2019 Books

I belong to two book groups, and for several years now I have been making Christmas cards for the members of  one of them, showing the books we have read during the year.  I give them out at the book group Christmas dinner in December.  Here's the 2019 card:

We read:

• The Collini Case, by Ferdinand von Schirach
• A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
• Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss
• The Golden Age, by Joan London
• The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker
• Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, by Alan Sillitoe
• Pereira Maintains, by Antonio Tabucchi
• Take Nothing With You, by Patrick Gale

As usual, there were several books that I'm sure I would never have read (never even heard of, probably) without the book group: The Collini Case, A Gentleman in Moscow, Pereira Maintains and The Golden Age.  The Collini Case deals with the long shadow of the Nazi era in Germany -  Ferdinand von Schirach's grandfather was the head of the Hitler Youth, and prosecuted for war crimes at Nuremberg. A Gentleman in Moscow is the story of a wealthy aristocrat who is confined to house arrest in a Moscow hotel after the Russian Revolution, and recounts how he survives and makes a life in straitened circumstances.  (It's going to be turned into a TV series with Kenneth Branagh, I read.)  Pereira Maintains is set in Lisbon in 1938, under the fascist dictatorship of Salazar - Pereira is a journalist writing about cultural topics and trying to stay out of politics, until finally he is forced to rebel.  The Golden Age is named after a children's hospital in Australia in the 1950s, where polio cases are sent for rehabilitation.  The main character and his parents have arrived in Australia as survivors of the Holocaust, and the novel also deals with the parents adjusting to their new lives.  I enjoyed all of those, and I think the rest of the group did, too.  The Silence of the Girls was my choice, a retelling of the Iliad from the point of view of one of the women who is awarded to Achilles as a prize, after her home is destroyed by the Greeks, and all her menfolk slaughtered. A really good book, though in our discussion we got into an argument about whether (in the world of the book) the Greek gods actually exist and do things or whether the apparently supernatural events are only supernatural to Briseis, because she believes in the gods.  (It's a work of fiction, so the gods are allowed to exist in the book, in my view, and can preserve corpses from decomposition, or whatever else they want to do.)  

I think I read Saturday Night & Sunday Morning a long time ago, and I'm sure I saw the film, but re-reading it now, I didn't like it.  I couldn't understand the main character - he seems to be unpleasant to people for no good reason, and then suddenly decides to get married.  But other members of the group did enjoy it, so it's just me.   I had read and enjoyed Patrick Gale's book A Place called Winter, inspired by his own great-grandfather's life, and enjoyed Take Nothing With You, too.  It's based partly on Patrick Gale's own experiences of learning to play the cello (not something I knew anything about).  The title is from the protagonist's treatment for thyroid cancer, being isolated in a lead-lined room having taken a radioactive iodine pill - he is advised not to take anything he values in with him, because it will become radioactive.  My husband has had the same treatment - reading a fictionalised account of it was a slightly odd experience. 

This year I decided to make cards for the members of my other book group, too.  (We don't have a book group Christmas dinner, so hasn't been the same prompt to distribute cards, so I  have made them New year cards.)  I used the same format - both groups read eight books in 2019. 

We read:

• Elmet, by Fiona Mosley
• Milkman, by Anna Burns
• If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin
• The Sealwoman's Gift, by Sally Magnusson
• Transcription, by Kate Atkinson
• The Way of All Flesh, by Ambrose Parry
• The Noise of Time, by Julian Barnes
• The Red-Haired Woman, by Orhan Pamuk

In the other group, we avoid reading books that any of us ahs read before (unless we decide to revisit a book that most of us read a long time ago, like Cold Comfort Farm or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), but this group doesn't have that rule, so I had already read The Sealwoman's Gift - in fact it appeared on last year's Christmas card for the first group.  It's a fascinating story, based on real historical events.  Some of the other books by well-known authors that had received good reviews were a bit disappointing.  But Milkman (that  won the Man Booker prize in 2018) was worth reading, and I might not have chosen to tackle it but for the book group.   The Way of All Flesh (Ambrose Parry) is not in the same league, but we enjoyed it.  It's a detective story set in 19th century Edinburgh.  "Ambrose Parry" is actually two people, a novelist who has written many other books and his wife who is an anaesthetist.  Several of the characters in The Way of All Flesh did actually exist, including James Simpson, an Edinburgh obstetrician who introduced chloroform as an anaesthetic, so as well as being a good read, the book is very informative about the early development of anaesthesia.  As with other well-written historical novels, you feel that you are being educated as well as entertained. 

2018 - A Year Of Books

Yesterday, one of my two book groups met for our annual Christmas dinner (at the Catch Seafood restaurant in Holmfirth).  Since 2011, I have made Christmas cards for the other members, showing the books we have read during the year.   They are a nice reminder - it's hard to remember what we read in what year otherwise (especially when you are in more than one book group).

