Best 10 books of 2020

i.e. the best books I read in 2020, not the best books published last year. I read a lot, but given the year that it was, that comprised a good deal of comfort reading and reading for pleasure rather than erudition. I’m counting series under one heading so I can get more titles in here

1. The first two books in Evie Dunmore’s excellent League of Extraordinary Women series, Bringing Down The Duke and A Rogue of One’s Own
2. Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders. Mimi asked me what the book was about and I told her it’s a book in a book in a book, and she’s now obsessed with that idea.
3. Nicci French’s Freida Klein series
4. Elle Kennedy’s BriarU and Off Campus series
5. Girl, Woman Other (Bernadine Evaristo)
6. Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata)
7. Destination Wedding (Diksha Basu)
8. Girls in White Dresses (Jennifer Close)
9. The Ten-Year Nap, (Meg Wolitzer)
10. Big Sky (the latest book in Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series, that I absolutely loved)

Honourable mentions

Famous people, Jeffrey Kuritzes
The Milkman, Anna Burns
The Luminaries, Eleanor Cald
The Dutch House, Ann Patchett (bonus: read this essay by Patchett on friendship and a bit about The Dutch House)
American Spy, Laura Wilkinson
Just realised 4 out of these 5 were books I read in March, when the horror of the pandemic was just becoming real (to the world; we were well aware of it in Hong Kong by end-January).

November reading list

Tags

fiction, reading

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

Short stories and essays are not my thing, but sometimes an author’s best work is in this genre, and then I make an effort. Alice Munro, for example.

This books of memoir-ish essays was worth it – although I didn’t finish, because something was wrong with my Kindle version and if I shut the book, it opened at the start and then I had to thumb through till I got to my page. Which was bearable until I was at about 50 per cent of the book, and then it got old. This was exacerbated by the fact that with dense essays of this sort, I tend to start and stop and come back to it.

I’ll leave you with a taste:

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself come from, and where you will go.

The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration – how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown. n territory, about becoming someone else.

It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ – the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get your out only that dark sea.

Something About You, Julie James

This is updated Harlequin, something I haven’t read in ages. Read my thoughts here.

Bringing Down the Duke, Evie Dunmore

This is one of the best, if not the best, things I read this year. My thoughts here.

A Rogue of One’s Own, Evie Dunmore

Hard to decide whether I liked this one more than Bringing Down the Duke. Lucie is who I identify with more, but my romantic prototype I like to think is more Bringing Down the Duke. My thoughts here.

Margaret the First, Danielle Sutton

This is a very whimsical, episodic life of Margaret Cavendish, the 17th C philosopher, scientist, and writer. My reaction to it reminded me of how I felt when I first watched Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth. I was nonplussed but then the impressions stayed with me, and it’s become one of my favourite films. I can’t say the same is going to happen with this book, but I enjoyed it, and I learnt about a fascinating woman, one of those we should but don’t learn about in philosophy class.

A Thousand Ships, Natalie Haynes

I’ve been trying to get a hold of this forever – a retelling of the Illiad from the point of view of the women – and I finally did. I was predisposed to love it, and I did like it a lot, but with a smidgeon of the disappointment. For one, there was too much tragedy (but that’s basically what happened to the women, tragedy without the glory).

I also found Calliope, the muses’ pronouncements, a bit too much. It was fine for one chapter, but then she spelled everything out too much. The idea of the war as something of an ecological cleansing – too many people, how to get rid of them – was timely, but it’s an idea I’m not fond of so I was vaguely irritated.

But also, there wasn’t enough getting into the women’s own heads, and more of them commenting on the actions of the men. I liked the bits on Polyxena and Briseus best (the latter became something of an obsessions with me thereafter. It never struct me before how Briseus – who I thought was a minor character – is actually a parallel Helen, a woman who changes the course of the war, but by pausing it).

Because of Madeline Miller, I am wedding to the idea of Achilles-Patroclus as the great love story, and the idea of it being “only friendship” doesn’t sit quite well with me. Of course, I began craving to read Miller again, but then I downloaded a whole pile of Troy novels and that faded. I basically fell down a Troy rabbit hole for the rest of the month.

