August books
Sep. 1st, 2011 02:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slemslempikeAugust
Mary Francis Shura - Summer Dreams, Winter Love
Azar Nafasi - Reading Lolita in Tehran
Fiona Cooper - Heartbreak on the High Sierra
Tracey Rosenberg - The Girl in the Bunker
Jenny Lindsay - The Things We Leave Behind
Michael Arditti - Unity
Joyce Grenfell - Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure
LT Meade - The Rebel of the School (K)
Christopher Brookmyre - The Sacred Art of Stealing
Victoria Walker - The Winter of Enchantment
Victoria Walker - The House at Hadlows
Marian Keyes - This Charming Man
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View of Hills
Mike Thomas - Pocket Notebook
Richard Herring - How Not to Grow Up
Mrs Stephen Fry - Mrs Fry's Diary
Summer Dreams, Winter Love is a typical teen book from the 80s/90s, and I love them. This one isn't particularly good, or bad, or memorable, but it suits me. The main character (see, can't even remember her name) is a girl who meets an older boy on her first day of high school, and cannot stop thinking about him, for like TWO YEARS. It's actually quite nicely done, in that she tries to work harder at not thinking about him and getting over it. She goes out with other boys, one of whom is an utter creep, but nothing works, and at the end of the book it turns out he feels the same way. WOOO. I never liked the boy, who might have been called Michael, come to think of it, and although the ending was very very obvious from the start, I was still somewhat disappointed.
Somehow I had got the idea that Reading Lolita in Tehran was once of those "exotic" pseudo-memoirs written by white men, but it's totally not! I really liked it, the novels weaving through their lives, and how she related to her students. It makes me want to read more Nabokov, though I probably won't. Heartbreak on the High Sierra is a lesbian Western novel, with a woman who is riding West coming across a valley full of women who are on the run from various things and live together and ride and shoot and chase off the group of evil men who want to steal their land. The plot was good, but I just couldn't get into it. The language was too stylized (written by a woman from Bristol, I think), and it wasn't for me.
The Girl in the Bunker was ace. It's the story of the Goebbels children's time in Hitler's bunker. I went to the launch of this, and as part of the discussion someone said "of course we all know the story", but I totally didn't. I knew Hitler died, that was pretty much it. I resisted looking up on Wikipedia until the end of the book, but (spoiler) THEY TOTALLY DIE. Their parents take them to the bunker to prove to the Fuhrer how committed they are and then when it all goes wrong they kill the children with poison. The book's narrated by Helga, the oldest child, who keeps a diary to be a record like her father. She idolizes Hitler, and believes that there will be secret weapons to win the war. As the book goes on and everything falls apart, she begins to realise that this is not true, and makes plans to escape with her siblings. But they don't make it out.
I bought Jenny Lindsay's book of poetry after seeing her read at a poetry evening someone at work organised a while back, but unfortunately I think much of the merit is in her performance of them, and they don't work as well for me written down. I still like "we know we're fucked", but overall it's not something I'll return to.
I found out about Unity when I was looking for even more information about the Mitfords. It's a novel about making a film about Unity Mitford, mostly when she moved to Germany to meet Hitler. It's sort of curated rather than narrated, by a man who acted in the initial student production of a play, and then kept in contact with the writer when he went to Germany to work for a famously difficult and genius director. The first section is Luke (the writer)'s letters to the curator about filming, and his girlfriend who is playing Unity and how she gets caught up in politics, then there are extracts from a diary written by another of the actresses, and finally a series of interviews with other people who were involved. Basically the actress playing Unity gets involved with ultra-left wing politics, and ends up killing herself and others in the attempt to set a bomb off in a public place. The film is abandoned, and much is made of the upper class English girl becoming radicalised while playing an upper class English girl who was radicalised. Fascinating.
I actually don't know much Joyce Grenfell beyond "George...don't do that", and maybe Stately as a Galleon, but still enjoyed the first volume of her autobiography (I'm midway through the second).
The Rebel of the School was HILARIOUS. The rebel in question is an Irish girl, and I started making notes of the awful things that were said, but lost track. She calls mistresses darling, and lives in a castle, and I pretty much hate her. She formed a wild Irish girls association, and leads the scholarship/foundation girls astray, and nearly gets one of them expelled who will then leave a life of poverty. Ugh.
