Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James

This well publicised novel is a follow on thriller from Pride and Prejudice featuring Mr and Mrs Darcy, the dreadful Wickham and all their cohort. Captain Denny is murdered in the shrubbery near Pemberley and Wickham is charged with the murder. The distress and scandal this causes threatens to undermine the entire family. Rubbish really, mildly entertaining, but a bit of a cheek to parody Jane Austen in such a way I think.

The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith

More of the Isabel Dalhousie series, in which Isabel gets on the trail of an art forger and continues in her relationship with Jamie. The philosophical musings have really grown on me and I am a victim of the charm of this woman and of Edinburgh, wonderful since we’re going there next year.

The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith

Next in line of the Isabel Dalhousie series, which I listened to as I did embroidery. Very appropriate. In this one Isabel and Jamie become closer and closer. In the meantime they become involved with Isabel's cousins, Mimi and Joe, and attend a houseparty with some wealthy Americans. There is more about the philosophy surrounding small things and about the love affair than any mystery in this novel. I liked it a lot.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Time for me at this late age to mount and assault on the American writers. In this novel, Pride and Prejudice meets Anna Karenina. Wharton’s novel looks at the strictures of aristocratic New York in the late nineteenth century, particularly as played out by Newland Archer, a young man of that time and place, and his fiancée May and the woman who comes into his life, Countess Olenska. The novel explores the way a young man with some imagination and perhaps hope for ‘escape’ is defeated by the machinations of his society, of doing the ‘right thing’. The novel is beautifully observed.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides is one of those writers for whose books I wait impatiently. And unlike lesser writers, of course, he can’t churn them out every year. I gulped down this book, which is about college graduates and their coming of age and their love lives in the 1980s. Eugenides reminds me a little of Jonathan Franzen in the way he can manipulate language and in the intricacy of his character portrayal. In this story Madeleine is in love with Leonard, who has manic depression, and Mitchell, who has divinity leanings, is in love with her. She’s a literary major, a princess of course, and the book charts their relationships with great skill. It’s not a Pulitzer Prize winner like Middlesex, but closer to a longer (though probably not as wonderful) version of The Virgin Suicides.

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate by Alexander McCall Smith

The second in the Isobel Dalhousie series, this time where a man who has had a heart transplant sees the face of a stranger and wonders what the mystery is. In some ways it reminded me of John Irving’s wonderful book The Fourth Hand – not that that particular book had such a great reception but I like everything Irving writes and am pretty uncritical. It’s a pretty wild sort of goose chase Isobel must go on and it’s hard to see how she can resolve anything sensible. In between it all are philosophical musings which are entertaining.

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith

I decided I would give Isobel Dalhousie another go. I find the Detective Agency books a bit silly, the homespun philosophy unsatisfying, but on re-reading this book, I found I liked the protagonist. She is so human. In this one she tries to find out what really caused the death of a young man who falls from the gods at the theatre. She bumbles along in her own way, treading on people’s toes and making great leaps of imagination, but the solution is as always in real life, a simple thing.

The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge

Elizabeth Goudge was an Edwardian romantic and I grew up in love with her children's book The Little White Horse. Something in the magic of it carried me through my days. This book, The Bird in the Tree, has a similar magical animal, a bluebird, as a sort of emblem. It's an unabashed, moralistic, religious centred love story but I love it as a period piece. It's about the Eliot family who live in Damroseay on the English coast, and has something of the Delderfield about it. The story is silly really, a grandson who wants to marry his aunt, the evils of divorce, the value of duty. But what the hell, I liked it because Elizabeth Goudge wrote it.

Birdcloud by Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx is really a cranky old lady. She reminds me of those tough talking women in westerns, saying it how it is, dry and wry mouthed. This book is a memoir of her building her house in Wyoming and I liked it partly because we had just been there so could picture the whole thing. But it rambles on into an exploration of American history, archaeology and so forth, and is quite interesting as a result though I got sick of it in the end – no dramatic tension to keep me going. And it didn’t help that I just don’t like her testy, permanently pissed off style. So, I don’t know about this book.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

I do love Waugh. I was watching reruns of the Brideshead TV series with Jeremy Irons – so old – when I realized I really needed to read this book again. It’s such a sensitive piece of writing that charts what I think must be Waugh’s own path to Catholic faith – he became a Catholic in 1930 at the age of 27.

