was already pregnant when she came to their door. She gives birth, and they name her son. What will happen to this confused young woman? We don’t find out. Perhaps this convent, full of mainly elderly and unworldly women will remain her home. Or not. Dolores’ life has been pretty grim so far and seems likely to remain so. Somehow, we as readers remain detached from her, as the author herself does. A strange, visceral book which kept me thinking beyond the time I turned the last page.

Let’s stay with – well, not nuns – but those who have chosen the religious life: Victoria Mackenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain. Two female mediaeval mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe tell their stories in alternating short chapters. Julian is the better known figure, for her Revelations of Divine Love, written when she was an anchoress, enclosed in a tiny windowed cell abutting a Norwich church. Both she and the other figure in the book, Marjorie Kent, had visions. Whereas Julian chooses to see little, but see it intensely, Marjorie is very different. Illiterate and rambunctious, with little time for her husband and children, she loudly proclaims her visions of Christ to anyone who will listen, and indeed those who do not wish to listen. Both took risks. To go against current Christian orthodoxy, especially as a woman, risked excommunication and a painful death. In the book, and we cannot know if this happened, the two meet, and this unlikely pair make a genuine connection. Beautifully written, and quickly read, this is a book that will stay with me for a long time.

So to another woman, isolated from her professional peers simply by virtue of being a woman: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. While Elizabeth Zott, hero of this book, was fighting her battles for acceptance as an academic and chemist in the ’60s, I was a schoolgirl at an all-girls’ grammar school where achievement was expected, and the norm. All the same, our academic prowess when, post graduation, we entered the world of work was not always remunerated as favourably as that of our male colleagues. So this story of a woman who was disregarded while her research was nicked by her male colleagues was bound to interest me, as was her determination not to patronise her female audience when she was hired to do a TV cookery show. But … the characterisation was thin (EZ herself), or frankly unbelievable (her small daughter), and the males disappointingly stereotypical – especially the villains of the piece. As a page-turner it wasn’t wholly successful for me.I’m out of step. Most readers seem to love it.

I’ve just finished Go as a River by Shelley Read (Whom I’ve met! She came to an event organised this week by our local independent bookshop and spoke engagingly and with warm enthusiasm). Victoria lives in a small inward-looking town in Colorado – one that will have been covered by a new reservoir by the end of the book. Hers is a family of men, the women in her life having died in tragic circumstances when she was only 12. They’re either hardworking and grim (father), brutal (brother) or bitter and disabled (uncle). She is their housekeeper. One day, she meets an itinerant young man, a Native American, despised and reviled by the local community: racism is rampant . Falling in love with him changes the trajectory of her life, and is the story which makes up this book. In this account, we have the wild and rugged forest landscape which surrounds her town vividly brought to life, as well as the emotional life of Read’s characters. This is an immersive tale of love, loss and resilience. As a debut novel, it’s a triumph.

Victoria is only 17 when her story begins. Ana, in Dominicana by Angie Cruz, is 15 and living in the Dominican Republic with her family. Since the age of 11 she has been promised in marriage to a man more than twice her age. Love doesn’t come into it. This wheeler dealer, a Dominican now based in New York is her family’s best chance of emigrating there with Ana as the sponsor. New York as Ana finds it is not a city paved in gold, but a shabby flat in which she is more or less a prisoner with a sometimes violent and unpredictable husband. This is her story of her feisty struggles to make a life for herself, and gain some independence, while maintaining contact with her family in troubled political times ( the late 1960s). A good read, up-beat and engaging even when times are very hard, and a real insight into the struggles and compromises of being an immigrant with responsibilities to those who have been left behind.

Lastly, another 15 year old, whom we meet in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. Kambili is a Nigerian teenager who lives a privileged life with her brother Jaja and her parents. Her father is a successful businessman who is proud of the way he is able to support his community with his generosity. His devotion to his Catholic religion is however fanatical and more than a little warped, his expectations of his children controlling and cruel. Their home life is set against the turbulent politics of the time, and the contrast with their father’s sister’s family. They are in much more straitened circumstances, but surround each other with easy-going love. It’s the play between these two sets of attitudes that brings this story into being, and allows Kambili gradually to find her voice. A compelling and often uncomfortable page-turner.

Each of these books is linked by having as their protagonists women, isolated either by choice or circumstance. Perhaps they could have done with reading next month’s starter book: Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict, by Elizabeth Day.

