March books
Apr. 1st, 2008 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slemslempikeMarch
The Fingerprint - Patricia Highsmith
School Ties - William Boyd
Older Men - Norma Klein
Phoebe of the Fourth - Ethel Talbot
Summer Nights - Caroline B Cooney
He Loves Me Not - Caroline B Cooney
Pledged - Alexandra Robbins
Aunts Aren't Gentlemen - PG Wodehouse
Nice Girls Don't - Caroline B Cooney
Accidents of Fortune - Andrew Devonshire
Barmy - Victoria Wood
Tiger in the Smoke - Margery Allingham
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian - Marina Lewycka
Chin Up, Girls!: A Book of Women's Obituaries from the Daily Telegraph - Georgia Powell and Katharine Ramsay
The Gentlewoman - Laura Talbot
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
Homoplot - Esther Saxey
Seriously Weird - Gene Kemp
Breaking Up - Norma Klein
Coming to Life - Norma Klein
Not So Quiet - Helen Zenna Smith
Dawn of the Dumb - Charlie Brooker
I wasn't overly impressed with The Fingerprint. Miss Silver has no presence for me at all, and the various suspects were largely unbelievable and insipid. Georgina was just too wet for words, and Mirrie needed shaking. The ends were wrapped up too quickly, and the death of the person who'd done it at the end was just annoying. That's not justice!
School Ties is a collection of two of William Boyd's films about public schools (Good at Games, Bad at Games and the other one the name of which I've forgotten), as well as his recollections of his own school days. They were interesting enough, but also annoying in places.
Older Men was great and really creepy. There is a 16 year old girl whose father adores her far too much. He has her mother committed to a mental hospital because he doesn't like women, only girls who adore him. She meets the family he had before he left them for his mother, and especially her stepsister who had the same relationship with him, and tries to convince her to get out of it before its too late. At the end, he's aquired a new family again, with a small girl who he adores.
Pheobe of the Fourth was rendered near-unreadable...by the author's overuse...of ellipses. Despite this...problematic style, it was an interesting read, about a girl who arrives at school finding their worship of The Manor School a bit silly, and how she learns to worship it a bit herself, but also how the Manor girls learn from her and realise that some of their actions were for show. Quite nice because they are quite often snide to each other, like real girls.
Summer Nights I enjoyed very much. It's the final book in a series of four that I've liked for ages, but never had this one. I like that Kip's so bossy and manages everything, and that even though Molly's going to be their friend, she's still quite awful. He Loves Me Not is about a girl who's a professional pianist and doesn't have time for much else, but she finds a boy who is similarly committed to his journalism, and they have a breakfast date. Nice Girls Don't is GREAT. Like He Loves Me Not, it's from a specifically romantic imprint, but is really focused on the girl rather than the relationship. Tory is on the girls' basketball team and mad that they don't get the support or funding that the boys' sports teams do. So she organises a Title IX thing with her school board and gets them to change the allocation. And along the way she finds that the boy she really liked isn't supportive of her, and isn't into school spirit, but the boy she kind of liked is really into her energy and helps her to put together a presentation and everything. I love Caroline B Cooney and her relationships where the girls aren't prepared or expected to change themselves to get the boy they like.
Pledged was kind of interesting. I don't know that much about sororities, but even so there wasn't anything particularly new in there. I liked her relationship with the girls, that was critical but not condemning. I would really like to read something similar about fraternities. Though I suspect it might be like the adult girls' school stories vs adult boys' school stories, where the men's reflections are much less troubled. Even so, recommendations welcomed.
I had somehow not read Aunts Aren't Gentlemen before, and enjoyed it muchly.
Accidents of Fortune was a library sale book I picked up because of the Mitford connection. Less about Debo than I had hoped, but actually he's a really interesting writer, and I appreciated the way he'd obviously reflected on his privilege, and how he was grateful and sensible to his obligations. He's amusing, mostly on purpose, though the way her refers to Harold Macmillan the Prime Minister as Uncle Harold without fail was rather peculiar, to say the least! I don't think I have ever been to Chatsworth, and I feel I should make the effort.
Barmy was enjoyable even if obviously no substitute for watching the sketches being performed.
