Bargain Books and Medicine Chests

I’m not sure if you can actually start a comment with an aside, but I’m a rebel, so I’ll do it anyway… When I was in college in the dim and distant past of the mid 80’s, a girl in one of my classes commented that I reminded her of Elizabeth Bennett. I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not because at that time, I hadn’t read Pride and Prejudice. The comment prompted me to remedy the oversight, and by the time I’d finished I decided that I was pretty damn happy with the comparison. This came back into my mind when I was reading Longbourn by Jo Baker which is a ‘what if’ might have been happening ‘below stairs’ while the drama of Pride and Prejudice is playing out. What it does is make you see Austen’s characters through the other side of the telescope, and that’s an illuminating view for many of the characters we know so well. But firstly I’m here to talk about Longbourn. A good friend recommended it, and I’m glad she did because it is delightful. Our heroine is Sar...

I bought The Song of Achilles a couple of months back and have been debating ever since whether I read it first or go back and revisit some of my Mary Renault books before I read it, given that The Song of Achilles is in the grand tradition of Renault’s historical novels about ancient Greece. In the end I decided to read The Song of Achilles first before my reread for a couple of reasons. One – it’s been a good 25 years since I read any Renault and I was kind of worried that they wouldn’t be as good as I remember, which would ruin a great memory for me, and two, if that happened it would likely put me off the genre before I read The Song of Achilles. Additionally if the Renault books were as good as I remember, it would mean The Song of Achilles would have to be extra special to stand up to them. People may accuse me of overthinking these things, and they’d probably be right. Anyway, I decided to read The Song of Achilles first, and let it stand or fall on its own merits an...

I think I’m genetically programmed to be suspicious of books on the Man Booker Prize List. I’m sure that most, if not all of the books and authors who are honoured each year are wonderful examples of their craft, but sometimes I just find them hard going. With this in mind, I was a little apprehensive approaching Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones which was part of  the Man Booker Shortlist in 2007 as well as winning a slew of other prizes. Despite my probably unfounded prejudices, I was interested in the premise of the book – you know when the flyleaf and back cover blurb is doing its job when it can make you buy a book despite your reservations. On the South Pacific island of Bougainville, a young girl called Matilda narrates her experience living on what should be an island paradise but is being torn apart by rival factions in a devastating civil war. Many people including all the teachers have abandoned the island leaving only one white man in Matilda’s village – Mr Watts - ...

It may be literary heresy, but I’m not a great fan of Ian McEwan – eek, there I’ve said it… I have Atonement on my shelves. I bought it at the time of publishing because it seemed like the thing to do at the time, and yes I thought it was well done, but I don’t know that I’m ever going to go back and read it again. I remember buying The Innocent and abandoning it part way through – something I don’t do lightly, but it just wasn’t doing anything for me. I’ve picked up Amsterdam and Enduring Love in bookshops, read the first couple of pages and wandered around the shop with them in my hand, and then eventually put them back because they weren’t doing that magical book thing when you feel like they’re almost pulsing in your hand shouting ‘read me, read me’. However, here I am, having read an Ian McEwan and enjoyed it – I feel like I may have to go lie down, or at least put my previous prejudices aside, which is always annoying! When it came out, I recall reading a lot abou...

I usually have a problem with short stories. The problem is that they are short! All too often I am just getting into the story when suddenly they’re done and I’m sitting there going, but, but, but I’m not ready to leave yet. Having said that Sleep No More by P.D. James is a little toothsome chocolate box of the best bitter chocolate you could hope for as a present. It’s no coincidence that there are chocolates on the book cover, or at least there are in my version. The book is subtitled ‘six murderous tales’, and that kind of sums things up. As the back cover says, “When it comes to crime, it’s not always a question of ‘who dunnit?’ Sometimes there’s more mystery in the why or the how .” It is this variation – the different flavours and different approaches to each murderous tale that makes this little collection work so well. For example, in some cases we know the murderer straight away, and even the why, but what is fascinating is the aftermath. And of course sometimes t...

