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Jun. 30th, 2012 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slemslempikeThe Rainbow Comes and Goes - Diana Cooper
Digging to America - Anne Tyler
The Brightest Star in the Sky - Marian Keyes
All's Fair in Love - Jeanne Andrews (Sweet Dreams)
The Post-Birthday World - Lionel Shriver
London Belongs to Me - Norman Collins
On the Way to the Wedding - Julia Quinn
Hand in Glove - Ngaio Marsh
Baking Cakes in Kigali - Gaile Parkin
The Man of My Dreams - Curtis Sittenfeld
The Rainbow Comes and Goes was incredibly dull. The Mitford connection had erroneously led me to hope for more amusement. This book is a memoir of her early childhood through to marriage, and is incredibly self-centred. She occasionally passes an aside about how dreadful they all were, but it comes across very smug and insincere.
Digging to America is about two families who adopt baby girls from Korea, how they end up being friends, how they deal with parenting generally and parenting an adopted child from another ethnicity and culture specifically. It was interesting, rather glib and not very satisfying to read.
Okay - is lezzer a reclaimed generally accepted non-dickish term in Ireland? Marian Keyes has straight characters use it quite casually in The Brightest Star in the Sky, and I think I remember it in her other books as well (though I could be wrong), and it didn't seem like she wanted us to think ill of the character, so maybe it doesn't seem, at the least, rude to her? Also, it's great that she's doing more reading about women's rights and things like rape and domestic abuse, but she doesn't do a very good job at writing about them without seeming like a well-meaning magazine article.
Mostly what I learned in All's Fair in Love was that the author thinks that being spotted during gymnastics is REALLY REALLY important. I'm not saying it isn't. But I know that every work-out or performance mentioned in the book was safely done. I would have been happy to take it on trust.
The Post-Birthday World is told in alternating chapters. The first follows a universe where Irina has sex with Ramsay MacDonald (utterly unbelievably dialected world class-snooker player) and leaves her partner for him, and the second is where she doesn't, and her partner ends up cheating on her instead. The absolute worst part of the book was Ramsay MacDonald's dialogue. It is a horrendous mix of every local idiom Lionel Shriver has ever heard, apparently not realising that cockney and Yorkshire are not the same thing, put together into sentences that were hard to even read, let alone imagine someone actually saying. There is a sort of explanation for this in the book, but it's about as believable as the writing. Each universe follows a fairly similar route, with book prize events, family visits, snooker games happening twice over with a different partner. I found it interesting enough to keep going to the end, but I found it rather unpleasant. The two men are supposed to be somewhat opposite, but they're both annoying and I would hate to be in a relationship with either of them. Ramsay MacDonald is frankly abusive, and I was quite troubled to read something indicating that Lionel Shriver thinks of him as exciting and hugely attractive.
Urchinette on twitter recommended London Belongs to Me, and I picked it up when I was about to have a meal by myself and wanted something to do. It follows several households in one house in London in the 1930s, how they interact with one another's lives, and what they do to try and help each other. There's an ageing bar hostess, a family whose daughter want more independence, the landlady who's being scammed by a psychic, and a mother whose son starts out stealing cars and ends up nearly being hanged for murder. It was really, really good. Urchinette said Norman Collins wrote another one set in a department store which I will look out for.
On the Way to the Wedding was enjoyable Georgian-set erotic/romantic fluff. I cann't remember much about Hand in Glove. There are people in a house, someone dies being hit by a pipe into a ditch, and there is a snobbish lie uncovered in the parish register. I did like The Man of My Dreams, with Hannah growing up and experiencing a series of unsuccessful relationships. Good.
My mum gave me Baking Cakes in Kigali after she finished it in an airport. It's rather like The Number One Ladies Detective Agency in terms of style, and it's also a book about a black African woman written by a white African author not from the same country, and probably culture. I enjoyed reading it, but it felt quite a bit as though the author was writing about Rwandans trying to counter racist assumptions about Africans, but doing so by presenting quite a sanitised view in order to align it more with white Western cultural norms. I wanted to make Jess read it (not that I have had much luck forcing her to read things she knows I know she won't like), but I had to leave it behind in a hostel.
