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slemslempike) wrote2010-02-03 10:26 pm
slemslempike) wrote2010-02-03 10:26 pm
January Books
January
Helene Hanff - Underfoot in Show Business
The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett
Letters to Ms. - Mary Thom
Flash Fire - Caroline B Cooney
Operation: Homefront - Caroline B Cooney
Family Secrets - Norma Klein
Sister of the Bride - Beverly Cleary
Ramona Forever - Beverly Cleary
The View from Saturday - EL Konigsburg
I Love You, Beth Cooper - Larry Doyle
The Divorce Express - Paula Danziger
It's an Aardvark-Eat-Turtle World - Paula Danziger
A Field Guide to the English - Sarah Lyall
Travels with my Aunt - Graham Greene
The Pursuit of Laughter - Diana Mitford
Masha - Mara Kay
The Youngest Lady-in-Waiting - Mara Kay
Brick Lane - Monica Ali
Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih
La Batarde - Violette Leduc
Emma's War - Deborah Scroggins
Belching Out the Devil - Mark Thomas
I found the Helene Hanff in a bookshop in Chicago with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zoje_george, then read it in her house and refused to leave it for her. That's the sort of houseguest I am. I was surprised to read that it was her first book. It's her account of being selected onto a playwriting course to be developed, never getting anywhere at all and her various sidejobs and projects failing in amusing ways.
The Uncommon Reader was a lovely read. My grandfather had mentioned it to me before, saying that he thought it was a bit disrespectful to suggest that the Queen was not a keen reader (and he is in no way an ardent monarchist, so I was surprised at this). I could see where he was coming from, but I thought it was a lovely book.
Letters to Ms. is from 1987, a collection of readers' letters, some criticising the magazine and others loving it. There are some sad ones about women who are having to stop reading the magazine because their husbands think that they're becoming too bolshy and they want to save their marriage. Mostly it's just the same discourses that are happening now, which is both comforting and depressing.
Flash Fire and Operation: Homefront are early/mid-nineties books by Cooney. I'd not sought these out as I'd assumed they were Point Horror ones of hers, which I'm not so interested in. But they are not, and are very readable though not among her best. Flash Fire is pretty much as it says. There are a bunch of insanely rich people living in a valley near LA when some fires start up. The kids are home alone, and need to get out of there. There are parental relationships that are given a kick-start about what's important, a selfish American teenage nanny, a put-upon teenage Latina maid, a family of purely evil looters and some horses. Not everyone makes it, to my surprise, though it was a bit lacking in nuance around the bad characters. Operation: Homefront is about a family whose mother is in the US version of the TA, and gets called up to fight in the Iraq war. They go from gung-ho patriotism and bloodthirsty war to worrying if she'll ever come home, and a greater appreciation of the human cost of war.
Family Secrets is about a boy and girl who have just got together when they discover that their parents have been having an affair with each other, and they're about to be step-siblings. They have a fairly petulant and difficult teenagery relationship, made more difficult by their proximity. It was a good, non-easy look at sex. Sister of the Bride was published in 1963. Barbara's older sister calls from college to say that she's getting married. She and her fiance don't want her to leave school, but there is still a change in her, as she is no longer giggling with Barbara about the silliness of her mother's "girls" group, and talks about being part of the wives' group at university and getting their "PhT" degrees (putting hubby through).
From that to a Cleary reread - Ramona Forever, in which Ramona's lovely aunt Bea marries Howie's silly uncle Hobart. I remembered little bits like sticking her hem up with tape, Willa Jean sitting triumphantly on her accordion and the names for the baby who turns out to be Roberta. Other rereads were the two Paula Danziger. I had forgtten that Danziger's first person writing has a lot of cop-outs like "I sit and think about how difficult it is to be the kid of divorced parents". And I'd forgotten what a dreadful little brat Phoebe turns into.
