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.