April reading list

Tags

fiction, reading

Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel

So I’m a fan of this series, but I guess Wolf Hall was my favourite. Of course, I enjoyed this. In fact, I kept reading other things, saving this one up.

But when I finally got to it, I found myself a little bored drifting. It is very long, and while one’s love of (Mantel’s) Cromwell (which is a weird pronouncement as well as a tribute to Mantel’s skill as a novelist) can take one quite far, perhaps the foreknowledge of the end, or just how everything seemed to around in circles or the reigning queen(s) (Jane Seymour/Anne of Cleves) don’t quite captivate (although I am fascinated by both these women as I am fascinated by all Henry’s wives – except perhaps Katherine Howard).

Also, the ending. I don’t know why I had a sense of deja vu. I no longer have my copy of Bringing Up Bodies at hand, but did it end with a similar perspective of the beheaded Anne?

Department of Speculation, Jenny Offil

One more book written by a creative writing teacher (or is that the case with all authors now? That they have all have creative writing degrees and then go on to teach the subject and so mine that territory when it comes to their own fiction?).

I don’t mean this as a slur, but it was quite like reading a (literary and fairly profound) blog. In fact, it charts the course of a marriage through fragments.

Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles

My initial impression was that it was written for the movie – The Grand Budapest Hotel came to mind. Also it had a bit of the Western person writing about the east –  the commies are the bad guys/plebs (well, they were, but is that the only perspective we can have?) and the aristocracy the good cultured one.

I have lost patience with the big bad commie point of view that Americans cleave to. In the count’s dinner with a senior Party functionary, the latter comments on Hollywood as the perfect propaganda device (but later undercuts that by citing noir). Here the novel performs this function by showing up how the well-intentioned system becomes a hierarchy of hierarchies. So the novel functions as anti-communist propoganda.

Weirdly or not so weirdly, it reads like the Russian novelists read in English, which may or may not have been the point

Anyway, it grew on me and stayed with me, so that’s something. Also, I realise that I now tend to read mostly women authors, and perhaps it was the ecriture masculin that I couldn’t quite get into?

Paper Moon, Rehana Munir

Read my thoughts here.

The Girl Who Lived, Christopher Greyson 

Another of those novels you read because you want to know what happened, not because you particularly care. Another male novelist I couldn’t quite get into, although it had a quite interesting female lead character.

Lab Girl, Hope Jahren

The memoir version of Overstory.  How to become a scientist. Do I need to say more?

Okay, it’s about a very successful paleobiologist – both her journey as a woman in science and the wonder of plants. The objects she studies become a metaphor for their own trajectory

The mushroom As a penis

Surrender, Dorothy – Meg Wolitzer 

Why do some books make it and some not? This is a lovely book, but doesn’t seem to have made it onto any lists.

Wolitzer’s thing is to do friendship and the keen observations that interesting people make. She does this conversation with friends so much better than Rooney

Or at least I think so perhaps because I’m Not (properly) a millennial

The Eighth Guest and other Muzaffar Jang Mysteries, Madhulika Liddle

A series of finely crafted short stories starring Mughal-era detective Muzaffar Jang. The actual mysteries are not amazing, but they’re enjoyable anyway.

March reading list

Famous people, Jeffrey Kuritzes 

Was hard not to read this and think Justin Bieber, even though I’m hardly familiar with today’s pop music. The coronavirus briefly forced me out of my comfort zone and into Taylor Swift but that’s it.

I was expecting this to be peopled with many glamorous characters, but what I got was a monologue. Nevertheless, really liked it. What does it say about me that I liked the Bieberesque voice?

The Dutch House, Ann Patchett 

Loved this like I’ve loved every Patchett book I’ve read. Siblings sitting in a car reminiscing about the bad old days – what’s not to like? One of Patchett’s regular themes is the strangeness of families – and she manages to wield her craft in such a way as to leave us feel heartwarmed at the end of it.

One of the questions posed by this novel: can a house be a country you’re in exile from?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh 

Read my thoughts here.

The Friend, Sigrid Nunez

A book about writing and dogs (not necessarily about writing about dogs, though there’s some of that). What’s not to like?

Like a continuation of Alexander Chee with a touch of the detachment of the last book.

But the book is so clever- is the friend the friend or the dog the friend?

The Milkman, Anna Burns

Read my thoughts here.

American Spy, Lauren Wilkinson

When you think of spy what do you think of? Certainly not a black woman, I’m sure. Wilkinson tells a personal story but also subverts the cold war narrative, by telling it from a black perspective. The theatre here is Africa, not Russia: while we know that the US meddled, Latin America, not Africa is what comes to mind.

I hadn’t even given Burkina Faso much thought before this. Now suddenly, after a mini history, I felt like I’d like to visit.

She also plays with the idea of the spy itself – the protagonist’s Marie’s mother, a black woman learns to pass for white, her father, a black man, passes in the white-dominated police system as one of them.  In a sense, then, Marie has espionage in her bones and it is no wonder that she excels at it, even though she only gets into the profession to fulfil her sister’s legacy.

The Perfect Spy, John Le Carré

Rather ironically American Spy had me hankering for a traditional spy story and I decided to go to a master I had not previously read. I googled his best book and this one came up.

I expected it to be a slog, but it it wasn’t. And it happened to share some similarities with Wilkinson’s work. Just like Wilkinson’s narrative is a letter to her children, so does Le Carre have British spy Magnus spin his tale for his son. Both are spies who became disillusioned and fled their former lives. Both had a troubled relationship with a parent. Both we trained in the qualities of spycraft growing up.

