September gets a bad rap – too many people waiting for October so they do Halloween and lord knows it’s spider month. But it’s my birthday month and I always get a burst of energy at this time. This year the energy is less for reading and more for a range of other creative pastimes. But I’ve still managed to get through some books (I also made the mistake of trying to count the number of books unread on the shelves…) We’ll skip over that and instead look at what I have read this month
The Change by Kirsten Miller
In the depressing cycle of news stories, the violent deaths of women – Sarah Everard, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, Sabina Nessa and so on – are the things that inspire the most rage and the most exhaustion. The abuse of power, from NHS surgeons to 90s comedians, remain the same and all we seem to be able to do is shake our heads and pass on the same lessons to our daughters that we learned from our mothers. I am so tired of feeling that nothing about this is better for my daughter than it was for my mother. This week’s news about Elianne Andam a case in point.
I imagine Kirsten Miller felt the same. The Change is a cathartic book full of rage at the cycle of apathy that surrounds the epidemic of violence against women. The Change is about three women – Nessa, Harriett and Jo – who all live in an American town and who are all approaching a certain age. With that age comes wisdom, power and the shucking off of expectations that they give a shit, for Harriett and Jo anyway. Nessa’s power is that she can see ghosts, especially of people who have been killed. Jo and Harriett have both been tossed about by the corporate world of work and have thrown that off – Harriett to become a hippy whose yard is overgrown with medicinal herbs, and Jo to run a gym where she can work off the huge amounts of energy that run through her. She is incredibly strong. The three women come together when Nessa’s power leads them to find the dead body of a girl who has been brutally murdered and they experience the reluctance of the powers that be to investigate properly. The book is full of stories of the ways women have been ignored, sidelined or manipulated in the interests of influential men and the three women have clearly had enough of it. Unlike Naomi Alderman’s The Power, The Change is interested only in revenge and liberation from men being shit. It’s quite cliched in places and it doesn’t offer any constructive answers. But reading it in the aftermath of any of the news stories about women recently make it quite a liberating experience.
Windward Family – Alexis Keir
I read this because Alexis Keir was due to give an author’s fireside chat at work, talking about his book and his experiences (it’s been postponed but fingers crossed we can hear from him soon). Windward Family is about his exploration of history, of the stories that make us, of global experiences of inclusion or exclusion and about his own family’s journey from St Vincent to Britain and then beyond. It’s not a traditionally told tale of one man’s journey to find his roots but instead nips about all over the place – to America, to Victorian Britain, to New Zealand, the Caribbean and to Luton. It shows us how disjointed our lives can be but also how varied, how we have so many more threads to our national stories than we allow to be told and how we should be curious about each other.
Their Eyes were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
Every so often an article gets published about Goodreads, where the troubled intellectual writes about how awful it is that works of great literature are given one or two stars by the hoi polloi and isn’t it ghastly how people just don’t understand. (There are several issues to be had with Goodreads of course, mostly about its usability, but the ratings are what people usually take the most umbrage at.)
Reading is of course incredibly subjective and what one person likes, another doesn’t. Once a book is out of the writer’s hands, it’s no longer theirs. Their Eyes Were Watching God was the reading group choice and I’ve been meaning to read it for years, possibly since I was at uni. I’m well aware that it’s a classic that says huge amounts about the lot of black women in America, and yet, I can’t give it more than three stars. My problems with the book are all my own and are not the book’s fault per se. And I’m still clear that it’s a work of classic literature that has much to say about the lot of black women in America. But.
Mostly, it’s because it’s written in dialect. Dialect books are sometimes best to read in the accent of the person speaking so this is where audiobooks come into their own. But I’m not great at audiobooks so I’m stuck with the page. Reading dialect is in many ways like reading a second language. I read Hurston like I read the stories on Duolingo – I have to take in every word and translate it to work out what it says. But then I miss the bigger picture and it’s such hard work reading in this way. So I try skim reading and have no idea what’s going on or who has spoken. (Hurston doesn’t use ‘said’ tags and every character uses dialect so there’s no differential.) It’s a position of privilege to demand everyone speak in a way that you can understand in your own way. If you’re writing a book about working black people in the Southern US, they aren’t going to talk like a white British woman. But I can’t get my head around reading this easily.
Winter in Madrid – CJ Sansom
Since visiting Madrid earlier this year, I wanted to read some more books set there and this is 650 page epic adventure story set during the Second World War, when Spain remained neutral but where Franco was cementing his position following the Civil War. It features Harry Brett, invalided out of the British army after Dunkirk who is recruited to spy on an old schoolfriend, Sandy Forsyth, in Madrid. Another old friend, Bernie, has also been captured by the Spanish and is in a prisoner camp. Bernie’s old girlfriend, Barbara, is with Sandy now but gets mixed up in a plot to rescue Bernie. And so a tangle of secrets and lies and politics and intrigue begins. And it is a tangle, though not of the Le Carre standard but enough to keep you reading on. It’s an adventure, as I say. I enjoyed it. It has Sunday evening mini series written all over it.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe – Fannie Flagg
My re-read this month came as we decided our garden tomato plants weren’t going to ripen so I dug this out to make some friend green tomatoes for lunch from the recipes in the back. Obviously then I decided to reread it. It’s a book of women’s voices, women’s experiences and of lots of love. I love it.
Moments of Pleasure
If you’ve not yet watched the Northern Soul prom in BBC iplayer, I recommend it. If I could travel back in time, an all nighter at Wigan casino would be something I’d love to do. Alas, I was born too late and too south. But the music’s great.
Very late to the party, we’ve just started watching Ghosts (also BBC iplayer) I believe the final series starts later this week. It’s very silly and good fun family viewing.
Susan E Barsby 