Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Jonathan Franzen said of this book: “I tore through this book with heedless pleasure.” Me too. It’s been a very long time since I sat on the couch and read a book right through. It’s utterly charming, slickly written (she’s a TV writer and it shows) and gripping enough to keep you going right through. It’s the story of Bee, her father Elgie and her mother Bernadette who all live in Seattle. They have a dysfunctional relationship to put it mildly but it’s a loving one. And the book it all about the complexities of their relationships. It’s funny and surprising and while it’s not literary fiction, it’s certainly fantastic fiction!

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

Daunted by the size of the Luminaries, I decided to have a go at Eleanor Catton’s first novel instead. What a lovely writer she is. Her language is fabulous, so much so that you stop and re-read bits as you go. The story, while appearing quite simple, is actually a complicated tale of people exploring their sexuality, and developing relationships. It revolves around four main characters: Isolde, a young girl whose older sister has had an affair with a teacher at her school; her saxophone teacher; Stanley, a young drama student; and Julia, who goes to Isolde’s school and also learns saxophone from the same teacher. The dialogue is really odd. The further the book progresses the less sure you are about whether it’s someone actually speaking, or thinking about what they have said or might say in the future or under different circumstances. The timeframe is similarly odd, jumping around depending on whose point of view you’re experiencing at the time. There is a lot from the girls at school and I got about halfway through before it dawned on me that they are rather like a Greek chorus, more or less anonymous but mouthing the words that describe the action, what other people think, a commentary. The mothers who visit the saxophone teacher (who remains nameless all through the book) are similarly anonymous even though they have names. Their dialogue sums up attitudes and beliefs without them ever having an individual thought. I found this book utterly fascinating. I read it slowly, taking big breaks because you can’t really afford to leap ahead looking for the story, you must concentrate on the detail and you want to remember bits. In this way Catton’s writing reminds me a little of Julian Barnes.

The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling

What awful characters, not one among them you can sympathise with and like. This is an incestuous tale of a sordid little village and the ugly spirited people who live there, all brawling and conniving over a vacancy on the local council and the consequent vote in the removal from their jurisdiction of a low class housing estate. Rowling writes in an easy flow but I’m not sure this story was worth the effort.

Questions of Travel by Michelle Kretser

Miles Franklin award winner this year – but why? This is a long winded book, told from the points of view of Laura, a drab writer of travel material, and Ravi, a refugee from Sri Lanka. Nothing much seems to happen and I spent a lot of the time reading this book wondering what was the point of it. Indeed I found it quite depressing, two hopeless miserable people battling their way through life and never really communicating with anyone else. The writing is, however, often excellent and there is some joy in that. But it wasn’t enough to save this book and I finished it with relief. As for the ending ….. for goodness sake. The woman at the bookshop told me she had read part of it but not finished it, couldn't remember why she hadn't, but it was supposed to be a great read. I should have folowed my instincts there!

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

The blurb describes the narrator of this book as a cross between Holly Golightly and Dorothy Parker. And it is a delight. Everything about it is great: the writing – stunning, arresting, causing you to stop and reread whole paragraphs just for the sheer pleasure of the language; the characters: intensely likeable, fascinating and complex; the story – unusual and intriguing. And yet it is a quick light read. It’s set in New York in the 1930s and tells the story of two girls, Katey Kontent from a working class Russian immigrant family and Evie Ross, from a wealthy mid western family, who try to make their way in the world. They meet Tinkey Grey, a wealthy businessman, and their lives change. This would be a great book for people who belong to book clubs, or anyone for that matter.

