50-Book Challenge 2010: Books 21-30
Books 1-10.
Books 11-20
21. Paws in the Proceedings, Deric Longden - more gentle anecdotes from Longden, his family, and his cats. The cats are rather long in the tooth by now, as are their owners, and Longden himself has suffered from ill-health, so if this offers little in the way of novelty or excitement it can be forgiven.
22. Hold My Hand, Serena Mackesy - Serena Mackesy is a writer I enjoy very much but who doesn't have the audience that, in my opinion, she deserves. Her first couple of books were superior chicklit, but this one's a solidly written modern-day ghost story, twinned with an only-too-familiar contemporary tale of an abused wife and daughter seeking escape from their violent past. They find sanctuary working in a manor house on the moors of Cornwall, but learn that even this comes with its own dangers. There are flaws: the author paints altogether too rosy a picture of Cornish village life (I've been there, and it's not nearly as cosy and friendly as it's drawn here); the conclusion is a little sudden and unsatisfactory - there's no real explanation as to why the ghost finally leaves; and the house itself is called 'Rospetroc', which I was unable to read other than as 'retrospect' - but that last one is my problem, not yours. Recommended. Hey, I bought it in hardcover, what more can I tell you?!
23. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak - bookshops need to start roping off a separate section for depressing YA books about the Holocaust (and/or post-apocalyptic dystopias), since that seems to be about the only thing anyone's writing these days. It would slot in nicely next to the Misery Memoir section. I know We Must Never Forget and It Must Never Happen Again, but I'm in no danger of forgetting, that's all I'm saying. So why did I pick this up, you may well ask, and the answer is, because it was hugely hyped (and on a three-for-two offer). All you really need to know is that it's 500 pages long, there are Nazis, and almost everyone dies. Luckily it's in fairly large type and very simple language, so it goes quite fast. I suppose one problem with it is that Death is the narrator. A lot of reviewers seem to have been very "gosh, wow" about this, but I'm quite used to Death as a narrator, or at any rate a major player, and this particular Death is bland and charmless; he is neither a cute Goth girl, nor does he ride a horse named Binky and have a fondness for kittens and curry, and so much the worse for that, I say.
24. English Passengers, Matthew Kneale - a rollicking tale of geology, Genesis and genocide, featuring a mad vicar, a body-snatching doctor, the unluckiest gang of smugglers in the history of the world, and an ever-diminishing group of native Tasmanians who find themselves being wiped out less by intentional malice than by simple, sheer carelessness. Beautifully written in a number of different but fully convincing voices, the horror of the Aborigines' fate almost slips in as subtext but will stick with you, I guarantee, for a very long time.
25. The End of Mr Y, Scarlett Thomas - this really should have been a good book. A young PhD student finds what may be the only copy in the world of a supposedly cursed book which holds the key to another dimension through which you can piggyback on the minds of others. How can you go wrong with a concept like that? Incredibly, by making it boring. The Troposphere is a world completely without magic, duller than a wet weekend in Bognor, while the characters are lifeless and, for the most part, unpleasant. A real disappointment.
26. The Stones of Green Knowe, Lucy M Boston - the last in the Green Knowe series takes us back to the very beginning of the story, to half-Norman, half-Saxon Roger, who sees Green Knowe being built and becomes the first boy to live there and to love the place. Later he finds a pair of ancient, chair-like stones in a nearby wood, which prove to have magical properties, enabling him to travel back and forth in time and check on Green Knowe's safety in the future. This allows him to meet the children (or most of them) from the earlier books, although he's frightened and horrified by Tolly's 20th century world - with reason, as the book ends with an act of heartwrenching vandalism.
