BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry

This lady has been writing back-to-back New York Times’s bestsellers. This is her third (!) This one is a rom-com about a literary agent who gets together with an editor. It was sprightly and fun and ideally suited to my Covid daze. It was interesting to read about the editing process, because I am very confident this book has been through a very rigorous editor. It is sharp as a tack. Like YOU, AGAIN, another rom-com that I read during Covid, it has been edited to within an inch of its life. Not a single piece of flab: just a machine for delivering plot. That’s hard to do and I admire it hugely.

THE ENCHANTED APRIL by Elizabeth von Arnim

Here is a highly season appropriate novel, about escaping the English winter. Four middle-class English ladies, all strangers, decide to spend a month in Italy together. The beginning is really fun, as the first of the ladies decides, in the depths of February, to blow her entire nest egg on the escape. Only those who have attempted to survive a London February can understand the urge to get CRAZY.

The plot doesn’t precisely work out, but who cares, it is such a fun novel of getting your life changed. One thing I did find weird, is I was thinking these ladies were old, based on the extraordinary dullness of their lives, but then it emerges they are only in their thirties! It’s amazing how many novels, even quite recent ones (this one is 1922), have this as the key takeaway: if I have to be born female THANK GOD it’s now and not earlier.

YOU, AGAIN by Kate Goldbeck

I had Covid (second time round) and felt dreadful, so decided to read this fun romcom recommended to me by Instagram. I’ve never read anything quite like it before. I think it is what is called commercial fiction, and I am ready for MORE. It was a sort of classic friends-to-lovers story, and it was a towering achievement of EDITING. There was nothing in it that was not fun, funny, or moving the plot forward. The time flew by. TOLSTOY TAKE NOTE. It is not easy to cut a story down to only the parts you want to read. Now to be fair, I cannot any more recall much about what it was about, or the characters, or anything, but it passed the time most delightfully

ANGEL by Elizabeth Taylor

This book tells about a teenage girl who becomes a writer. I have read an awful lot of books that could be described as being that, as obviously: writers write what they know. This though is something different. The girl is a horrifying, self-absorbed anti-hero, or, in summary, #goals. Here she is on getting married: ” . . . she had thought of love with bleak distaste. She wanted to dominate the world, not one person.”

We follow her through a life of bestsellers and terrifying selfishness. It’s eerie and frightening. Elizabeth Taylor is just a fantastic writer. Her MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT was one of my favourite novels of last year, and while I did not like this one as much it is still objectively better than most things I read this year. Let me end by giving you this flavour, of her on a car ride:

She would have liked to drive on for ever, peacefully, jolting along in the warm air until it grew dark. The great brass lamps would be lit, drawing pale moths out of the blackness, bringing one tree forward after another, shining on closed flowers, on owls sitting on posts and cats’ eyes among the tall grasses.

WILLIAM’S WIFE by Gertrude Trevelyan

Here is a book about becoming a bag lady.  Required reading, because we are all always at risk of bag ladydom.  The story begins with a young shopgirl marrying a wealthy widower in the early 1900s.  Today we’d call his behaviour coercive control.  Back then I suspect they just called it marriage.  For example, he is extraordinarily unwilling to give her any money. She doesn’t get anything for new clothes for twenty years, and has to steal it from the housekeeping allowance. 

She starts off reasonably normal, but over time gets stranger, starting to hoarde, and feeling that ordinary neighbours are somehow intrusive.  Then the husband dies, and I thought this was going to become an uplifting worm-turns type story, where she save herself. But it turns out to be a much more realistic kind of story, in which the worm keeps going the same way it always was. 

Once on her own, she finds she cannot bring herself to spend the money she now has, and is increasingly paranoid.  It’s so totally told from her point of view that you do not quite realize how bad it has got until right near the end. In an impressive piece of writing, the author introduces a brief interaction with a policeman, where you abruptly realize that she now seems to others to be a crazy old bag lady.  It is almost a jump scare. 

This book comes from a press that re-publishes forgotten books.  I often find that if someone has bothered to republish a book by a woman, it often a very good book.  Many more books by women have been forgotten than books by men, so the likelihood is higher I guess.  This writer, Gertrude Trevelyan, was famous even as a student at Oxford for her writing, and spent all her twenties dedicatedly writing, not travelling, not nothing, before dying in the London Blitz.  Seems sad she should be forgotten. 

THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT by Laila Lalami

I’m apparently really feeling shipwrecks at the minute.  I just finished THE WAGER, a total shipwreck shocker where a rich guy makes bad decisions.  Today, and on dry land, those people usually get promoted.  Back then and when the ocean is involved, outcomes are harsher. In this mind-bending novel, THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT, based on real events, a Spanish expedition lands in Florida in 1527.  The genius running it, Nantes, decides it will be a good idea to send all the ships onward to a bay (that he assumes probably exists) while he leads 300 people to find a lost city of gold that he has tortured some native Americans into telling him exists.  No surprises, everybody dies, and cannibalism absolutely plays a role.  Only four people are ever heard from again.  They turn up eight years later, having completed an incredible tens of thousands of miles to end up all the way at Mexico City. 

This story is told from the perspective of one of the four, an enslaved man called Estebianco. The other three all wrote accounts of their journey, but he is only known from one line, which lists him as one of the four survivors.  The novel is a really impressive feat of imagination, taking him from Morocco through enslavement and on to this truly wild journey.

I just want to say one thing that really made me LOL, and gives one more sympathy for this Nantes. You will recall (maybe) that Cortez conquered the Aztecs and became fabulously wealthy, finding so much gold that he crashed the value of gold in Spain.  Apparently Nantes was supposed to have lead that expedition, but Cortez just basically got organized and left before they could make it official.  Poor guy. I just love his bad temper and his feeling that he somehow deserved a city of gold.   Don’t we all.

ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT by Sarah Thankam Mathews

This is a book about a recession. In it, a young woman works a job she hates and is extremely grateful for. It’s a story humming with economic anxiety.  This part made me laugh:

Early on he (her boss) called me his rock star.  This was funny to me, since in actuality rock stars get onstage, perform, fuck many girls, wreck the hotel room.  I, meanwhile, sweated competence, a hungry efficiency. 

How often have I sweated competence!  OFTEN.  It’s curious how very few books are written about office jobs, given so many people spend so much of their lives in them.  It’s like we don’t think it’s a real part of our life.

I also really like this part:

All my life, when I imagined the future, I thought of each of us as small atoms, individuated, settling down, getting a flat somewhere, wearing out one job and then another, like successive pairs of shoes.  You grew up, you were found a person to marry, you went sullenly to work, you kept a house running, you did the requisite paperwork or paid the price, and then for two hours of the day you might cultivate a pastime, like yelling at sports on the television or forcing the lawn into submission.  It took bravery to imagine something even slightly different, let alone follow that imagining through.

Ouch. 

One piece of whining, there was a lot of weirdly specific descriptions of food.  Try this:

Some people find it harder to forgive you for not actually being wrong, Tig had said in her Tig way over bowls of bisque served with ragged pieces of country loaf.

?!? ragged pieces ?!? country loaf !?!

SYBILLE BEDFORD by Selina Hastings

Here is a book that presents the mind-boggling idea that you may not have to work at anything to be a worthwhile person. This is a biography of Sybille Bedford, who is is a writer I am familiar with through only one book (A LEGACY, which I randomly found in a second hand store). Bedford was born rich, but her family lost their money, and then she went ahead and lived off the money of her various friends. She didn’t seem to find this weird, and neither did they. It is just bizarre: she goes from summers in Provence to balconies in Rome, to English salons. She is gay and sleeps with everyone in a fifty mile radius. Basically, she focuses on having a wonderful time, and everyone thinks that is just fine. WHERE HAVE I GONE WRONG. It is totally inspirational.

This lady just LOVES TO HANG OUT. Here she is in an interview: “I love food, good food, simple, authentic. Taking food with friends has a sacramental dimension for me. It is part of the love of life. ” I just love this conscious focus on enjoyment. And it continued throughout. Even approaching seventy we are told she “had amassed a large number of friends, and was constantly adding to her social circle, going out most evenings, coming into contact with new worlds and sections of society.” In her nineties her girlfriend is in her fifties! Totally baller.

IN MEMORIAM by Alice Winn

I started this book at 10pm, in bed, and next thing I knew it was past midnight. I hadn’t even looked up.  It’s a long time since I got absorbed in a book so easily.  It reminded me of childhood, when I used to often read for hours.  I finished the whole thing the next day, despite being kind of busy.  I chose long bus routes on purpose so I would have time to read, and it’s a long time since I enjoyed a London bus so much. 

The story starts in a boys’  boarding school in England.  The one boy, Gaunt, is in love with the other boy, Ellwood. It’s hard enough at the best of times to tell if someone likes you back, but it’s especially hard for Gaunt, because its 1913, and despite all the boys sleeping with each other in this place (?) it’s also profoundly homophobic.  And that’s the other part: it’s 1913.  Gaunt enlists when the war starts, and we go to the trenches.  Ellwood follows him out there. 

The book is inspired by the IN MEMORIAM section of boarding school newspapers, that used to carry reports of deaths of old boys.  Before the war, this section was short, but after 1914 it became lengthy, there as large numbers of teenagers from the fanciest schools started dying.  It’s sad to think, for the younger boys, waiting to turn 18, how they went from the it’ll-be-over-by-Christmas enthusiasm of 1913 to just-waiting-for-my-turn-to-die in 1917, 1918. 

Reading this book gave me some hope that my phone has not permanently damaged my attention span.  What I need to be doing is spending more time on finding books I might actually like, because when I do, it’s like I am nine again, the internet’s not been invented, and my mind is still my own.

THE L-SHAPED ROOM by Lynne Reid Banks

A novel about someone who gets pregnant before abortion is legal. Surprisingly, it is kind of uplifting. The woman concerned is middle class, and is offered an abortion by a proper doctor in a hospital. She decides this would be ‘taking the easy way out,’ (?!?) so keeps the baby. A lot of crazy things happen, such as jaw-dropping rudeness from strangers, getting fired for being pregnant (?!?), and similar. I can only say again: THANK GOD FOR FEMINISM.

Despite all this, it is curiously mostly a story about how going outside your comfort zone – in this case, she moves into a working class bedsit, and becomes friends with black people and Jewish people – can actually provide you with new opportunities and new freedoms. It’s a strangely happy book.

There was much to admire in the writing. As a little sample, here she is coming to her father’s office to tell him she is pregnant. She got pregnant the first time she ever had sex, with a fellow actor in the small-time repertory company she is with:

My father often said he didn’t know where all my ‘acting nonsense’ came from. If he could have seen himself putting on his head-of-an-industrial-empire act in that shabby, poky office, he’d have known it came straight from him. They way he glanced up from his work, looked at me for a second as if trying to place me, then let a tired smile play around his lips – it was a perfect performance of the weary tycoon smiling tolerantly at the carefree daughter who knows no better than to interrupt his Atlasian labours. . . . In some strange way I was almost looking forward to telling him now. I was glad I’d decided to do it at his office. I wasn’t afraid of him here. I saw him here, not as my father, perpetually demanding strengths and achievements of me, but as a supremely unimportant cog trying to pretend it was the whole dull wheel