This year's books were:

• The Mask of Dimitrios, Eric Ambler
• A Thousand Paper Birds, Tor Udall
• Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
• A Death in Summer, Benjamin Black
• The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
• The Sealwoman's Gift, Sally Magnusson
• The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West
• Cakes and Ale, Somerset Maugham

Unusually for us, most of this year's books were not new, going back to the Hardy and Turgenev books which are 19th century classics.  I have read several other books by Thomas Hardy, but hadn't read The Mayor of Casterbridge before, and I don't think I have ever read any of the Russian classics.  Fathers and Sons was fascinating, painting a picture of an alien society, with its own strange rules.  Also fascinating to read in an afterword of how it's viewed in modern Russia.

The Return of the Soldier was a surprise hit - I think most of us had never heard of it before.  It was published in 1918, and so was a story about a WW1 soldier published while the war was still in progress.  Although published much later (1930), Cakes and Ale is set around the end of the 19th century, I think, but depicts the same class system, of strict social rules and stifling snobbery.    I read a lot of Somerset Maugham's work at one time, but had never read this one - it was very entertaining.  It's supposed to be about Thomas Hardy and his wives (not very secretly), but I tried to ignore that.

I think the book most of us liked best was The Sealwoman's Gift.  It's a fascinating story based on actual events, of a raid on Iceland in the 17th century to capture a shipload of slaves and take them to North Africa.  Some of them were eventually ransomed and went back to Iceland.  It's a bit hard to understand why the main character chooses to leave her relatively comfortable life in North Africa, where it's easy to be clean and warm, and you can eat dates and oranges, and she can be near her one remaining child, and instead go back to her husband in cold, dark Iceland and eat dried puffins.  Except that in historical fact, she did. 

Our next book, for the January meeting,  is The Collini Case by Ferdinand von Schirach.

Another Year in Books

Last week, one of my book groups had our Christmas dinner (at the Olive Branch, Marsden, where we had a very good meal).  Very sadly, we have lost one of our members this year - she died in the summer after a short illness, unexpectedly and far too young.  We thought of her and remembered that at last year's Christmas dinner, she was with us.

As is now traditional, I gave everyone a Christmas card, showing the books we have read this year.

The books are:

• Anna of the Five Towns, Arnold Bennett
• On the Black Hill, Bruce Chatwyn,
• Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín
• Me and Mr J, Rachel McIntyre
• The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt
• An Officer and A Spy, Robert Harris
• Sweet Caress, William Boyd
• Exposure, Helen Dunmore

A good selection of books - there were none that I really didn't like.  (That has happened in the past, when some books have been very hard work to read.)   I enjoyed the last three very much, and I think my overall favourite was An Officer and A Spy.   It's a fascinating account of the Dreyfus Affair in France, which I knew nothing about at all.

Our next book (for our meeting in January)  is Brighton Rock by Graham Greene.  I haven't read it before, and haven't seen the 1947 film with Richard Attenborough as Pinkie,  either.  I'm looking forward to it.

2015 - A Year of Books

As usual, I have made Christmas cards for one of my book groups that show this year's books.

 

We have read:

• The Shock of the Fall, Nathan Filer
• Apple Tree Yard, Louise Doughty
• The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai 
• The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer
• Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
• The Book of Lost and Found, Lucy Foley
• Plainsong, Kent Haruf
• H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

Cold Comfort Farm is an old favourite - most of us had read it before, a long time ago, and we decided to read it again and see if it was as good as we remembered (yes, it was).  I loved H is for Hawk - I have lent my copy to a friend, but will re-read it when it's returned.  Plainsong was a discovery - I had never heard of the author, but enjoyed it very much, and have since read his other novels set in the same fictional town.  The Shock of the Fall is a moving account of a young man struggling with mental illness.  At the other end of the scale, I really didn't like Apple Tree Yard - my copy went to a charity shop as soon as we had discussed it. Not much to say about the others - in fact, I must confess I never read The Interestings because we were going to be on holiday when the group met to discuss it.

We've already started on next year's books - for the next meeting in January we are reading Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett.

 

This Year's Books

Last night, one of my book groups had our annual Christmas dinner, and exchanged Christmas cards.  As is by now traditional (i.e. I have done it for the past three years), I made a card showing the books that we have read this year.     

We usually read eight books in a year.  This year's were mostly novels, apart from Chris Mullin's diaries of the last stretch of his career as an MP, and Michael Ondaatje's memoir of growing up in Ceylon and his family's history there.  The books I enjoyed most, and the ones I am planning to keep, are Stoner by John Williams and Strange Meeting by Susan Hill.  The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields would also be a keeper, except that I borrowed  it from the library.    Chris Mullin's Decline and Fall and Barbara Pym's Excellent Women were also library copies - making a Christmas card means that I have to borrow them again to make the card (which might give you a clue as to why you can't see the title of the Barbara Pym book).   It also means that I am not often tempted to get a Kindle - books on a Kindle would not make a good picture.