The Song of Troy, Colleen McCullough

So, once one knows the mythology, the fun of reading new takes is how they explain the unexplainable. This version provided some backstory that I didn’t know and also contextualised the war as an economic conflict – a trade war as it were. But I didn’t find some of the explanations entirely convincing: why did Priam insist on getting his sister back? It’s understandable that Agamemnon would want an excuse for a war, but why would Priam provoke one? Helen falling in love with Paris was also not entirely plausible – which is why the myth provides a divine explanation (Aphrodite’s promise, but this novel ellided that).

Odysseus’ rationale for goading Agamemnon into killing Iphigenia was also not solid – he said that if he lost his son, Agamemnon should lose his daughter, but Odysseus’s son wasn’t dead. And if Odysseus didn’t want a war in the first place, why would he encourage a sacrifice that would prolong the war?

What struck me is the similarity between the Troy myth and the Mahabharata. A Thousand Ships suggested the real reason for the war was the need for a cosmic cleansing, an idea also suggested in the Mahabharata. The story of Thetis and Peleus was similar to the Shantanu/Ganga story in the Mahabharata.

McCullough provides a lot of details about the strategic choices in the war – splitting the army, for example. She also provides a political implications – Agamemnon’s need to defend the new (patriarchal) religion over the old.

Finally, McCullough’s take on the Achilles-Patroclus relationship is that it is just a friendship, a proposition that seems somewhat heretical to me, seeing as what got me started on this trip was Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, which was basically and Achilles-Patroclus love story. Could this be “just friendship”? Maybe, but McCullough’s take a pretty heteronormative, centering Achilles and Briseus and turning Patroclus into a sullen reject.

Girl, Woman, Other – Bernadine Evaristo

Years ago, Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman was a pop-feminist sensation, although I don’t think it has aged particularly well. This novel should replace it – a fictional portrayal of the many permutations and combinations of (black) womanhood.

The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker

Another female perspective on the events of Troy, this time narrated primarily through Briseus, who I now realise I’ve been fascinated with ever since the Troy movie (starring Brad Pitt as Achilles and Diane Kruger as Helen).

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Mona Awad

Apparently, a fat girl can’t win – even if she’s thin. This is one of those angsty, clever girl novels, that I realise I’m not 100% a fan of. However, because she is not a manic pixie goth girl, but a fat girl, I was more interested. It’s also good that the novel goes beyond the teenage years, but unfortunately, she remains consistently unhappy.

October reading list

Tags

books, fiction, reading

I Always Loved You, Robin Olivera

What a banal title for the story of great artists (Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt) . I resent Cassatt’s story being told through the prism of love as if Degas were her mentor when they were really collaborators. Still, I learnt a lot about Cassatt and the impressionist circle, so there’s that.

Companion film: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

A Good School, Richard Yates

Say Holden Caulfield hadn’t skipped school but turned back instead and introduced us to the various “phoneys” there. You might have found yourself at the Dorsett Academy of Yates’s novel.

This entire novel is why I would not send my children to boarding school. Also I did an article on Hong Kong kids going to British and Australian boarding schools and the psychological trauma I discovered killed much of vestigial St Clare’s romance I harboured.

What is it about boarding schools? Is it because it’s a kingdom of kids on their own? Is it any surprise that these would take on a lord of the rings turn?

Still, we can’t stop reading them can we? And this one somehow pulls you in, not only with the dramas of the boys but their teachers too.

The Word is Murder, Anthony Horowitz
The Sentence is Death, Anthony Horowitz

Horowitz is doing something extremely clever with the detective genre. In the Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders series, he managed the unlikely combination of the detective genre with the publishing industry, throwing in a book within a book.

In this series, he writes himself into the narrative. The premise is that a former police officer turned detective, Daniel Hawthorne, asks him to write a book about a case he’s been asked to solve, which means that our narrator/writer becomes part of the action, tearing down the fourth wall as it were. Apart from the oddness of this, Hawthorne is an extremely unlikable detective and Horowitz-as-narrator ponders what he should include and what he should leave out during the action, thus rather cleverly including the less palatable bits after all.

Ms Ice Sandwich, Mieko Kawakami

All I wanted to do in October was read detective fiction, but then I read a profile of Sayaka Murata, and I started reading this, even though it’s not by her.