It is subversive in its own way, showing the possibility of solidarity across the lines of the cold war and the tr ascendance of friendship.

A God in Ruins, Kate Atkinson 

This is a “companion piece” to Life After Life, which introduced us to the Todd family. In that novel, the focus was on Ursula; this time, it’s on her much-loved brother Teddy. While it’s nice to visit the family again, the next generation not as captivating as the previous – which is perhaps the point.

It’s a little hard to get at what the book is about – but a theme that struck me is the relationship between parents and children and the relationships that flow across generations. There are parent-child pairs who do not really like each other (Teddy-Viola, Viola-Sunny/Bertie). The scene in which Viola slaps Sunny and the impending guilt was too close to the bone.

Also, Viola’s treatment of Teddy made me reflect on my own communication with my parents during the coronavirus. We are at the age when the parent-child role seems to get reversed, when we find ourselves telling our parents what to do. But Teddy’s perspective as an elderly man reminded me that we need to handle this flip carefully so as not to infantilise our parents or be straight up obnoxious. Resolved to try and do better. Failed. 

Though have to say halfway through stopped being fed up with Viola and started being fed up with Teddy and what a paragon of virtue Atkinson makes him out to be. Also found the relationship between Nancy and Teddy disappointingly vague, though I guess her intention was to subvert the idea of the childhood sweetheart from the previous novel. 

Some incidents are repeated (such as references to a person who had got decapitated and sleeping with Julia – not sure if that was sloppy editing or a stylistic device I was too dense to get.

She does a volte face at the end which went way over my head because unlike in Life after Life I couldn’t take the time turning that seriously. Further research indicates that she did intend to play with the idea of fiction, but given that she has pushed the notion of multiple possible endings to its extreme in Life after Life, this doesn’t quite have much impact.

The Outline, Rachel Cusk

This should have been called Conversations with Grown-up Friends. It read like a cross between Conversations with Friends and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

A novel that reads like memoir, with lots of surprisingly insightful anecdotes – mostly about marriage and how it holds together (and idea of) self.

Read it to delay plunging into Hillary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light and at one point was tempted by the arrival of period to switch books but found it surprisingly easy to finish this first which I mean as a compliment

Made me want to go back and study literary form, which could take me to philosophy in a way that the cultural studies I have been doing may not.

Murder at the Happy Home for the Aged, Bulbul Sharma

Picked this also to delay reading The Mirror and the Light, but it didn’t quite satisfy. I like the idea of elderly detectives and the portrayal of a contemporary Goan village with the influx of North Indians and Russians. But the mystery itself was wanting and the writing did not rise in the way that some detective stories have been doing recently.

 

 

February book list

Tags

books, historical fiction, reading

Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson

Thought that I was reading about a black family so was confused when it opened on what seemed like a debutantes ball. Turns out I was indeed reading about three generations of a black family.

It is told from multiple perspectives and moves back and forth in time.

Was rereading Elle Kennedy’sThe Goal and in some ways there is a common plot line – both flip the stereotype of the young pregnant mother and the father who leaves in these situations.

Weight, Jeneatte Winterson

This is part of Cannongate’s retelling of myths series. Winterson weaves the myth of Atlas into her own story.

At the heart of her retelling, this question: Do we create our own burdens?

Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George

This was a massive tome and I spent a good part of the month reading it. It was like a counterpoint to Colleen McCollough’s Anthony and Cleopatra, which portrayed the pair in a not-so-flattering light and introduced me to the character of Octavian.

I largely enjoyed McCollough’s take, but I liked George’s better. Unlike colleen mccollough’s take, Cleopatra is not catty about the other women. She presents Cleopatra as having more than ambitions for her son – of having an Alexandrian vision of merging East and West. In her telling, Anthony was not a weak man but a modest man. He did not want to be emperor.

Cleopatra’s life as we know it features two grand romances: with Julius Ceasar and with Anthony. After reading the Ceasar section, I wondered how Anthony would ever stand up. But oh, George makes sure that he does, and she is not as cruel to Anthony for his failures as McCollough was.

In the first romance, Cleopatra went to Caesar at his call. He held all the cards. She all went to Anthony, but full in control, extravagant. In both cases she wanted something – her crown and then that of her son

Mimi was learning about Egypt at the same time. I heard her listening to a video that simply mentioned Cleopatra’s love affair with Anthony. As if that’s all she was – a consort to a Roman

Mimi surprised me by asking a pertinent question: why would a Roman have a love affair with an Egyptian (and vice versa). I found that I could explain the whole saga to her from Caesar onwards and she was fascinated.

I also told her how Cleopatra was so much more than a pretty face and she wanted more than love from the Romans. We looked at the map and how one small city, Rome, could control so much of the world. It struck me that the Roman reaction to Egypt is like the American to Chinese culture and vice ver

Big Sky, Kate Atkinson

This is the latest installment of Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series. Read the last one some time ago so some of the characters came back to me only slowly.

So good. Just what I needed – I think I read it around the time house arrest began to really get to me.

A detective story but with the redeeming quality of farce. Loved Crystal, the bimbo redeemed.

