June reading round up

It’s finally warm and I’ve been taking part in a writing intensive this month – 1000 words a day – and have pretty much completed it too. I did think this might impact on how much I read this month but actually, the biggest obstacle to getting a lot of reading done was the length and slow pace of one of this month’s books instead. But here’s what I did read.

The Dance Tree – Kiran Milgrave Harwood

This was the reading group choice and I was unsure about it – as I’m not great at historical fiction and the opening three pages were dreadfully bleak. However, there is an improvement as you get to know the characters and I found it a compelling read. It’s based on the true story of a dance trance that affected women in Strasbourg in the 1500s. The story is based around three women: heavily pregnant Lisbet, her friend Ida, and her sister in law Nethe who has just returned from penance for a sin Lisbet is unaware of. The story is based around the heavily religious community they live in, the power of the authorities over the people of Strasbourg, and deals with female friendship and the nature of love. The characters, as I say, I enjoyed very much, though I found the plot slightly odd – and I think it’s because despite all the fuss about the dance that takes place, you don’t get a real sense of the dance, its power or why people are putting themselves in a trance like state. You only see it as an observer, and possibly with quite a modern sensibility. So, I enjoyed the book while not finding it wholly convincing.

Thinking Again – Jan Morris

I cannot remember where I got this or why, except that I’ve never read Morris. This is the second volume of her diaries when she was an old woman living in Wales with her wife, who is mentioned several times as having dementia. Morris is an interesting daily chronicler, and has deeper questions to ask of everyday life, though with an old fashioned perspective. Which is to be expected, given her age at the time of writing. I may not have agreed with everything she said, but I enjoyed the way she said it.

A Gentleman in Paris – Amor Towles

This is a long book, nearly 500 pages, and for many of them, there isn’t a lot of action. The story concerns Count Alexander Rostov who, in 1922, is called into the Kremlin and told that as he is an unrepentant aristocrat, he is now under house arrest and cannot come and go as he pleases. Rostov has to move from his suite of rooms at the Hotel Metropol up to the servant quarters and cannot leave, but because he is of an eternally positive disposition, he makes the best of this and carries on life as best he can. This means a series of charming anecdotes with fellow guests and staff, including a girl Nina, who he becomes friends with, a glamorous actor Anna, and the chef Emile. By the time the novel ends – and it’s only towards the end that we have any plot at all, it seems – it’s 1954, Rostov has been working at the Metropol for much of his time and we have read about thirty years of his life. I read Towles’ The Lincoln Highway last year, which I also enjoyed but described as Steinbeck-lite and I wonder if this reads as Russian-lit-lite, having as it does, some wider questions about life within the text, which strikes me as a Russian lit thing to do. Again, an enjoyable if slow and ambling read.

The Glass Hotel – Emily St John Mandel

The random wheel of books chose this from the shelves for me and I don’t know if I’d ever have thought a book about a ponzi scheme would be this interesting. This is a book of random characters, loosely interlinked through a series of encounters but the main character is Vincent – a woman who is tending bar one evening when she meets a charismatic businessman, Jonathan, and marries him. (Vincent’s name threw me all the way through the book, it is ridiculous how firmly you have to try and train your brain away from a gender binary.) There are other people – Vincent’s half brother Paul, Jonathan, various friends – and the story weaves through several years and encounters before coming to a strange ending. There’s plot but not an obvious one and it is a rather intriguing wander through loss, grief, crime and punishment, and retribution. I liked it.

Frank and Red – Matt Coyne

There’s a whole trope of books out there about what happens to a man when his partner dies, and for the most part, men appear to become incredibly rude and domestically hopeless. I do find this a bit odd – if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I’m pretty certain S will be sad but he will be able to work the washing machine. Anyway, this is one of those, with Frank being this main old man, a recent widower who is haunted by the ghost of his wife. He never leaves the house and is estranged from his son when he gets new neighbours – Red, a 6-year old boy, and his mum. This is your typical two different characters who both need something come together and become unlikely friends kind of thing. It was ok, nice enough.

Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris

Sedaris is a well-known essay writer by now but I think this was his first book and perhaps he was still trying his style out. On the whole, it’s not as funny as some others I’ve read. It starts out talking about his family and their quirks which, as they are an odd bunch, could be entertaining but somehow get tiresome. Luckily by this point, the essays move to the time he spent living in France and especially learning French. I’ve been doing French on Duolingo for nearly four years now and found a lot of common ground to laugh at here. The second half of the book is much better.

Hunted – Abir Mukherjee

Mukherjee is a Scottish-Asian writer who is better known for his historical crime series set in the British Raj. This is a stand alone thriller and therefore very different. And it goes with a bang! It’s like a fast and furious movie, the action always moving form one place to another, never keeping still. There are two interwoven stories, one of two parents trying to find their children who have got mixed up in a plot to wipe out the US Presidential candidates, and another of a rogue – aren’t they always? – FBI agent who is tracking them all down, the bad guys and the parents. It flits back and forth and so do the characters. If you like thrillers and action movies, you’ll like this. I raced through it.

The Year of Nothing – Emma Gannon

I really like The Pound Project, a small quirky indie publisher who create limited print runs for their titles and give you a short window to pre-order them. They often have fun ideas, or are able to look at things in a different way, plus the output is nicely bound, well packaged books, often with extra illustrations. The Year of Nothing is one of these and follows journalist Emma Gannon as she deals with burnout and recuperation. There are two books, divided into two seasons each and each chapter covers a month and how she manages. It also gives you ideas you could try if you wanted to have some of the self care options she tries or questions to ask yourself – essentially to avoid falling into the same trap. While Gannon does spend a lot of time in bed or watching old movies, her concept of doing nothing is fluid – she also goes walking around graveyards, spends time with friends in a treehouse in Glastonbury and at one point pops over to Porto for a few days. I’m not begrudging her any of these things in recovery time, but the idea of doing nothing is actually doing no work and it’s not the same thing. Anyway, this is essentially the kind of thing they could publish in The Pool if The Pool was still going.

Moments of Pleasure

Bashing out 1000 words a day has been quite enjoyable, and fitted into daily routines quite well. The pressure to bash out new words is quite difficult to sustain, and by the end of the month, I had a load of stuff I needed to work on that was less about putting down new words and more about sorting the existing words. Some writers hate editing. I am not one of them.

I also caught an exhibition at Lakeside gallery in the University of Nottingham about the history of Boots the Chemist, which is well worth a bit of your time. Especially the lovely big old jars of spices and apothecary stuff, cabinets of medicines and all kinds of wonders.

Finally, the girl and I went to watch Lea Salonga at Nottingham’s Royal Centre this week and it was lovely. No one tells you that the bonus of having children is bringing them up to like the stuff you like so you can then go to watch the stuff together. But having a companion who likes musical theatre is fab. Tears were shed. Hands were clasped in joy.