Stranger in the Forest by Eric Hansen, October 2013

This is an older book, written in the 1980s, detailing Hansen’s trip across Borneo accompanied by local guides. He explored parts of the country that were completely unknown to white people and spent a lot of time in camps and long houses with various local tribes. I read it while I was travelling in Borneo. His observations are interesting though a bit dated and of course, very personal. So I’m not sure how accurate they are – though this is a book full of personal experience and opinion and doesn’t purport to be a text. What shocked me was how much has changed in Borneo since he was there: the jungle is disappearing daily, sacrificed to logging, mining and palm oil plantations. It is extremely likely that most of this rainforest will have disappeared by the end of the decade and the extensive range of animals, plants and birds, representing one of the most diverse populations in the world, will be extinct.

Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry

This is Stephen Fry’s wonderful autobiography, covering the first twenty years of his life with excursions into philosophy and everything else you can imagine. He is almost excruciatingly honest about his experiences and his feelings, and the sense that here is an essentially humble man comes through even though he is absolutely frank about what a genius he is. It’s not a light, fun read, but well worth the effort.

In One Person by John Irving

ANOTHER fantastic read from John Irving. One of the things I love about Irving are his epic family tales (Until I Find You for example) where an emotionally isolated young man seeks to know himself and his family. There’s a real lost father theme and also a close male-female relationship that borders and sometimes crosses over into the sexual but is really about knowing and accepting one another. And the characters are always extreme, bizarre in many cases, wonderfully eccentric. Dig a little deeper and you find you do actually know people like them I think. This book is about Billy/Bill/William who is bisexual. He struggles with his sexual identity all through school and early adulthood, trying to make sense of who he is against the backdrop of homophobia (and everything else of a ‘different’ sexual nature-phobia) of the 70s, 70s and on. I loved this book because it charts Billy’s discovery of himself and growth into confidence and self-acceptance with humour, tenderness and intelligence. It’s hard to imagine how a straight man, as I believe Irving is, could have put himself so realistically into this first person narrative.

Trains and Lovers by Alexander McCall-Smith

This novella is too elegant. It is a series of confessions about love made by four passengers in a compartment in a train on the way from Edinburgh to London. There is a long winded explanation about love and confession at the beginning but honestly it just didn’t do it for me. I thought it was more banal than anything else. The subtlety of it, and I’m sure other people will find it subtle, was lost on me.

Wait for Me by Deborah Devonshire

This is the memoir of the youngest of the Mitford sisters who married the Duke of Devonshire. It’s a memoir of a way of life that I think must be all but over now. It’s quite fascinating because first it is another version of the Mitford story and lovers of the Nancy and Jessica Mitford books will enjoy the biographical details of their lives enormously. Because it is a memoir it sorts out exactly who is who in that family as well – Nancy the caustic eldest daughter, Dianna the beauty who ran off and married Sir Oswald Mosely, Pamela the practical one who ran farms and bred dogs, Unity who went to Germany and allied herself with the Nazis, Jessica who married a communist but ended up in the USA, and Tom Mitford, the only son, died during WWII. Intertwined with the family story is the story of Deborah’s marriage to Andrew, who became Duke of Devonshire, and their quest to restore and maintain Chatsworth, one the great houses of Britain. There’s lots to learn in this story. I was only vaguely aware of the Labour government’s introduction of death duties that forced these old families to sell up most of their property. While social justice is one thing, it can also be blind to a country’s history and hundreds of these old places were sold and knocked down and the land redeveloped as ugly modern estates before the public changed its opinion – too late. The people the Deborah talks about, who are part of her everyday life, are the world’s elite: everyone from Aly Khan to Fred Astaire to the Kennedy family to every noble person you’ve ever heard of in Britain. It’s interesting in a gossip magazine sort of way. Her casual statements (‘..a kind friend lend us a plane to go down to so-and-so….’) are so out of our world that it actually stops you reading for a moment, the way serious swearing used to do when you read a book twenty years ago. I found this book difficult to read for any length of time because although essentially chronological, it is still very episodic. She reminisces within reminiscences and the narrative thread is not strong enough to be compelling. All the people in the book become tiring too – you need to take regular breaks to remember come to terms with the cast of thousands. But overall it’s a really interesting insight into the way Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, and her family have lived.