How to write an autobiographical novel, Alexander Chee

• Read this after I had a discussion with Mincat about Humans of New York (why she hates it, why I like it). In my view, Hony offers a snapshot of people’s lives, a moment frozen in time. It’s like fragments of an autobiography.
  It’s always made me feel a bit weird that I like to read autobiographies, especially of writers, even if I haven’t read the writer’s other work. Jeanette Winterson is an example. Alexander Chee is another.
• This is a series of autobiographical essays but also a must-read for anyone who is interested in the craft of writing. Chee not only attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, he also taught writing. If you, like most of us, were unlucky enough to not go to Iowa, then read this.
• The Anne Dillard essay got me thinking about how people diss writing degrees when there is so much to be learnt about the craft of writing. How is it that it’s fine to study music or art but not writing? Why must one be totally unschooled to do this?

Rachel Howzell Hall: Land of Shadows, Skies of Ash, Trail of Echoes

Detective fiction is the new chick lit in my book so please recommend series.

A black detective is a refreshing change. The milieu is the black middle class – the same crimes, different race – yet the ghetto is never far away.

Racial tension is evoked in the relationship between Elouise Norton and her white partner Colin, a newbie from Colorado. But the usual dynamic is flipped – Colin is the interloper here while Elouise has the upper hand.

My one quibble is that the chemistry between Elouise and Colin is unnecessary. There was a time when I used to be like something was missing in a story.

Every book has some personal issue intertwined with the case . In the first, it’s a missing girl like her sister, in the second it’s the shit behind the facade of a marriage, in the third its absent fathers.

The Green Girl, Kate Zambreno

Sometimes a book you’ve wanted to get your hands on for ages lives up to the expectations. This was not one of those times. Read my thoughts here.

 

God knows

One of the consoling facts for both V’s and my parents when we decided to get married was that despite our cultural differences, we shared a religion. Never mind that both of us had stopped going to church regularly by then.

Unfortunately for them, instead of bolstering each other’s faith, we progressively lost it. Nevertheless, I planned to raise my children as Catholics as I was convinced that it would give them structure and community.

However, as I increasingly came to see belief in God and religious rituals as anything more than quaint practices as being as silly as unflinching belief in Harry Potter, I found it would be quite hard to answer “yes” with a straight face questions such as “does God really exist?”.

So, much to our parents’ dismay, religion fell by the wayside.

The result, though, is that my children have been exposed to a much wider set of mythologies than they would have had been insisted on belief in one faith. They never quite took to the Bible, instead been drawn to Hindu mythology. Reading those stories to them, I ended up educating myself and becoming a fan of the sheer fantastic quality of imaginative storytelling. I can see why the Judeo-Christian tradition paled in comparison.

When the government declared schools closed this month, one of the unforeseen side effects was the lack of books. Due to a lack of space, I’ve pruned our bookshelves and relied more on the school and public library. However, even the public library has shut down, so we were forced to turn back to our bookshelves.

And we found Muezza and Baby Jaan, a collection of stories from the Quran by Anita Nair. It had been rejected in the past for being too wordy and having too few pictures, but it seems to have caught on this time (it is a tad worthy and could do with at least one illustration every couple of pages).

While my knowledge of Hindu mythology had been sketchy, my knowledge of Muslim mythology was pretty non-existent, save for knowing the background to some of the festivals and the difference between Sunni and Shia. I tended to fall back on the idea that since the Muslim Holy book shared many stories with the Bible.

Muezza and Baby Jaan tells its religious stories through a series of conversations between a cat and a djinn that takes the shape of a camel. This nesting of stories within the narrative makes it a little complicated, but the kids enjoyed the Muezza-Baby Jaan conversations as much as the Quranic stories, possibly more, so I can’t complain. They also surprised me by remembering some of the common biblical stories, so I guess they aren’t as devoid of Christian mythology as I had thought.

Despite V and I being quite open in our lack of faith in the existence of the divine, our helpers are believers and have done some amount of indoctrination. Mimi, by personality, is more drawn to spirituality and insists she believes in god, though which one keeps changing.

At some point in Muezza and Baby Jaan, Muezza said that when he gets angry, he recites the ninety-nine names of God and then the book proceeds to list then. I read a few and can see the point of this recitation as it has a calming effect as such recitations tend to.

Mimi surprised me by deciding she would read all the ninety-nine names (her reading skills are actually poor, so I was not optimistic about her getting through the Arabic names but she progressed further than I would have expected). She knows she has a tendency to fly into rages and I think she wanted some divine intervention to help her calm herself.

While I have no objection to her reciting the ninety-names of God, I think it would be easier to teach her the Hail Mary and Holy Mary. Apparently, both my children are familiar with the rosary, thank to our helpers. I suggested Mimi could say these prayers when she needs to. Despite my own lack of faith, I can see the value of prayer for a restless child and I have already taught her a nightime prayer (which she seemed fascinated by at the time though I’m sure she’s forgotten now).

The next day Mimi had a fall on her scooter. Suddenly, she said: “I know why. It’s because I fought with you.”

“What?” I asked.

“I said the ninety-nine names of God and said I wouldn’t be angry, but I fought with you. So God punished me by making me fall.”

I was gobsmacked. “That’s not how it works. God – if he exists – doesn’t punish,” I told her.

But then I realised that all the stories we had read recently were of God punishing people. The idea of a vengeful God is so powerful that even children who have never been exposed to it take to it like fish to water almost as soon as they encounter it.

Perhaps to them it is comforting to think that someone out there is controlling things, even our misfortunes. But it is also deeply flawed.