The View from Saturday was a nice, if rather slight, read. A group of kids are put together for an inter-school quiz, and the chapters relate how each of them came to be in the group, and then why they know the answers that they know. It's a little bit like Slumdog Millionaire (though this book is from 1996). One thing that annoyed me was that they had a character say that "tip" and "posh" were both words that were originally acronyms, and they're NOT, that's a MYTH. Hmph.
I Love You, Beth Cooper is apparently now a film, but I haven't seen it. I liked the book, in which a geeky valedictorian uses his speech to tell the most popular girl in the school that he loves her, even though they've never spoken. Anyway, she and her friends show up at his house, obviously to take the piss, but then they end up having a really weird night together with his best friend, and it's all a bit tangled and lovely.
The first couple of chapters of A Field Guide to the English are DREADFUL. It gets a bit better later on, and the chapter about women in the houses of parliament is really interesting. But she conflates "British" with "English upper class" - about how the British send their children to boarding school at a very early age, and we're all terribly repressed about sex and have rubbish teeth WHICH WE DON'T. I gave it to Jess to read and was very entertained by her expressions of fury at the same places as me.
Travels with my Aunt was great! A retired bank manager meets his mad aunt at his mother's funeral, and ends up in a world of drugs, money laundering, international criminals and other such mayhem.
The Pursuit of Laughter wasn't disappointing exactly, as I have no particularly high opinion of Diana, but odd that it was titled such. She is not nearly as amusing as she thinks. Her writing about being imprisoned without trial was very moving, though, and thought-provoking. It is odd how liberal she can be about things like sexuality, and yet so blinkered about fascism and race.
When I was visitingyiskah in Sudan she had photocopies of Masha and The Youngest Lady-in-Waiting, which I had been hearing about for years but never had a chance to read. And they are MARVELLOUS. In the first one, Masha goes away to the Smolini Institute in Russia, moving through the ranks of the school. She has a friend who is a birch tree, which is far less sickening than it sounds. And her best friend (I have forgotten all the names, this month) is BRILLIANT. In the sequel Masha is selected as a lady-in-waiting for a Grand Duchess, and has a lovely time at first. They meet Pushkin (who is a DICK, apparently), but then their friends are caught up in the Decembrist Revolt and their happiness unravels.
I liked Brick Lane very much indeed. It was funny and sad, and I very much liked the ice skating at the beginning and end. Also her sister's employer saying she was going to start a charity about child workers in Bangladesh "like the ones who clean the roof?" "No, not those." "Like the ones who come to the door and sell us food?" "No, not those either."
Season of Migration to the North is a novel by a Sudanese writer, about Sudan. The main character has come back to his village for a visit after living in the UK, and meets a newcomer, who is very strange. He turns out to have been a bigamist type in the UK who killed his wife and caused the suicide of other women. He vanishes one day from the village in the floods and is presmued dead. His widow is pressured to marry an old man in the village, and then she and he are found dead, she has stabbed him and then killed herself, I think, and she has been violently sexually assaulted.
La Batarde (with some accents on some letters) is the autobiography of Violette Leduc, who I'd never heard of before. It reads very like a novel though. It is the story of her unhappy relationships with girlfriends, and an unhappy marriage to a man, and the weird mix of masochism and sadism of her emotional responses. Her girlfriend buys her some clothes at one of the posh shops in Paris, and then in the second world war she starts running a black market food business. Very odd.
I started to reduce my consumption of Coke-brand drinks a few years ago after seeing Mark Thomas's stand-up show where he talked about the murder of union members in coke bottling plants. I now try to remember to check the origin of drinks I buy, though I don't go without if it's a case of Minute Maid or nothing. Anyway, so reading Belching Out the Devil was an attempt to remind myself why, and it worked. Interesting and funny, amazingly not very preachy at all. VERY badly proofread though.