Queen Lucia by EF Benson

This is an utterly delightful satire of middle class pretension written in the 1920s. It’s of the same ilk as Crome Yeloow but on a more domestic and perhaps I should say more bitchy scale. It deals with Lucia, who is the ‘queen’ of her small village out of London and her devoted friend Georgie and the circle of other middle class village dwellers who she has revolving around her every whim. Lucia is the one that sets the standard, the one who everybody wants to impress, the one who arrives last at every event to make then wait. She’s a little like Hyacinth Bucket. In this story another lady moves into the area and the trouble begins as Lucia is unwittingly outclassed and outmanoeuvred by the new arrival. It made me laugh out loud in so many places – EF Benson has a deft hand and understated witty style that I just adored.

How to Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran

I got this book on the strength of Marika Hardy’s recommendation and it really is a book for the modern day feminist ie a person who thinks we are all just ‘the guys’ and if the men aren’t/are doing it, well the same applies to the women. It’s long been my definition of feminism though I’ve been attacked by several uber feminists who thought I didn’t live up to the definition of a feminist. I don’t know whether I was supposed to hate men or not wear makeup or what to qualify, but I don’t care anyway. I found this book quite endearing really. Caitlin Moran is such an honest and forthright person, and she voiced so much of what has been going on in my brain over sixty years that it was almost comforting to read it. I know I’m alright when I read her experiences, I’m not alone and I’m not stupid. She talks about all the standard things that best women, the decisions they are forced to make, the compromises, the questions that confront them: surgical enhancement, having and not having kids, abortions, our ‘pin up’ girls, pornography, a whole range of things and she is unapologetic about her views. And it all comes down to ‘the guys’. I really enjoyed this book and shall probably read this one again. Pity it’s on my Kindle and will be difficult to lend around.

The Prince: Faith, Abuse and George Pell; The Quarterly Essay by David Marr

Wow. This is everything you ever wanted to know about Pell, and in particular how and why the Catholic church is such a hotbed of paedophilia and has been covering it up for so many decades. David Marr has done his usual meticulous research and the essay is gripping reading. One terrifying quote: ‘ Forty years after the DLP collapsed under the weight of its own irrelevance, the Movement will have one man in the curia and another in Canberra. Pell is about to live the dream of every prince of the church: to be the spiritual adviser to a national leader.’

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

This may verge on chicklit but it is lovely chicklit. It’s written from the point of view of a man with Aspergers who is seeking love through what he calls The Wife Project. Then he meets Rosie, who fulfils none of the criteria… and of course the rest is inveitable. But it is such fun and there are plenty of laugh aloud moments, something that is increasingly rare these days. The character of Professor Don Tillman is extremely endearing and the rest of the cast are typically flawed but wonderful human beings. I loved this book though it’s over before your know it!

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Following on from Wolf Hall, this continues the story of Thomas Cromwell, the most powerful man in the kingdom after Henry VIII. It’s a great read, involving and well researched, and very human. I have become quite interested in Cromwell now and would actually like to read something serious about him, because I get so absorbed in the story with these historical fiction novels that I cross the line all the time and believe it all!

Lady Susan by Jane Austen

It is obvious that this is an early work, and in fact Lady Susan was written when Austen was in her teens. It’s the story of the widowed Lady Susan, her sixteen year old daughter Frederica, and the friends and family upon whom Lady Susan imposes herself. She is a dreadful and immoral woman, utterly beautiful and charming, but a nasty piece of work. She flirts outrageously, leads men into thinking they can marry her and all the while carries on an affair with a married man. She tries to manipulate her daughter into marrying a man she doesn’t love. And so on and on as Austen begins her exploration of the themes that will reach their full maturity in later works: love, how society works, morality and immorality, the way people manipulate one another. And of course even in this early piece her language is wonderful. It’s a delightful piece of work, extremely short but funny and charming. It’s written as a series of letters between the main characters, which limits the perspective she can show, but is obviously experimental as well. There’s also a strong sense of naughtiness in it – I imagine just writing about this wicked Lady Susan was a bit of risk in itself.