In fact, Catholic catechism has sort of outgrown this idea even before I left the church. The vengeful god of the Old Testament, we were told, was not as important as the forgiving God in the New Testament.

It’s been a long time since I heard the words “God will punish you”. Ironically, the last time I heard it was at my in-laws 50th wedding anniversary mass, where for reasons unknown, I volunteered to do one of the readings and to my horror ended up having to stand before the community enjoining wives to submit to their husbands. I considered coughing over that part, but settled for a smirk.

Maybe the priest heard that in my voice because he decided – to my surprise, because in fact obedience has been left out of wedding vows – to stress that point. Perhaps he saw that his audience was rather unresponsive to his message because he ended with a menacing, “if you don’t, God will punish you!”

Snort.

 

 

 

 

January reading list

Tags

books, reading

Three Women, Lisa Taddeo

This is an ethnographic project that almost reads like fiction. Ya deo follows three women as they navigate sexual lives complicated in some way.

This line on the force of male desire: “men did not merely want, they needed”.

It rings true but is it?

The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon

Did you ever wonder what Aristotle might be like in bed? No?

Well, read this to find out. It traces the years Aristotle spent working on his greatest project – Alexander the Great. Take this exchange:

Alex: “You’re going to hate an entire nation because you lost one friend?”

Ari: “You’re going to love an entire nation to annoy your teacher?”

And

Ari: “You’ll have to destroy their world just to get into it. What’ll it be worth to you then?”

“You can make the world larger for yourself by conquering it, but you always lose something in the process. You can learn without conquering.”

Alex: “You can.”

The Argumentative Indian, Amarya Sen

• Loved the giggle worthy opening.
• The bit about the BJP’s limited success and the soft hindutva – that has changed
• Shantiniketan: no exams at all (yet he became an economist
• Stopped half way through and never went back. My bad.

The Position, Meg Wolitzer

The premise is how a book can change lives. The book in question is book about sex, written about one’s parents.

You know how we hate the idea of our parents having sex, what if you discovered a book detailing the sexual exploits of mom and dad? What if not just you but the whole world saw it?

Basically, a family drama that deals with sex and love in different permutations and combinations.

Elle Kennedy: The Deal, The Mistake, The Score, The Goal

Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here

Sheena Kamal: The Lost Ones, It All Falls Down

Would have been fine if it was a simple missing persons mystery. Turns out to be much more.

Why does the bad guy have to be an outsider though? (not like there aren’t enough white baddies  and Zhang is not a Cantonese name)

My one quibble is how our intrepid (homeless) detectiv, Nora Watts, seems to escape from the most hoary situations. Thrillers are like fairytales – the good guys always win in the end

By the second book, I was sold. In this one, Nora, tries to find her father, but finds her mother. Motherhood – her mother’s, her daughter’s, that of the baddies. Obviously I was all over it.

Overstory, Richard Powers

Thought the individual stories were too fragmented in the beginning but it grew on me (see what I did there?). By the end, had a desperate need to climb the mountain near my house, which I guess is praise?

Didn’t love any of the characters though.

Top 10 books I read in 2019

Tags

books, fiction, reading

MinCat put out a call on FB for one book recommendation. Obviously, this is hard especially when I read so much, and so much good stuff, but to my own surprise, I was able to come up with the standouts with too much trouble.

1. An American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld
2. The Wife, Meg Wolitzer
3. Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld
4. Commonwealth, Ann Patchett
5. Unmarrigeable, Soniah Kamal
6. Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn
7. Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld
8. Hush Hush , Laura Lippman
9. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman
10. The Dry, Jane Harper

December reading list

Tags

books, chick lit, family dramas, historical fiction, reading

Commonwealth, Ann Patchett

The funny thing was that I picked up the book so I would read something not too intense so I could pay attention to my husband and children and instead the husband and children in the novel caught me and swallowed me whole, and I literally told my own husband to shut up and let me read.

This is a sprawling family drama, about secrets and loyalties, but uplifting in the end.

The Confessions of Young Nero, Margaret George

Read second part first so there was overlap, especially at the end. It’s well written but I lost steam by the end.

The Deal, Elle Kennedy

This wasn’t my favorite. The premise which turned out to be sex didn’t turn me on. And then it went on too long. Garrett-Hannah felt like a repeat of Hunter-Demi in The Play. Still fun read though

Throaway observation: In every single book she mentions the partitions in the showers of the hockey team’s men’s locker rooms. It’s like she’s determined to kill some myth about boys checking each other out in the shower.

Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng

A family drama in the guise of a mystery. Moral of the story: Parents fuck up their kids with the best intentions.

The Lost Man, Jane Harper

I thought this was part of the Falk series. It was connected in a very subtle way. But it was very good. I love how she sets her stories in the outback and how the land is so much a part of it, how she deconstructs the idea of the noble savage. All the more relevant in these times as fires rage in Australia.

 

The Convenience Store Girl, Sayaka Murata

Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here. This is not chick lit, if that’s going to put you off, but it had some commonalities with the single girl narratives of that genre so I put my thoughts on that blog.

The English Cameo – Madhulika Liddle

Love the Mughal era and wish there was more written in that period. I stayed away from this – a mystery series set in Emperor Shah Jahan’s time – for a long time because I felt like it didn’t deal with the main Mughal players but it’s excellently done. Going to read the rest in the series for sure.