I really wanted to like The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce. Last year I read her The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and it became one of my favourite books for the year. So I was primed to love this book too. But I didn’t… It’s not a bad book, and I’m sure lots of people loved it. It certainly got lots of good reviews if the back cover blurb is to believed. But I was just kind of disappointed. The basic story is of Frank who is a vinyl record aficionado, owns a record store in a rundown part of town and is one of the last holdouts in the face of the encroaching age of CD’s. The street is occupied by a variety of quirky businesses and their owners who are hanging on by their toenails in the face of urban development and vandalism.   Into Frank’s world walks a mysterious woman who captures everyone’s attention and eventually asks Frank to teach her about music. And so a tentative relationship dance begins. This is all very promising, and I have to say that the author ...

I had read a lot about The Salt Path by Raynor Winn in various newspapers and websites, both as interviews with the author and in book reviews. With each piece of commentary I was more and more intrigued and wanted to get the book. Then my best friend got to it before me and confirmed everything that I had read about it, so really it was a no brainer to buy it myself. Of course the fear when the interviews, the reviews and the personal recommendations are all so positive is, what happens if I don’t like it? Or even worse, what happens if I’m ambivalent about it? That’s always a bit of a horror reaction for me. I’d rather have a deep reaction to a book, even if that reaction is dislike, then just to be lukewarm about something that an author has take a lot of time and effort to craft. Luckily, I can say hand on heart that I was not disappointed with The Salt Path. I was moved, shocked, furious, frustrated, breathless and uplifted by it, and none of those reactions was in the...

I’ll be honest, my feelings about Transit by Rachel Cusk are all over the place. She’s a major award-nominated writer, whose previous novel Outline was much lauded, although I admit I haven’t read it. I hadn’t come across her before until I saw the book on the bargain pile at Munros. I read the blurb and was intrigued enough to shell out my $7.99 for it. The basic premise of the book is of a writer who moves to London with her two young sons after her marriage goes down the pan. She moves into a flat that needs a lot of TLC and is situated above a couple of nightmare neighbours. Over the course of the novel we come to know a little more about her neighbours, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. I’ve been trying to analyse why I’m so at sixes and sevens with this book. The first chapter intrigued the hell out of me, and I thought, yep, here we go. Then I spent most of chapter two feeling annoyed and that the writer was showing off her admittedly extended vocabulary, but in...

I’ll start by saying unequivocally that The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett is a total joy to read from start to finish. There, that’s my review… Okay, let’s rewind and dismantle that statement a bit, as I should probably say why I feel like that. The Uncommon Reader of the title is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and in this small, but beautifully formed novella (only 120 pages) Alan Bennett imagines that the Queen comes across a small mobile library on the grounds of Buckingham Palace one day while she’s out with her corgis. Always a stickler for etiquette, she borrows a book to be polite, and makes the acquaintance of a pretty unprepossessing kitchen boy called Norman. From such small beginnings, great national events are built. After a hesitant start the Queen begins to relish her forays into literature, aided and abetted by the redoutable Norman who is elevated to a position as a page, much to the chagrin of her private secretary Sir Kevin, a New Zealander of whom ...

Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell is the reason I wanted to start a book blog. Of course I wanted to share my feelings about this book, but even if no one else ever reads this entry, I wanted to get my thoughts down because of the emotions that were stirred. As it says on the front cover, it’s as memoir of friendship. More specifically a memoir of the friendship between Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp, who first met in Boston at a party in the early 1990’s when the former was the book review editor at the Boston Globe and the latter was a columnist for the Boston Phoenix. From a quiet first social encounter they become reacquainted due to both having young puppies who needed a lot of walking and attention. Over time a love affair with dogs became a love affair of friendship that lasted a lifetime. This could so very easily have been a book that was all surface. It has all the hallmarks of melodrama. Discussion of alcoholism and abstinence, steadfast male frien...