I really liked Angelique, the police officer protagonist of The Sacred Art of Stealing. I also liked that when she had sex with the bank robber he came as soon as she touched him, because he was so excited after not having sex for so long, and they still went on to have a great time. And that it was all very clever and fitted together so nicely. I shall read the next book that features her
I found the two Victoria Walker books in a charity shop - they're published by Fidra and look pretty nice with it. I enjoyed The Winter of Enchantment much more than the sequel, partly because I found the magical enchantment slight tweeness a bit too much to take. I did very much enjoy reading Victoria Walker's introduction, and how she ended up living on a farm in Wales with no heating or indeed clue about what to do.
This Charming Man was a grab from the work shelf, which I was pleased to have as I've enjoyed her books previously. This one felt a little off somehow. I was early on put off by Lola's insistence that even though the cross-dressers she was hosting didn't like the term (or recognise themselves as) "trannies", she should get to use it because she liked the way it sounded. I also thought that the characterisation of the abusive man was a bit one-note and not terribly believable. It was very sad and made me feel depressed though, and think more about whoever it was that said that women can no longer look to the law to resolve cases of sexual and domestic violence.
I hadn't read any Ishiguro before A Pale View of Hills, and thought this was excellent and want to read more (and probably will). I am quite a plot-focused person, so I found the non-resolution and glimpses-rather-than-explanation a bit challenging at times. Pocket Notebook is VERY different - a copper gone bad and clearly mentally ill and what he writes down in his notebook.
I find Richard Herring very difficult. Partly I feel guilty for wishing he would just work with Stewart Lee, when that very obviously isn't his fault, and also he is just so embarrassing in his blog. I thought that How Not to Grow Up showed him as fairly unpleasant and demanding a lot of the time, even beyond the level to which that was part of the story. Apparently he's still with the woman he represents himself as badgering into going out with him at the end of the book.
Mrs Fry's Diary was a Christmas present, and I was very pleasantly surprised that it stood up to being moved from a joke twitter account to a joke book quite well. I smiled several times, reader.
Mary Francis Shura - Summer Dreams, Winter Love
Azar Nafasi - Reading Lolita in Tehran
Fiona Cooper - Heartbreak on the High Sierra
Tracey Rosenberg - The Girl in the Bunker
Jenny Lindsay - The Things We Leave Behind
Michael Arditti - Unity
Joyce Grenfell - Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure
LT Meade - The Rebel of the School (K)
Christopher Brookmyre - The Sacred Art of Stealing
Victoria Walker - The Winter of Enchantment
Victoria Walker - The House at Hadlows
Marian Keyes - This Charming Man
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View of Hills
Mike Thomas - Pocket Notebook
Richard Herring - How Not to Grow Up
Mrs Stephen Fry - Mrs Fry's Diary
Summer Dreams, Winter Love is a typical teen book from the 80s/90s, and I love them. This one isn't particularly good, or bad, or memorable, but it suits me. The main character (see, can't even remember her name) is a girl who meets an older boy on her first day of high school, and cannot stop thinking about him, for like TWO YEARS. It's actually quite nicely done, in that she tries to work harder at not thinking about him and getting over it. She goes out with other boys, one of whom is an utter creep, but nothing works, and at the end of the book it turns out he feels the same way. WOOO. I never liked the boy, who might have been called Michael, come to think of it, and although the ending was very very obvious from the start, I was still somewhat disappointed.
Somehow I had got the idea that Reading Lolita in Tehran was once of those "exotic" pseudo-memoirs written by white men, but it's totally not! I really liked it, the novels weaving through their lives, and how she related to her students. It makes me want to read more Nabokov, though I probably won't. Heartbreak on the High Sierra is a lesbian Western novel, with a woman who is riding West coming across a valley full of women who are on the run from various things and live together and ride and shoot and chase off the group of evil men who want to steal their land. The plot was good, but I just couldn't get into it. The language was too stylized (written by a woman from Bristol, I think), and it wasn't for me.