27. Coraline, Neil Gaiman - somewhere on the internet there's a list of movie summaries in which every one of Neil Gaiman's reads "Loser finds they are someone important in parallel universe next door to this one". Which is a bit unkind, but funny nonetheless. This was a reread after watching the film and going "I don't remember the book being that damn scary!" - for which there is a good reason, namely that it isn't, although quite creepy enough to fit its purpose. The film, however, is pants-wettingly terrifying, and I am now extremely glad that I didn't see it at the cinema, especially not in 3-D. (Other things unfamiliar about the film - Coraline's small-boy sidekick, everyone being American - also turn out to be cinematic licence.) The book's an enjoyable little chiller although hardly the masterpiece that Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones claim in their back cover quotes. Guys, I'm fond of my friends, too, but keep it real, you know?
28. The Sugar Queen, Sarah Addison Allen - lonely, frumpy, bullied Josey looks into her closet one day and finds, alongside her secret stash of sweets and romance novels, local waitress and bad-girl Della Lee Baker, who promptly sets about helping Josey fix her life, starting by introducing her to the sister she never knew she had. It occurred to me, as I was reading this that, with its characters who set water boiling through the sheer strength of their passion, or who are constrained by their nature to keep every promise they make, however inconvenient, or who find exactly the book they need for any occasion appearing conveniently to hand, if it had been set in Argentina rather than North Carolina and translated from Spanish then it would probably qualify as magical realism. As it is, I guess it gets filed under fluffy chicklit, although very enjoyable fluffy chicklit. How can't you love a heroine who longs for winter to come so that she can wear thick tights and big, baggy sweaters (so do I!) and who lives with a bullying harridan of a mother? It suffers somewhat from dialogue that serves to carry the plot forward without sounding like actual conversation - the hero of the piece, Adam the postman, is almost the only exception to this - but otherwise is quite delightful throughout.
29. Best Gay Love Stories 2006, edited by Nick Street - it would be awfully easy to say "If these are the best, I'd hate to see the worst" - and awfully flippant, and awfully unkind. Unfortunately, it would also be pretty much true; these range from not-too-bad to bloody awful, and there's almost nothing here that wouldn't be out of place on ff.net. Plus some of the writers do use the most astonishingly flowery prose: one character boasts not only 'glistening sealskin eyes', a voice 'like the rain itself had come inside to converse', and 'arched seabird wings of his upper lip', but also an 'unblemished complexion like porcelain' and 'the vulnerability of a waking child'. Suddenly I feel so much better about my own crappy writing. It's possible that, even in this day and age, it's more important that gay writing exists at all than that it has to be good. But I hope not.
30. The Brontës Went to Woolworths, Rachel Ferguson - this is one of the most delightful, charming, eccentric and hard-to-explain books I have ever read; I'd put it on a spiritual par with I Capture the Castle and The Constant Nymph - it has very little actually in common with those books, but there is something of the same feel to it. The main characters are the three Carne sisters - drama student Katrine, journalist Deirdre and schoolgirl Sheil - who, with their mother, live in London in the early 1930s and share their lives with an eclectic assortment of characters, some real, some imaginary, some part one, part the other: Ironface the doll, who married into French society and gives herself airs; Crellie the dog, who helped relieve Mafeking and who has religious leanings; a seaside pierrot known to the girls as 'Saffy', whose real life they have given a full and imaginary extra dimension of their own; and a High Court Judge, who they have (again, in their imaginations), more or less adopted as a replacement father. Woven in amongst all this are some elements of the supernatural: Deirdre has seen her father since his death; Sheil encounters a 'nature spirit' on a visit to Skye … and then there are the Brontës …
Other characters get their say from time to time; the Carne's present governess, Miss Martin, for example, who finds the family's eccentricities far from charming and, although she has woes of her own to which Deirdre, at least, is not unsympathetic, eventually has to be driven away by Emily and Charlotte. Then there is the lovely, down-to-earth Mildred, wife of Lord Toddington, the judge, who turns out to be an unexpected kindred spirit.
It won't be a book for everyone; I've seen a number of reviewers complain of the Carnes' snobbery, for instance. It's nothing of the kind, of course, it's simply the attitude prevalent in the period, and the book has to be read as being of its time - as does anything. I loved it almost unreservedly (although I did think it petered out rather suddenly and disappointingly), wish I had discovered it years ago, and shall most certainly reread it for comfort in times of trouble.