I enjoyed it – the common link with Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, an unforgettable character, is that this is about such a woman looked at from the outside. It’s a short novel, a novella really.

Breast and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami

Expected this to be a novella, but it turned out to be rather long, or three novella’s in one. The first part was the most powerful, circumscribing an entirely feminine universe: a single woman living in Tokyo, her sister from Osaka where they grew up, her niece, their mother and grandmother.

The latter part turned into a single writer’s journey, and also about her desire for a child without having sex. Both Convenience Store Woman and this novel have asexuality as a plot point; it seems to be a theme in contemporary Japan, or is it just women’s writing?

The protagonist of this novel gets to continue her lineage in a really beautiful way. I also loved how there was no woman-on-woman hating, despite (or because of?) there being so many female characters.

I then fell into a Laura Lippman hole, where I read several of her standalone novels in succession. They’re supposed to be standalone, but characters from previous novels recur in quite a satisfying way.

Every Secret Thing: Loved it. Again, very female-centric, with two girls, a mother, another mother, a crime that went punished but that now seems to recur.

To the Power of Three: Also very female-centric. A trio of girls, one of whom is shot. A seemingly open and shut case, but something’s not right. Shades of Megan Abbott here. I noticed a couple of things that recurred from the previous novel – a self involved parent, the good girl who turns out to be bad.

What the Dead Know: Again, girls – sisters who disappeared and then a woman claiming to be one of them reappears. The difference between all these books is that they are set in completely different eras, although all in Baltimore County. This one was in the 70s, and though I did not love it, I quite enjoyed it.

Life Sentences: Okay, this is where I got off the Lippman train. Not forever, I will return to her oevre, because she’s a writer that works for me. But this book seemed self indulgent. She had a writer as her main character and she sort of flipped the black-white dynamic; here, the black girls/women have the upper hand and the white girl is angling to be one of them, but it didn’t quite come off, apart from the fact that the mystery itself was not so mysterious.

The Liar’s Girl, Catherine Ryan Howard

This was my attempt to explore a new detective/thriller writer, and it didn’t quite work for me. It’s about a serial killer case set in Dublin that was apparently solved, except that the killer then strikes again. The problem is that it turned out to be one in which the protagonist behaves in quite stupid ways although she is clearly in danger from the start. This is one of my pet peeve’s in this genre, so I basically skim read the thing.

Destination Wedding, Diksha Basu

Loved this. Read it over my birthday and it was the perfect gift. Read my thoughts here.

The Vacationers, Emma Straub

Straub is someone who’s work I discovered recently and quite enjoy. It’s usually about the relationship between individuals in family, or families intertwined. This one is about a family that goes on holiday when the cracks are already showing.

Opening Night, Diksha Basu

This is classic chick lit, and I should have written about it on the blog, but I can’t bring myself to, because it was pretty mediocre. A first novel I guess, and it is encouraging to see how a writer gets better over time. The main thing I enjoyed about it was that it was set in the suburb I grew up in, but even here it was the newcomer’s perspective that I am curious about but also am a little contemptuous of.

Companion book: Rehanna Munir’s Paper Moon, for a more authentic take on the Bandra career novel.

Modern Lovers, Emma Straub

A book about marriage and what makes a good one, across the straight/gay divide. Also a book about friendship and it’s relationship to marriage.

 

September reading list

Tags

19th century, detective, fiction, reading

If Only I Lived in that House, Meghan Daum
This is the memoir of a woman obsessed with moving house  She is extreme but I can relate. Having lived at the same address for 24 years and now another 10 since the kids were born, I had an in between period when we moved every two years and I loved it. A move is an opportunity to de clutter and to reinvent. A clean slate. 

The first chapter about her parents is probably the best  In the middle I got a bit impatient – I mean holding interest in a person repeating the same pattern over and over is not something I’m adept at  I had to read two chapters of Middlemarch FFS as a palate cleanser  But I returned to it.  It suddenly struck me – I will never own a house that I Bought myself. And I’m ok with that 

Middlemarch, George Eliot

I guess one has to be over 35 to enjoy 19th C novels (except Pride and Prejudice, that’s for everyone). The scope of it is awesome – it’s from falling in love to after the happy ever after, weaving together several strands.