Helene Hanff - Underfoot in Show Business
The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett
Letters to Ms. - Mary Thom
Flash Fire - Caroline B Cooney
Operation: Homefront - Caroline B Cooney
Family Secrets - Norma Klein
Sister of the Bride - Beverly Cleary
Ramona Forever - Beverly Cleary
The View from Saturday - EL Konigsburg
I Love You, Beth Cooper - Larry Doyle
The Divorce Express - Paula Danziger
It's an Aardvark-Eat-Turtle World - Paula Danziger
A Field Guide to the English - Sarah Lyall
Travels with my Aunt - Graham Greene
The Pursuit of Laughter - Diana Mitford
Masha - Mara Kay
The Youngest Lady-in-Waiting - Mara Kay
Brick Lane - Monica Ali
Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih
La Batarde - Violette Leduc
Emma's War - Deborah Scroggins
Belching Out the Devil - Mark Thomas
I found the Helene Hanff in a bookshop in Chicago with
zoje_george, then read it in her house and refused to leave it for her. That's the sort of houseguest I am. I was surprised to read that it was her first book. It's her account of being selected onto a playwriting course to be developed, never getting anywhere at all and her various sidejobs and projects failing in amusing ways. The Uncommon Reader was a lovely read. My grandfather had mentioned it to me before, saying that he thought it was a bit disrespectful to suggest that the Queen was not a keen reader (and he is in no way an ardent monarchist, so I was surprised at this). I could see where he was coming from, but I thought it was a lovely book.
Letters to Ms. is from 1987, a collection of readers' letters, some criticising the magazine and others loving it. There are some sad ones about women who are having to stop reading the magazine because their husbands think that they're becoming too bolshy and they want to save their marriage. Mostly it's just the same discourses that are happening now, which is both comforting and depressing.
Flash Fire and Operation: Homefront are early/mid-nineties books by Cooney. I'd not sought these out as I'd assumed they were Point Horror ones of hers, which I'm not so interested in. But they are not, and are very readable though not among her best. Flash Fire is pretty much as it says. There are a bunch of insanely rich people living in a valley near LA when some fires start up. The kids are home alone, and need to get out of there. There are parental relationships that are given a kick-start about what's important, a selfish American teenage nanny, a put-upon teenage Latina maid, a family of purely evil looters and some horses. Not everyone makes it, to my surprise, though it was a bit lacking in nuance around the bad characters. Operation: Homefront is about a family whose mother is in the US version of the TA, and gets called up to fight in the Iraq war. They go from gung-ho patriotism and bloodthirsty war to worrying if she'll ever come home, and a greater appreciation of the human cost of war.
Family Secrets is about a boy and girl who have just got together when they discover that their parents have been having an affair with each other, and they're about to be step-siblings. They have a fairly petulant and difficult teenagery relationship, made more difficult by their proximity. It was a good, non-easy look at sex. Sister of the Bride was published in 1963. Barbara's older sister calls from college to say that she's getting married. She and her fiance don't want her to leave school, but there is still a change in her, as she is no longer giggling with Barbara about the silliness of her mother's "girls" group, and talks about being part of the wives' group at university and getting their "PhT" degrees (putting hubby through).
From that to a Cleary reread - Ramona Forever, in which Ramona's lovely aunt Bea marries Howie's silly uncle Hobart. I remembered little bits like sticking her hem up with tape, Willa Jean sitting triumphantly on her accordion and the names for the baby who turns out to be Roberta. Other rereads were the two Paula Danziger. I had forgtten that Danziger's first person writing has a lot of cop-outs like "I sit and think about how difficult it is to be the kid of divorced parents". And I'd forgotten what a dreadful little brat Phoebe turns into.
The View from Saturday was a nice, if rather slight, read. A group of kids are put together for an inter-school quiz, and the chapters relate how each of them came to be in the group, and then why they know the answers that they know. It's a little bit like Slumdog Millionaire (though this book is from 1996). One thing that annoyed me was that they had a character say that "tip" and "posh" were both words that were originally acronyms, and they're NOT, that's a MYTH. Hmph.