Of course it’s set in my favourite period of English history, the years between the wars. We visited Blenheim Palace a few years ago and I believe that’s where the film is set and it helped me visualise the place as it is described in the book.

I also find the English thing about young men having affairs and then moving on to heterosexual relationships here. Cara, Lord Marchmain’s mistress, discusses it when Charles meets her in Venice, as an early form in the progression of mature of love. Most interesting. Not part of our culture here and I wonder whether it actually existed outside literature (though it seems to appear in books about the public schools and in politicians’ clandestine and News of the World reported behaviour still).

There’s a great sadness in this book, which I think reflects what happened to the world as a result of the second war. You read it in so many books, the destruction of innocence and the progression into a harder, greyer and colder world. All the great houses closing, as the upper classes way of life collapses, their money runs out and the world is handed to hard nosed business men like Rex Mottram.

So, a complex book about Catholic guilt that everybody should own and read regularly. Now that’s a flippant summation! Wonderfully written, wonderfully conceived, tender, moving and sad.

Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones

This is a fantastic book. It’s about the journey of a refugee from Tunisia (actually elsewhere in Africa but working in Tunisia) as she seeks her child who has been stolen away.

I love the structure of this book. It’s told by all the people she comes in contact with on her journey, then there’s a great section from her so that you see the same thing from a different perspective and there are lots of aha moments as things fall into place for you.

It’s beautifully written and compassionate, not a moment of sentimental feel good stuff in it, but honest and fresh writing. I loved this book. Loved it.

Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

This is one of Brooks’ lesser novels I think. It’s still very much worth reading but I wonder if it’s as Theo said, that she’d signed the book deal but when she did the research discovered there wasn’t enough story to support the novel. It’s based on fact, as her work is always, the true story of a couple of American Indians in the earliest days of the colony who are sent off to study at the six year old Harvard College.

She invents a ficitional heroine to hold the story together, Bethia, and it’s her relationship with the Indians that brings the story together. There’s some interesting insight into what it was like being young woman and living I a brand new Puritan colony at the time but essentially the whole thing is pretty thin . the problem is that little is known of Caleb the Indian other than that he went to college. So she’s had to develop a fantastical relationship with Bethia, and add elements of conflict like the pull to Indian traditional religion and magic and so forth.

So I found it unsatisfying but only through the prism of her other work, her magnificent ‘March’ for example.

Atlantic by Simon Winchester

The earth was once all atmosphere which cooled and coalesced. Water condensed out of it, and the continents were formed by super volcanoes spewing magma out that became stable and could be thought of as land masses. Between the land masses formed the sea, essentially.

The Atlantic formed between America and Africa/Europs. People on theeast shore gradually worked their way to the coast but it was the Phoenecians who eventually were brave enough to sail out of the Mediterranean and along the coast of morocco to establish trading routes and to harvest murex snails for their fabulous purple dye.

Next up the Vikings (warriors) and the Norsemen (peaceful traders), Romans, Arabs, Genoese.

Most interesting is the settlement of Norsemen discovered in L’Anse aux Meadows, Canada, which was the first European settlement in America. It was settled by Leif Erikkson, a Norwegian, and predates Columbus by about 400 – 500 years. Columbis actually never set foot on American soil, rather he discovered islands such as the Bahamas and South American countries such as Venuzuela, but the penny never dropped and he didn’t ever recongise this as a continent. That was left to Amerigo Vespucci who saw the connection and wrote a book about it. Mapmakers named the country after him.