May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes

Theo has just read me something from the paper about Chinese students and their families blockading the exam hall where they had just done their final school exams to protest about inspectors preventing them cheating. They said that they were disadvantaged since everybody in China cheats. This could almost have come from May We Be Forgiven. It’s a crazy book full of crazy situations, all of which are scathing satires on the American way of life. Early in the book the protagonist, Harold, who is a Nixon scholar, defines the American Dream, ie the opportunity for anybody to make good, and refers to Nixon’s part in promoting it. The events in the book are about the American Dream gone nuts. Essentially, and without spoiling the story, Harold is a mild mannered, somewhat spineless and unengaged professor of Nixon studies who becomes involved with his sister in law Jane. This involvement unleashes a series of events, which are fairly credible but very strange. I found the book long and, not knowing a great deal about Nixon, a little long winded when it talked about him, but probably appropriately so if you knew the history. The descriptions of institutions such as the schools, the criminal justice system and so forth are hilarious, brilliant satire and at the same time ridiculous – I hope! This book probably verges on chick lit but I really enjoyed it. It’s well written and compelling.

Miss Mapp by EF Benson

Second in the Lucia and Mapp series, Miss Mapp is another controlling character living in a small English village. She is more demonic than Lucia, nastier and more deliberately cruel, and you can’t like her as much. The story revolves around the town of Tilling (based on Rye where EF Benson lived) and involves a series of small town characters including Major Benjy, Captain Puffin, Mrs Plaistow and Diva, Miss Mapp’s arch enemy and outwardly, bosom friend. Life is all about who can get and disseminate the gossip first. Mapp and Diva spend a lot of their time trying to one-up one another and find ways to embarrass one another and make each other look foolish. This book describes a series of everyday events in the village, ranging from quarrels over new dresses to the arrival of Mr Wyse and Susan’ Plaistow’s attempts to entrap him. It’s all done across a backdrop of bridge and tea parties. This is laugh aloud stuff: Benson is witty and bitchy and obviously knows these types well . I’ll keep reading this series until they are all finished, the writing is so arch and so clever.

Noah’s Ark by Barbra Trapido

I do love Barbara Trapido. She gets right under the skin of her characters, who are so human that you identify with them completely. This story is about Ali who has been married to Noah, her third husband, for ten years. An old flame comes back into her life and she has to come to terms with that and finally to come into her own. It’s a story about relationships within a family and with friends and even with enemies, and is warm and funny and sensitive.

A Passage to India by EM Forster

When I went to one of the literature lectures at the NSWAG recently, the lecturer said this was her favourite EM Forster novel. Perhaps because I’m on holidays and not feeling very serious, I’ve found it hard to read. The poetic passages and the long descriptions of Indian religious ceremonies and the fraught emotional journeys of the characters were hard going. The themes of course were fascinating and showed prescience: Indian independence, freedom from the British, the pomposity and public school mentality of those British ruling India, the racism and tension that ran through both Indian and British societies. I can see how this book must have caused a furore when it was published in the 1920s. The story is abut four characters, Dr Aziz a Muslim doctor, Miss Quested, a British woman who has come out to marry one of the civil servants, Mr Fielding, an enlightened British educator and Mrs Moore, the mother of the civil servant. She’s the strangest of the characters, showing a sort of spiritual awareness and separation from the attitudes of the ruling class there. Anyhow when they go off for a picnic Miss Quested accuses Aziz of improper behaviour and that results in a court case that unleashes all the animosity between all the groups and puts a huge strain on the friendship between Fielding and Aziz. The question at the beginning, and at the end, is whether there can ever be a proper friendship between an Englishman and an Indian.

