I don’t think I’ve had such a busy month for a while – it’s all been school trips and and optician and dentists and exams and weekend trips where we indulged our inner nerds (at EM Con and then as Jane Austen cosplay, because we’re nothing if not versatile) and new initiatives at work and catching up with friends and still I managed to read well.
Karla’s Choice – Nick Harkaway
I love the George Smiley books. Harkaway is Le Carre’s son and a writer in his own right, and was asked by the family to write some more Smiley. Quite a terrifying prospect I should think. This is meant to sit between The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor, in terms of the timeline, which is a bit wobbly anyway. On the whole, it’s pretty good. It has a similar type of confusion about who is doing what, who is double crossing who and so on and I raced through it in two days.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold – John Le Carre
Karla’s Choice made me realise I’d not read this for years and had forgotten everything about it which, as Karla references events that take place in this, meant I needed to fill in some gaps. It’s unfair to Harkaway in a way, as this also highlighted that he’d done a good job but this is a great job. There’s an extra angle and depth to this that wasn’t quite in Karla’s Choice, as well as a clear line on the callousness of the Cold War outfits. It’s a slim book but packs a lot in.
Abide with Me – Elizabeth Strout
OK, I’ve read all her books now. This is a standalone one from earlier in her career and set in a small town, like so many, but featuring a minister Tyler Caskey and his daughter Katherine. Aged five years old, Katherine is struck dumb by grief at her mother’s death and the community hopes that her father will help her but Tyler is struggling himself, with questions of grief and loss and spirituality. When the small town rumour mill gets going, both the family and the town have to face their own humanity and face up to some dark choices. This wasn’t as immediately engaging as some of Strout’s later books but it’s still adept writing and put me in mind of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series in many ways.
The Nanny State Made Me – Stuart Maconie
A gentle exploration and celebration at the areas of the state that have looked after us in the last hundred years or so, and a look at why they have been gutted or changed. Each chapter is divided by themes: transport, housing, play and leisure, welfare and so on, and the story in many ways is very similar each time. A realisation, often post-1945, that something was poor and needed solving, it gets supported and good things happen, it gets privatised by a Tory government, everything gets worse and more expensive. I knew that Nottingham’s bus system was excellent – where I live – but I was unaware that no other city can replicate it now because of a law passed in 2017, (another gift from Chris ‘Failing’ Grayling) so everywhere except Nottingham and London has terrible bus services. Maconie is a pleasant companion to talk this stuff through with because he gets less angry, though still obviously has a political bias (which chimes with mine) but one thing that does grate after a while is his constant references to the south as one big area of people living in vicarages and riding horses and generally being posh. Having read his other books where he travels around the country I’m sure he’s aware that the South is not a homogenous mass of privilege but sometimes these Northern commentators can’t help themselves.
The Correspondent – Virginia Evans
I got this from the library and began reading it one restless night when I wasn’t concentrating. It wasn’t doing anything for me and I put it down, forgot about it and then decided to return it unread but then happened to read an interview with the author. So, I picked it up again and raced through it in two days. It’s an odd novel, simply as it’s epistolary, proper letters, not emails, and set in the modern day so there’s the juxtaposition of modern life and a letter writer. It’s also set in the US but the author is an Anglophile who also lived, studied and wrote in Ireland for a time. All this makes you feel like something is off, and yet it works. The protagonist is an elderly woman who loves writing letters, a retired clerk to a judge, mother to two grown children and divorced from their father. She writes to authors she admires – Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, among others – she writes to friends and family, she writes with the young son of a friend, she writes thank you notes to a neighbour who brings her gifts. And she writes to the employee of a DNA company whose test she takes to discover her heritage, because she was adopted. All these start to tell you the story of her life, events she regrets, issues that have caused pain to her family and to herself. It’s enjoyable.
Bad Actors – Mick Herron
Another in the Slough House series with Jackson Lamb and this is as sticky and grubby as the others, but this time with a character meant (I think) to be a thinly veiled reference to Dominic Cummings, though potentially more violent than I think (hope) Cummings would be.
Just My Type – Simon Garfield
Mr B bought me this for Christmas and it’s the history of fonts and the people who developed them. My favourite font use is the railway signs of old, classic and beautiful (something of a sadness that these are in Gill Sans when Gill was such a repulsive perv) and I have feelings about fonts. I hate Times New Roman and Calibri, find Trebuchet good to write with and will tolerate Helvetica which is very much the font that we’re living with these days. Anyway, this is quite pompously written in parts but is interesting and the sub chapter about each font is written in that font which seems obvious when you write it down but was still a thoughtful touch they didn’t have to do.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
The reading group choice this month and I had read it many years before and forgotten what it was about, although kept getting flashes of remembrances as I reread. It struck me as so very much a period piece and yet I doubt in some areas of America that very much has changed or if it has, it wouldn’t take much to go back. Troubling but beautifully written.
The Breath of Sadness – Ian Ridley
I read a lot of books about people carrying on after a death. This is the latest read, something I’ve had on my list for ages. Ian Ridley is a sports journalist, and he was married to Vikki, another sports journalist, when she died from breast cancer aged only 56. Ridley has had cancer himself, and they had joked that it would return for one or other of them, just a matter of knowing who. Trying to deal with his personal devastation at her death, he decides to attend a series of first-class cricket games at grounds across the country. And so that’s what this book is, a man trying to deal with grief, and watching cricket.
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
I thought this year I would reread Austen because her birthday and the focus on her work, but I’d just not quite been in the right mood until this month (see below.) So I started with her first published novel and one I’m fond of. It’s not got as much sparkling dialogue as Pride and Prejudice, but there are some moments of cattiness as you’d expect from Austen who is very hard on her sex but far too kind to Mr Willoughby, much more than he deserves, the cad. What did I notice this time? The word ‘nuncheon.’ Isn’t that excellent? Nuncheon is a light refreshment between meals, a snack, if you will. And the absolute drama of the scene where Marianne is perilously close to dying in bed and Elinor comes downstairs seeking her mother and finds ‘only Willoughby’ The way it’s written, you can envision the two of them, perhaps a lightning flash, the drama. Ah. Anyway, there has been some debate about whether Marianne can be happy with Colonel Brandon and of course she can. Marianne ‘could never love by halves’ – it’s written right there. I’m ending the debate. The only thing is that we’re told and only shown a little that Colonel Brandon is a mensch – it really is Alan Rickman’s portrayal that works for him. But I reckon Austen would have liked that.
Moments of Pleasure
I’ve been meaning to reread Jane Austen this year to coincide with her 250th birthday but haven’t quite been in the mood. However, we did go to Chatsworth’s Jane Austen weekend where we were able to wander the house and grounds, in Regency style dresses and gloves, and watch pop up performances, dancing and readings. It was rather marvellous, and felt like a short holiday from real life. You can read all about this in this other blog post.
A lot of people have said good things about The Ballad of Wallis Island, the indie film from Tim Key and Tom Basden. I too will say good things as, on the surface, it’s another English eccentric tale, but deep down, it’s a rather moving portrayal of loneliness, grief and isolation. Right up my street.
Susan E Barsby 