Reviews of Books
Jan 11th, 2012 by admin
This I read (or at least blogged) 33 books – last year I did 37 (I blame the lower number on Bleak House and Little Dorrit!).
My favourite novels of 2011 (that’s when I read them) were Olive Kitteridge, Freedom, A Visit From the Goon Squad, Elegies for the Broken Hearted, Notes from an Exhibition and Because of the Lockwoods.
I don’t have any particular goals for 2012 – apart from the usual clearing of the to be read pile. Maybe I will try to read 50 books (or at least blog 50 books).
Dec 9th, 2011 by admin
As you know, I read Patterns in the Carpet and really enjoyed it, so decided to read more Drabble.
I really struggled with this one. I had to renew my library copy (which is extremely unusual). I’m not sure if it was me or the book – I have been really busy…
Here is the blurb …
Freda Haxby is as famous for her writing as she is for her eccentricities. But for Daniel Palmer, Rosemary, Grace and their families, she is a monster mother. This is the story of an end-of-the-century family whose comfortable lives are disrupted by a succession of sinister events.
In this novel there is a lot of authorial intrusion. For example,
We are nearing the end. Soon we can go for the kill. Indeed, for the overkill. Frieda has killed Hilda, and we have killed Freida, and Benjamin has tried to kill himself. There will be one or two more deaths, but not many, some will survive.
I found this a bit annoying and distracting. The characters are very well-written, particularly Frieda, Benjamin and Emily. I can well imagine people having conversations about the ‘veil of ignorance’, earnestly trying to help people, but running out of patience and motivation. I want to say this is a novel for baby boomers or second wave feminists (you know the Germaine Greer generation), but that seems a bit flippant – maybe I should just say it doesn’t appeal to me.
More reviews …
http://thisdelicioussolitude.blogspot.com/2007/02/witch-of-exmoor.html
http://musingsfromsrilanka.blogspot.com/2010/10/book-review-witch-of-exmoor-by-margaret.html
Dec 6th, 2011 by admin
This is my favourite Whipple to date. I found this novel compelling reading when and how would Mr Lockwood’s fraud be discovered? What would happen to all of the Hunters? Whipple’s ability to write about ordinary people in an interesting manner is amazing. I find it difficult to understand why she is not more wildly known.
Here is the blurb …
Dorothy Whipple excels in her portrayal of family life and in her wise and humourous understanding of the many elements of character and personality that clash to make up a family. Her new book, while not a family chronicle in the accepted sense, is a subtle and convincing portrayal of character in a family setting and shows with delightful perception how the grown person can still be influenced by the events of childhood. In Thea, denied the easy way by the lack of financial security, readers will recognize one of Mrs Whipple’s best characters. In her mother and her brother and her sister; in the Lockwoods against whose patronage Thea so determinedly rebelled; in the frank forthright Oliver Reade, symbol of a new order of things, and in the vivid portrayal of English North Country and French Provincial life, readers of Mrs Whipple’s earlier novels, Greenbanks, They Knew Mr Knight and They Were Sisters to name a few, will immediately recognize that once again her charm and her humourous but acute acceptance of the strange twists of life and people have produced a story as enjoyable as any of its predecessors.
I do reveal a bit about the plot, so be warned. Mrs Hunter is hopeless completely incapable of organising her family and their affairs after the unexpected death of her husband. In step the Lockwoods. Mr Lockwood would rather not help and certainly helps with an ill-grace. The Hunters are made very aware of their reduced social standing (Mrs Hunter gets Mrs Lockwood’s cast off clothing and they are invited to look at the gifts the Lockwoods are giving other people). Molly is sent of to be a nursery maid – despite being obviously unsuited to the the position and Martin becomes a clerk at a bank (despite wanting to be a doctor). Thea is the only one who doesn’t think the Lockwoods are kind or generous. She hates their patronising interference, but is at a loss as to how to resurrect her family’s fortune and respect. Ultimately Oliver is the one to provide the help and guidance the family need and Thea finds and opportunity for revenge and then regrets the impulse.
The best part of this novel are the wonderful characters – they are all complicated. Mr Lockwood could easily descend to a Mr Brocklehurst type villain, but we do ultimately feel sympathy for him. Thea is young and excitable, but she matures over the course of the novel and finally recognizes Oliver’s true worth.
This is definitely worth reading if you like domestic fiction or character driven fiction.
More reviews …
http://bookssnob.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/because-of-the-lockwoods-by-dorothy-whipple/
http://karensbooksandchocolate.blogspot.com/2011/04/because-of-lockwoods-by-dorothy-whipple.html
Dec 2nd, 2011 by admin
This was a book club selection – we occasionally like to try the Booker winner (2011).
Here is the blurb …
The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past, Julian Barnes’s new novel is laced with his trademark precision, dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world’s most distinguished writers.
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian’s life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget.
Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks, with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky. And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to upset all your vaunted truths?