Fat-Headed Censors

ExACTly. Worth a read, I think, as are all posts from Travel Between the Pages, a blog which is ‘the intersection between travel, books, and art’. Always interesting, usually thought-provoking, often funny.

Travel Between The Pages

You would have to have been living under a basket to avoid the recent brouhaha over the re-editing of classic books by so-called sensitivity readers and editors. Here in the Colonies we’ve been through this with the books of Dr. Seuss and other popular children’s authors. Now, the UK has gone mad censoring works by Roald dahl and others.

McSweeney’s recently posted a pointed response to this nonsence in an article by Peter Wisniewski aptly titled “FUCK YOU, YOU FAT-HEADED ROALD DAHL-CENSORING FUCKERS.”

Dear Fat-Headed Roald Dahl-Censoring Fuckers,

You’re censors. You’re not editors, and you’re not readers. You’re censors. You are exactly what Orwell warned us about.

So fuck you.

Without the author’s consent, you are changing and omitting words that the author wrote. That makes you a censor. An agent of censorship. Only fascists censor books.

What you’re doing is crazy. See? We said it. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy.

You…

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Six Degrees of Separation: from Passages to Night Crawling

Kate W: Books are my favourite and best https://booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com/2023/03/04/six-degrees-of-separation-from-passages-to-soundings/

The full title of Passages, this month’s starter book, describes it as being about ‘predictable crises of adult life’ Gail Sheehy’s road map of adult life shows the inevitable personality and sexual changes we go through in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond. And I haven’t read it.

But I have read a book whose female heroine is forced into adapting to a life for which she had been totally unprepared, and for which there was no self-help manual: A room made of leaves, by Kate Grenville. This is an involving story based on the lives of John Macarthur, who has a bit part in Australian history, and his wife Elizabeth, who hasn’t, but who, through her amanuensis Kate Grenville, wrote this book. It’s 1788. After an unwise liaison with a hot-headed and unbalanced soldier, John Macarthur which results in her pregnancy, she is forced to make a new life in Australia where her husband has duties guarding the penal colony in New South Wales. Isolated in this unfamiliar terrain, she has to develop strategies and find strength to navigate her new life and her impetuous and unpredictable husband. This book beautifully evokes the landscape of this part of Australia, and the tough life shared by army personnel, prisoners, and the original Aboriginal population, for whom, unlike most of her fellow countrymen, she develops respect and sympathy. An evocative and poignant story.

Another book had me reading about a woman who also couldn’t have read Passages: Free Love by Tessa Hadley. We are in the 1960s, and are introduced to Phyl, a middle class housewife with a husband in the Foreign Office and two children. The family is prosperous and content. Then Nick, the son of old friends comes for a meal, and everything changes as Phyl makes choices which up-end this happy and conventional family. I was immediately immersed in this story, where first one twist, then another interposed itself in the narrative. Extraordinary as these twists were, the sixties setting gave them the ring of authenticity, and I had little difficulty in being totally sucked into the worlds which Phyl and her various connections inhabited. I found it a real page-turner.

The next two women also had little control over how their lives unfolded:, as told in The Lace Weaver by Lauren Chater. Estonia, 1941. The country is in the grip of a savage conquest and occupation by Russia. Increasingly deprived of a means of scrabbling a livelihood together, for the women of the town where young Kati lives, hanging on to their heritage tradition of shawl-weaving in delicate lacy patterns becomes a way of asserting their commitment to their country. Moscow, 1941. Lydia, a privileged young woman of Kati’s age discovers some unwelcome facts about her parentage and resolves to escape. After several heart-stopping adventures, she finds herself in the same refugee camp as Kati.The two young women tell their stories in alternating chapters, with the leitmotif of the shawl being the device that threads their stories together: stories of danger, love, brutal deaths and the importance of all the women’s support of one another as their men fight the Russian occupiers in under-the-radar resistance groups. Although I found that difficulties were sometimes too slickly resolved, nevertheless the story emphasised the fragility of life, the strength of the human spirit.

