April has been a reading month. I mean a lot of reading. Though in the last week I’ve barely touched a book so crammed it all in early. I had a week off work which helped. Anyway, this is what I read this month!
This Lovely City – Louise Hare
Oh I loved this. It’s set in London and features a group of black men who came to England during the Windrush time and how they try to settle for work and family within the city. It’s a love story between Lawrie, a postal worker, and his neighbour Evie, and how they get entangled in a tragic discovery. I thought this was brilliantly written, and really liked how it brings a whole scale of racist actions to life – from blatant attacks to micro aggressions – and the effect these have on someone who is just trying to have a normal life. This is Hare’s first book and she’s clearly a great new writing talent.
The Most Fun We Ever Had – Claire Lombardo
No idea where the title came from as I couldn’t finish it, or even get very far but this should be a life lesson – that if a book has recommendations that compare it to Jonathan Franzen then I need to put it down and not bother (I never finished a Franzen book either). Anyway, if whining rich white Americans is your thing, perhaps this would work but I thought they were weird as all that and wasn’t interested.
Miss Benson’s Beetle – Rachel Joyce
Loved this, in what is likely to be Joyce’s best book yet. She writes loneliness and isolation so well, and yet this is not a lonely or sad book. Instead it details the blossoming of a friendship and of a life and is written as a girl’s own adventure, including all the tropes of the boy’s own genre but in reverse. It’s splendid fun and I’ve been waiting for the paperback for so long but it was worth the wait. Miss Margery Benson jacks in her soulless teaching job in the 1950s and goes off to fulfill a lifetime ambition – to find an as yet undiscovered beetle. Advertising for an assistant, she finds she is travelling with Enid Pretty, a pink suited, high heeled extroverted cupcake of a woman who should be the last person you would expect to travel to the jungles of South Pacific islands. But Enid has a secret and Miss Benson needs help. It’s an unlikely friendship but I thought it was fantastic.
Listening Still – Ann Griffith
I really liked the quiet poignancy of Anne Griffin’s first book and was delighted to find a cameo appearance by the protagonist of When All is Said in Listening Still. Listening Still is the story of Jeanie, who works in her family’s undertaking business. Jeanie can talk to the dead. She take their last confessions, their messages and regrets and requests. But the rest of her life is falling apart. Her marriage is rocky (for the record, I thought her husband was a whiny petulant type who was lacking in empathy but never seemed actively unpleasant – masterful stroke of characterisation) and her parents have decided to have retire early and up sticks to the seaside, leaving her and her husband to run the business with her aunt. The book tells of how Jeanie grew up with this gift, how she had a grand passion and a close circle of friends and most of all, it tells of the burden she carries by listening and talking to the dead. This is a great concept for a novel and I thought Griffin really carried off the ‘supernatural’ element of this well, never allowing it to become fantastic or silly. This is another quiet triumph for Griffin, who can tell deep truths about unknown lives with charm and insight. Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy.
A Woman is No Man – Etaf Rum
A book set among Palestinian families settling in Brooklyn and how the women are treated in these close knit Muslim communities. The story centres on Isra, a shy woman sent from Palestine to be married , and how she tries to please her husband’s overbearing mother Fareen, and fit in with the rest of his family. Years later, we see Isra’s daughter Deya having similar battles with Fareen to avoid being married off – but there is no sign of Isra. The truth about what happened to her, and how Deya can have a different life is what drives the book – incredibly sad but fascinating look into another culture.
David and Ameena – Ali Rauf
The second book this month about immigrant families in New York – this time a love story between a Jewish chap and a Mancunian Muslim girl. I found him quite annoying tbh, but otherwise this was interesting without being entirely emotionally engaging.
Love Letters – Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West
The title is a misnomer, to be honest, as these are letters and diary entries for the whole length of the Vita and Virginia’s relationship, which was not always that of lovers, but I imagine “Close friends who were once lovers and also had a business relationship letters” doesn’t really work as a title. Anyway, while I had read some of these before, putting them in a book together makes it comes across as much more of a story – Woolf wrote to so many people and had so many visitors that her diaries and letters volumes are jam packed. These are quite lovely, and made me feel very affectionate towards them both.