This is a short novel and quite easy to read. I started to wonder about the nature of memory – is it reliable or faulty, but also about conflicting points of view and whose memory is the ‘correct’ memory. Early on Adrian says
“History is the certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
and that is what this novel is about. The writing is beautiful – I wish other authors could be as economical with their prose.
More reviews …
http://rippleeffects.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/the-sense-of-an-ending-by-julian-barnes/
http://eleventhstack.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/the-sense-of-an-ending-the-2011-booker-prize/
Nov 19th, 2011 by admin
I read a review of this book somewhere (probably The Australian Review) and thought it sounded interesting and then I found a copy on sale at Borders – it was meant to be.
The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws is an original and brilliant work. Margaret Drabble weaves her own story into a history of games, in particular jigsaws, which have offered her and many others relief from melancholy and depression. Alongside curious facts and discoveries about jigsaw puzzles — did you know that the 1929 stock market crash was followed by a boom in puzzle sales? — Drabble introduces us to her beloved Auntie Phyl, and describes childhood visits to the house in Long Bennington on the Great North Road, their first trip to London together, the books they read, the jigsaws they completed. She offers penetrating sketches of her parents, her siblings, and her children; she shares her thoughts on the importance of childhood play, on art and writing, on aging and memory. And she does so with her customary intelligence, energy, and wit. This is a memoir like no other.
This was a lovely book to read – part memoir part jigsaw history. There were anecdotes from her friends and acquaintances about their ‘jigsaw puzzling’. Drabble uses a chatty style – it is like you’re sitting at her table doing a puzzle together.
And yes, I did feel motivated to do a jigsaw puzzle. I like the idea that it is always possible to complete the puzzle you just need time and a bit of discipline.
I liked this book so much I’ve moved on to The Witch of Exmoor.
Here are some more reviews …
http://acommonreader.org/review-the-pattern-in-the-carpet-margaret-drabble/
http://picklemethis.blogspot.com/2009/05/pattern-in-carpet-by-margaret-drabble.html
Nov 14th, 2011 by admin
A friend recommended this book to me at least a year ago. I picked it up a couple of times in various different book stores, but wasn’t that interested. Then I saw it in my local $5 book store and picked up a copy. In the way these things go, I really enjoyed it and I am sure I shall read more of his work.
Here is the blurb …
The new novel from the bestselling Patrick Gale tells the story of artist Rachel Kelly, whose life has been a sacrifice to both her extraordinary art and her debilitating manic depression. When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies painting obsessively in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children have more than the usual mess to clear up. She leaves behind an extraordinary and acclaimed body of work — but she also leaves a legacy of secrets and emotional damage it will take months to unravel. A wondrous, monstrous creature, she exerts a power that outlives her. To her children she is both curse and blessing, though they all in one way or another reap her whirlwind, inheriting her waywardness, her power of loving — and her demons! Only their father’s Quaker gifts of stillness and resilience give them any chance of withstanding her destructive influence and the suspicion that they came a poor second to the creation of her art. The reader becomes a detective, piecing together the clues of a life — as artist, lover, mother, wife and patient — which takes them from contemporary Penzance to 1960s Toronto to St Ives in the 1970s. What emerges is a story of enduring love, and of a family which weathers tragedy, mental illness and the intolerable strain of living with genius. Patrick Gale’s latest novel shines with intelligence, humour and tenderness.
I really enjoyed the slow (and sometime misleading) unfolding of Rachel’s story. The writing was beautiful. The characters were all sympathetically portrayed – even Rachel who was really a bit of a monster. This novel examines the fine line between creativity and madness and also what happens to families when the creative genius is a mother? She is absent when she is creating and when she is not creating she is fighting her inner demons.
Here are some other reviews …
http://booksinstacks.blogspot.com/2011/03/notes-from-exhibition-patrick-gale.html
http://kirstenjane.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/notes-from-an-exhibition-patrick-gale/
http://www.26books.com/2008/06/cathys-book-13-notes-from-an-exhibition-by-patrick-gale/
Oct 31st, 2011 by admin
This book seemed to be everywhere for a while and that kind of popularity always puts me off. I’m sure it won’t live up to it’s reputation. However, several friends read it and loved it and I ran out of things to read on holiday (horrifying thought) so I decided to read The Help and despite the hype I loved it.
Here’s the blurb …
Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women:
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women – mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends – view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.
Obviously I am aware of the civil rights movement in the US, but I am completely ignorant of the fine details. SO this story told from the view point of the maids (or help) was a real eye-opener for me. I’m dumbfounded by the way people spoke to the maids – like they were recalcitrant children (so patronising) and then there is the whole separate toilet issue! But the vital point was the intimidation and violence directed at the black people to maintain the status quo.
This novel is an entertaining and easy read as well as being informative. I do find it strange that the white women allow people they see as inferior to race their children. The novel is written from three different perspectives; Aibileen, Minnie and Skeeter. Each has a distinct voice and different experiences, which creates a well-rounded view of rural life in Mississippi in the early 1960s. Even the white women lived narrow and restricted lives – it’s all about getting married and being part of the Junior League. I’m glad I read this novel and I’m looking forward to seeing the movie.