I wish there was more of Celia, she is the less clever one, but is able to cut to the chase.

I loved the Garth family – they reminded me of Little Women, complete with a Marmee.

The most impressive thing is the complexity of each character, and there are so many.

The ending surprised me; rest assured it was (mostly) happy, but I couldn’t be sure what would happen until the end.

Moonflower Murders, Anthony Horowitz

Being a writer is not usually a glamorous career, or at least one that has enough drama to weave an exciting story around. So, you have TV series on lawyers, the police, the army, Wall Street, journalism. Still, writers sometimes become stars in their own right (think Hemmingway) and their lifestyle might be the subject of the more literary novels.

How often do you get an editor taking centre-stage though? I’m an editor and I once described my job as “nit-picking”. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but it doesn’t sound scintillating when described. Horowitz goes one step further and makes his editor a detective, which makes some sort of sense when you think about it, because editors are extremely careful readers.

And the detection here is textual. The editor has to solve a whodunnit, by devising how life imitates art. The editor/detective is only doing what the reader does at a higher level; showing the reader how it’s done. Oooh it is too clever.

There’s a book within a book. The frame story is that of the editor/detective trying to solve a mystery, and the mystery is related to a book that the editor edited, which is then produced in full.

So you essentially get two detective stories with threads connecting them that you have to tease out, and if that weren’t enough, there’s a little gem of a detective story about a diamond and how the detective (a more typical one, a simulcrum of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot) in the book-within-the-book first found fame.

Sound confusing? Don’t worry, it’s all very much like a traditional British whodunnit, with the resultant pleasures.

The only catch was halfway through I realised I was reading the second book in a series. I briefly considered switching to the first book, but it didn’t make a huge difference, except that when I read the first book eventually, I had an inkling of the outcome.

Magpie Murders,  Anthony Horowitz

I was amazed at the structural innovation of Moonflower Murders, but when I read this one, I realised that Horowitz had already done it before. This book also has a book within a book, and resonances between the two books. In Moonflower Murders, I found it slightly hard to get into the book-within-the-book, but in this one, I actually preferred it. Perhaps because I sort of guessed/knew the outcome of the frame story.

August reading list

A Room with a View, E.M. Forster

I read this basically to fully appreciate Kevin Kwan’s Sex and Vanity, but I ended up enjoying it thoroughly. The first thing that struck me is how contemporary it feels.

For example, he takes the piss out of the British traveler, especially the kind that is on a quest for authenticity and who sneers at the typical traveler.

Then, there his lampooning of the British obsession with class. This is something I noticed in the only other book by this author that I’ve read – A Passage to India – which vividly brought home how the British concretised the caste system in India because of their own classist mindset. While I was reading that book I was pretty hung up on seeing it orientalist. I had no agenda with this one, and I fully appreciated Forster’s satirical powers.

There is also an engagement with feminist themes – this is really an anti-Pygmalion novel, but I was impressed that Lucie not only called out the obvious attempts of the anti-hero to mould her to his fantasy, but the subtle attempts of the hero. The difference between the two men is that one accepts the criticism immediately and it is clear he can change.

𝕊𝕖𝕩 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕍𝕒𝕟𝕚𝕥𝕪, Kevin Kwan

Read my thoughts on the chick lit blog here.

All Adults Here, Emma Straub

Just a great book driven by the characters and their lives. There is a queer relationship at the heart of it that pleasantly surprised me, but it is also about family, siblings and friendship.

The Windfall, Diksha Basu 

Excellent rendition of the middle class India. At some points, I felt that there was too much layering on about how the protoganist feels the need to keep up with the Joneses, but the additional plot of the son in America adds variation.

The Oxford Murders, Guillermo Martinez

This is supposed to be a mathematical murder mystery, but that turns out to be a red herring. It’s a well crafted story, easy to read.

Not a Sound, Heather Gudenkauf

One of the those mystery/thriller things that I did not love, but did not hate either. Do female protagonists in this genre have to be this tortured type? Also I guessed the killer quite early on. The last bit dragged on a bit too much.

