50-Book Challenge 2010: Books 1-10
Books read 2010: Books 1-10
01. Jill's Gymkhana, Ruby Ferguson - the first in the 'Jill' series, reissued in 2009 by Fidra Books with the full, original text, unmodernised and un-Bowdlerised, and the Caney illustrations. This tells the story of how Jill Crewe and her mother move to Chatton in straitened circumstances - despite which they are able to buy a cottage with a paddock attached - how Jill falls in love with a black pony in a nearby farmer's field, and how, through a series of chance encounters and lucky coincidences, she is able to buy him, keep him, learn to ride him and, by the end of the book, become the star of the Chatton Show. Along the way we meet the cast of characters that will become familiar throughout the later books: Jill's best friend Ann, her dreadful cousin Cecilia, her riding mentor, the wheelchair-bound Martin Lowe (it's interesting how matter-of-factly and sympathetically the author deals with Martin; somehow it seems a far more modern attitude than it probably really is). Written in 1949, the book shows its age in the usual way of vintage children's books: the sheer amount of freedom that the children are routinely allowed and, contrastingly, how terrifyingly strict Jill's mother is in some respects. Notably, in spite of their poverty and her insistence that Jill must pay for Black Boy's upkeep herself, she refuses to allow Jill to take money for walking some smaller children to school, and is all set to refuse a gift from Martin - who is pretty strict himself - because it's too generous. As recently as 1949, the Crewes' cottage has no electricity and gas only downstairs (it does at least have a bathroom though), and Jill receives exactly one Christmas present from her mother - a fountain pen. What would they have made of today's children with their sacks full of MP3 players and Wiis? It's also a terrifying reminder of how badly the currency has become devalued: Jill's mother receives fifty guineas for the serial rights of one of her books, out of which Jill is able to buy Black Boy for £12!
Jill, by the way, is 11 at the beginning of the book, and, in spite of a passing mention toward the end that she'll soon outgrow him, she still has her beloved Black Boy at the end of the series, when she's 16. One can only assume that she didn't, in fact, grow very much, or that she shortened her stirrups and rode with her knees around her ears!
02. The Thornthwaite Inheritance, Gareth P Jones - this is never going to win any prizes for originality - it's a fairly standard late entry to the field of light/juvenile Gothic that includes A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Gashleycrumb Tinies - and it's not likely to win any prizes for great literature either, or for startling plot twists: you're likely to guess the villain by the second page. Still, it has some good ideas, and some interesting characters, and would probably make a not-bad children's film. That might even have been the author's original intention.
03. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows - you just know a book with a title that whimsical can't be good news, and when you see how much the Daily Mail liked it, you can't help but be a little ashamed to have it on your bookshelf. It's a bit of a book of two halves, in fact, which isn't really surprising since it's also a book of two authors, Annie Burrows having stepped in to finish the MS when the original author died. As a lightweight exchange of letters between a writer's blocked author and assorted members of a reading group on Guernsey it just about works, although the Guernsey residents are altogether too colourful and whimsical a bunch for words; once the main character actually gets to Guernsey, the excuses for the letters to continue wear a bit thin, but it still more or less holds out; but then there's a damn silly sub-plot involving some lost letters of Oscar Wilde tacked on to the end - perhaps in reaction to a real-life equivalent of the fictional editor's comment that 'strings of anecdotes don't make a book' which simply doesn't work at all. The problem is that all this whimsy is set against the background of the only-just-post-War-years, and a lot of the anecdotes in question are exceedingly grim; the two don't sit too well together.
Local reviewers have complained that the Guernsey islanders don't sound like Guernsey people. I'm not qualified to judge on that count, but they don't sound much like English people either, so I shouldn't wonder. The author also makes the common mistake of viewing homosexuality from a modern perspective. Trust me, in 1946 and for many years thereafter, a gay man didn't go around blurting his proclivities to every casual acquaintance.
All that said, it was an easy and painless enough read - something ghastly happens to a cat, one of my pet hates in all forms of literature, but, given the wartime setting and the very much worse things that were going on all around, I'll cut the book some slack this time - and one has, after all, to do something on the bus.
04. Enchanted Glass, Diana Wynne Jones - an elderly magician dies and passes on his heritage (posthumously) to his heir without ever having had the chance to explain what it entails; a young runaway with his own unknown heritage winds up on the magician's doorstep shortly thereafter. Both have to unravel and accept their backgrounds and their destinies, both of which are far more - or, possibly, far less - complex than they might have imagined. Throw in a cast of villagers, some of them as talented as the magician himself (if not more so), a giant who happens to live in the garden, a village fete, the denizens of Elfland, a dog who sometimes isn't, and far too much cauliflower cheese, and … you have a Diana Wynne Jones novel.
