October reading round up

I love autumn but mainly in September. October is too unpredictable and, these days, dominated by spooky season. I don’t care. I don’t care for ghosts or cats or creepy or pumpkin space latte. Halloween has been fun since I had a child but it’s a day, a single day. It doesn’t have to be a month, nor does it need to take over your personality for all that time. For heaven’s sake, get a grip.

Rant over. And now, for what I read this month.

Frankie – Graham Norton

I know, this isn’t the kind of thing I usually read and in principle obviously the proliferation of celebs writing books is a nightmare. But I heard him talking about it on Radio 4 and the story sounded interesting. Plus, of all the celeb authors out there, I’ve met him and he is excellent at his job, and doesn’t have huge pretensions for literary life (he refers to himself as “a chat show host with notions.”) Frankie is the name of a young Irish girl, orphaned young and brought up by her religious aunt and uncle, who marry her off to a priest. The marriage is not a success and Frankie ends up in London with her childhood friend, finding independence and work. The story of her life, including a long stint in New York, is told to her new carer who visits the house for overnight visits after Frankie has a fall. It is a light competent read I got from the library, diverting enough for an evening read.

Hell of a Book – Jason Mott

This is a slightly weird book but compelling enough for me to keep reading through the weird bits. A dual narrative of sorts, it starts with a little boy, known only as ‘The Kid’ or later, ‘Soot’, being taught to become invisible by his parents. The other story is about an author, a black man who has written a ‘hell of a book’ and he is now touring the US to promote it, while ostensibly writing the follow up. He is encouraged not to talk or write about ‘the black experience’ by his publishers (the opposite of Percival Everett’s Erasure) but as the book continues, his story and that of The Kid get intertwined. The author tells us throughout that he sees things, establishing himself as an unreliable narrator, but somehow this also makes you like and trust him more. The impact of the book is to explore some aspect of the black experience in the US and to the edge of everything sits the possibility of violence breaking out at any time. It’s worth a read and a study.

Train Dreams – Denis Johnson

This is a slim novella and a tale of frontier America. It’s the story of Robert Grainier, brought up by his uncle after the death of his parents, and how he goes on to become a labourer at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It’s a life of hardship, difficult labour and, after he’s found a wife and built her a cabin in the woods, a forest fire kills her and their baby. Maybe. It’s hard to write about this, the prose is mostly sparse but still catches you with how awful some of the events are, how hard a life it was and yet Robert keeps going. It’s very well done in such a short book but melancholy.

Orbital – Samantha Harvey

Another slim volume of distinctive writing and this has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I read Harvey’s last book, Dear Thief, which I started liking and felt it lost its way. This feels like it ought to be different but still covers huge themes about what it means to be human or how to act as a human which she explores in a way in Dear Thief. Orbital, as you might guess, is set in space. The space station orbiting the earth and the lives of the astronauts and cosmonauts on board as they go around the earth sixteen times in an earth day. There is little dialogue, and no punctuation marks for the little there is, but there is much description of feelings and observations and actions, so the whole thing reads as a dream in many ways. I took a while to get into it, but some of the themes are fascinating. She explores the questions many people ask about space – why do we go there when we’re making such a mess of earth, what’s the point of it, and more – and goes from these to minute details of people’s lives. It’s very well done and because of the structure, perhaps doesn’t have the chance to wander aimlessly which the previous book did by the end. This sounds like a grudging review of Dear Thief which I do think is worth reading. This is too – and I’d be interested to see how she does at the Booker.

Cassandra at the Wedding – Dorothy Baker

It was only once I finished reading this that I found it’s a republishing of a book originally written in 1972. I thought this read quite modern and apart from a single scene with a payphone, hadn’t noticed the gap. It is odd though. It’s three internal monologues told by Cassandra and her twin Judith. Cassandra is at university writing her thesis and goes home for Judith’s wedding. We can tell she does not want Judith to get married and assume there is some big reason for this, a rupture of the family of some kind. Cassandra’s first monologue is the longest and sets the scene for the rest of the book. I don’t want to spoil the story but it’s one of those books that is all about the characterisation and voice and much less about the plot.