Reader, I Married Him – ed. Tracy Chevalier
These are short stories inspired by Jane Eyre, or at least by the line from Jane Eyre used as the collection’s title, but in truth, there seemed little to link them well and it was a rather odd collection. Not badly written and there are some great writers here but I didn’t really get the concept well and it all fell rather flat.
There was Still Love – Favel Parrett
I can’t remember who or what recommended this but I’m so glad I found it. It’s a quiet book where little happens but is rather beautiful and has much to say about unseen lives that nevertheless witness moments from history. There Was Still Love features a Czech family, including twin girls, one of whom is sent away to escape the war (the family could only afford the ticket to send one girl away) and the other who stayed in Prague. The ramifications for them and the rest of their family are explored in slow steady detail here and its rather lovely.
The Ends of the Earth – Abbie Greaves
Another book I picked up via Netgalley as an advance read and I got through it quite quickly – I read faster on the ereader app than in an actual book. Mary sits each evening in a tube station with a sign reading ‘Come home Jim’ and has done for the last seven years. Why? Her friends set about trying to find out. It is a shame, then, that the reason is really very poor.
Crossroads – Mark Radcliffe
A music book that explores moments where musicians reached a crossroads to make a change in their career that went splendidly well for them and for music in general. Mark Radcliffe reached a similar crossroads in his life, following cancer treatment and a milestone birthday, so he decided to loosely use that as a theme to talk about things he really likes, and throws in tons of dad jokes too. A fun read.
You, Me and the Sea – Elizabeth Haynes
I really wanted to like this and still quite can’t put my finger on why I didn’t. It is about Kate who has made a series of ‘”fuck ups” and decides to take a temporary job on a remote Scottish island looking after a birdwatching holiday retreat. Also on the island is the lighthousekeeper Fraser, a large man with a tragic past that has followed him to the island (though to reveal more would spoil the plot, but I did guess it anyway). I think it would have been better had it been at least 100 pages shorter – there’s a lot of introspection on Kate’s fuck ups and Fraser’s bad dreams – and Kate could have been less annoying, perhaps if she didn’t try to base her whole self around being one of those women that can’t exist without a man. Whatever it was that I didn’t like – length, characters, fewer descriptions of puffins than expected – I did at least keep reading to the end.
Lost Children Archive – Valeria Luselli
This was the book group choice for the month – and my pick too. I chose it because of the fuss surrounding American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins (which I also read and thought was very badly written tosh) – Lost Children Archive was on a list of alternatives people might like to read if they wanted to find out more about the Mexican border crisis from more authentic authors. But this is barely a book about the Mexican border crisis and instead a quite dull essay on the disintegrating marriage between two very strange people as they drive across America with their children. I think somewhere in there may have been the point that she was trying to make about families, connection, about how we treat each other – and there was a tenuous attempt at creating a parallel between the border crisis and the eradication of Native Americans which was quite clumsy. Weirdly, in the middle of the book, I came across a single paragraph which was all about how we experience time differently and, while she wasn’t writing about the pandemic, it made so much sense to me and really resonated, and then it went back to the self indulgent nonsense it had been before. I need to apologise to the reading group. This was a disappointment. If anyone has any good recommendations about the border crisis then I’m still interested…
Moments of Pleasure
We loved Queen of Katwe which was on BBC iplayer this month – a film about a Ugandan chess champion. And with the easing of lockdown restrictions, we also made it to a National Trust shop and stocked up on their superior blood orange curd which has been gracing my daily toast – it is a thing of joy. On the whole, my forays into the city have so far been fun enough to stimulate by listening to other people gathering and enjoying the atmosphere, but then I’ve been glad to come home away from them all. So obviously the best moment of pleasure this month for any reading fan has been going into bookshops again. I came home with a lovely new pile of things to read from both the shops in town.
Susan E Barsby 