Chasing Hillary, Amy Chozick

I expected this to be a bio, but it’s really a memoir about a journalist whose career became inextricably tied up with Clinton’s. I’m just going to post my scattered thoughts:

• Like that it turned out to be a journalistic memoir and that she presents herself as a fuck up
• Dislike that she doesn’t seem to like Hillary perhaps because she didn’t talk to her much (e.g. detail about Botox, the unfair comparison of how Obama handled negative stories )
• Oh well at least it’s not a gushing portrait
• It reads as an apologia of sorts  all those negative stories (Bathroomgate for example, which by mid-book I didn’t remember what it was) there was a reason for them
• My impression of Hillary as a geek who really had her facts down was correct. Apparently that’s not what it takes to be president
• Here’s a writing sample: “Hillary’s Iowa town halls became so frequent and intimate that they started to take on the familiar, if laborious, feel of catching up with an old girlfriend who cites GDP statistics over brunch”
• She didn’t (only) lose because she’s a woman but because she’s a geek. She promised to underpromise, which is hardly going to enthuse an electorate
• Who were Bernie’s people? In Amy’s experience, kids who go to NYU (i.e. rich kids and bros). On Bernie bros saying they’d vote for a woman, just not that woman: “Thirty years of sexist attacks had turned her into that woman. That sooner or later, the higher we climb, the harder we work, we all become that woman.

Ask Again yes, Mary Beth Keane 

After Commonwealth, I’ve decided I like these modern multigenerational family dramas. I like that they have happy endings these days Nietszche’s amor fati – if you had to say yes to your life again with all its failures and challenges, would you? A tragedy shatters the book but it also shows how it can all be put together again.

Galatea, Madeline Miller

This is a novella, really, and as with all Miller’s mythological stuff, it’s good. But it was also … fleeting.

Ayesha, At Last, Uzma Jalaluddin

Loved. Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here.

 

 

 

 

November reading list

Tags

detective stories, feminism, fiction, reading

People who eat darkness, Richard Lloyd Parry

Why would I want to read a book marked by tragedy from the start? A young British woman disappears in Japan, the newspapers reported extensively on the case (though I wasn’t aware of it). How much is there to say?

But the writing pulls you in. And while Parry goes on a fair about supplementary characters like Lucie’s mother, they are all interesting stories.

Sometimes I lie, Alice Feeney

Like In a Dark Dark Wood, this one tries too hard to be a thriller. Is it possible for a thriller to have too many twists. Apparently, it is. I didn’t care about the characters but just kept reading to find out. And then, I had to Goodle to understand the ending, which is not a good sign.

So irritated was I by this novel that I had to read some academic papers as a palate cleanser.

The Women’s Room , Marilyn French

OMG this. All of it.

The Women’s Room is the third of my triumvirate of feminist novels from the 70s and for some reason, possibly the literalness of the title, I thought it would be the most meh, so I kept it for last. Turns out I had saved the best for last.

This is like a go-to on how to write a feminist novel – so many feminist issues (okay pertaining to white women of the 50s, 60s and 70s, but I’ve kind of realised upper caste Indian women share many of those concerns) given living, breathing human form.

French presents one of the most unsentimental description of pregnancy I have ever come across. Reading about the birth of the protagonist Mira’s first child was traumatic

Some questions:

Is marriage destined to be like this in some form?

Why doesn’t Natalie leave Hamp? Why don’t we all?

Don’t tell Alfred, Nancy Mitford

Here she achieves what she was striving towards in the last two novels – perfection of tone and cutting satire.

Again, although this novel was written in the 60s about aristocratic British Society, I found something to resonate with. Just when I was worrying about my kids, Fanny has the same dilemmas about whether the kids are all right.

The Splendor Before the Dark, Margaret George

This is the second book in George’s duet about the roman emperor Nero (I hadn’t yet read the first). I only knew of Nero as a tyrant, but George sheds a different light on his character, what his perspective might have been on events he was maligned for. It opens with a different take on the epithet that many of us might be familiar with – that Nero “fiddled while Rome burned”.

This was just the right length and well written, making be resolve to read the first book.

Force of Nature, Jane Harper 

Better than Laura Lippman. Nuff said.

The Girl in the Green Raincoat, Laura Lippman 

This was more novella than novel. It was weird to see detective Tess Monoghan, one of whose defining characteristics is her penchant for exercise and eating, home bound and on a strict diet. We don’t hear of her bouncing ponytail once. My least favourite of the series.

Hush Hush, Laura Lippman

On the other hand this was really excellent. If the Green Raincoat was simple, this one was complex. The theme running through was mothers – Tess as a working mother, the two mothers in the case she’s dealing with, her aunt Kitty’s relationship with motherhood.

Loved it, and can’t believe this is the last Tess Monoghan book.

My Sister the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithewaite

Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here.

Grief is a Thing with Many Feathers, Max Porter

This is poetry in novel form. Not as sad as I thought but maybe that’s Crow’s influence. Feel quite smirky that I got the Crow (Ted Hugh’s, not Laura Lippman’s) reference from the start.

I was surprised to read the bio at the end and discover that Porter has a living wife. Some people are just geniuses, I guess, and do not need to live what they write.

The Chase, Elle Kennedy
The Risk, Elle Kennedy

I am only a little sheepish about admitting that I am hooked on this series. Thoughts on the chick lit blog here.

This is My Life, Meg Wolitzer

Didn’t love this from the start as I have tended to with her other novels

Somehow I didn’t get into the characters as much. The character I liked the most Erica, the older, fat sister was floating through two thirds of the novel

I really liked the last third

This is a very female-centric novel – a mother and her two daughters and two of these characters are fat and it is dealt with (each of them takes a different approach to it, it’s interesting).