At about this point, though, I gave this book up. The problem was thatWinchester went on and on and on with waffle and personal pompous ranting. When he has facts to explain he is masterful but I spent so much time riffling through pages of this book looking for the meat when all I could find was the literary version of that abominable food fad, FOAM.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

This is one of the most confusing stories I have read in a long time! Because I am travelling and reading on a Kindle, it's impossible to go back and forth and try to figure out who exactly is who. I finished it, liked it, but then went to the New York Times book reviews section www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/.../review/Blythe-t.html to try to get a handle on what I had been reading. What follows is their plot summary and you'll see why I was lost! Still, worth reading this book. Here we go:

"The book starts with Sasha, a kleptomaniac, who works for Bennie, a record executive, who is a protégé of Lou who seduced Jocelyn who was loved by Scotty who played guitar for the Flaming Dildos, a San Francisco punk band for which Bennie once played bass guitar (none too well), before marrying Stephanie who is charged with trying to resurrect the career of the bloated rock legend Bosco who grants the sole rights for covering his farewell “suicide tour” to Stephanie’s brother, Jules Jones, a celebrity journalist who attempted to rape the starlet Kitty Jackson, who one day will be forced to take a job from Stephanie’s publicity mentor, La Doll, who is trying to soften the image of a genocidal tyrant because her career collapsed in spectacular fashion around the same time that Sasha in the years before going to work for Bennie was perhaps working as a prostitute in Naples where she was discovered by her Uncle Ted who was on holiday from a bad marriage, and while not much more will be heard from him, Sasha will come to New York and attend N.Y.U. and work for Bennie before disappearing into the desert to sculpture and raise a family with her college boyfriend, Drew, while Bennie, assisted by Alex, a former date of Sasha’s from whom she lifted a wallet, soldiers on in New York, producing musicians (including the rediscovered guitarist Scotty) as the artistic world changes around him with the vertiginous speed of Moore’s Law."

Long Song by Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy also wrote Small Island, the story of Jamaicans coming to live in England with great expectations about the time of the Great War. It was a beautifully crafted book, with sensitive and wonderful characters, that deals with hope, and dreams, ambitions and disappointments. It was made into a terrific mini series a few years back.

This book is not as subtle as Small Island. It is the chronological retelling of a woman’s life story and charts the end of the slave trade on the British owned sugar plantations in Jamaica. The main character July is a feisty young woman at the beginning but there is a great chunk of her life missing and when we get her back again she has changed. I wanted to know what circumstances changed her, how she negotiated those years in between and more.

The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt

I had heard that this book had had lukewarm reviews but I really enjoyed it. It’s a story for slow reading, an introspective account of the woman in flight from a marital disaster and the several weeks she spends back in her hometown while she recovers and regroups. It details the small but important relationships she has with her mother, her mother’s friend Abigail, her neighbour Lola and the group of twelve year old girls to whom she teaches poetry. These are day to day type relationships but Hustvedt treats them as if she is painting miniatures, so every detail is important. She writes poetry as well, so perhaps the focus of poetry on every word and every nuance influences the way she sees and describes these relationships. It’s a philosophical book and an intelligent, well researched and thoughtful piece of work. Yummy.

The Gordian Knot by Bernhard Schlink

A big fan of The Reader and the brilliant Flights of Love, I hadn’t realized Schlink wrote thrillers. This is so different from the usual American/English thriller genre though. It’s sparse, unadorned prose, all narrative really, with difficult and fairly unlikeable main characters. The protagonist, Georg, is finely drawn but utterly colourless. I also had problems with the story, which focuses very much on what Georg is imagining is happening and is somehow quite messy and angst ridden. He’s engaged as a translator to copy documents for a readily identifiable crook, and then the whole thing goes pear shaped as his Mata Hari, Francoise, disappears and he tries to track her down in America. The resolution, when it comes, is pretty silly. I found this book flat - it just doesn’t work, which is a shame when it comes from such a fine writer.