What She Saw, Lucinda Rosenfeld

How did such fiesty seemingly well adjusted young woman turn essentially into a clone of the over angsty type in Normal People. Are we to assume that this is what college does to a slightly awkward young woman ? I could get on board with the horrid disaster of the professor but it did drag on and then she never seems to break the pattern, until she does and then it seems rather abrupt. She’s still better than the woman in Normal People because at least she has some bitchiness left  so there’s that.

I Don’t Care About Your Band, Julie Klausner

Thankfully, a memoir in which the fiesty protagonist stays fiesty, even though she does also stay in something of a rut. This is a single woman in New York’s romp through dating, but the woman in question is a comedien, so the writing benefits from her acerbic wit.

July reading list

Tags

books, chick lit, reading

Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kaufman 

This is the summary for the layman of years of the work of a psychology and Nobel prize winner in economics – basically, stop thinking of yourself as a rational, logical creature. Okay, Freud already told us this, but Kaufman makes this simpler and his ideas are backed up by empirical research.

The way he puts it, we have two “systems” in place in how our brain processes information. One is the intuitive, involuntary, and prone to confirmation bias, the other is slower, more logical, but also lazy – prone to being swayed by the first.

The more I read about how our brains work, the more I appreciate what an achievement not being entirely influenced by stereotypes is.

I’ve not even close to finishing this. Once I found myself back working from home, I had to push the blues away by resorting to lighter reading material.

This is how you lose the time war, Amar El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This is totally not the kind of book I would read, had MinCat not recommended it. I’m so not into sci-fi and fantasy, and reading this only confirmed that for me. It is superbly written, full of poetic impressions of different worlds and historical and literary references.

And yet, I found myself thinking I’d have liked it if it was just 10 letters long. This is not a comment on the book – which is amazing, kind of like if Neo and Smith from the Matrix had started writing to each other (now, there’s an idea) – but on my taste.

And then I descended into a chick lit/ Pride and Prejudice extravaganza.

Read my thoughts on When Life Gives You LuluLemons and The Starter Wife here.

A fairly enjoyable chick lit here How To Teach Filthy Rich Girls here.

Why Girls in White Dresses pulled me in here.

Why every Pride and Prejudice fan should read Longbourn here.

June reading list

Tags

books, feminism, fiction, Hillary Clinton, reading

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton

I have been meaning to read this for years. I even picked it up once from the library, in the days when I read books the old fashioned way, and then decided it was too heavy to lug around in my bag. This is exactly an example of an advantage of reading on the Kindle.

When I started the book, though, I realised it was set in the 19th C, and increasingly I’ve been feeling what is the point of plodding through stuff from that era, when it’s so much easier and more enjoyable to read contemporary literature. But it turns out this so well written it pulls you in.

It’s set in the (colonial) founding era of New Zealand and there’s a mystery and even a bit of a ghost story at the heart of it. Also, for those of you into astrology, it’s plotted along an astrological character so different characters and events are tied to a star sign but that part of it was beyond me.

One thing that strikes me about books from that period is if there’s a ship, there’s going to be a plotline involving Canton and the opium trade.

There are a number of online threads dedicated to puzzling out bit and pieces of the book. And it has stayed with me since, so clearly was worth the effort.

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin

This is a charming story about a young Irish woman who moves to England due to the lack of opportunities in her home town and how she makes a life there. Something about Eilis reminded me about V who claims he doesn’t feel quite and home in Hong Kong. And then I wrote that there’s something of me in… but I didn’t complete the sentence in my notes, and I can’t remember this insight.

If life gives you Lululemons, Lauren Weisberger

I haven’t really loved any of Weisberger’s novels after The Devil Wears Prada. This is supposed to be a sequel of sorts featuring Emily, Miranda Priestly’s original assistant before Andrea came in.

I didn’t hate this, but I didn’t love it either.

Bonjour Tristesse, Francoise Sagan

Picked this up to cohere with my French phase. It’s about a young woman’s coming of age over a summer spent at a seaside town with her father and his girlfriend. Wasn’t bad but wasn’t amazing either.