Playground – Richard Powers

I love the huge ambition and sweep of Richard Powers’ books, although they often need a bit of focus to get into. His recent books have been focused around environmental issues and Playground is about the oceans and the impact on human life of AI and tech bros. It’s the story mainly of two boys, Rafi and Todd, growing up together in Chicago, one black and one white, both from difficult home backgrounds, both with different skills and interests but they bond and find a common love of a game, Go, and the infinite possibilities in playing. It’s also about a Pacific island and how these places have been and can be exploited for experiments by Western nations, and it’s also about a diver, Evelyn Beaulieu, and how she discovers wonders in the deep. All these strands come together in a complicated way as you read and you get involved in each strand of the story. A really immersive read. Though I may need someone to explain the end to see if I understood it right.

The Long-Winded Lady – Maeve Brennan

If time travel was possible and you asked me what time I’d like to return to, I’d say New York in the fifties (or London in the thirties – I have no interest in experiencing life without sewers, hot water or readily available coffee.) So I enjoyed this very much. It’s a series of essays published by Brennan, an Irish writer in New York, in the fifties and sixties. Each column has a single paragraph, descriptive and past tense and covers what she finds and observes on the streets – lots of human interaction, how people react to fires or theft or restaurants. I dipped in and out over a period of time and enjoyed it very much.

Enter Ghost – Isabella Hammond

Oh I tried so hard to like this. It’s shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, about a production of Hamlet – both of which I love – and set in Palestine so shines a light on the Middle East, which feels important bearing in mind the news this last year. But my goodness, it’s quite boring and unengaging in places. I really wanted it to be better and the characters more interesting but they weren’t. A real disappointment.

I Am Homeless if This is Not my Home – Lorrie Moore

I’ve never read Moore but keep meaning to get round to her short stories. This is a novel, possibly even a novella, and it’s a bit weird. And I wonder if it might actually have been better as one of two linked short stories. It’s about a man whose brother is dying and one day he visits him and talks and talks, and then he gets a call to say his ex-girlfriend has killed herself. (She’d been threatening to do that for a while). So he leaves his brother and goes to find out what happened and while he does that, the girlfriend appears in ghost form and he drives her to an alternative destination. I mean, I could handle that in itself, but it was the style I couldn’t quite get or what the point was. There was some emotional scenes near the end and it’s meant to be odd, I think. I’m still unsure about it. I guess something about the nature of grief and love and, oh I don’t know.

Flatlands – Sue Hubbard

My goodness, I could feel the cold and the bleakness while I read. It was the literary experience of picking dirt out form under your fingernails. Set in Lincolnshire during the Second World War, this is the story of a strange friendship that springs up between an evacuee and a conscientious objector. It’s based on a Paul Gallico story and a retelling, I think (I can’t look up the details on the book now as I left it in our holiday rental for the next people to feel bleakly depressed over) anyway, something to do with snow geese. It’s well written and the place is deftly explored but it summed all my prejudices about Lincolnshire.

Midnight and Blue – Ian Rankin

We last left Rebus on the verge of being arrested for the murder of Big Ger Cafferty and this book sees him serving time, though only for attempted murder. But as you can imagine for a city like Edinburgh with as many drug warring gangsters as seem to appear in turf wars in Rankin’s books, the inside life isn’t much better and soon there’s a murder in a cell. The action flits between Rebus trying to investigate (and not get killed) and Siobhan Clarke on the outside, going up against Malcolm Fox to solve a series of cases, including the prison one. Try and keep up. Solid stuff as ever.

This Must Be the Place – Shain Shapiro

This should have been a magazine article. It’s billed as a look at cities and how they are shaped by music, but mainly about the music industry as it appears in most accessible form, in live music gigs and bars. And how a variety of factors – including music education, the housing crisis, rising cost of living and more – contribute to the wider musical scene in cities and what to do to make this better. Shapiro has excellent credentials in his work but he’s no writer and this is a rather dull report, when it could have been a lot more.

Moments of Pleasure

We went to watch The Pretenders play, a nice sensible gig for old folk where we could all sit down and admire Chrissie Hynde’s thigh high boots.

We also went to Lisbon, and felt the sun on our backs and sampled many different pasteis de nata. (The Lisbon lego store had a lego version of a custard tart.) The castles of Sintra in the hills were also some of craziest things I’ve ever seen and I adored them, though not the cold, rain and mist that came with them that day.

And finally, I had a story accepted for publication. Even in an online magazine that doesn’t pay, this feels like an achievement after what has felt like a long struggle with blocks and confusion and bad writing and noise and mess. Some way to a returning mojo.