Here is a classic American novel set in a small town in Ohio. It follows two married couples across a few decades. I was enjoying it, until I wasn’t. I got to page 382 and then abruptly decided to quit. It’s hard to explain why. It was well written, it had a plot, but somehow it just seemed very ordinary, and like my reading time would be better spent elsewhere. Can’t think when else I’ve quite a book this late on this slender a reasoning.
Tag: fiction
HEART THE LOVER by Lily King
I read this in on one long and sleepless night. I really enjoyed it. It tells about a woman’s long relationship with her university boyfriend. Let me give you a taste. Here is the boyfriend, talking about his mother:
“We are not the same species, Yash said once. I am a human being and she is a two-ton albatross. She wants things from me I cannot give.”
At the end, SPOILER ALERT, she spends a few days with him in hospital as he dies of lung cancer. I cried myself silly.
The next day was very strange. I felt like I was living in two realities, my own, and the one in the book. I guess these days it’s rare I read a novel straight through.
FAN SERVICE by Rosie Danan
This was a charming romcom about a woman, Alex, who falls in love with a werewolf. It’s fun and genre-y, and also a pretty clever metaphor for learning to live with things you can’t control.
Alex was obsessed as a teenager by a TV show about a werewolf, and was the moderator of the show’s main wiki. I actually found this part of the book deeply reassuring. I always wonder if I am too online, and this made me realize that really I’m not – other people are way, way, way more online than I am. I could barely understand some of the references. Hurray!
WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan
On the one hand, I did not finish this book. I bailed about 200 pages in. On the other hand, I kind of enjoyed it. It tells the story of a professor of literature in 2130, whose specialist period is 1990 to 2030.
The first interesting part was how overwhelmed he is, and the whole academy is, by how much material our era left. The reality TV, the emails, the messaging, etc etc. Its wild how much more info we leave behind than people before the internet.
The second interesting part was the world. It is a globally warmed world, so the UK is just a series of islands, and they have very few species – just eight butterflies. Its not as if the professor does not know how good the past was, but it’s not as if he thinks he lives in a dystopia. And it made me wonder: we all know we live in a very reduced natural world; how strange we don’t think we live in a dystopia.
It’s also a post-nuclear war world, so there is very little global trade. They look back on our world as a world of wild and extravagant luxury. So perhaps we should think we live in a utopia. I don’t know.
The plot was kind of questionable, all about trying to find a lost poem, and at some point we switched back into our present with the poet, so maybe it was all going to make sense, but I can’t tell you as I gave up.
GHOSTROOTS by Pemi Aguda
Here is speculative horror fiction from Nigeria. Unfortunately, it’s short stories, which I always struggle to get into. However they were skilful stories. I liked, for example, the description of a woman “who is stroking her blond wig as if it were a living thing, a pet that needs comfort”
I also really enjoyed the way she evoked contemporary Nigeria, very dense and real. This I thought was an interesting part, about a girl whose parents will not tell her anything about her grandparents:
“But what do Nigerian parents tell their children about their own parents? Especially the Pentecostal Christians? Nothing. If you took a poll of your friends, three out of five would be similarly ignorant of these histories of parents who moved from somewhere to Lagos, left behind religions and curses and distant cousins and grimy pasts”
That first generation who moves to town, who goes from nine kids to two, in any country, is an interesting one.
Nigeria is generally kind of an extreme place, and it makes for a fun setting for speculative fiction. One charter fears she is the reincarnation of her evil grandmother, and she asks her “coworkers if they believe in reincarnation. Five of them believe. Two of them claim to have corroborative stories.” One of them feels she is a reincarnation – of Beyonce.
THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF by Helen Garner
I chose this book on impulse because Amazon recommended it to me. I had just read a book by the same aurhor, her first, which is why the algorithm though I might like it. That one was a deeply personal memoir of her life in a commune with her junkie boyfriend. This one is wildly different, being a straightforward piece of courtroom reportage.
It was pretty interesting. It tells the real life trial of an Australian man who drove his three children into a dam. They were drowned, but he survived. He claimed he had a coughing fit. His ex, and his family, all testified in his defense, saying he loved his children and would never have killed them. He was also however in the middle of an apparently amicable divorce – his wife was leaving him for the contractor who was doing up their house – and it became increasingly clear over the course of the trial that this mild-manner man in this polite divorce had actually murdered the children to get his revenge.
The story in itself was pretty interesting, but what really elevated it was Garner’s clear, lucid writing, and her close observation of how ‘justice’ actually gets served. The part that I can’t get over is that these poor kids were found unbuckled. It looks like the five year old unbuckled the two year old’s car seat, and the eight year old actually managed to get the window down; but just not quite in time to escape.
DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis
Prepare yourself to hear that there is an author who has won more major SF awards than Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov COMBINED, despite having written fewer books than any of them. Yep. It’s this Connie Willis. I have never heard of her and will be amazed if you have. In the introduction, they say that she has ‘one thing’ that makes her different from those other writers, and that one thing is her ‘ability to make you care,’ and I would say, yes, I hope so, because my assumption is that is the existence of a ‘vagina.’ However let us not get bogged down in all that.
This book raises the interesting question of what would happen to the careers of historians if time travel were invented. It tells of an ambitious young historian that volunteers to go back to what they consider one of the most dangerous centuries, the 14th. And then boom, suddenly it’s a novel SPOILER ALERT of the black death. It’s just a straight up story of what it must have been like to be there then. Interestingly, they called it ‘the blue sickness.’ I had never considered how awful it must have been to go through the plague without even paracetamol or disinfectant. It’s stomach churningly terrible.
The people in the future (which looks a lot like the 1950s) try and rescue the young historian, but they can’t get back into the past initially, and what I was struck by was how incredibly inefficient phoning people used to be. They spend absolute ages waiting by the phone and taking messages and trying to catch people at home. It’s guess I had underestimated how much the group chat alone has improved human efficiency.
STARTER FOR TEN by David Nicholls
I really enjoyed this author’s new book, YOU ARE HERE, so thought I would give his first one a try. He’s a skilled guy, but for me it was a bit meh. This is partly I guess because he has grown as a writer, which is interesting to see. This one, like YOU ARE HERE, is lightly comic, but it has much less heart.
Perhaps also I was slightly put off by the subject matter, being an account of an awkward young man’s first year at university. Not that this is not good subject matter, but let’s be real, it’s been done a lot. Many authors historically have been men, and awkward men at that, so they’ve had a lot to tell us about that experience. So the bar is high. Side bar, I note I have also read many accounts of men losing their virginity to prostitutes. I have yet to read one by the prostitute. Any suggestions?
THE FRIENDZONE by Abby Jimenez
Here is a genre romcom. I just read a genre rocmcom by the same author two days ago, as I am on a long beach vacation, and what was weird was this: it was basically the same plot – couple are blissfully in love, but girl has an illness that means she must break up with him instead of talking to him (?). Like I appreciate that genre is genre, but damn, it was literally the same story. However I was three beers in by this stage and the sun was hot.
LIFE’S TOO SHORT by Abby Jimenez
Here is a genre romcom I read on the beach in an afternoon. It was a genre romcom, so what can I tell you? Boy meets girl, it ends happily, this is what we are looking for in genre fiction. However, one interesting part was that the girl believes she has a terminal illness, and will likely be dead in two years. She therefore lives her life as fully as she can, always getting the good wine, always doing the trips, etc, and it really made me think how funny it is that because we have (maybe) fifty years instead of two, we think we should not get the good wine. It’s not as if fifty years is so very long.