From the Memoirs of a Non-enemy Combatant, Alex Gilvarry

Weirdly, I chose this because it’s partly set in the fashion industry in New York and that’s the space my head was in at that time.

The fashion stuff gets the chick lit tone right, but then the novel takes a darker turn, as the protagonist is shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. It’s brilliantly done – the gradual shift from the flippancy of high fashion to its antithesis.

When I hear of these things, I wonder  what the point of being alive is. If such things exist in America and any of us can get embroiled in them, then we are just a sliver away from hell.

The chill I felt at the continuing existence of Guantanamo persisted for a long time – even when I read Curtis Sittenfeld’s fictional account of Hillary Clinton’s life and she listed her achievements, and closing Guantanamo wasn’t among them.

This, then, is art. To put yoke such dissonant worlds together so we can feel true horror.

The Ten-Year Nap, Meg Wolitzer

Is there a Wolitzer novel I don’t like? Why isn’t she more celebrated? I’ve read my way through her oevre and loved every one but one.

It’s a masterclass in how to write a feminist novel without being polemic

Wolitzer takes a feminist concern and weaves people – real people that you would care about – around it in a nuanced way, showing how feminist concerns intersect wuth life.

In this one, the problem is – what does a stay at home mum do when her child turns 10?

How to answer the question “what do you do?” in s city like New York where worth – identity itself – is measured by one’s professional occupation is a perennial irritation, but one that begins to come from the inside once the child no longer needs the mother as much as she hitherto did.

This is also a book about friendship between women and infidelity between friends (that in this case runs parallel to marital infidelity)

It starts with one woman and then moves outward to encompass her bestie, the group of mothers she lunches with and then tangents of occasionally into their mothers, or famous women – Nadia Comenici, Magritte’s wife (whose name horribly escapes me) who have touched their lives in some way.

The whole thing is so skillfully women together without being a polemic.

Small Island, Andrea Levy

Windrush has been on the edges of my consciousness since I follow the Guardian on Facebook, but I never completely understood what it is about.

The novel turns on a number of parallels – two small islands (Jamaica and Britain), two women, and a strange connection (or two) between them. It is about the clash of black and white in Britain.

One thing that struck me was the contrast between British racism and American racism, seen to be much worse. Also, how people in the colonies in some ways see themselves as connected to the “mother country”, which in fact has no time for them and disdains them.

No Going Back, Sheena Kamal

The third installation of the Nora Watts series. It was okay because of Nora and her dog Whisper. But the quest went on too long.

It also seemed silly – she was in over her head and in the end what she should have done from the beginning happened

Also it seems like Kamal got pushback for her portrayal of East Asians and so she addresses this (unconvincingly) in a conversation with a journo – what? I’m only saying it as it is.

Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld

This is Sittenfeld’s “what if” take on Hillary Clinton’s life, the “what if” being what if Hillary didn’t marry Bill.

In the early stages of the book, it seemed like the narrative came straight out of Hillary’s biography, which didn’t seem to be the case with An American Wife, but then again, was there ever a Laura Bush biography?

Reading the early part of the book is also strange because you’re rooting for them to stay together and you’re imagining it because that’s what happened in real life, even though the premise of the book is that they don’t. This is going to stick in my head as how Bill and Hillary were as young people.

There’s also a reversal of how I would have imagined their relationship to be – Bill is the needy one.

[Spoiler alert]

There are many extremely clever turns in the book – Trump is effaced, or rather he is substituted by Bill, the sexual predator who did not get his comeuppance.

Could it be possible that all Hillary was missing in her presidential run was Trump in her corner?

The linguist diagnosis of why audiences judge her was particularly poignant: “You’re female. In all seriousness, the important thing to understand is that eople believe they’re making specific observations about you, but they’re just unaccustomed to hearing the voice of a woman running for president.”

and

“But whenever you’re on TV, imagine you have a huge tattoo across your face. You’re discussing healthcare, and people can hardly listen because they’re so busy thinking, Why did she get that tattoo? That’s how unfamiliar voters are with a woman running for president.”

Ultimately, the novel is an American feminist fairy tale, in which the dream of a woman in the most powerful position in the world is realised.

