The rest of August reading round up

Following my glorious week’s holiday with seven books completed – you can read what I thought here – here’s what I read for the rest of the month.

Mansfield Park – Jane Austen

I haven’t read this for years. I read it in my first Austen phase, as an A level student, and remember it as being quite boring. In the recent BBC documentary, they talked of how Austen had high hopes of it following her success with Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, but it flopped and I saw this and thought, I’ll give it another go now that I’m older and more mature. Or something. In comparison to P&P, I’m afraid it absolutely suffers. In later life, Austen would call P&P too light hearted but the dialogue is still some of the best ever committed to the page and Mansfield Park just doesn’t cut it. She’s trying to make a point about the economics behind marriage and the rapid pace of change in society and I understand all of that but, it’s quite hard work. The main character is Fanny Price, plucked from poverty to live at Mansfield Park with her aunt and uncle, an act of charity on their part. Fanny starts the book terribly: she’s dull, weak and liable to faint after 15 minutes walking. The only person who is nice to her is her cousin Edmund, who is such a mother hen, he’s just intensely irritating. The plot involves the tangling of Fanny’s cousins with a brother and sister, the Crawfords, and their selfish ways, and Fanny sits passively and watches everything. Now, it turns out that Fanny definitely improves as a character as the book goes on but I’m sad to say that Edmund does not. He is by far the least likeable Austen hero and, while nice to Fanny at the beginning, is happy to try and marry her off to Henry Crawford despite knowing a) Crawford is a cad and b) Fanny doesn’t want to marry Henry. Cassandra Austen wanted Fanny to marry Henry the cad and reform him and I prefer this idea to the reality of the ending where Fanny ends up with Edmund OR, she could have let Fanny go somewhere, anywhere, and meet other men and marry one of those, OR basically do anything other than end up with Edmund who only seems to marry her at the end by default. Surely she spends their marriage secretly worrying if he still fancies someone else? She deserves better.

On the Calculation of Volume Vol II – Solvej Balle

This, you may remember, is the series from the Danish author that features a woman destined to relive the same day over and over again, though she does have some control over where she is and doesn’t start the day in the same place. This is the second volume and she has reconciled herself to reliving the day over, having spent the first volume assuming she had a year and then would move on. To try and cope in this volume, she recreates seasons, travelling to places that feel colder to have as much of a winter as she can (there’s a heartbreaking couple of days where she fakes Christmas with her parents) and then as she calculates it should be spring, moves somewhere warmer and so on. This is enough to sustain this volume but the reader, knowing there are a further five books to come, does start to wonder how this is going to be managed. So it’s something of a relief for a major plot development appear at the end. Volume three comes out this autumn and I’m looking forward to it.

Creation Lake – Rachel Kushner

You sometimes see stories in the press about spycops and how they infiltrate subversive groups and then get found out and it appears sordid and grubby and does nothing except erode people’s faith in the police. Rachel Kushner decided it might be interesting to write about a spycop, someone with few morals who manipulates people in this way, and I could see how that would be an interesting challenge to write. This, though, is not interesting to read and is hopelessly let down by the blurb quotes on the cover. I cannot imagine what book the person who described this as “Kill Bill meets John le Carre” was reading but I don’t think we read the same one. The infiltration story was straightforward enough, the spycop (not actually a cop as she’d been fired from her FBI job and now worked for private firms, so actually even fewer morals than a spycop) was totally unreliable and a bitch, as you’d expect. But the subplot was about an activist who’d gone off to live in caves and disengage from everything and who wrote long emails about Neanderthals. None of this was interesting or appeared relevant and I couldn’t understand why it should have any bearing on the story itself. The entire book was lost on me. But hopefully it will make for a good discussion at reading group early next month, or at least give me the chance to rant a bit.

Picture Imperfect – Jacqueline Wilson

JW is one of my daughter’s heroes and we had tickets to see her talk locally about this book, which is an adult sequel to The Illustrated Mum, one of her children’s books from a few years’ back. She’s lovely, is Jacqueline Wilson, and I’ve met her before when I used to work book events. The event started nearly half an hour late (NOT something that would have happened in my day) so I started reading this while we waited and finished it the next day. Essentially it reads just like a Jacqueline Wilson kids book but with more sex and a few swears.

Florrie: A football love story – Anna Trench

This is a graphic novel that imagines what may have happened in the 1920s when the FA banned women’s football because it was becoming popular, potentially more popular than the men’s game. Florrie is a young female football player who lives with her dad and brother in Norfolk and helps run their second hand book business. She gets the chance to play and travel, and meets a French player with whom she falls in love. But along comes the ban, she can no longer travel and doesn’t want to leave her dad who is becoming ill. Her mementoes are found in a trunk when she dies. The book is based on the real life ban and imagines what it may have been like. It’s rather charming, with lovely black and white illustrations and I thought it was very sweet.

By the River: Essays from the water’s edge (various)

This is from the series of essays published by Daunt Books which includes essays about food, dogs, the Hampstead swimming ponds and there’s a new one about cycling. The essays are thoughtful and interesting for the most part and I always enjoy this series.

The Bookshop Woman – Nanako Hanada

I picked this up in Bath earlier in the month assuming it was fiction. It’s actually a memoir-sort-of-self-help fable and is about Hanada, working at a quirky book and gift shop when she separates from her husband and starts to wonder if she should do more with her life. She joins a social media app called Perfect Strangers where she suggests that she will recommend a book to every person she meets. Soon she is documenting her meetings with people on the app, some weird, some charming, some (predictably) wanting sex, one a life coach who helps her think about what she wants. There is a lot of book chat in here, and obviously centres on Japanese books, most of which I hadn’t heard of. There is a drop in the middle where I did think it’s a bit samey but it changes for the final section. A nice enough read.

Moments of Pleasure

A day in Folkestone by the sea. A production of Fiddler on the Roof. An 80th birthday party. Picking tomatoes from the garden. Discovery apples season. Greengages. Playing badminton badly. Collecting book titles from National Trust library displays.