Dominion by CJ Sansom

I got tricked into reading this book by the bookseller’s blurb. It’s a thriller, plain and simple, set in a sort of historical context. The premise is that England capitulated to Hitler early in the piece and World War II never eventuated. The whole of Europe has become a fascist state and while nominally independent, Britain is completely under the thumb of Germany. Against this backdrop, the protagonist David gets caught up in the Resistance movement and is called upon to help rescue an old school friend who has important secrets that both the Germans and the British fascists want to get hold of. The story revolves around getting this man, Frank Muncaster, safely to America. I got quite bored towards the end and began flipping pages – except it’s on my kindle so I should say clicking pages I suppose. I found it a silly and unrewarding read.

So Much for That by Lionel Shriver

Shep Knacker is a nice guy trying to live his dream of heading off to a simpler life in Pemba in Africa. He has sold his business and his home and has been researching possible locations for years. Finally he is about to bite the bullet … and his wife gets cancer. So begins Lionel Shriver’s searing analysis of the American health system, albeit in the guise of a novel. This book took some reading because there were times when, like the characters, I almost felt I couldn’t go on. But it was compelling at the same time, especially the secondary story of Shep’s mate Jackson whose daughter has a rare genetic disorder that is slowly killing her. There’s no escape for these people, and by inference anyone else in the US, where the system exists to serve the profit driven operations of the insurance companies and where employees are stuck in jobs because they need the otherwise unaffordable health insurance that comes along with the gig. The lack of government assistance is chilling. People who don’t have insurance, or whose money runs out because of the incredible 40% co-payments required, are faced with on-the-streets option, something almost unthinkable for an Australian with such a wonderful health care system and a safety net to boot. Shriver has done her usual careful research: the detailed descriptions of the system, the diseases and their effects on people’s lives ring utterly true and are extremely discomfiting. The only thing I didn’t like about this book was the ending, which I simply didn’t buy.

On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry

I absolutely loved Barry’s earlier book The Secret Scripture, which I wrote about on this blog some time ago. This one is a good follow-up, the story of a young Irish political refugee who flees to America and lives a life dogged with tragedy. I find it interesting that she refers to the suffering her employer has endured during her life, although she never specifies it, but at the same time she seems not to recognize the truly hideous tragedy of her own life. She reminds me a bit of Bert Facey in A Fortunate Life. Lilly’s first husband is killed, the second deserts her, her son is lost to her and then her grandson kills himself – yet shining through all of this is her beautiful soul, her acceptance of the vagaries of life and her complete lack of self pity. Barry is a poet. He weaves words and phrases in such a melodic way I suspect him of being Irish himself – he may, be, I’ve never checked.

The Quarterly Essay by Mark Latham

The Quarterly Essay by Mark Latham This is really just a record of my having read it. Mark Latham is incredibly matured, incredibly impressive, and incredibly sensible in this must-read piece. I couldn’t possibly summarise the essay here but a lot of it crystallizes what I had been thinking for the last couple of years about what is wrong with the government and what can be done to fix it.

The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy

Nine hundred odd pages - wow! I'd read this before, when I was much younger, and had seen the television adaptation. But it still has great power, the horror of being stuck in a loveless marriage, or worse in fact, one where you are actively repelled by the man you're married to. And that period where a woman is the property of the man, with no more power than a child. We've all been watching Downton Abbey, set in the same period, but really there is no comparison. One is romanticised and forgiving, set amidst perpetually sunny rose gardens, while the Galsworthy is incisive, shrinking from nothing. I enjoyed reading the saga of the beautiful Irene, the breakaway Young Jolyon, the oily Soames and his conniving, property obsessed relatives. It helps me see where all those middle-class attitudes about hard work and saving come from! It's also interesting to see how bad decisions and sadness in one generation can pass down a family and affect the future generations. It's a sort of English version of Anna Karenina, both in sentiment and length.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