My Dirty, Shiny Life by Lily Bragge

This is what Andrew O’Hagan describes as a misery memoir. The only reason I read it was that the writing is really good. But the story, oh for heaven’s sake. It’s Lily’s life, her dreadful violent upbringing, unplanned pregnancies, drug use and heroin addiction, suicide attempts and then, yes you guessed it, she finds Jesus. Years ago when my dad was dying in Hawaii a support person gave me her book to read and comment on. It was essentially the same tale – dissolute youth, promiscuity, drug addiction, and finally salvation. I don’t know what to think about that, merely remark on the similarity of these stories. Perhaps people who have nothing to live for can find a purpose through religion?

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

What a whopping great book this one is. It’s a 600 page tale of a polygamist and his four wives and 328 kids, told from the point of view of him, his youngest wife Trish and the black sheep of the family, his thirteen year old son Rusty. It tries to analyse the types of stresses and strains that would afflict families constructed like this and I found it a pretty interesting read. There were some very funny moments in it and the characters were finely drawn and believable. It’s a great holiday read, as the narrative is compelling. I particularly liked the descriptions of the setting in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, which were beautifully described.

Room by Emma Donoghue

Room was long listed for the Booker Prize so it was always going to be interesting. It’s the story of a young woman who has been kidnapped and incarcerated in a room and the child that she has during the seven years of her imprisonment. The writer admits that the idea was triggered by the Austrian case of a few years ago where a father kept his daughter locked in a room and fathered seven children with her, three of whom were also imprisoned. But she says this is where it ended and I can see that: it’s the story of the relationship between the child, Jack, and his mother and of how they cope when they are finally launched into the world. It isn’t voyeuristic in the least and the voice is that of the child. I really liked the way the characters developed, the real irritation the mother has from time to time, the child’s insightful analysis of things juxtaposed with his five year old innocence. It’s a compelling book and I did find myself skimming through the first bit to get the action.

The Wailing Wind by Tony Hillerman

This writer was recommended by E Annie Proulx at a talk Theo and I went to recently. She said he writes from the Navajo point of view, and indeed you do learn a bit about American Indian rites and beliefs as you wade through the story. Apart from that though there’s not much to this book: it’s a detective story set in Arizona (quite close to where we shall be travelling later this year), and tells the story of a murder over gold rights. It’s artlessly written, a yarn rather than a piece of literature, and I found the detailed descriptions of people pouring coffee and packing sack lunches needlessly dull. 2 stars for the Indian content.

The Boat by Nam Le

This is the most wonderful collection of short stories by a young Australian writer, Nam Le. Rather than writing solely about the Vietnamese ‘ethnic story’ experience, as he describes it, Nam Le spans the experiences of the underclasses in many parts of the world. The stories range from the lives of young ‘soldiers’ in Colombia to the experience of a young child witnessing the bombing of Hiroshima to a teenager coming of age in a coastal Victorian town. They are such authentic stories that you feel Nam Le has actually lived these lives and been in these places and times, though of course it is patently impossible. The most moving for me was the story entitled The Boat, which describes in devastating – and there’s a sense of it being almost real time - detail the flight of a sixteen year old Vietnamese girl on a dilapidated junk. It’s the most moving and horrifying account of the experiences of refugees who escape on boats that I’ve ever read and I feel certain it is founded in truth. Every paranoid red neck who screams about so-called illegal immigrants coming here on boats should be forced to read this story.

At Home by Bill Bryson

This book came with me to the south coast for a fortnight and it took me the whole two weeks to read. That wasn’t because it was hard going: on the contrary it is written with Bill Bryson’s trademark wit and ease of language. The reason it took so long was that is was absolutely fascinating. This is a book about social history. It uses Bryson’s rectory home in England as that starting point of an investigation into the Victorian period. This inevitably takes him on a journey right around the world as he explores the influence of global trade and political machinations on his sleepy village in England. I kept reading a chapter and the putting it down to think about and then to regale my fellow holiday makers with half a dozen utterly fascinating facts that I’d just discovered. I don’t often even think about re-reading books but I wanted to begin this one again as soon as I had finished it. It is definitely a book to buy and keep and dip back into whenever you have the opportunity. 5 stars

The Epic of Gilgamesh

I was inspired to reread this document by a wonderful art book I am reading, slowly, called Art, the Whole Story. It’s a history of art and treats civilizations chronologically, so it’s really a history of society as well. There’s a section on Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, that intrigued me greatly. I knew about Mesopotamia but, not having studied ancient history, it was all very sketchy. So first I delved into more information about Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, the city states, Babylon and so forth and then I got hold of the epic, which I had studied at uni and promptly forgotten.