Books 11-20
21. Paws in the Proceedings, Deric Longden - more gentle anecdotes from Longden, his family, and his cats. The cats are rather long in the tooth by now, as are their owners, and Longden himself has suffered from ill-health, so if this offers little in the way of novelty or excitement it can be forgiven.
22. Hold My Hand, Serena Mackesy - Serena Mackesy is a writer I enjoy very much but who doesn't have the audience that, in my opinion, she deserves. Her first couple of books were superior chicklit, but this one's a solidly written modern-day ghost story, twinned with an only-too-familiar contemporary tale of an abused wife and daughter seeking escape from their violent past. They find sanctuary working in a manor house on the moors of Cornwall, but learn that even this comes with its own dangers. There are flaws: the author paints altogether too rosy a picture of Cornish village life (I've been there, and it's not nearly as cosy and friendly as it's drawn here); the conclusion is a little sudden and unsatisfactory - there's no real explanation as to why the ghost finally leaves; and the house itself is called 'Rospetroc', which I was unable to read other than as 'retrospect' - but that last one is my problem, not yours. Recommended. Hey, I bought it in hardcover, what more can I tell you?!
23. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak - bookshops need to start roping off a separate section for depressing YA books about the Holocaust (and/or post-apocalyptic dystopias), since that seems to be about the only thing anyone's writing these days. It would slot in nicely next to the Misery Memoir section. I know We Must Never Forget and It Must Never Happen Again, but I'm in no danger of forgetting, that's all I'm saying. So why did I pick this up, you may well ask, and the answer is, because it was hugely hyped (and on a three-for-two offer). All you really need to know is that it's 500 pages long, there are Nazis, and almost everyone dies. Luckily it's in fairly large type and very simple language, so it goes quite fast. I suppose one problem with it is that Death is the narrator. A lot of reviewers seem to have been very "gosh, wow" about this, but I'm quite used to Death as a narrator, or at any rate a major player, and this particular Death is bland and charmless; he is neither a cute Goth girl, nor does he ride a horse named Binky and have a fondness for kittens and curry, and so much the worse for that, I say.
24. English Passengers, Matthew Kneale - a rollicking tale of geology, Genesis and genocide, featuring a mad vicar, a body-snatching doctor, the unluckiest gang of smugglers in the history of the world, and an ever-diminishing group of native Tasmanians who find themselves being wiped out less by intentional malice than by simple, sheer carelessness. Beautifully written in a number of different but fully convincing voices, the horror of the Aborigines' fate almost slips in as subtext but will stick with you, I guarantee, for a very long time.
25. The End of Mr Y, Scarlett Thomas - this really should have been a good book. A young PhD student finds what may be the only copy in the world of a supposedly cursed book which holds the key to another dimension through which you can piggyback on the minds of others. How can you go wrong with a concept like that? Incredibly, by making it boring. The Troposphere is a world completely without magic, duller than a wet weekend in Bognor, while the characters are lifeless and, for the most part, unpleasant. A real disappointment.
26. The Stones of Green Knowe, Lucy M Boston - the last in the Green Knowe series takes us back to the very beginning of the story, to half-Norman, half-Saxon Roger, who sees Green Knowe being built and becomes the first boy to live there and to love the place. Later he finds a pair of ancient, chair-like stones in a nearby wood, which prove to have magical properties, enabling him to travel back and forth in time and check on Green Knowe's safety in the future. This allows him to meet the children (or most of them) from the earlier books, although he's frightened and horrified by Tolly's 20th century world - with reason, as the book ends with an act of heartwrenching vandalism.
27. Coraline, Neil Gaiman - somewhere on the internet there's a list of movie summaries in which every one of Neil Gaiman's reads "Loser finds they are someone important in parallel universe next door to this one". Which is a bit unkind, but funny nonetheless. This was a reread after watching the film and going "I don't remember the book being that damn scary!" - for which there is a good reason, namely that it isn't, although quite creepy enough to fit its purpose. The film, however, is pants-wettingly terrifying, and I am now extremely glad that I didn't see it at the cinema, especially not in 3-D. (Other things unfamiliar about the film - Coraline's small-boy sidekick, everyone being American - also turn out to be cinematic licence.) The book's an enjoyable little chiller although hardly the masterpiece that Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones claim in their back cover quotes. Guys, I'm fond of my friends, too, but keep it real, you know?
