Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

This is a sweet novel that reminded me a little of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. This time the protagonist is not someone with autism. It’s told in the voice of a damaged human being, Eleanor, and tracks her progress as she begins to unpick her personal history and come to terms with what has happened to her and to heal herself. Satisfyingly, this is of course achieved through human connection and friendship. And just to keep things moving, there is a healthy and quite skillfully devised set of unexplained events that gradually unfold. I was genuinely surprised by the ending, which impresses me! I powered through this charming book in just two or three sittings.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

My dad gave me this book when I was about eight years old. I remember struggling to read it, and it did take me a couple of years before I managed it. Rereading now, I’m amazed that I managed it even then! It’s a fascinating insight not into India so much as into the attitudes of the British and colonists. Kipling is wordy and difficult for the modern day reader, used now to plainspeak and plot driven stories. The book itself doesn’t actually have much in the way of plot – the child is recruited by the British rulers as a messenger/spy in their battle to stop the Russians gaining a foothold in Afghanistan. He travels through India as a disciple to a Buddhist lama gathering and disseminating information along the way. The real joy of this book is the characterization, with wonderful rough diamond horse traders and eccentric lamas and bumbling yet somehow highly effective spy masters who can take on any disguise and speak any native dialect. It’s harder work than a modern novel, but a classic.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

I’m not all that keen on long family sagas, spanning three or four generations. There’s never enough room for proper character development or any kind of thoughtful analysis or detail around the events that happen. There’s just too much to cram in so the whole thing degenerates into ‘and he did this and then she did that and a year later this happened and another five years later we’ve suddenly all moved on and something else has happened and all the kids have grown up in the meantime …’ But having said all that, I quite enjoyed this book because I knew nothing at all about Korean history or about their relationship with Japan. So this book charts the story of various generations of Koreans who were colonized by the Japanese, moved to Japan, lived through the war (which barely rates a mention in the book!), got involved in running pachinko (gambling) parlours and then all more or less died. The theme of the entire thing is the struggle Koreans had, and possibly still have, with the extreme racism of Japanese towards them, even if they have been born in Japan. So I found it worthwhile reading the book, even though I don’t think it was particularly well written.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

I’ve read this book before but I so much enjoyed rereading it almost ten years later. This time, I took the book slowly, reading just a few pages at a time instead of greedily gulping the story down as I so often do. Amor Towles is a magician with words and imagery. There were times where I just stopped and thought about how he had phrased things, how original and clever his metaphor is. This time too I felt that I recognized a distinct Great Gatsby influence, which I don’t think I was aware of before. The book is set in roughly the same period, and charts the entry of a working class girl, Katey Kontent, into the upper echelons of New York society. Its characters are thoughtless and hedonistic, and at times as arguably corrupt as Mr Gatsby himself. And of course a love story runs through as the backbone of the novel. I think I still prefer A Gentleman in Moscow, but both books are thoughtful observations of a class system – albeit one in the US and one in Russia – seen through the eyes of characters that you can warm to. Lovely, lovely, lovely. My favourite book(s) at the moment. I can’t wait to see what Amor Towles produces next.

Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe

The second in our non fiction group’s series was also disappointing. We all felt that Pascoe’s subject could have been presented in a much more succinct way. Having completed an undergraduate degree majoring in anthropology and had some experience working with Indigenous people, nothing in this book really surprised me. It all made so much sense. The development process of Indigenous culture is not dissimilar to many cultures around the world and it was no surprise that Indigenous peoples farmed land, managed animal stocks, saved seed, created art, travelled widely for ceremonial gatherings and so forth. Of course there were many details that we didn’t know – that Aboriginal people built stone dwellings in alpine regions, for example. I was especially interested in the records that the early white explorers kept, in which they observed the agricultural practices of the Aborigines. Of course, once settlers marauded across the land with their destructive farming practices, all that evidence was wiped out. I also found the sections about governance very interesting. But there was also a lot of unsubstantiated opinion in this book – what white settlers were thinking when they made certain decisions, for example. Unless Pascoe had access to records of these people’s thoughts, then it’s not wise to make assertions. We can imagine, but we can’t claim anything as fact without some sort of evidence. Having said all that, it’s a worthwhile book to read and different people will learn different things from it.

Golden Hill by Frances Spufford

This guy is in love with Henry Fielding – wordy, lush prose, swashbuckling and sometimes ribald adventure, innocence abroad in a big bad city….. The story is set in 18th century New York, a dark and dangerous place populated with thieves and drunkards at one level and political manipulators and spies at another. The protagonist arrives from London with a secret personal mission, not revealed until towards the end of the tale, and is thrown into this maelstrom of humanity. I didn’t love the plot as much as the telling, and it did take some concentration to get into the swing of the language – yes, pretty much like Fielding! It was an absorbing, entertaining read and really a terrific first novel for this writer. I’ll be interested to see what he comes up with in the future and whether he develops another authorial voice to match his subject.

Capital by Thomas Piketty

I read this for my newly formed non fiction discussion group. Or at least I read the first half of it! The theme of the book is that inherited wealth is the foundation of inequality. It’s a Marxist viewpoint. So, when a person inherits wealth, then they can invest those additional assets into further wealth producing assets. And thus wealth inequality not only continues but increases. It’s not a new story. His solution is taxation, specifically death taxes I think, but as I said I didn’t get to the end. Friends who know these things are quite critical of the book and his theories, but I am not well enough educated in the area of economics to do much more than observe the arguments. The group stopped halfway through because we all felt overwhelmed by the content, including all the formulae etc, but then we are all from a humanities background and chose this book to challenge ourselves. It sure did!