A month of lighter mornings and joy at spring flowers, coupled with an ongoing existential crisis at the state of *waves hand* well, most everything else. Thank goodness there are still books.
A Life of One’s Own – Joanna Biggs
I actually read this in February and forgot to mention it in last month’s roundup. This is a non-fiction book about nine women writers who were known for ‘starting again’ at some point in their careers, and as Biggs was going through some tough personal times, she took the opportunity to use this as an excuse to write a book about how to start again. The book includes lots of my favourites, including Virginia Woolf, George Eliot and Sylvia Plath, among others, and was a good look at aspects of their lives and writing that I enjoyed. The personal parts about Biggs were less absorbing but mercifully shorter.
Night Swimmers – Roisin Maguire
Of the two books I read this month that were set in lockdown, this was the better. It was a coincidence that I was reading two lockdown books – this is set in Northern Ireland and involves a small town where Eowen arrives, separated from his wife after a tragedy. He rents a cottage from cantankerous Grace, who is branded mad and odd by the locals despite her coming across as pretty normal to me, but that’s small towns for you. Lockdown is used as a handy reason to keep people in one place when they otherwise might have moved on, but this is really a book about grief and loss and community and family and all the usual things. It’s well written and I enjoyed it.
Four Thousand Weeks – Oliver Burkeman
This was recommended in a couple of places, and I’d been looking into time management in a vague way following a course at work and a general feeling that life was getting on top of me. Four thousand weeks is, on average, the time each of us has on Earth, and making peace with this is the easiest way, according to Burke, to make the most of our time here. You have to let things go, realise that you’re not going to be able to do everything and spend time doing things you most enjoy with people you like and love. So far, nothing that wasn’t better expressed in Do You Realise? by The Flaming Lips, so I also wanted a better steer on how this is easily accomplished and Burkeman doesn’t really help much. There’s the usual blurb about cutting out social media and being more mindful so you can enjoy the mundane tasks, but anything more meaningful or practical is not what Burkeman wants to offer. I felt perhaps he could spend more time considering that people can’t always drop the stuff they don’t like and follow their dreams – such annoying obstacles as paying rent, caring for other people, needing to eat etc – but on the whole, this did have some good points to make about how much we think we can get done, how we wildly overestimate this and how we should just enjoy things more. Or we can just sing Do You Realise? on a regular basis and enjoy that.
Here Comes the Miracle – Anna Beecher
I put off reading this for a while because the blurb confused me but this is a well written, terribly sad book about a sibling relationship, with other odd bits of family history thrown in, seemingly for no reason at all. I imagine Beecher wrote this as part catharsis, she hints at it in the acknowledgements and the story is about Joe, a premature baby and his sister Emily, and how their family manage when Joe is diagnosed with cancer in his early twenties. There is very little plot beyond this, but there are these extra bits of story about their grandfather Edward, who was punished as a child for his burgeoning relationship with another boy, and how he grows up to marry Eleanor instead. These seemingly had no relation to the story, except as interesting diversions, which I quite liked. Anyway, this is good but very sad.
Fourteen Days – edited by Margaret Atwood
This was the other book I read about lockdown, and it’s a many authored set of linked stories, raising money for the Author’s Guild in America which kept many writers going financially throughout the pandemic. A good cause, which is just as well as I didn’t get on with the book. Essentially, it’s about the residents of an apartment building during lockdown and the stories they tell each other while gathering for social distanced drinks each evening. So it’s a series of linked anecdotes and there was little character development, mainly because you can’t keep track of who they all are. I kept reading to check if my hunch about the ending was right (it was) but otherwise this wasn’t quite right.
Days of Light – Megan Hunter
Hunter wrote the excellent novella The End We Start From, which was recently made into a film with Jodie Comer, and this is due out next month, another novella. Days of Light is the story of another sister, told over six days of her life, one of them the scene of a terrible tragedy, and how this impacts her life. The book opens just before the Second World War, when the characters know conflict is looming but the war doesn’t interfere with the plot, merely functioning as a setting. I didn’t have any idea what was going to happen throughout, but what an interesting turn in life, and yet the book also shines a light on how poorly the middle classes prepared their daughters for life. I thought this was an excellent novel, really interesting turns and a sensitive portrayal of a delicate relationship. Hunter is due to visit my local bookshop in May to promote this so I look forward to seeing her there.
Wandering Souls – Cecile Pin
There was a moment when I was growing up when the news was often full of stories about Vietnamese boat people, and I never really thought what this meant. But here is a book about some of the boat people, siblings sent away from Vietnam ahead of their parents who are going to join them on their way to America, a few years after the fall of Saigon. The children take the boat, and have to stay in a camp where they learn that the rest of their family has been killed on the journey. From then, they must survive alone and eventually make their way to 1980s England, which had agreed (reluctantly) to take in refugees. There are lots of American based stories about Vietnam, for obvious reasons, but I liked that this one explored coming to England instead, and it’s an intelligent and perceptive read.
This is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
I picked this up in London before Christmas, in an effort to read something different. I don’t tend to read a lot of sci fi, or so I tell myself, but this isn’t really sci fi, it just has a futuristic setting. It’s a love story, in some ways a spy story, and just happens to be set in a future alternative universe where there is a time travel war being waged between two sides. Our protagonists are Red and Blue, one from each side, and as they travel about for the war, they leave each other letters that take fantastic forms – wood carvings, words in seeds, all kinds of things. Of course, there are suspicions of their loyalty and the book becomes a race to see if they can make it together. In an article I read before starting the book, I read that there are lots of references to sci fi novels in the text, which I knew I wouldn’t understand but I found this strangely liberating as I could just skate over anything weird and go with the wider story. So that’s what I did and I’m glad I picked this up – it would undoubtedly be better if I understood all the layers involved but was still a fascinating and different read.
Dear Miss Lake – AJ Pearce
The fourth in Pearce’s Emmy Lake series, this is published in the summer so I will review it at length then, but in short, I wept over it and loved it all. Splendid.
The Murderer’s Ape – Jacob Wegelius
This is a children’s book, and they recommended the second in the series on A Good Read last week so I thought I’d give it a go. It’s excellent. For a start it has maps in the front and back pages, and the characters are not just listed but have full page illustrations. Wegelius does his own illustrations so there are pictures at the beginning of every chapter too. The Murderer’s Ape is about Sally Jones, a gorilla who is also an engineer on The Hudson Queen, a ship whose captain, The Chief, is taken on for a job outside Lisbon and goes horribly wrong. With the Chief put in prison, it’s up to Sally Jones to prove his innocence and survive on her own in a hostile world. This is set at a vague point in the past, likely the last vestiges of British empire, and is a rollicking adventure without there being any of the hardcore violence or misery that take over adult adventure stories. It’s written for an intelligent audience and is easily suitable for grown ups as well as children. I’m looking forward to continuing the series.
Leave No Trace – Jo Callaghan
My mate Jo’s second crime book, featuring her detective-AI pairing Kat and Lock. This time the duo get to track down a live case, a real killer stalking the men of Nuneaton. The plot is fast paced and rattles along, and you get a further sense of a potential development from both Kat, still dealing with the grief of losing her husband, and Lock, working out how humans think and work. It’s a fun twist on the crime genre.
Moments of Pleasure
We spent Mother’s Day wandering around a National Trust property in the sunshine, looking at the spring flowers, eating scones with jam and cream and generally feeling like we were stretching our souls to the season. Sometimes it’s just the simple things with the right people.
Susan E Barsby 