28. The Sugar Queen, Sarah Addison Allen - lonely, frumpy, bullied Josey looks into her closet one day and finds, alongside her secret stash of sweets and romance novels, local waitress and bad-girl Della Lee Baker, who promptly sets about helping Josey fix her life, starting by introducing her to the sister she never knew she had. It occurred to me, as I was reading this that, with its characters who set water boiling through the sheer strength of their passion, or who are constrained by their nature to keep every promise they make, however inconvenient, or who find exactly the book they need for any occasion appearing conveniently to hand, if it had been set in Argentina rather than North Carolina and translated from Spanish then it would probably qualify as magical realism. As it is, I guess it gets filed under fluffy chicklit, although very enjoyable fluffy chicklit. How can't you love a heroine who longs for winter to come so that she can wear thick tights and big, baggy sweaters (so do I!) and who lives with a bullying harridan of a mother? It suffers somewhat from dialogue that serves to carry the plot forward without sounding like actual conversation - the hero of the piece, Adam the postman, is almost the only exception to this - but otherwise is quite delightful throughout.
29. Best Gay Love Stories 2006, edited by Nick Street - it would be awfully easy to say "If these are the best, I'd hate to see the worst" - and awfully flippant, and awfully unkind. Unfortunately, it would also be pretty much true; these range from not-too-bad to bloody awful, and there's almost nothing here that wouldn't be out of place on ff.net. Plus some of the writers do use the most astonishingly flowery prose: one character boasts not only 'glistening sealskin eyes', a voice 'like the rain itself had come inside to converse', and 'arched seabird wings of his upper lip', but also an 'unblemished complexion like porcelain' and 'the vulnerability of a waking child'. Suddenly I feel so much better about my own crappy writing. It's possible that, even in this day and age, it's more important that gay writing exists at all than that it has to be good. But I hope not.
30. The Brontës Went to Woolworths, Rachel Ferguson - this is one of the most delightful, charming, eccentric and hard-to-explain books I have ever read; I'd put it on a spiritual par with I Capture the Castle and The Constant Nymph - it has very little actually in common with those books, but there is something of the same feel to it. The main characters are the three Carne sisters - drama student Katrine, journalist Deirdre and schoolgirl Sheil - who, with their mother, live in London in the early 1930s and share their lives with an eclectic assortment of characters, some real, some imaginary, some part one, part the other: Ironface the doll, who married into French society and gives herself airs; Crellie the dog, who helped relieve Mafeking and who has religious leanings; a seaside pierrot known to the girls as 'Saffy', whose real life they have given a full and imaginary extra dimension of their own; and a High Court Judge, who they have (again, in their imaginations), more or less adopted as a replacement father. Woven in amongst all this are some elements of the supernatural: Deirdre has seen her father since his death; Sheil encounters a 'nature spirit' on a visit to Skye … and then there are the Brontës …
Other characters get their say from time to time; the Carne's present governess, Miss Martin, for example, who finds the family's eccentricities far from charming and, although she has woes of her own to which Deirdre, at least, is not unsympathetic, eventually has to be driven away by Emily and Charlotte. Then there is the lovely, down-to-earth Mildred, wife of Lord Toddington, the judge, who turns out to be an unexpected kindred spirit.
It won't be a book for everyone; I've seen a number of reviewers complain of the Carnes' snobbery, for instance. It's nothing of the kind, of course, it's simply the attitude prevalent in the period, and the book has to be read as being of its time - as does anything. I loved it almost unreservedly (although I did think it petered out rather suddenly and disappointingly), wish I had discovered it years ago, and shall most certainly reread it for comfort in times of trouble.