My July reading

I got waylaid this month by a friend going to see the Harry Potter play so I started re-reading them all. (There’s no re-reading option on Goodreads so my reading challenge figures are wrong…) I’ll talk Harry at the end. Otherwise…

Rowan Coleman – We Are All Made of Stars

I wrote last month about how I’d stopped reading A Song for Issy Bradley because of the hospitalisation of my daughter after she choked on a grape and went into cardiac arrest. I haven’t yet been able to pick it up and went into a reading funk, not knowing what to dip into. Thank goodness for this book. I won a copy of this from Rowan Coleman’s Facebook page (along with a lovely silver star pendant and necklace) and had been saving it for the right time. We Are All Made of Stars is about Stella, a nurse at a hospice who writes letters for her patients so they can finally say what they want, to be read after their death. But Stella is married to an ex-soldier who is suffering severe PTSD and neither of them know what to do or how to move on.

You might think a book that brushes so close to death is not what a traumatised mum should be reading but I found this to be such a soothing balm to read. It’s a cliche to say something like this can be life-affirming but this is what I found in the book. Above all things, it’s a love story, or rather several love stories, including a lovely burgeoning relationship between two teens, and we also witness the love between patients and families, and among the patients together.

Some of the letters Stella writes are stories in themselves and I found myself thinking about what splendid spin offs they could make. All in all, this was an incredible comfort to me as I spent a week in some kind of limbo trying to drag myself back to real life. But aside from my personal life, this is a warm and generous book, full of the best that people can be.

William Boyd – Sweet Caress

This is one of Boyd’s epics. The ones that cover the life of one person, spanning a wide amount of time. His best known, and I think best book, that does this is Any Human Heart (fully recommended) but Sweet Caress is pretty entertaining too. The person in question is Amory Clay, a female photographer. We meet her while she is a teen at school where her traumatised father attempts to kill them both, all the way through to her last days in Scotland in the 1970s. In between, she becomes a society photographer, causes a scandal in pre-war Britain, goes to war, finds love and gets married.

I liked Amory but I felt as a character she was always a little distant, though I’m not sure why. She is not a wholly formed jump off the page character like Logan Mountstuart from Any Human Heart. Her family and friends are never fully formed either, and I wonder if this was because it was was written in the first person. Amory seemed aloof from others, and thus painted them as aloof from us.

Having said that, I love these kind of books with big sweeping world changes within, and how one person can tell a bigger story. This is not quite Boyd’s best but it’s on the right track.

Sue Perkins – Spectacles

I don’t often do biographies, and I rarely do celebs but I was staying with my mum and she had this to hand. I read it in two evenings. It’s very funny. I like having ridiculous feelings of kinship with someone I admire, so the fact that me and Sue have the same first names and birthdays in September both made me like her even more. Plus, we have a loose family connection through her speech therapist. Mostly, this is a funny affectionate look at Sue’s life and how her family, friends and lovers have kept her going. The stories about her parents are wonderful, I imagine quite exaggerated, but with the silly humour that always gives me the giggles.

Harry Potter (I’m currently on book 6)

I love how quickly I get absorbed by these books.

I hate how no one told JKR about Stephen King’s rule on words ending in ‘ly’. It’s the writing rule I try to stick to the most. The number of times Harry says something bitterly… make it stop!

My fondest bookselling memory, in fact, possibly my favourite work memory of all (apart from flashing my tattoo at Sir David Attenborough obvs), remains running the launch party for book seven at Nottingham Waterstone’s. Torrential rain, five times as many people as we were expecting, chaos, and the only person available to put our displays together was my sister who had come to volunteer for the night for fun. Everyone else was busy entertaining the customers. At 2am I stood in the pouring rain in a large black velvet witch’s hat yelling at a man that I was closing the shop and he was too late for his copy but he could come back at 7am when we reopened.

I have no idea what this says about me.