I liked Tiger in the Smoke, even if it does have my bugbear of criminals dying before justice is meted out. Also whatshername was rather drippy and a bit annoying, and the letter from husband 1 to husband 2 was sick-making.
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian I quite enjoyed, but not as much as I was expecting to based on reviews I'd read. I also half hoped that there would be secret Peterboroughian knowledge contained within so that I could enjoy the book On Another Level, but either it didn't or I don't actually qualify to know the secret Peterboroughian knowledge, so that dream was thwarted.
I suppose I should have been clued in by the fact that it's from the Telegraph, but reading the introduction to the collection was a mistake. The obituaries themselves are fascinating and well-written (though there is a strange assertion that it was the way Grace Hopper looked and not what she did that led many to erroneously assume she was a feminist), but the introduction is infuriating. It explains that the women in these pages had no time for feminism (it excepts Bella Abzug, but not Jill Tweedie, rather insanely), and would have been contemptuous of the current "whinging", and had no tales to tell of male chauvinism. Right. Clearly nothing to do with the fact that (and again, it is the Telegraph after all), most of the women in the pages are immensely privileged in other aspects of their life and might have had more resources, and that the first few exceptions to male-dominated spheres quite often don't receive the same antagonism that the women who follow do. Anyway.
The Gentlewoman is a Virago book, written 1950s, I think, and about the second world war, and a governess who is a gigantic snob, and how she fails to cope with the change in social order. Very good, and as awful as Miss Bolby was I never fully lost sympathy with her.
I read Rebecca after enjoying the That Mitchell and Webb Look's parody and realising that I probably should read it. It was brilliant, but I will only ever think of Mrs Danvers as David Mitchell. Anyone have any opinions about Rebecca's Tale, or whatever the Sally Beauman prequel's called?
I thought Homoplot was very good indeed - the kind of lit crit where it doesn't matter if you haven't read the books because they're written about so well, but that also makes you want to seek them out to better understand it all. It's about the coming-out story and the construction of queer identites, and the problems that certain identities create within the strictures of the genre.
I was pleased to buy Seriously Weird in a library sale and now I am doubly so because I didn't waste more money on it, and the little money I did spend went to a good cause. I was really disappointed, as I've really enjoyed her books before, and I don't think just because I first read them when I was young. This book is about a girl and her family, especially her younger brother, who is undiagnosed but probably meant to be autistic. Almost all the characters are unbelievable and one-dimensional - the headteacher who wants Troy out of her mainstream school purely so that she can have a better OfSTED report, the people who are hurt by Troy's behaviour, the family themselves. Being charitable, it could be that it's just that the narrator sees them that way, but even so she'd have to be remarkably dense to do so, which I don't think is intended. Also, she starts out by describing her friends, and tells us one is black and one is Chinese, but doesn't mention the race of the others, grr, and then later on in one of the number games Troy likes, he does a think where he takes ages where they started something - so when he started school, when his dad started work, and when his mum got married. Nevermind that the dad clearly also got married, or that the mum's job is quite important in the story, that's ignored. Bah.
I'd read a piece in Bitchfest about Norma Klein's teen lit and how feministy they were, so I bought a bunch from Amazon marketplace. When they arrived, it turned out that she also wrote fairly trashy adult lit, which I had accidentally purchased, along with Breaking Up, which is YA, but also one of the few I have in fact already read. I realised this during the first chapter when the heroine is reading Playgirl on the aeroplane. Then she has a friend who is too close to her brother, and then she sort of steals the brother away and eventually has sex with him. It was good. Coming to Life was one of the trashy adult books, which is quite odd. It's listed as romance, but what actually happens is that her husband goes mad, starts hitting her, she has an affair that the man's wife approves of and nearly starts a menage a trois, gets an MA so that she can get a job and be independent and ends up single and much much happier.