It’s the story of Gilgamesh, the king if Uruk, two thirds god and one third man, and out of control really. While he is lord and protector, he is also fighting and killing people, sleeping with all the virgins and generally behaving like a bit of a naughty lad. The gods create a friend and companion for him, Enkindu, a wild man who has to be tamed from his life with the animals. He is tamed by a harlot who tempts him and seduces him, and he becomes conscious of his role as man. He and Gilgamesh journey to the mountains to kill the giant Humbaba (what a great name) and bring back cedar for their city. The gods decree that Enkindu must die and Gilgamesh is left bereft. He travels to the ends of the earth to meet Utnapishtim, the equivalent of Noah, who tells him he will never find the life he is seeking ie immortality. He does in fact get to grasp a plant that offers immortality but it is stolen away from him by a serpent. He accepts his fate and returns home, eventually to die the beloved king.

The biblical parallels are really interesting, especially the story of the flood that Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh. The gods are also fascinating, so quixotic, so similar to the Greek and Roman gods that followed them.

It’s a very short thing, a collection of writings that survived from a great library on twelve clay tablets, so there is stuff missing and I believe no real guarantee of how it all goes together. But it really is the beginning of literature, one of the earliest of works still existing I think: the story dates back to about 3000BC and the tablets to the 7th century BC

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

At last I got around to reading what many people say is their favourite and one of the greatest novels ever written. I hadn’t read any Tolstoy before and was surprised at how lucid and simple the language is, much like Churchill’s speeches, clear and without needless embellishment but with a fineness of meaning that often takes your breath away. I was prepared for the sad tale of Anna, but amazed at how realistic the collapse of her mental state seemed. I could really see the decline and fall of this woman. And I was delighted with Levin, who is a bit of a self portrait of Tolstoy’s, a man who struggles with his role as a landowner, with his faith and with the entire meaning of existence. I saw the film The Last Station recently and between that, and seeing the wonderful performance of Uncle Vanya that Sydney Theatre Company put on late last year, I really feel as if I am gaining some sort of handle on the Russian situation, then of course, not now.
So back to the book. Brilliant, a masterpiece, all the clichés. It took me a month to read it, dipping in and out, because it’s not a story you race through. I was glad to have the time and a peaceful environment in which to explore it and to think about the concepts and enjoy the language, and glad to be old enough to understand and have experienced the aspects of human nature that Tolstoy explores.
5 stars

Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander

One of the things Lander says that white people like is irony. And this book is all irony. It’s a fairly flippant piece that lists a hundred or so things that ‘white people like’ but by white people, he means middle class people and/or those striving to impress. The list makes you alternately cringe and laugh out loud: coffee, farmers’ markets, gifted children, Prius cars, renovations, NGOs, having gay/black/other ethnicity friends and so forth. There’s something there for all of us. But while Lander clearly wants to have a dig at political correctness and people trying hard to impress, this is a lightweight book cobbled together quickly from his widely read blog at the behest of a publisher in a big hurry, so you can expect no more than a columnist style wit and depth. Entertaining enough but not worth buying. 2 stars

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

I’m quite ambivalent about this book. It’s a murder mystery/detective thing that switches between the points of view of several characters and between two periods of time. I was confused about which detective was which from beginning right through to the end. And I also found the main characters fairly unsympathetic at the outset, not really establishing themselves as people I cared about until well into the second half of the book. Some of the characters were really quite irrelevant. So, while I wanted to find the answer to the mystery and finished the book for that reason, I really found it unnecessarily complicated and a bit of a chore. 2 stars