Digging to America - Anne Tyler
The Brightest Star in the Sky - Marian Keyes
All's Fair in Love - Jeanne Andrews (Sweet Dreams)
The Post-Birthday World - Lionel Shriver
London Belongs to Me - Norman Collins
On the Way to the Wedding - Julia Quinn
Hand in Glove - Ngaio Marsh
Baking Cakes in Kigali - Gaile Parkin
The Man of My Dreams - Curtis Sittenfeld
The Rainbow Comes and Goes was incredibly dull. The Mitford connection had erroneously led me to hope for more amusement. This book is a memoir of her early childhood through to marriage, and is incredibly self-centred. She occasionally passes an aside about how dreadful they all were, but it comes across very smug and insincere.
Digging to America is about two families who adopt baby girls from Korea, how they end up being friends, how they deal with parenting generally and parenting an adopted child from another ethnicity and culture specifically. It was interesting, rather glib and not very satisfying to read.
Okay - is lezzer a reclaimed generally accepted non-dickish term in Ireland? Marian Keyes has straight characters use it quite casually in The Brightest Star in the Sky, and I think I remember it in her other books as well (though I could be wrong), and it didn't seem like she wanted us to think ill of the character, so maybe it doesn't seem, at the least, rude to her? Also, it's great that she's doing more reading about women's rights and things like rape and domestic abuse, but she doesn't do a very good job at writing about them without seeming like a well-meaning magazine article.
Mostly what I learned in All's Fair in Love was that the author thinks that being spotted during gymnastics is REALLY REALLY important. I'm not saying it isn't. But I know that every work-out or performance mentioned in the book was safely done. I would have been happy to take it on trust.
The Post-Birthday World is told in alternating chapters. The first follows a universe where Irina has sex with Ramsay MacDonald (utterly unbelievably dialected world class-snooker player) and leaves her partner for him, and the second is where she doesn't, and her partner ends up cheating on her instead. The absolute worst part of the book was Ramsay MacDonald's dialogue. It is a horrendous mix of every local idiom Lionel Shriver has ever heard, apparently not realising that cockney and Yorkshire are not the same thing, put together into sentences that were hard to even read, let alone imagine someone actually saying. There is a sort of explanation for this in the book, but it's about as believable as the writing. Each universe follows a fairly similar route, with book prize events, family visits, snooker games happening twice over with a different partner. I found it interesting enough to keep going to the end, but I found it rather unpleasant. The two men are supposed to be somewhat opposite, but they're both annoying and I would hate to be in a relationship with either of them. Ramsay MacDonald is frankly abusive, and I was quite troubled to read something indicating that Lionel Shriver thinks of him as exciting and hugely attractive.
Urchinette on twitter recommended London Belongs to Me, and I picked it up when I was about to have a meal by myself and wanted something to do. It follows several households in one house in London in the 1930s, how they interact with one another's lives, and what they do to try and help each other. There's an ageing bar hostess, a family whose daughter want more independence, the landlady who's being scammed by a psychic, and a mother whose son starts out stealing cars and ends up nearly being hanged for murder. It was really, really good. Urchinette said Norman Collins wrote another one set in a department store which I will look out for.
On the Way to the Wedding was enjoyable Georgian-set erotic/romantic fluff. I cann't remember much about Hand in Glove. There are people in a house, someone dies being hit by a pipe into a ditch, and there is a snobbish lie uncovered in the parish register. I did like The Man of My Dreams, with Hannah growing up and experiencing a series of unsuccessful relationships. Good.
My mum gave me Baking Cakes in Kigali after she finished it in an airport. It's rather like The Number One Ladies Detective Agency in terms of style, and it's also a book about a black African woman written by a white African author not from the same country, and probably culture. I enjoyed reading it, but it felt quite a bit as though the author was writing about Rwandans trying to counter racist assumptions about Africans, but doing so by presenting quite a sanitised view in order to align it more with white Western cultural norms. I wanted to make Jess read it (not that I have had much luck forcing her to read things she knows I know she won't like), but I had to leave it behind in a hostel.
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Date: 2012-06-30 08:28 pm (UTC)ANYWAY. I like reading your book reviews and it makes me tempted to read books you've mentioned positively (though that relies on them being on offer at 50p in a charity shop, sadly!)
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Date: 2012-06-30 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-01 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-02 07:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-02 06:07 pm (UTC)It was lovely to meet you properly at knitting by the way.
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Date: 2012-07-04 09:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-09 07:52 pm (UTC)'London Belongs to Me' sounds nice, though!
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Date: 2012-07-09 08:11 pm (UTC)