More reviews …
http://agoldoffish.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/the-help-–-kathryn-stockett/
http://whatsarahreads.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/the-help-by-kathryn-stockett/
Oct 25th, 2011 by admin
I bought this novel based solely on the title – there should be more dancing, don’t you think? I have read and enjoyed Summer at Mount Hope, so that might have made me more receptive to buy a book knowing nothing at all about it. Rosalie Ham is Australian and this novel is definitely Australian. It reminded me at times of the movie The Castle – there were some laugh out loud Australian humour, so international readers beware.
Here is the blurb …
Margery Blandon has led an upright, principled life guided by the wisdom of desktop calendars. What went wrong? Margery suspects her that her first born, Walter, has betrayed her. Her second son, Morris, might have committed a crime, and her only daughter is almost certainly trying to kill her. Then there’s Pat, her life-long neighbour and enemy – now demented – who possibly knows the truth about everything. Should she throw herself from the 43rd floor, or should she abandon everything she believes and embrace her enemy for the sake of what’s right?.
I loved this novel, the characters are superb. Margery with her cross stitch aphorisms (mostly taken from desktop calendars), her strict routine (roast chicken every Sunday) and her willful blindness to people and events around her. Then there is Walter, the Brunswick Bull, who has never been quite the same since the last fight. Judith, Margery’s daughter, with her mobile beauty business and her determination to finally possess her mother’s pearls. This was a joyful book about a difficult subject; aging. Her children want her to move into a nursing home, so they can sell the house and have the cash. She wants to stay there and if she moved who would tie Mrs Parsons’ shoe laces? There is also a bit of a mystery about Margery’s husband (who blew himself up – and the pub – by smoking too close to his oxygen tank) and Pat (who has dementia) seems to know what it is. And is her second son really managing a hotel overseas? I suspect Margery knows everything, but doesn’t really want to admit she does.
This novel is about families – the relationships between family members, what is due to family and the lies we tell one another for whatever reason. Although it has funny moments, there is an undercurrent of sadness to this novel. Margery, after a life of disappointment, is finally living how she wants and old age, infirmity and greedy relations might steal it all away.
More reviews …
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/the-age-of-enlightenment-20110922-1klsd.html
Oct 18th, 2011 by admin
This novel was recommended on a blog I read (possibly this one). I didn’t know anything about it, but reserved if from the library – there was quite a queue.
Here’s the description …
In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol.
This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While ‘scholarshipping’ at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship-and innocent love-that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept.
Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice-words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago.
Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart.
I have visited Seattle and it is always nice to read about a place you have been. This novel, in particular, had a great sense of place – the smell of salt, the rain and mud at the fairground, chinatown and japantown. The characters were wonderfully drawn as well.
For me this novel was an easy way to learn slightly more about the internment of people with Japanese ancestry during world was two. I didn’t know anything about it at all until I read Snow Falling on Cedars.
The prose was at times slightly forced – I was jolted out of the story and made aware I was reading a novel. However, I still think this novel is well worth reading and I look forward to Mr Ford’s next novel.
More reviews …
http://pattispages.blogspot.com/2011/10/hotel-on-corner-of-bitter-and-sweet-by.html
http://knightofswords.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/review-hotel-on-the-corner-of-bitter-and-sweet/
Oct 12th, 2011 by admin
As it is school holidays, reading is happening, but thinking and writing is not.
I read a review of The Best of Everything here and was intrigued, Luckily I could get a copy for my Kindle (have I said how much I love my Kindle?).
This novel is Mad Men from the girls’ perspective, although as it was written in 1958, we should say Mad Men is like it.
Here is the description …
When Rona Jaffe’s superb page-turner was first published in 1958, it changed contemporary fiction forever. Some readers were shocked, but millions more were electrified when they saw themselves reflected in its story of five young employees of a New York publishing company. Almost sixty years later, The Best of Everything remains touchingly–and sometimes hilariously–true to the personal and professional struggles women face in the city. There’s Ivy League Caroline, who dreams of graduating from the typing pool to an editor’s office; naïve country girl April, who within months of hitting town reinvents herself as the woman every man wants on his arm; and Gregg, the free-spirited actress with a secret yearning for domesticity. Jaffe follows their adventures with intelligence, sympathy, and prose as sharp as a paper cut.
I loved reading this novel. The characters were very convincing (even the scary stalker one!). It was about gaining independence and moving out of the family home. They all seem to be marking time waiting for something better to come along (this usually means meeting a man and getting married – Caroline might eventually find satisfaction in her career). It is a 1950′s version of Sex and the City. The exploits of single women looking for fulfillment in New York. It is a fun read of the ‘glamourous’ life of a New York City girl.
More reviews .
http://bookssnob.wordpress.com/2011/08/03/the-best-of-everything-by-rona-jaffe/
http://www.picklemethis.com/2011/08/25/the-best-of-everything-by-rona-jaffe/
http://www.afashionacityastyle.com/2011/07/book-recommendation-best-of-everything.html