Speaking of fat, listen to this podcast.

Still House Lake, Rachel Caine

Not bad. Well paced with decent characters. Just that, like many of these popular thrillers, it was just too much. And also, the end was so written with a sequel in mind.

Fleishmann is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner

The thing that confused me is that this was described as a feminist novel. How could it be feminist if the whole thing is told froM a mams perspective ?

Maybe she was trying to flip the narrative so we sympathize – some kind of defsmoliarisation thing, some joke on the men who wouldn’t have picked up a novel entitled “Libby is in trouble”, or they’d put down the novel in 20 pages because they couldn’t bear to listen to a woman “whining”

But I wouldn’t  have. I was a teeny bit bored of Toby .

Or maybe Libby + Rachel = Toby but no, the novel was set up as Toby-centric and we were set up to dislike Rachel.

But if not feminist, this is a novel about marriage About how marriage is an impossible project because it expects people to stay the same

My dear English Lit prof in college said to this us once and I remember both thinking “that’s not very profound” and “that’s not going to happen to me”. Because it’s not everyone sells you the idea that’s marriage Is wonderful – most of us saw our parents marriagr firsthand  – but that we think we’d be the exception, don’t we?

[spoiler alert]

By the end of the novel, it turns out that doing a riff on a Norman Mailer/Philip Roth kind of thing, which feature the preoccupations of an angsty, divorced white guy, is exactly what she was trying to do, so okay. Even though I didn’t find it completely convincing. Did she manage to redeem Rachel? I didn’t think so initially, but now when I think of Rachel, I not only don’t think of her as a bitch, I think of myself.

Although Libby’s the one I should have identified with but throughout her  soliloquy I kept thinking – woman you need a job!

 

 

 

 

 

 

October reading list

Tags

books, chick lit, feminist novels, reading

Lethal White, Robert Galbraith

Robert Galbraith is JK Rowling’s detective-writing pseudonym. I quite liked the first book in this series, but it’s increasingly going downhill. This one took the cake.

The rather cliched attraction between Strike and his assistant Robin has been getting terribly annoying. Sometimes this kind of chemistry works; in this case, I just wanted to slap the two of them and get on with the mystery.

I’m beginning to wonder whether I have just turned into a grumpy old crone because I find descriptions of romantic angst stupid. For example, at the last of this book, Strike shows up at Robin’s wedding, and Robin just has to know whether she’s getting her job back or not, thus basically disrupting the proceedings. And I’m like, FFS get a room. Or not. But get on with the mystery please.

Even more annoyingly, Strike keeps thinking about his ex Charlotte, making one long for the days of Hercule Poirot who barely had a personal life. And then, we are constantly told how much they all drink, as if we are teenagers and this is of interest.

The mystery itself was decent, but this book can be one third shorter without all the romantic mooning around.

Die A Little, Megan Abbott

Abbott’s forte is creating a dense creepy atmosphere, and she does this in 1950s suburbia as well as she does in her teen novels.

The One Memory of Flora Banks 

Is it me or do a lot of these YA books (except Megan Abbott) have kids with some kind of disability? This one is about a girl who has no short term memory. Ultimately, though, it is about parents of teenagers needing to let them go.

The twists were quite unexpected – except the one related to the boy.

The Dry, Jane Harper

Finally a well plotted thriller featuring good old detective work. The mystery here is intensely personal – the detective goes back to his roots and must face his own past. The narrative is set amid Australia’s drought that makes its rural areas a tinder box and shatters then image of village life as kumbaya.

I’ve found another thriller series yay.

In a Dark Dark Wood, Ruth Ware 

The title itself tries too hard, and I can’t say I loved this one. I kept reading it to know what happens, but I didn’t really care about the characters, partly because they struck me as stupid. Here are some ways not to be stupid:

Don’t go to a hen weekend if you haven’t seen or been in touch with the bride in years

Or if you didn’t get a wedding invite

Don’t play stupid drinking games if you don’t want to (why do people play drinking games in their 30s?)

When you’re cautioned by the police, don’t keep talking without getting a lawyer

Meh. Anyway, I read a few reviews because I was astonished at how bad I felt the book was, and I have to say that the resolution was not unexpected but not as expected as a the critics said either.

The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer 

Wolitzer is not the opposite of Sally Rooney but the synthesis of Rooney and some chick lit writer, say Sophie Kinsella (or someone who writes about entirely ordinary people). She tends to write about precocious kids, but in a self-aware way without taking them entirely seriously.

Take the title itself. The group in the camp decided to call themselves “the Interestings” because each of them was in some way. While they tried to be ironic about life, they also believed their own hype at some level.

When Jules was inducted into their midst, she wasn’t sure what her thing was. This pressure to find one’s thing ,do we all feel it? I certainly did.

I loved this book. Maybe I will return to it as Jules returned to her camp.

Anthony and Cleopatra,Colleen McCollough

My general knowledge of this pair came from the Shakespeare play. What Shakespeare makes out to be a great love story is basically politics.

It’s a massive tome. I learnt a lot, but skimmed through the wars.

One curious character in the novel was King Herod, who those of us steeped in Christian lore know of as the baddie who ordered the first-born sons of Jews to be killed so that he could weed out the future messiah. Turns out – surprise surprise – he too was a complicated character, and not necessarily the bit player I had thought he was.