We’ll go back to the 12th century now, to read about a woman who at first had little control over her life- until she learnt how to assume it: Lauren Groff’s Matrix. I expected to enjoy this book far more than I actually did. The hero, Marie de France, is someone known to have existed, but very little of her history is known. Which pretty much gave Lauren Groff carte blanche to write her story as she chose. In short, Marie, a bastard of noble birth, is big and ungainly. Sent as a prioress to an impoverished and unimportant abbey, she successfully devotes her whole life to making it large, beautiful, and extraordinarily wealthy. Groff’s research is impressive: she clearly understands the mediaeval religious life well. Her writing is striking, luminous. But I was entirely uninvested in the life of Marie de France and in the lives of her fellow-nuns. Dramas were quickly resolved: whole years, or even a decade or so passed in a single sentence. I didn’t care for Marie a great deal – for her visions and her acquisitiveness – apparently for the glory of God. And really, it was a matter of some indifference to me whether I finished the book: I did – for the quality of the prose, rather than the uninvolving narrative.

Another woman – in fact The hero of this book is the subject of Elizabeth McCracken’s story. Apparently it’s her mother, but actually it’s auto-fiction, which is fictionalised autobiography. A book that is curiously hard to describe or pigeon hole. The author – American – is playing the tourist in London, re-exploring the haunts she and her recently deceased mother enjoyed together. She moves seamlessly, but never inappropriately between her London adventures, her mother’s life as a woman with life-affecting health issues, and the need to sell the unwieldy and neglected house that was her parents’ last home. Her father also died not too long ago, but he plays no more than a bit part in this story. McCracken’s mother was wilful and opinionated, witty and optimistic – and great fun, despite her very real mobility difficulties. McCracken herself vacillates between protecting her mother’s privacy and wanting to cherish her memories. She wants to write a book that’s like ‘David Copperfield except Jewish, and disabled, and female, and an American wiseacre, but there’s too much I don’t know and I can’t bear to make up.’ This is a funny, unsentimental and vivid book which is impossible to characterise – or to put down.

I seem to have a chain which is all about women, so here’s my last one, and so different from any previous choices. Night crawling by Leila Mottley. 17 year old Kiara’s father, always in and out of jail, is dead, her mother is in a halfway house, and her older brother chases unrealistic dreams of becoming the next big name in the music industry. She’s in charge of their home, and de-facto of her friend and neighbour’s 9 year old child, whom she loves unconditionally. Under-educated and with no training, she has no means of paying the rent and eviction looms. Sex-working provides an answer, but soon she falls into the clutches of a ring of sex-seeking cops from whose grip she has little chance of escape. This is her story: that of a feisty young woman making the best of the rotten hand that life has dealt her. Told in her own words, Kiara paints a picture of a world where racism and poverty and lack of choice are normal and where the choices she must make are impossible. It’s inspired by a true story of corruption in the police department. Kiara is bold, witty and tough, and Mottley gives her a rhythmic, new and exciting langage. An energising read.

Six women, roughly fashioned into this month’s chain. Where will next month’s take us? It’s Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography Born to Run.

PS. Away from home, I am finishing this post off on my phone. Getting the link to Kate’s post to display in the usual way has turned out to be above my pay-grade.

Eating to extinction

I have just finished reading Eating to Extinction, by Dan Saladino. It’s an ambitious, immersive and important book. Saladino has made a tour of the world’s vanishing foods – its animals, vegetables, crops, and shown us why retaining diversity in the food chain matters so much.

This engaging and readable book takes us with Dan Saladino as he visits Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania in quest of wild honeys – they’re the very last people to be constantly on the move, with no settled place to call home – they have lived successfully with no possessions, no money and no leaders. In Australia, he’s shown murnong, a radish like root once prized by the aboriginal people, and all but obliterated by introduced over-grazing sheep. Bere is an ancient barley adapted to the harsh conditions in Orkneyn Orkney. There are Swabian lentil growers; apple growers in Kazakhstan; Skerpikjøt, the wind-dried mutton of the Faroes …. and so many more. Each adventure, to areas where local custom and traditional ways of life remain strong is full of interest, and leaves me with a desire to try the foods and drink he sampled. It also leaves me with a determination to do what I can to support the remaining foods being saved by passionate and committed producers.