Not So Quiet was simply astounding. I picked it up just to have something to read a chapter of before going to sleep and then suddenly I'd read it all and couldn't sleep for ages because of having to think about it. Though quite why I thought that a chapter of a book about driving an ambulance in the first world war would be a nice relaxing read before bed I have no idea. Anyway, it was just brilliant, the story of a young woman working in an ambulance convoy, changing from being a nice, well-bred young lady to being someone who can deal with the horrific work they have to do. She has to keep this separate from writing to her parents, who need her to be their brave girl doing her bit. At one point she is imagining her mother and the woman with whom she competes to be doing the most for the war effort in the camp, showing them round the ambulances she's cleaning, the vomit and the shit and the blood and the smell of gangrene, and the men gone mad and their faces blown off, and it's awful to read. By the end she copes by withdrawing herself entirely, and doesn't so much deal with the death and dismemberment of her family and friends as just not be able to care very much any more. Apparently she was initally approached to write a 'response' to All Quiet on the Western Front called All Quaint on the Western Front, and she was so horrified at the thought she wrote this, based on the diaries of an ambulance driver.
Dawn of the Dumb was a bathroom book of several months, which I decided to finish up so that I could post it on this list. It was okay. Very irritating when read in large chunks, and he can be rather creepy about women from time to time. There were a few things that made me properly laugh, but I can no longer recall what they were. Also he thinks David Tennant is the best Doctor ever (only he said "Doctor Who"), and I disagree with that quite strongly.
In conclusion - Not So Quiet is amazing, read it. Seriously Weird is not, don't.
The Fingerprint - Patricia Highsmith
School Ties - William Boyd
Older Men - Norma Klein
Phoebe of the Fourth - Ethel Talbot
Summer Nights - Caroline B Cooney
He Loves Me Not - Caroline B Cooney
Pledged - Alexandra Robbins
Aunts Aren't Gentlemen - PG Wodehouse
Nice Girls Don't - Caroline B Cooney
Accidents of Fortune - Andrew Devonshire
Barmy - Victoria Wood
Tiger in the Smoke - Margery Allingham
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian - Marina Lewycka
Chin Up, Girls!: A Book of Women's Obituaries from the Daily Telegraph - Georgia Powell and Katharine Ramsay
The Gentlewoman - Laura Talbot
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
Homoplot - Esther Saxey
Seriously Weird - Gene Kemp
Breaking Up - Norma Klein
Coming to Life - Norma Klein
Not So Quiet - Helen Zenna Smith
Dawn of the Dumb - Charlie Brooker
I wasn't overly impressed with The Fingerprint. Miss Silver has no presence for me at all, and the various suspects were largely unbelievable and insipid. Georgina was just too wet for words, and Mirrie needed shaking. The ends were wrapped up too quickly, and the death of the person who'd done it at the end was just annoying. That's not justice!
School Ties is a collection of two of William Boyd's films about public schools (Good at Games, Bad at Games and the other one the name of which I've forgotten), as well as his recollections of his own school days. They were interesting enough, but also annoying in places.
Older Men was great and really creepy. There is a 16 year old girl whose father adores her far too much. He has her mother committed to a mental hospital because he doesn't like women, only girls who adore him. She meets the family he had before he left them for his mother, and especially her stepsister who had the same relationship with him, and tries to convince her to get out of it before its too late. At the end, he's aquired a new family again, with a small girl who he adores.
Pheobe of the Fourth was rendered near-unreadable...by the author's overuse...of ellipses. Despite this...problematic style, it was an interesting read, about a girl who arrives at school finding their worship of The Manor School a bit silly, and how she learns to worship it a bit herself, but also how the Manor girls learn from her and realise that some of their actions were for show. Quite nice because they are quite often snide to each other, like real girls.
Summer Nights I enjoyed very much. It's the final book in a series of four that I've liked for ages, but never had this one. I like that Kip's so bossy and manages everything, and that even though Molly's going to be their friend, she's still quite awful. He Loves Me Not is about a girl who's a professional pianist and doesn't have time for much else, but she finds a boy who is similarly committed to his journalism, and they have a breakfast date. Nice Girls Don't is GREAT. Like He Loves Me Not, it's from a specifically romantic imprint, but is really focused on the girl rather than the relationship. Tory is on the girls' basketball team and mad that they don't get the support or funding that the boys' sports teams do. So she organises a Title IX thing with her school board and gets them to change the allocation. And along the way she finds that the boy she really liked isn't supportive of her, and isn't into school spirit, but the boy she kind of liked is really into her energy and helps her to put together a presentation and everything. I love Caroline B Cooney and her relationships where the girls aren't prepared or expected to change themselves to get the boy they like.