I really wish I hadn’t seen the film of this book even though it was so many years ago. The incredible force that is Maggie Smith still pervades the book, which I’m re-reading for the NSW Art Gallery lecture series on at the moment. I like reading it as a mature person though as it puts the foolishness of Miss Brodie into perspective. What a character. And of course it really is all about her, with the six girls and the drawing and music masters, all lightly drawn, orbiting her like the sun. Everybody is a bit in love with Miss Brodie, and more than a few them get burned by the heat. She really is a very dangerous woman when let loose on a bunch of impressionable children. This is a one of those delightful pieces of writing where the characters and the story are teased out in the retelling, and although it all seems quite genteel when you read it, it’s really a story about sex and lust and procurement and manipulation. One thing I really enjoyed abut her character is that she is a ringer for a friend I had once, a similarly dangerous person who is utterly convinced and religiously fanatical about her beliefs. I hear her speaking every time Miss Brodie opens her mouth to make one more confident pronouncement. Isn’t that great writing when a character is so authentic?

A Room With a View by EM Forster

I’d seen the film, listened to the music, but never read the book. It’s charming, as the young and inexperienced but potentially ‘wonderful’ heroine Lucy Honeychurch discovers herself. She and her cousin Charlotte spend time in a pensione in Florence and meet up with a group of people who become part of their lives – George and Mr Emerson, Mr Beebe the clergyman, Miss Larkin the novelist – and when Lucy returns home and becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse, all of these characters play an important part in what happens next. It’s a story about manners and customs and pretensions, beautifully written, with some period moralizing, but with a sort of wonderful, almost languid rhythm that carries you along with the flow of the story.

The One Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

“The international best selling sensation”. Also the reason I haven’t put anything on my blog for a month or more. I cannot finish this book. It is sitting half read, blocking me from getting into anything else, and driving me crazy. I do so hate abandoning books. I really wish someone would tell me what all the fuss is about with this book. It’s about Allan Karlsson who escapes from an old people’s home on his hundredth birthday and through a series of slapstick mishaps manages to rip off some drug dealers. He teams up with a group of people and they go on the run with dealers and cops in hot pursuit. Interspersed with all this are tales of Allan’s youth and if you think the contemporary story was ridiculous, wait till you read these flashbacks. I actually find this book insulting. It’s like a cartoon but in words, simplistic characters, banal language, entirely focused on the narrative ( and then… and then…and then…) and containing nothing to engage with the reader. Actually a better description comes to mind: it’s like naïve art – Grandma Moses in prose.

Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene

I launched into this book, which I should have read many years ago but didn’t, expecting something of the Aunty Mame of Aunt Julia (and the Scriptwriter) ilk. But this aunt is a seriously naughty woman. There’s no indulgent smile as you watch her get up to all manner of really wicked deeds: she is indeed utterly selfish, unrepentant and single mindedly bad. Despite all that I did like her and I also liked her nephew, the stitched-up retired and boring bank manager and narrator, who is in the throes of finding himself through the good offices of Aunt Agatha. Grahame Green is a ‘proper’ writer so there’s a lot of pleasure to be had in his language and especially in his wit. And this book is witty, a terrific satire of English life in the vein of Mitford and Huxley.

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido

What an utterly delightful book. I picked it up on the bookshelf of our apartment book exchange (recently installed in the common garage) and found myself compelled by its charm. Barbara Trapido is an accomplished writer, who knows her literature and her music and her language, so it’s a genuine pleasure to read, quite apart from the story. The narrative verges guiltily on the chick-lit, but avoids it because it has a true voice. It is the story of Katherine, a rather displaced young woman leaving school and starting at university, who becomes friends with her professor’s family. It covers about ten or fifteen years of her life, as she matures, works her way through relationships and losses and finally, of course finds happiness. This book won the Whitbread Special Prize for Fiction. I’m going out to find more Trapido books now as they are a light enough read to put on the detestable Kindle for my three months of travelling this year.