Disease can rampage through a single variety at horrifying speed, and if that variety is all we have, the consequences are obvious. Too many of our foodstuffs are in too few hands. The cultures that are injected into our cheeses worldwide to make them what they are are in the hands of some 5 suppliers. The cattle we breed are – worldwide – largely a single breed. Seeds in every continent are in the hands of just four corporations,. Thousands upon thousands of local varieties, bred over the centuries to suit local conditions have been lost forever. So many of the foods we rely on – animal and vegetable – once developed to suit particular soils and climate have been wiped out or, if lucky, painstakingly recovered from a vanishingly small stock pile by some single-minded enthusiast. Now, most foods are grown as a one-size-fits-all.

Whereas foodstuffs used to be so different and varied from one country and region to the next, now the entire world derives 50 % of its calorie-intake from just three foods: wheat, corn and rice. The fast-food burger is becoming a world-wide phenomenon. Saladino shows us that besides this being so dangerous – an epidemic could wipe away a foodstuff completely – it’s also impoverishing our diets, and the rich variety of local foods. He discusses globalisation, the crippling effects of war and climate change. The good news is: with a lot of hard work and good will, it’s not quite too late to stop the rot.

The most important book I’ll read this year. And one of the most interesting.

For Gumtrees and Galaxies: Gaia Nature Reading Challenge

Six Degrees of Separation: from Trust to Groundskeeping

Kate W: Six Degrees of Separation

I wanted to read the starter book for this month’s chain, Trust, by Hernan Diaz. But for some reason, the library hasn’t yet satisfied my reservation of it. So I’m working with Diaz’s own comment about his book: ‘there are very, very few novels that deal with the process of accumulation of capital. This, to me, was baffling.’

I have to say it doesn’t baffle me. But I thought I’d go with a short book that looks at a world where capital was – for large swathes of the population – in very short supply. A bit like today. The War of the Poor by Eric Vuillard was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2021. This is a vigorous and pacily written appeal for social justice, using the various Peasants’ Revolt type struggles of the Middle Ages, sometimes rooted in religious fanaticism to make its points. His focus is the life and times of Thomas Müntzer, German preacher and theologian, for whom even the likes of Martin Luther were too Establishment.

In a mere 60+ pages, he conjures the atmosphere of discontent of the peasantry with the oppression and poverty which was their lot. It was a fight that could not be won, and in vigorous, emotionally wrought poetic language, Vuillard tells the tale of what he sees as one of history’s great injustices.

From one political struggle to another. Red Milk by Sjón (translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb). This is the story of Gunnar Kampen, who grew up in Iceland a towards the end of WWII in a family fiercely opposed to Nazi oppression. The story depicts a happy enough conventional childhood which progresses towards his job in a bank. And yet … he comes into contact with Fascist ideas and ideals, and soon becomes a leader of Iceland’s under-the-radar Nazi movement.

The book goes out of its way to portray Gunnar as a young Mr. Average, whose political proclivities are hard to spot in society at large, while pointing out those aspects of Iceland’s recent history that make it possible for Gunnar to entertain the views that he has. An unusual and compelling book, showing the mindset of a young man sucked into a belief system now regaining some political traction throughout Europe.

Gunnar is an unusual young man who presents as absolutely average. So does William, the young hero of A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe. The tragedy of Aberfan is one that no Brit of my generation or older is likely ever to forget. That 116 children and 28 adults, all from the town’s primary school should lose their lives when a colliery spoil heap collapsed and buried them was shocking, even from afar. For 19 year old William Lavery, just-graduated embalmer who volunteers to go and help prepare the dead for burial it was traumatising, and coloured his life thereafter. It wasn’t the first traumatic event in his life. The first was when he was a boy chorister in Cambridge – and actually, he had trauma to deal with before that too, as a boy of 8. This is the story of how his life unfolds, switching back and forth between the years, unpicking the various strands of his story that depict the damaged young man he becomes, and his eventual slow redemption. Beautifully and engagingly told, this story deals with big, unmanageable emotions, and is one of those books about which I can say ‘ I couldn’t put it down’.

I read another book about Aberfan, several years ago. Owen Sheers‘ The Green Hollow. He paints a scene of ordinary families getting ready for the day, ordinary children chattering their way to school, an ordinary teacher taking the register. A series of letters explain why the Coal Board is taking no action about the slag heaps . And then …. a rumble, a roar develops. That is all.

Then we switch immediately to the rescue. To the young medical student who finds himself unwittingly part of the rescue operation, to the miners, parents, journalists.