It's a sad fact that Diana Wynne Jones didn't/hasn't/doesn't write more; there's really no-one else quite like her. This isn't one of her top-of-the-tree efforts (it would take a lot to topple Howl's Moving Castle or Fire and Hemlock from their secure places in my affections), but it's still a damn sight better than most of the dross that's churned out in the name of YA fantasy.
It's interesting that this is the second book in rapid succession in which the location is almost a character in itself - not so much so as in The House of Many Doors, but enough to be worth a mention.
Also worth a mention in passing is the fact that the cover art perfectly reflects what's described in the book. This is such a rare phenomenon that it really is that noteworthy.
New DWJs are a rare phenomenon too. Now for the long, long wait until the next one ...
05. I, Coriander - Sally Gardner - ah, well, everyone can't be Diana Wynne Jones. A dull and badly-written fantasy set partly in Cromwellian England (oh, my goodness, has the author ever done her research!) and partly in the realms of Faerie, blah, blah, blah. This isn't actually mine, I'm glad to say, it's Judy's, I'm not sure why it's on my desk. I read it while my computer was hanging, which it now does so frequently that I pretty much have to keep emergency something-else-to-do matter to hand.
(Am I alone in thinking that 'Sally Gardner' is an unfortunate name? Down by the Salley Gardens my love and I did meet/She passed the Salley Gardens with little snow-white feet/She bade me take love easy as the leaves grow on the tree/But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree … just me? Oh. Okay.)
06. A Stranger at Green Knowe, Lucy M Boston - this is an anomaly among the Green Knowe books; it's the only one that contains no magic - in the strictest sense of the word. But it's Lucy Boston and Green Knowe and it has its own special magic in the tale of Ping, a Chinese orphan, and the unlikely bond he forms with Hanno, a runaway gorilla. Neither of these characters are exactly what you would expect to find in the heart of the English countryside, and yet Green Knowe takes them both into itself and makes them its own.
07. An Enemy at Green Knowe, Lucy M Boston - this is another anomaly in the Green Knowe series: it's scary. If Stranger had too little magic, Enemy has to much of it: dark, spiteful, evil, black magic that nearly overcomes Mrs Oldknow, that takes everything that Tolly and Ping can throw at it, and that's even almost too strong for Green Knowe itself. In fact, forget scary - it's downright terrifying, and if I'd read it when I was a kid I would probably still be having nightmares.
08. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery - oh, dear heavens, what a dreadful, tedious, tiresome, pretentious book! I am pretty sure that when one of the characters is a 12-year-old who's planning to commit suicide (to avoid a predictable bourgeois future), one isn't supposed to think "Well, get on with it then" and, likewise, when the other main character is a concierge who not only makes a great to-do about her artistic and intellectual superiority but also continually refers to herself as an 'autodidact', one isn't supposed to cheer when the irritating cow gets hit by a truck - and yet, and yet … that's where I found myself. It's either author! or reader!fail, and I know which one I'm betting on. Remember, kids: everything Japanese = refined and cultured; everything Western = decadent and worthless. This is the sort of thinking that leads to Unhappy Hipsters.
09. Bury Her Deep, Catriona McPherson - the third in the Dandy Gilver series, this takes a turn for the dark, weird, and, in places, decidedly nasty (a warning for the squeamish: something unpleasant and quite, quite unnecessary happens to a cat toward the end). It's also, to be brutally honest, a bit of a mess - the plot never quite hangs together, the characters behave in the most erratic and irrational manners imaginable, and the ending is decidedly unsatisfactory. (There is also a very notable problem with a point of view shift, again toward the end of the book. As these stories are first-person narrated, it presents a bit of a problem when the narrator's rendered unconscious …) A disappointment.
10. Runemarks, Joanne Harris - we're all familiar with the author who lives in denial of their genre writing ("It doesn't have spaceships in, so it can't be science fiction!"). Joanne Harris is somewhat the opposite; for years she's been slyly slipping fantastic elements into her otherwise resolutely mainstream fiction and getting away with it. Here she goes for all-out fantasy, and it's a sad reflection on the publishing world today that in order to do so she's had to have it marketed as YA. This is a lovely book: a joyous, irreverent romp through Norse legend, full of verve, humour, action, adventure, and the most dangerously charming Loki you're ever likely to meet. At almost 500 pages it initially looks daunting, but Ms Harris's timing is impeccable: the action is divided into bite-sized chunks, and every section ends with a punch that makes you want to keep on reading.
My one criticism is that the young female protagonist, Maddy, who is initially the novel's main POV character, finds herself more and more squeezed out as more and more characters are introduced - in particular Loki, against whom nobody stands a chance - and appears rather colourless compared to the Norse pantheon. But then, I suppose … anyone would.