Pledged was kind of interesting. I don't know that much about sororities, but even so there wasn't anything particularly new in there. I liked her relationship with the girls, that was critical but not condemning. I would really like to read something similar about fraternities. Though I suspect it might be like the adult girls' school stories vs adult boys' school stories, where the men's reflections are much less troubled. Even so, recommendations welcomed.
I had somehow not read Aunts Aren't Gentlemen before, and enjoyed it muchly.
Accidents of Fortune was a library sale book I picked up because of the Mitford connection. Less about Debo than I had hoped, but actually he's a really interesting writer, and I appreciated the way he'd obviously reflected on his privilege, and how he was grateful and sensible to his obligations. He's amusing, mostly on purpose, though the way her refers to Harold Macmillan the Prime Minister as Uncle Harold without fail was rather peculiar, to say the least! I don't think I have ever been to Chatsworth, and I feel I should make the effort.
Barmy was enjoyable even if obviously no substitute for watching the sketches being performed.
I liked Tiger in the Smoke, even if it does have my bugbear of criminals dying before justice is meted out. Also whatshername was rather drippy and a bit annoying, and the letter from husband 1 to husband 2 was sick-making.
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian I quite enjoyed, but not as much as I was expecting to based on reviews I'd read. I also half hoped that there would be secret Peterboroughian knowledge contained within so that I could enjoy the book On Another Level, but either it didn't or I don't actually qualify to know the secret Peterboroughian knowledge, so that dream was thwarted.
I suppose I should have been clued in by the fact that it's from the Telegraph, but reading the introduction to the collection was a mistake. The obituaries themselves are fascinating and well-written (though there is a strange assertion that it was the way Grace Hopper looked and not what she did that led many to erroneously assume she was a feminist), but the introduction is infuriating. It explains that the women in these pages had no time for feminism (it excepts Bella Abzug, but not Jill Tweedie, rather insanely), and would have been contemptuous of the current "whinging", and had no tales to tell of male chauvinism. Right. Clearly nothing to do with the fact that (and again, it is the Telegraph after all), most of the women in the pages are immensely privileged in other aspects of their life and might have had more resources, and that the first few exceptions to male-dominated spheres quite often don't receive the same antagonism that the women who follow do. Anyway.
The Gentlewoman is a Virago book, written 1950s, I think, and about the second world war, and a governess who is a gigantic snob, and how she fails to cope with the change in social order. Very good, and as awful as Miss Bolby was I never fully lost sympathy with her.
I read Rebecca after enjoying the That Mitchell and Webb Look's parody and realising that I probably should read it. It was brilliant, but I will only ever think of Mrs Danvers as David Mitchell. Anyone have any opinions about Rebecca's Tale, or whatever the Sally Beauman prequel's called?
I thought Homoplot was very good indeed - the kind of lit crit where it doesn't matter if you haven't read the books because they're written about so well, but that also makes you want to seek them out to better understand it all. It's about the coming-out story and the construction of queer identites, and the problems that certain identities create within the strictures of the genre.
I was pleased to buy Seriously Weird in a library sale and now I am doubly so because I didn't waste more money on it, and the little money I did spend went to a good cause. I was really disappointed, as I've really enjoyed her books before, and I don't think just because I first read them when I was young. This book is about a girl and her family, especially her younger brother, who is undiagnosed but probably meant to be autistic. Almost all the characters are unbelievable and one-dimensional - the headteacher who wants Troy out of her mainstream school purely so that she can have a better OfSTED report, the people who are hurt by Troy's behaviour, the family themselves. Being charitable, it could be that it's just that the narrator sees them that way, but even so she'd have to be remarkably dense to do so, which I don't think is intended. Also, she starts out by describing her friends, and tells us one is black and one is Chinese, but doesn't mention the race of the others, grr, and then later on in one of the number games Troy likes, he does a think where he takes ages where they started something - so when he started school, when his dad started work, and when his mum got married. Nevermind that the dad clearly also got married, or that the mum's job is quite important in the story, that's ignored. Bah.