Now the town is different. Life goes on. It has to. Children yearn to appear on ‘Strictly’ while every year commemorating what happened all that time go. Scars exist alongside hope. This is a moving, powerful, poetic account. It’s dignified, quiet and respectful, and a fine tribute to a town that’s had to deal with utter despair.

A book now about other towns which have irrevocably changed – because they’ve disappeared: Matthew Green‘s Shadowlands. Here is a totally immersive account of how certain villages and towns in England simply got wiped from the map. By placing his chosen locations in the context of their history, their geography and their climatic or political turbulence, he offers a surprisingly varied set of stories of obliteration, drowning, geological change, historical unrest. Every story is placed in the context of that community’s place in history, and offers a rounded, absorbing and detailed account of why and how these communities disappeared. A moving and haunting set of stories.

I wrote only a fortnight ago about – not towns and villages – but forests which have disappeared. Guy Shrubsole‘s The Lost Rainforests of Britain. You can read my review here.

For my last book, I’ve chosen a story where our young hero is a groundsman at an American college, in a small team responsible for its trees and woodlands: Groundskeeping, by Lee Cole. A love story set in 2016-17 at a time when Trump and his ideas were in the ascendant, although he hadn’t yet been elected President. Owen’s from a working class Kentucky family, earning a wage as a groundsman at a college, while still trying to further his education and career as a creative writer. Alma came as a young child from Bosnia, and this refugee family has made good – very good. It’s this tension between their two backgrounds when they catapult into a relationship that informs the whole book, and is painstakingly examined throughout. I turned the pages willingly enough, but felt 400+ pages was far too long to sustain the plot, and was mildly irritated by Owen’s self-absorption throughout.

I seem to have travelled quite a long way from my starting point. Let’s see what we can all make of next month’s: the 1970s self-help classic, Gail Sheehy‘s Passages.

A Novel: as generated by Artificial Intelligence

Last week, fellow blogger Brian D Butler who blogs at Travel Between the Pages. published an entire short novel on his site. He had come up with a prompt, but the story was generated by AI at the website InstaNovel. He thought it was awful. So do I. You can read it here. But what could AI do for me? I had to find out.

This was my prompt:

Pretty dire, isn’t it? If that’s the best it can do, perhaps bloggers, writers and illustrators have nothing to fear. But then … those very first cars had people solemnly walking in front of them, waving a flag as a warning. Things do move on.

By the way. My feature image? Generated by by AI as an experiment by WordPress. As is the final paragraph of all, printed below. I don’t think AI Mark 2 quite knew what AI Mark I was getting at, do you?

My AI novel is about a world where autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) exists, and people have to find a way to interact and live peacefully alongside it. The story follows a group of intrepid humans who strive to bridge the gap between human and computer-powered life. Despite various struggles, the characters eventually find acceptance and cooperation, building bridges between humans and AI in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world.

This novel explores how machines might change society and how people might react to and embrace technology. The story examines the impact

Thoroughly British Rainforests

I have just been reading a book about rainforests. In Britain. Not the exotic tropical rainforests seen on television through which, drenched in sweat, you hack your way, attacked by insects and snakes as you wield your machete: but the gentler British version, temperate rainforest. These increasingly rare woods now occupy under 1% of the earth’s surface. No wonder they’re a best-kept secret.

Guy Shrubsole‘s The Lost Rainforests of Britain is an engaging and thoroughly absorbing account of a National Treasure of which most of us in Britain are completely unaware. Our temperate rainforests are spectacular woodlands with ancient, often stunted gnarled trees, draped and and bearded with mosses and lichens, and once marched across the British Isles from Dartmoor in the south to the north of Scotland – most particularly on the more sodden western seaboard. These days this unique habitat is increasingly under threat, and tiny pockets of such forest are now hard to find, and increasingly isolated and encroached upon.

Guy Shrubsole is the evangelist who seeks to protect and save them. To tell the story of this once widespread forest, he discusses geology, farming history, climate, Celtic Druids, the Romantic poets, JRR Tolkein – even Arthur Conan Doyle. He maps the eco-system in detail and calls for immediate political and public support: Shrubsole is a campaigner as well as a writer. This book may sound worthy, and therefore possibly dull. But it’s very readable, elegiac, amusing, entrancing and shocking by turn. It may turn out to be 2023’s Must Read.