Highly recommended.
01. Jill's Gymkhana, Ruby Ferguson - the first in the 'Jill' series, reissued in 2009 by Fidra Books with the full, original text, unmodernised and un-Bowdlerised, and the Caney illustrations. This tells the story of how Jill Crewe and her mother move to Chatton in straitened circumstances - despite which they are able to buy a cottage with a paddock attached - how Jill falls in love with a black pony in a nearby farmer's field, and how, through a series of chance encounters and lucky coincidences, she is able to buy him, keep him, learn to ride him and, by the end of the book, become the star of the Chatton Show. Along the way we meet the cast of characters that will become familiar throughout the later books: Jill's best friend Ann, her dreadful cousin Cecilia, her riding mentor, the wheelchair-bound Martin Lowe (it's interesting how matter-of-factly and sympathetically the author deals with Martin; somehow it seems a far more modern attitude than it probably really is). Written in 1949, the book shows its age in the usual way of vintage children's books: the sheer amount of freedom that the children are routinely allowed and, contrastingly, how terrifyingly strict Jill's mother is in some respects. Notably, in spite of their poverty and her insistence that Jill must pay for Black Boy's upkeep herself, she refuses to allow Jill to take money for walking some smaller children to school, and is all set to refuse a gift from Martin - who is pretty strict himself - because it's too generous. As recently as 1949, the Crewes' cottage has no electricity and gas only downstairs (it does at least have a bathroom though), and Jill receives exactly one Christmas present from her mother - a fountain pen. What would they have made of today's children with their sacks full of MP3 players and Wiis? It's also a terrifying reminder of how badly the currency has become devalued: Jill's mother receives fifty guineas for the serial rights of one of her books, out of which Jill is able to buy Black Boy for £12!
Jill, by the way, is 11 at the beginning of the book, and, in spite of a passing mention toward the end that she'll soon outgrow him, she still has her beloved Black Boy at the end of the series, when she's 16. One can only assume that she didn't, in fact, grow very much, or that she shortened her stirrups and rode with her knees around her ears!
02. The Thornthwaite Inheritance, Gareth P Jones - this is never going to win any prizes for originality - it's a fairly standard late entry to the field of light/juvenile Gothic that includes A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Gashleycrumb Tinies - and it's not likely to win any prizes for great literature either, or for startling plot twists: you're likely to guess the villain by the second page. Still, it has some good ideas, and some interesting characters, and would probably make a not-bad children's film. That might even have been the author's original intention.
03. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows - you just know a book with a title that whimsical can't be good news, and when you see how much the Daily Mail liked it, you can't help but be a little ashamed to have it on your bookshelf. It's a bit of a book of two halves, in fact, which isn't really surprising since it's also a book of two authors, Annie Burrows having stepped in to finish the MS when the original author died. As a lightweight exchange of letters between a writer's blocked author and assorted members of a reading group on Guernsey it just about works, although the Guernsey residents are altogether too colourful and whimsical a bunch for words; once the main character actually gets to Guernsey, the excuses for the letters to continue wear a bit thin, but it still more or less holds out; but then there's a damn silly sub-plot involving some lost letters of Oscar Wilde tacked on to the end - perhaps in reaction to a real-life equivalent of the fictional editor's comment that 'strings of anecdotes don't make a book' which simply doesn't work at all. The problem is that all this whimsy is set against the background of the only-just-post-War-years, and a lot of the anecdotes in question are exceedingly grim; the two don't sit too well together.
Local reviewers have complained that the Guernsey islanders don't sound like Guernsey people. I'm not qualified to judge on that count, but they don't sound much like English people either, so I shouldn't wonder. The author also makes the common mistake of viewing homosexuality from a modern perspective. Trust me, in 1946 and for many years thereafter, a gay man didn't go around blurting his proclivities to every casual acquaintance.
All that said, it was an easy and painless enough read - something ghastly happens to a cat, one of my pet hates in all forms of literature, but, given the wartime setting and the very much worse things that were going on all around, I'll cut the book some slack this time - and one has, after all, to do something on the bus.
04. Enchanted Glass, Diana Wynne Jones - an elderly magician dies and passes on his heritage (posthumously) to his heir without ever having had the chance to explain what it entails; a young runaway with his own unknown heritage winds up on the magician's doorstep shortly thereafter. Both have to unravel and accept their backgrounds and their destinies, both of which are far more - or, possibly, far less - complex than they might have imagined. Throw in a cast of villagers, some of them as talented as the magician himself (if not more so), a giant who happens to live in the garden, a village fete, the denizens of Elfland, a dog who sometimes isn't, and far too much cauliflower cheese, and … you have a Diana Wynne Jones novel.