The Infatuations, Javier Marias

A weird book  because it’s mostly in someone’s head (woman who watches a couple who frequents the same cafe she does and then gets involved in their lives when tragedy strikes), which shouldn’t be a problem with me, but I guess, while  there was some suspense in the beginning, it didn’t completely hold.

 

May reading list

Tags

books, fiction, reading

Sitayana, Amit Majumdar

This is a very skilfully told tale, but I felt like it did not deserve the title. It tells the Ramayama through multiple perspectives, not just that of Sita. Nothing wrong with that, but then why is it called Sitayana. Chitra Divakurani Bannerjee’s Forest of Enchantments deserves the title more, methinks.

Which brings me to the question of what the appeal of these retellings is. Obviously, we already know what happens next, but the pleasure is in how the writer explains what happens next – character, motivation etc. I liked the characterisation of Hanuman and Suparnakha.

These retellings help me like the Ramayana more but the Mahabharata will always win for me.There is something I dislike in Rama’s surety of purpose. Give me Arjuna’s ambivalence any day.

This novel does conjure about the pathos of Sita very well. I realise it’s the part of the narrative that stays with me – Sita’s final act of rebellion. I always wondered how Lav and Kush could forgive their father.

Dante and Aristotle Discover The Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Alire Saenz
This is a queer young adult novel. I really got into it in the second half. Till then it was a good insight into how to deal with teenage boys.

Priest Daddy, Patricia Lockwood
What makes a good memoir? Can an ordinary person write a memoir?
Yes, if they have something that makes their point of view extraordinary. In this case, it’s a poet with a father who is a Catholic priest (yes, you heard right. Apparently, if a man was married and then convert and becomes a Catholic priest, he can keep his wife and children) at a time when priests are being outed as paedophiles. It’s like Mary McCarthy’s Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood updated.

Nicci French’s Frieda Klein series

So I read binged this series. I loved and was obsessed by them. Many readers seemed to have a problem with Frieda, the psychotherapist-detective protagonist, finding her cold. I found her restrained and controlled but also caring. A cold person could not have that many friends. But she definitely had reserves of strength and discipline few people possess. As the series went on, it was more clear why this is the case.
I also loved that she was a psychotherapist and that she used her knowledge of psychology not only to solve crimes but to simply do her job. There are reports of her therapy sessions and it made me want to get back in therapy myself – but also the dream of having someone as skilled as her. My problem with therapy is that I do a fair amount of analysis on my own or with friends so it’s a bit frustrating when therapists uncover similar insights to what I’ve had with my BFFs. I need a therapist like Frieda yo, and by god I will find her, but without all the murder and mayhem I hope.
I had two main problems with Frieda: first,  I found it extremely irritating how she never answers her phone, even after her not doing so resulted in someone’s death. I get that it’s fashionable to go off the grid or whatever but not when you’re patnering with someone to track a serial killer.
The second was her closed off behaviour with her boyfriend Sandy in the first few books. I never quite bought into that relationship, and I found it annoying the first time she quit him cold turkey, but when she did it again, I was like FFS, isn’t this the sort of thing a person goes into therapy for. I mean, sure, break up with your boyfriend by all means, but not even give him an explanation after he’s made a big life change for you? That’s not cold, it’s inexcusably fucked up, especially in a person who should be capable of some self awareness.
Finally, I felt a little uncomfortable with the Josef character. Oh, I loved Josef. He and Frieda reminded me of Otis’s mother and the builder in Sex Education, but I found it slightly disturbing how Josef kept cleaning up and cooking for people and going “this is friendship” as if only “foreigners” were capable of this kind of largesse and that all he privileged white people could magnanimously accept this care. Josef keeps mentioning how Frieda helped him, but how did she really? By letting him build her a ceiling?
Apart from that, I loved the series, I loved all the characters, most of the books had twists that I did not expect, and you should read them.

Long Bright River, Liz Moore
A different take on a detective story. The core mystery turns out to be not one (though there is a mystery to be solved still), but it’s beautifully written and there’s the sisterly bond involved, so I was sold.

Forty Rules of Love, Elif Shafak
The opening gripped me because it spoke to me – Ella was in the same crisis I was.
I wanted to know more about Rumi and Sufism, but in these sections I was not blown away.

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.