We each got a Christmas present at the dinner from our Secret Santa - a book, of course.  Mine was The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.

I have read it before, from the library, and enjoyed it very much.  It's great to have my own copy (and a very nicely-produced copy, too) and I'm looking forward to reading it again.   I knew when I read it that Barbara Kingsolver must be a knitter, and I subsequently read a feature on her in Vogue Knitting.  Here is her account of a non-knitter (her character Harrison Shepherd) talking on a long car journey to another character, Mrs Brown, about her knitting:

 "... I thought it was an indigo porcupine."
 She had a laugh at that.  She has eleven nephews and nieces, I learned, and meant to outfit the tribe on this journey, working through socks from top to toe, all from the same massive hank of blue wool.  The coming holiday shall be known as "The Christmas of the Blue Socks from Aunt Violet."  She worked on a little frame of four interlocked needles that poked out in every direction. as she passed the yarn through its rounds.
"Aren't you afraid you'll hurt yourself with that?"
"Mr. Shepherd, if women feared knitting needles as men do, the world would go bare-naked."

And later Mrs Brown knits Mr Shepherd a pair of gloves for Christmas, taking the measurements from a grease stain he left on a piece of paper,  He is astonished because he has never had a pair of gloves that he can wear comfortably before - his fingers are extraordinarily long.  But she has made a pair that fit him perfectly, in pure merino wool.

 A good read.

Another Year in Books

This week, one of my book groups met for our annual Christmas dinner, and for the third year I made Christmas cards for the other members showing the books we have read this year.

 

I found  The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson a bit tedious (even though it has sold over 3 million copies world-wide, according to Wikipedia), but the book I really didn't like was  A Short History Of England by Simon Jenkins.  It was inevitably superficial, since it attempted to cover so much ground in a single book - not even a particularly long book.  It starts with the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain and ends more or less at the present day (although the last part of the book is of course about the United Kingdom and not just England).  Jenkins writes about important men (hardly any women) and significant events and ignores the rest of the world entirely, except as adversaries or allies of England in war.  It's  history as "just one damn thing after another".  For me, it didn't convey any sense  of what it might have been like to be living at a particular time in history, which is what I find interesting in reading about past times. 

When it was my turn to propose the book that we should read next, I chose Shakespeare's Restless World by Neil MacGregor  as an antidote.  Fortunately, we all enjoyed reading it.  It is full of fascinating detail about life in Shakespeare's time, and beautifully illustrated - the book is structured around surviving objects from that time.  It describes a very different world, when Venice was a world power and the King of Morocco was extremely wealthy,  while England was a not very powerful country on the edge of Europe, under threat of invasion from Spain for much of the period.  London was an unhealthy place to live at the best of times, and there were frequent outbreaks of plague.  There was huge political uncertainty too - public discussion of who would succeed Elizabeth I was forbidden (I didn't know that).   Reading about the concerns of Londoners in Shakespeare's time makes it even more remarkable that his plays are still relevant today.   

I have had to keep all the books that we read during the year so that I could photograph them for the card.  But now the Simon Jenkins book and The Hundred Year Old Man are going to the nearest charity shop.  I enjoyed reading the others and will keep them.

Another Year in Books

Last year I made Christmas cards for one of my book groups with a photo of some of the books we had read.   It made a nice card, and several members of the group told me that they had kept theirs as a record.  The card created an instant tradition, and this Christmas I made a similar one, showing all the books we have read in 2012.

This year's books were:

• Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
• Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
• Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
• David Lodge, A Man of Parts
• Raymond Carver, Beginners
• Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game
• Beth Gutcheon, Still Missing
• Marina Lewycka, Various Pets Alive & Dead

Of the nine books, my top choice would be Still Missing. I can't say that it's an enjoyable read, because it deals with a parent's worst nightmare, a missing child. But it was gripping and very convincing in portraying how the parents and the people around them got through the aftermath of the disappearance as best they could.  The edition that we read is a re-issue by Persephone, and so was beautifully produced, a pleasure to hold. 

Happy reading in 2013. 

Bookish Christmas Card

Yesterday, one of the two book groups I belong to had its Christmas dinner, and I made Christmas cards for the other eight members showing a stack of some of the books we have read.   The group has been running for nearly four years, and we have read  about 30 books over that time, so only a small proportion appeared on the card - I had to choose from those that I still have copies of.  The books I bought but really did not like have gone to charity shops, and a few books I borrowed from the library.  We borrowed a set of 9 copies of one book (Pyongyang, a graphic novel by Guy Delisle) from the Readers Group support section of our excellent local library service.   And I have lent my copy of the last book we read  (Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch) to a friend.  What's left is a fairly random selection.  

We have read quite a variety: mainly novels, but also non-fiction, short stories, poetry, .... One of the good things about belonging to a book group is that you read a wide range of books, and find that you enjoy some that you wouldn't normally have chosen to read.

And the photo makes a nice card, if not especially Christmassy.  The message is more:  "Happy Reading in 2012".