The Girl in the Bunker was ace. It's the story of the Goebbels children's time in Hitler's bunker. I went to the launch of this, and as part of the discussion someone said "of course we all know the story", but I totally didn't. I knew Hitler died, that was pretty much it. I resisted looking up on Wikipedia until the end of the book, but (spoiler) THEY TOTALLY DIE. Their parents take them to the bunker to prove to the Fuhrer how committed they are and then when it all goes wrong they kill the children with poison. The book's narrated by Helga, the oldest child, who keeps a diary to be a record like her father. She idolizes Hitler, and believes that there will be secret weapons to win the war. As the book goes on and everything falls apart, she begins to realise that this is not true, and makes plans to escape with her siblings. But they don't make it out.
I bought Jenny Lindsay's book of poetry after seeing her read at a poetry evening someone at work organised a while back, but unfortunately I think much of the merit is in her performance of them, and they don't work as well for me written down. I still like "we know we're fucked", but overall it's not something I'll return to.
I found out about Unity when I was looking for even more information about the Mitfords. It's a novel about making a film about Unity Mitford, mostly when she moved to Germany to meet Hitler. It's sort of curated rather than narrated, by a man who acted in the initial student production of a play, and then kept in contact with the writer when he went to Germany to work for a famously difficult and genius director. The first section is Luke (the writer)'s letters to the curator about filming, and his girlfriend who is playing Unity and how she gets caught up in politics, then there are extracts from a diary written by another of the actresses, and finally a series of interviews with other people who were involved. Basically the actress playing Unity gets involved with ultra-left wing politics, and ends up killing herself and others in the attempt to set a bomb off in a public place. The film is abandoned, and much is made of the upper class English girl becoming radicalised while playing an upper class English girl who was radicalised. Fascinating.
I actually don't know much Joyce Grenfell beyond "George...don't do that", and maybe Stately as a Galleon, but still enjoyed the first volume of her autobiography (I'm midway through the second).
The Rebel of the School was HILARIOUS. The rebel in question is an Irish girl, and I started making notes of the awful things that were said, but lost track. She calls mistresses darling, and lives in a castle, and I pretty much hate her. She formed a wild Irish girls association, and leads the scholarship/foundation girls astray, and nearly gets one of them expelled who will then leave a life of poverty. Ugh.
I really liked Angelique, the police officer protagonist of The Sacred Art of Stealing. I also liked that when she had sex with the bank robber he came as soon as she touched him, because he was so excited after not having sex for so long, and they still went on to have a great time. And that it was all very clever and fitted together so nicely. I shall read the next book that features her
I found the two Victoria Walker books in a charity shop - they're published by Fidra and look pretty nice with it. I enjoyed The Winter of Enchantment much more than the sequel, partly because I found the magical enchantment slight tweeness a bit too much to take. I did very much enjoy reading Victoria Walker's introduction, and how she ended up living on a farm in Wales with no heating or indeed clue about what to do.
This Charming Man was a grab from the work shelf, which I was pleased to have as I've enjoyed her books previously. This one felt a little off somehow. I was early on put off by Lola's insistence that even though the cross-dressers she was hosting didn't like the term (or recognise themselves as) "trannies", she should get to use it because she liked the way it sounded. I also thought that the characterisation of the abusive man was a bit one-note and not terribly believable. It was very sad and made me feel depressed though, and think more about whoever it was that said that women can no longer look to the law to resolve cases of sexual and domestic violence.
I hadn't read any Ishiguro before A Pale View of Hills, and thought this was excellent and want to read more (and probably will). I am quite a plot-focused person, so I found the non-resolution and glimpses-rather-than-explanation a bit challenging at times. Pocket Notebook is VERY different - a copper gone bad and clearly mentally ill and what he writes down in his notebook.
I find Richard Herring very difficult. Partly I feel guilty for wishing he would just work with Stewart Lee, when that very obviously isn't his fault, and also he is just so embarrassing in his blog. I thought that How Not to Grow Up showed him as fairly unpleasant and demanding a lot of the time, even beyond the level to which that was part of the story. Apparently he's still with the woman he represents himself as badgering into going out with him at the end of the book.
Mrs Fry's Diary was a Christmas present, and I was very pleasantly surprised that it stood up to being moved from a joke twitter account to a joke book quite well. I smiled several times, reader.
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