None of these images is from a temperate rainforest: I haven’t – yet – visited one. But the picture shows somewhere I have been: the so-called Lud’s Church, a ferny gorge near Gradbach in Staffordshire, where the cool damp microclimate qualifies it as the very tiniest of rainforests.

I read this for the 2023 Gaia/Nature Reading Challenge

It fired my imagination, and reminded me that I may already have explored such a dim, green and shady place, crowded with trees clothed in soft green mosses, and draped with tangles of lichen, evocative of a spirit life with wraiths, witches and goblins. It wasn’t here in England, but in southern France, where even in the foothills of the Pyrenees it’s hot and often dry. I’ll post about that next …

Browsing through the Backlist

Guilty as charged. I read a book. I thoroughly enjoy it. ‘That was great’. I think. ‘I must read more by her/him’. But then another enticing book by somebody else entirely comes along, and … I don’t.

Cathy of What Cathy Read Next fame has a challenge to help put this right, and she’s called it Backlist Burrow. Choose six authors whom you’ve enjoyed, find two books from their backlist … read them … and report back. I don’t undertake to read two, though I might. But one for sure. And here are my chosen authors.

I read Edith Wharton‘s novella Ethan Frome for Six Degrees of Separation back in December 2021, and immediately vowed to read more from this upper-class New Yorker who, during the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth was able to portray so incisively the characters she created. I still haven’t. Now I have to…

I wonder if this resembles the Massachussetts that Ethan Frome knew? (Ilse Orsel, Unsplash)

Another unforgettable character was Berta Isla. Javier Marías describes her life thoughtfully, discursively. Her husband, working for the secret service is almost constantly absent and unable in any way meaningfully to communicate with her and participate in the marriage. I want to read more from Marías.

Berta and her husband Tomás grew up together in Spain (though not in Zaragoza where this photo of the Basilica of Pilar was taken). After University in Oxford, his career took him to the mists of she-knew-not-where. (Oxford: Lina Kivaka, Pexels)

I read Mary Lawson‘s A Town called Solace when it was chosen for our local bookgroup. I immediately fell for the complex web of characters she created, and the interest she brought to the life of a small and humdrum Canadian town. So – more please!

I wonder if this is a track near Solace? (Ember Navarro, Unsplash)

When I chose Roy Jacobsen‘s Eyes of the Rigel from the library, I was unaware that this Norwegian tale, set on a small island after WWII was the last book in a trilogy: an immersive story of memory, belonging and guilt. I need to catch up with the first two: The Unseen, and White Shadow.

Northern Lights in northern Norway (Dee: Unsplash)

Nicola Upson‘s Stanley and Elsie, a fictionalised telling of the story of the painter Stanley Spencer was a compulsive read. Having a look at her crime novels centred on the life of Josephine Tey seems like a good move to me.

Shipbuilding on the Clyde: Stanley Spencer

Georgina Harding. Here’s another author I want more of, and here’s another instance of my inadvertently starting off with the third book in a trilogy: Harvest. This is a thoughtful picture of a family accommodating itself to an earlier tragedy. I’d like to read the back stories in The Gun Room and Land of the Living.

Harvest, not in Norfolk where Harding’s Harvest is set, but here in North Yorkshire.

This of course is in addition to tackling the (largely virtual) tottering pile of books recommended by friends, book bloggers, newspaper reviews. Really, it’s all quite impossible.

Six Degrees of Separation: to Write a Book, or to Cook a Bear?

Six Degrees of Separation: Katc W

This month’s starter book, Beach Read by Emily Henry is one I had no desire to read. However, one summary I read describes it as being about two very different writers. ‘she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast‘ Goodreads).

Somehow, that put me in mind of Maggie O’Farrell‘s The Marriage Portrait. In 15th Century Florence, Lucrezia, third daughter Cosimo de’ Medici, finds herself betrothed, then married to Alfonso, heir to the Duke of Ferrara when her older sister, his original choice, dies. The story flits between her early life in Florence and her early married life. Underneath, throughout her marriage, her conviction that she will be killed by her apparently loving husband bubbles away. This is a tale, sumptuously and evocatively told. It’s a mixture of fact, of weaving in allusions learnt from Browning’s poem My Last Duchess, from myth and fairytale and from gothic horror to create an engaging and highly pictorial story, which goes a long way towards helping us understand what it might have been to be Lucrezia: child, noblewoman, wife.