The thing about these Roman books is that I didn’t realise – silly me – how much Christian history was intertwined. I mean, the Roman emperor is mentioned a lot in the Bible, heck it was a Roman governor who ordered the Crucifixion, but again, I didn’t realise how significant Judea was, or maybe it’s made out to be because these novelists are, like me, steeped in Christian lore and can’t resist playing up that connection.

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, Becky Albertalli

Why did I read this? Because a girl posted on an FB group about its sequel (coming up next) which I wanted to read, so I picked this up.

Of course, I enjoyed it. But questions.

I’ve been wondering about YA as a category. What is a young adult?

I’ve always categorised YA as books 13-year-olds read but 13-year-olds are not even close to being adult. Or even 16-year-olds.

But the voice in these books sounds about that old, or rather young. Is this how adults think kids sound?

Also is it necessary to be into music if you’re in a teen? Because I’m going to fail to relate as a parent.

Leah on the Offbeat, Becky Albertalli

Obviously, I loved this, but perhaps because I read it right after Simon, I was a little less enamoured of the teen angst. Also, the obsession with coming out – what’s with that? I get that telling and who one tells is significant especially to teenagers but making that the plot point of two novels in succession is a bit much. And all the need to have everyone happily paired off.

The End of Everything, Megan Abbbott

I speed read this in one evening, not in a good way. I did not love it, I just wanted to know the end.

There were twists but they were not entirely unexpected.

I love Abbott’s spooky writing but I felt this one was trying too hard.

Love in the time of Affluenza, Shunali Shroff

Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here.

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

This is the first in a triumvirate of feminist novels from the 70s that have long been in my list. This one’s claim to fame is its concept of the zipless fuck. I quote:

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game . The man is not “taking” and the woman is not “giving.” No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one

Lovely. Thing was this concept was the best thing about the novel and it came early. It’s ostensibly about a single woman trying to find herself, but the way she seems to do this is to have lots of no-strings-attached sex (even as she sorta wants a string) and I don’t care to read about sex that much in novels (except in Judith Krantz novels, she does sex so well). Also, I get the whole sex-as-liberation thing, but seriously it cannot be the only thing, can it?

Read Vogue’s take on whether the zipless fuck has become quaint in our era here.

Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann

Feminist 70s novel no 2. Liked this one a lot better. It’s surprisingly contemporary. Three women take Manhattan, then LA, trying to make it and find love as they go along. Sound familiar? Except that this novel makes no bones about how difficult it is to do this while being female, even if you’re pretty.

 

September reading list

Tags

books, reading

Okay, before we get started, I read a lot this month mainly because I was unwell a lot. Have been wondering if these monthly lists are two long and I should be breaking them up. Let me know if you have thoughts on this.

Now onto the books:

The End of the World — Again: Why the Apocalypse Meme Replicates in Media, Science, and Culture, Barry Vacker

This is a semi-academic book which, as the title suggests, tries to account for the popularity of apocalyptic memes – that is, doom-and-gloom predictions that the end of the world is nigh. The answer:

1. Because we can wipe the slate clean and start over
2. Out of some instinct to fast forward to the end
3. To know what’s coming

Vacker points to the failure of philosophy to provide a metameme that accounts for our new scientific understanding of our place on the fringes of the universe. The result is an ever more ardent clinging to religion and superstition. That’s the part I liked.

The part I didn’t like so much was his use of Baudrillard – a very cool philosopher whose work I want to read more, because I’m convinced that the Kardashians are exactly what he’s talking about (having read only a summar of his work) – to rant about people staring at their screens (booooring!) and reinforce some kind of authenticity that the contemporary world is apparently lacking.

In Big Trouble, Laura Lippman
The Sugar House, Laura Lippman
In a Strange City, Laura Lippman
No Good Turn, Laura Lippman

As you can see, I binged on the Tess Monaghan series this month. I liked all of these but I had to google the first two before writing this, which just goes to show. What impresses me about Lippman is how the cast of characters remains vaguely the same but the mise en scene as it were shifts quite a lot in each book, so that one is exploring an entirely different area or theme – Texas (which is a state bordering Maryland weirdly),  Baltimore politics, Poe and antique collecting, and crime among youth African-Americans. With regard to the latter, I was a little uncomfortable with how white people, on both the good and bad sides, were both the evil and the saviours behind the scene of black people’s deeds, but Lippman mitigates this somewhat with self-reflection on the part of the white saviour at least.

Daisy Jones and the Six

This came highly recommended. I didn’t love it initially, but it grew on me.

I did like the format of each character offering their own perspective on the events. What I loved: three women – the manic pixie dream girl, the one of the guys, the Madonna – and sultry sidekicks. They could have been chicks who hated other women and defined themselves according to men. But no. They were that, but supported other women. This is becoming one of those must-haves in novels for me.

Anna of Kleves, Alison Weir

I love Weir’s take on events, but I’m getting rather tired of unwanted pregnancies as a plot point.

While a lot of attention has been paid to Holbein’s over flattering portrait of Anna, which may or may not have disappointed King Henry when he saw her in person, Weir focuses on Anna’s reaction to him.

Her take on their relationship is different from the usual one, which claims that Anna inspired disgust in him. Instead, Weir proposes a more nuanced reading of their relationship, which accounts for Henry’s growing illness and perhaps that somehow (believably) she was not to his taste. Apart from Katherine of Aragon, Henry seemed to get on best with English women, whom he had courted himself.