I'd read a piece in Bitchfest about Norma Klein's teen lit and how feministy they were, so I bought a bunch from Amazon marketplace. When they arrived, it turned out that she also wrote fairly trashy adult lit, which I had accidentally purchased, along with Breaking Up, which is YA, but also one of the few I have in fact already read. I realised this during the first chapter when the heroine is reading Playgirl on the aeroplane. Then she has a friend who is too close to her brother, and then she sort of steals the brother away and eventually has sex with him. It was good. Coming to Life was one of the trashy adult books, which is quite odd. It's listed as romance, but what actually happens is that her husband goes mad, starts hitting her, she has an affair that the man's wife approves of and nearly starts a menage a trois, gets an MA so that she can get a job and be independent and ends up single and much much happier.
Not So Quiet was simply astounding. I picked it up just to have something to read a chapter of before going to sleep and then suddenly I'd read it all and couldn't sleep for ages because of having to think about it. Though quite why I thought that a chapter of a book about driving an ambulance in the first world war would be a nice relaxing read before bed I have no idea. Anyway, it was just brilliant, the story of a young woman working in an ambulance convoy, changing from being a nice, well-bred young lady to being someone who can deal with the horrific work they have to do. She has to keep this separate from writing to her parents, who need her to be their brave girl doing her bit. At one point she is imagining her mother and the woman with whom she competes to be doing the most for the war effort in the camp, showing them round the ambulances she's cleaning, the vomit and the shit and the blood and the smell of gangrene, and the men gone mad and their faces blown off, and it's awful to read. By the end she copes by withdrawing herself entirely, and doesn't so much deal with the death and dismemberment of her family and friends as just not be able to care very much any more. Apparently she was initally approached to write a 'response' to All Quiet on the Western Front called All Quaint on the Western Front, and she was so horrified at the thought she wrote this, based on the diaries of an ambulance driver.
Dawn of the Dumb was a bathroom book of several months, which I decided to finish up so that I could post it on this list. It was okay. Very irritating when read in large chunks, and he can be rather creepy about women from time to time. There were a few things that made me properly laugh, but I can no longer recall what they were. Also he thinks David Tennant is the best Doctor ever (only he said "Doctor Who"), and I disagree with that quite strongly.
In conclusion - Not So Quiet is amazing, read it. Seriously Weird is not, don't.
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-01 08:15 am (UTC)When I was younger I read just about every book written about the First World War. I think I'll spare myself Not so Quiet, although it sounds interesting.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-01 10:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-01 09:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-01 10:44 am (UTC)Yes indeed about Not So Quiet
Date: 2008-04-01 08:09 pm (UTC)Re: Yes indeed about Not So Quiet
Date: 2008-04-02 10:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-02 04:34 pm (UTC)Please do not review my book if you read it, however: I fear your accurate summing up.
I never liked Summer Nights because basically in the Matt-and-Emily story, Emily had to decide and agree to have it All Matt's Way, which didn't really seem like a particularly reasonable compromise. So I sulked. I have now lost it, and am annoyed, which is slightly hypocritical given my reaction to it, but I have the other three and they were gifts and I am MISSING THE LAST BOOK, damn it.
I re-read Rebecca earlier this year. I want to read Jamaica Inn as we always passed it on the way to my grandmother's house and it's annoying not to have read the book associated.
Sometimes I think of doing book review-y things, but I always think I'll have the Wrong Opinion (which is silly because there presumably can't be a wrong opinion, opinions being something subjective) and am too scared so to do. And, of course, embarrassed at the amount of re-reading I do, and the nature of my reading. I think I need to get over myself a bit.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-03 04:46 pm (UTC)I know what you mean about Matt and Emily. I didn't mind too much though, as it seemed like it was a counterpart to Con and Anne, where she goes off and he has to deal with it. Matt was at least intending to come back to Emily. I think I just felt that she came over a bit brattish over it, and so I thought if I were Matt I'd have scarpered too!
I've not read any other Daphne DuMaurier books, I'll be keeping an eye out for them though.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-01 09:03 pm (UTC)As for Ethel Talbot, I remember getting very annoyed by similar issues with her punctuation in Diana the Daring, and your review makes this book, which I'm pretty sure I haven't read, sound quite similar to her Sally at School. At least, I think it was SatS and hers.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-01 10:37 pm (UTC)I think I might have read Sally at School at some point, but the only Talbot I ever remember anything of is Patricia, Prefect, which I did like, and don't remember having the same... issues.