From one woman’s life to another.in this case a wholly fictional one, as told in Laird Hunt‘s Zorrie. This is the story of an ordinary woman living in rural Indiana, born during the 1930s Depression years. It’s quietly, beautifully told, from the days when Zorrie is orphaned and put in the care of a resentful spinster aunt, through the years of her adolescence, marriage and beyond to old age. Zorrie’s is a narrow world, but she has the same struggles with grief, with loneliness that befall most of us at some stage. But she also experiences love, and deep friendships, and reaps the rewards of steadfast hard work. I was moved by and involved in the story told in this short book.

From one simple life to another, in Limberlost, by Robbie Arnott. Set in rural Tasmania towards the end of WWII, , this book ‘s earlier pages chronicle the life of young Ned, son of an apple farmer. As the book moves on, episodes from his whole life interweave the narrative, and indicate how events from his boyhood inform the adult he became. What makes this book special is its sparse yet luminous prose: its ability to make readers care for Ned, who has difficulty articulating his feelings and aspirations. The novel isn’t plot-driven. It relies on various episodes such as his caring for a fierce marsupial, a quoll, whom he has inadvertently trapped to illustrate his character, his inability to trust himself to explain and justify. The one real drama in his marriage isn’t really explored. This quiet, understated book may well be my book-of-the-year 2022.

We’re still crossing continents in my next book: to Europe – to Italy. I’m staying here, by Marco Balzano. A powerful, understated novel sweeping us through much of the twentieth century. Trina narrates her story to her missing daughter. She lives in Curòn, in the German-speaking Italian Tyrol, and witnesses Mussolini’s attempts to Italianise it and stifle its German heritage; the impact of the Nazis and war on their lives; and finally sees their community destroyed by the building of a – it turns out – inefficient dam which drowns Curòn and surrounding villages. Important moments of history are told here through the lives of ordinary people, few of whom are described, other than as, for instance ‘the fat woman’, ‘the old man’ – they become ciphers for us all.. That is what makes this book, so simply told, so potent.

Now we’re off to Spain. I picked Barcelona Dreaming by Rupert Thomson from the library shelves for no better reason than that Barcelona is a city I know well since our daughter moved there ten years ago. Yhis is a book with a strong sense of place. Not Tourist Barcelona, with its must-see monuments, its busy cafes and its omni-present pick-pockets: but the varied city which all kinds of people from dyed-in-the-wool Catalans to ex-pats and immigrants call home. Here are three interlinked novellas, each with a very different character at its heart. They never meet, but are linked loosely through neighbours, colleagues and unconnected events. The book explores themes such as immigration, racism, nostalgia, lack of self-knowledge: old relationships that linger on. Thomson conjures up people whose complicated lives are utterly plausible, and a city that lives and breathes without reference to the tourist haunts so many travellers see. An immersive book.

These first five books all have a single character at the story’s heart. My sixth does too in many ways. To Cook a Bear, by Mikael Niemi. But is the hero the narrator, Jusi, or the pastor? We’re in northern Sweden in 1852, within the Arctic Circle – an area where Swedes, Finns and the Sami people all live. Revivalist preacher Laestadius, an avid amateur botanist is pastor in a community here, and takes in an abandoned Sami boy, Jussi, who’s suffered much abuse and poverty. This pastor is astute and observant – more so than the local sheriff, and it’s he who continues his pursuit for the truth when first, a local girl is killed, then another is grievously attacked: the easy, but incorrect answer is – a bear. The pastor teaches Jussi to read, write and use his brain, and it’s largely the boy who tells the story, though he remains, as do the Sami people generally, disregarded and despised by the local community. This is a good story and well told, portraying an isolated community, reliant on gossip, tradition, religion and superstition to get by. There are twists which bring the pastor (who is an actual historical figure) and Jussi into real danger. This is Scandi Noir introduced into the history books, and emphatically not a detective story with added costume.

So I’ve come full circle, by beginning and ending my chain with two stories inspired by the lives of real people. If I’m honest, this was also driven by my wish to include my very favourite book title of 2022: To Cook a Bear. The other factor making this list into a chain is that – quite exceptionally, I read all six of these books straight after one another (though not in this order) since the last appearance of Six Degrees.

And next month’s starter? Trust, by Hernan Diaz. I’ve reserved it at the library already.