While I liked the parts which were grounded in historical fact, I found some of the fictionalised parts quite trying.

Sleepwalking, Meg Wolitzer 

Along with Curtis Sittenfled and Megan Abbott, Wolitzer is my third newly discovered favourite authors. This is her debut novel, and I loved it.

Like Sally Rooney territory, Wolitzer’s subject are three precocious girls who march to their own drum beats. Each of the “death girls” as they are called are obsessed with a different (death-obsessed) poet. This is right up my street; I like to think that had I grown up in an American high school I would have been a goth (though I probably would have been the coolish nerd aka Andrea in Beverly Hills 90212). Let’s just say I’m an aspirational goth.

I tend to be a little impatient with these too cool for school types, but Wolitzer saves her novel my not taking them too seriously.

Children of Jocasta, Natalie Haynes

The thing I have always wondered about the Oedipus myth is how could he sleep with his mother. The answer, Haynes provides, is that she was much younger than his father.

This book is a repudiation of superstition, a pragmatic explanation of where the myths came from even as it brings the characters in the myths alive.

Also, while Antigone has been recuperated as a heroine recently, especially in feminist work, Haynes focuses on Ismene.

The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas

This book has been all over the interwebs – a young adult novel about a teenage black girl who witnesses a friend being shot by the police. I did not love love it initially because many of the issues the book deals with are not new to me but it does a great job of putting them across in a simple and engaging way.

However, weeks after reading it, the characters and plot points have stayed with me, so I guess it did find its mark. The part I liked the most was how it shows a black community which has its flaws but also where families and neighbors are loving.

Wonder, R.J. Palacio

This book was reccomended to me by my teenager niece and her friend. I asked about it while driving somewhere with them and they started telling me so enthusiastically even though I had just been trying to be polite.

I felt I should read it for my niece. I resisted because I knew it was going to be sad and it’s a kids book

I loved it.

I did cry a lot. It touched a nerve because my kids may be in a new school next year and while they do not have any disabilities, some of the cruelties inflicted in this book could be on just about anyone.

It has a happy, quite scripted for the screenplay-type ending though, so rest assured you’ll come away on a positive note.

Queenie, Candace Carty Williams

Loved. Read my review here.

The Gendered Brain, Gina Rippon

“What are you reading?” asked Mimi

“A book about the brain. Some people think that men have different brains from women.”

“Whaaat?”

“Yeah, but this book says that’s nonsense.”

“We already knew that.”

Yeah we did. But the book shows the lengths that different fields of knowledge – including science/ have gone to prove otherwise. Apart from definitively showing how the evidence for gender differences in the brain is almost non-existent, there is lots of interesting info about, well, the brain.

For example, just after we bought Nene his coveted Nintendo Switch, I came upon this: “30 minutes a day of playing Super Mario over a period of 2 months also proved to be a brain changing experience, with increases in gray matter volume in the hippocampus as well as the frontal areas of the brain”

Also this: Hits to self esteem are registered in the brain as strongly as  as physical pain. It made me wonder: is this why we seek romantic love? We need that unconditional anchor to our self esteem. Maybe this is why the love meme is so attractive – the idea of being chosen as an adult.

I ended up falling sick and not finishing this, but I intend to pick it up again once my brain is back to normal.

The Uninvited Guests, Sadie Jones

This is a really well written Downton-Abbeyesque Edwardian novel. Except that there’s a paranormal element. This novel proved to me – as if I needed proof, but the fact is, no matter how many fantasy novels I struggle through, I still keep hoping I’ll get into them – that I am not cut out for anything fantasy or paranormal related. Harry Potter was an anomaly.

I ended up speed-reading towards the end, just to know what happened so I could give it up. I later came back and read it through, but nope, no more paranormal for me.

The Forest of Enchantment, Chitra Banerjee Divakurani

Hmmm, okay, so I don’t like fantasy, but I love mythology. Heh.

In the Preface, the author notes how many people wrote to her after The Palace of Illusions asking when she was writing her next book and she promised one on Sita very soon. Then, she found it was harder than she thought to write a Sitayan and it was ages before the book came out.

I didn’t write to her inquiring, but I was one of those Palace of Illusions fans waiting for the Sita book. And it just about lived up to my high expectations.

Sita has been the subject of much feminist criticism – though there is a famous essay by Madhu Kishwar about how Sita holds feminist potential – so this book can be seen as part of the enterprise to rescue Sita. The underlying argument is a fictional articulation of Kishwar’s thesis – that Sita was a strong woman and a rebel in her own way, in her own context.

Apart from rescuing Sita, however, Divakurani also rescues Ram. I did not have a very favourable impression of Ram with his obsessions with abstract ideals of right and wrong (although for a long time I myself was obsessed with these). However, Divakurani humanises him and makes him, well, hot. If that is not a feat – for those of us who grew up on the Doordarshan version of Ram – then what is?

She provides a modern interpretation of the rakshasas and asuras as tribals. Not surprisingly, she provides a sympathetic reading of the Suparnakha story, but she also offers us a Kaikeyi we can admire. Unfortunately, she chooses to blame the hunchback for the whole Bharat-first debacle, when the physically disabled were often blamed in ancient times for all misfortunes because physical deformity was equated with moral baseness.

My one problem were the explicit meditations on the nature of love – though I guess the point was/is to reestablish the Ramayana as a love story – but overall enjoyed this one.