I Love You, Beth Cooper is apparently now a film, but I haven't seen it. I liked the book, in which a geeky valedictorian uses his speech to tell the most popular girl in the school that he loves her, even though they've never spoken. Anyway, she and her friends show up at his house, obviously to take the piss, but then they end up having a really weird night together with his best friend, and it's all a bit tangled and lovely.
The first couple of chapters of A Field Guide to the English are DREADFUL. It gets a bit better later on, and the chapter about women in the houses of parliament is really interesting. But she conflates "British" with "English upper class" - about how the British send their children to boarding school at a very early age, and we're all terribly repressed about sex and have rubbish teeth WHICH WE DON'T. I gave it to Jess to read and was very entertained by her expressions of fury at the same places as me.
Travels with my Aunt was great! A retired bank manager meets his mad aunt at his mother's funeral, and ends up in a world of drugs, money laundering, international criminals and other such mayhem.
The Pursuit of Laughter wasn't disappointing exactly, as I have no particularly high opinion of Diana, but odd that it was titled such. She is not nearly as amusing as she thinks. Her writing about being imprisoned without trial was very moving, though, and thought-provoking. It is odd how liberal she can be about things like sexuality, and yet so blinkered about fascism and race.
When I was visiting
yiskah in Sudan she had photocopies of Masha and The Youngest Lady-in-Waiting, which I had been hearing about for years but never had a chance to read. And they are MARVELLOUS. In the first one, Masha goes away to the Smolini Institute in Russia, moving through the ranks of the school. She has a friend who is a birch tree, which is far less sickening than it sounds. And her best friend (I have forgotten all the names, this month) is BRILLIANT. In the sequel Masha is selected as a lady-in-waiting for a Grand Duchess, and has a lovely time at first. They meet Pushkin (who is a DICK, apparently), but then their friends are caught up in the Decembrist Revolt and their happiness unravels.I liked Brick Lane very much indeed. It was funny and sad, and I very much liked the ice skating at the beginning and end. Also her sister's employer saying she was going to start a charity about child workers in Bangladesh "like the ones who clean the roof?" "No, not those." "Like the ones who come to the door and sell us food?" "No, not those either."
Season of Migration to the North is a novel by a Sudanese writer, about Sudan. The main character has come back to his village for a visit after living in the UK, and meets a newcomer, who is very strange. He turns out to have been a bigamist type in the UK who killed his wife and caused the suicide of other women. He vanishes one day from the village in the floods and is presmued dead. His widow is pressured to marry an old man in the village, and then she and he are found dead, she has stabbed him and then killed herself, I think, and she has been violently sexually assaulted.
La Batarde (with some accents on some letters) is the autobiography of Violette Leduc, who I'd never heard of before. It reads very like a novel though. It is the story of her unhappy relationships with girlfriends, and an unhappy marriage to a man, and the weird mix of masochism and sadism of her emotional responses. Her girlfriend buys her some clothes at one of the posh shops in Paris, and then in the second world war she starts running a black market food business. Very odd.
I started to reduce my consumption of Coke-brand drinks a few years ago after seeing Mark Thomas's stand-up show where he talked about the murder of union members in coke bottling plants. I now try to remember to check the origin of drinks I buy, though I don't go without if it's a case of Minute Maid or nothing. Anyway, so reading Belching Out the Devil was an attempt to remind myself why, and it worked. Interesting and funny, amazingly not very preachy at all. VERY badly proofread though.
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I have a copy of Masha and I love it, but I haven't read TYLiW in years. I used to get them both out of the library regularly. (BTW, the best friend is Sophie.) You might also want to watch out for A Circling Star if you haven't already read it. It's also set in Russia, but at ballet school rather than Smolni.
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A Circling Star is brilliant - all about women's roles and what they have to do to succeed and the choices they all make whether to put their own desires or men's desires for them first, whether to be subject or object. If you ever see a copy, grab on to it with both hands!
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