It's a sad fact that Diana Wynne Jones didn't/hasn't/doesn't write more; there's really no-one else quite like her. This isn't one of her top-of-the-tree efforts (it would take a lot to topple Howl's Moving Castle or Fire and Hemlock from their secure places in my affections), but it's still a damn sight better than most of the dross that's churned out in the name of YA fantasy.
It's interesting that this is the second book in rapid succession in which the location is almost a character in itself - not so much so as in The House of Many Doors, but enough to be worth a mention.
Also worth a mention in passing is the fact that the cover art perfectly reflects what's described in the book. This is such a rare phenomenon that it really is that noteworthy.
New DWJs are a rare phenomenon too. Now for the long, long wait until the next one ...
05. I, Coriander - Sally Gardner - ah, well, everyone can't be Diana Wynne Jones. A dull and badly-written fantasy set partly in Cromwellian England (oh, my goodness, has the author ever done her research!) and partly in the realms of Faerie, blah, blah, blah. This isn't actually mine, I'm glad to say, it's Judy's, I'm not sure why it's on my desk. I read it while my computer was hanging, which it now does so frequently that I pretty much have to keep emergency something-else-to-do matter to hand.
(Am I alone in thinking that 'Sally Gardner' is an unfortunate name? Down by the Salley Gardens my love and I did meet/She passed the Salley Gardens with little snow-white feet/She bade me take love easy as the leaves grow on the tree/But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree … just me? Oh. Okay.)
06. A Stranger at Green Knowe, Lucy M Boston - this is an anomaly among the Green Knowe books; it's the only one that contains no magic - in the strictest sense of the word. But it's Lucy Boston and Green Knowe and it has its own special magic in the tale of Ping, a Chinese orphan, and the unlikely bond he forms with Hanno, a runaway gorilla. Neither of these characters are exactly what you would expect to find in the heart of the English countryside, and yet Green Knowe takes them both into itself and makes them its own.
07. An Enemy at Green Knowe, Lucy M Boston - this is another anomaly in the Green Knowe series: it's scary. If Stranger had too little magic, Enemy has to much of it: dark, spiteful, evil, black magic that nearly overcomes Mrs Oldknow, that takes everything that Tolly and Ping can throw at it, and that's even almost too strong for Green Knowe itself. In fact, forget scary - it's downright terrifying, and if I'd read it when I was a kid I would probably still be having nightmares.
08. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery - oh, dear heavens, what a dreadful, tedious, tiresome, pretentious book! I am pretty sure that when one of the characters is a 12-year-old who's planning to commit suicide (to avoid a predictable bourgeois future), one isn't supposed to think "Well, get on with it then" and, likewise, when the other main character is a concierge who not only makes a great to-do about her artistic and intellectual superiority but also continually refers to herself as an 'autodidact', one isn't supposed to cheer when the irritating cow gets hit by a truck - and yet, and yet … that's where I found myself. It's either author! or reader!fail, and I know which one I'm betting on. Remember, kids: everything Japanese = refined and cultured; everything Western = decadent and worthless. This is the sort of thinking that leads to Unhappy Hipsters.
09. Bury Her Deep, Catriona McPherson - the third in the Dandy Gilver series, this takes a turn for the dark, weird, and, in places, decidedly nasty (a warning for the squeamish: something unpleasant and quite, quite unnecessary happens to a cat toward the end). It's also, to be brutally honest, a bit of a mess - the plot never quite hangs together, the characters behave in the most erratic and irrational manners imaginable, and the ending is decidedly unsatisfactory. (There is also a very notable problem with a point of view shift, again toward the end of the book. As these stories are first-person narrated, it presents a bit of a problem when the narrator's rendered unconscious …) A disappointment.
10. Runemarks, Joanne Harris - we're all familiar with the author who lives in denial of their genre writing ("It doesn't have spaceships in, so it can't be science fiction!"). Joanne Harris is somewhat the opposite; for years she's been slyly slipping fantastic elements into her otherwise resolutely mainstream fiction and getting away with it. Here she goes for all-out fantasy, and it's a sad reflection on the publishing world today that in order to do so she's had to have it marketed as YA. This is a lovely book: a joyous, irreverent romp through Norse legend, full of verve, humour, action, adventure, and the most dangerously charming Loki you're ever likely to meet. At almost 500 pages it initially looks daunting, but Ms Harris's timing is impeccable: the action is divided into bite-sized chunks, and every section ends with a punch that makes you want to keep on reading.
My one criticism is that the young female protagonist, Maddy, who is initially the novel's main POV character, finds herself more and more squeezed out as more and more characters are introduced - in particular Loki, against whom nobody stands a chance - and appears rather colourless compared to the Norse pantheon. But then, I suppose … anyone would.
Highly recommended.