March books

[slemslempike]

Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
Another Part of the Wood - Beryl Bainbridge
Tripwire - Lee Child
The English Mail Coach - Thomas De Quincey
This Book Will Save Your Life - AM Homes
Run Away Home - Antonia Forest
Let Down Your Hair - Fiona Price
Just One Damned Thing After Another - Jodi Taylor
Aunts Aren't Gentlemen - PG Wodehouse
Running Blind - Lee Child
The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbusiness - Ron Jeremy
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Murder on the Flying Scotsman - Carola Dunn
A Symphony of Echoes - Jodi Taylor
The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
Suck It, Wonder Woman - Olivia Munn
A Second Chance - Jodi Taylor
A Trail Through Time - Jodi Taylor
When a Child is Born, Roman Holiday - Jodi Taylor (short stories)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
Talk Sweetly to Me - Courtney Milan
Are you There, Vodka? It's me, Chelsea - Chelsea Handler
Soul Music - Terry Pratchett
Born Standing Up - Steve Martin

I liked Breakfast of Champions much more than I was expecting. I'd somehow always thought that Vonnegut was someone whose books I very much wouldn't enjoy, and admittedly it did take me until half the way through the book to actually want to keep going with it. I did like the pictures though.

I think that Another Part of the Wood is the first book I've read by Beryl Brainbridge, whom I always confuse with Beryl Cook. A collection of awful people are on holiday in some woods, and a child is neglected and eventually dies.

I'm rereading some of the Reacher books - some I remember instantly what happened and whodunnit as soon as it starts, and some it takes me ages to get through. He kills a lot more people than I remember, and not just people who are trying to kill him.

In the first flush of excitement about having a Nook last year I downloaded a whole bunch of books from Project Gutenberg, and somehow this ended up on the Nook recently when I had just run out of books I wanted to read. It was rather good! I loved the descriptions of people wanting to be on the mail coaches taking exciting news of battled, and which people did and did not want to be on the outside of the coaches. There was an extended funnyish bit about why women aren't as good as men, which confused me until I realised it was several essays stuck together and not a random digression.

I used to note when I read a book on ebook, and now I've switched over so completely that it's very unusual that This Book will Save Your Life was read in paperback format. It was a very noticeable paperback because itiscoveredinring doughnuts. I'm not sure if it would garner so many comments somewhere where doughnuts are readily available. It was a book with nothing much happening, and all interactions seeming kind of glancing and frothy, but somehow not insubstantial.

The modern Marlows readthrough on [Unknown site tag] has finished, and I'm rather sad. It was lovely to be able to read the thoughts of other fans, and particularly to be guided by some really good people in the main posts. It was frustrating to be thwarted by lj's comment limits, but so great to have a community that busy again. I'll definitely be reading the posts on the two historicals. Run Away Home is the only one of her books that I like less every time I read it. Every single one of the others I've found something more in each reread, and enjoyed seeing what I did and didn't remember, but RAH just left me flat. The horrible attitudes of the Marlows to Judith and to Ann, Giles appearing in more flesh than usual and being an arse (I never used to think that).

Let Down Your Hair is a retelling of Rapunzel, featuring a women's studies department at a university, so of course I would enjoy it. The main character has been home schooled by her very strict feminist grandmother, and rather isolated from popular, "non-feminist" culture and activities. After meeting a male life model at an art class she embarks on breaking the bonds of her relationship with her grandmother. I felt that the lack of popular culture knowledge didn't really ring very true, but I liked her journey of discovering what she did and didn't want to keep from her grandmother's ethos, and how she wanted to stick to some feminist principles and not others.

I rather think that it was on oursin's journal that I first heard about the Jodi Taylor series on time travelling historians, but that might not be correct. Anyway, a while ago I bought the first one, and then in Zanzibar I finally got around to reading it. I LOVED it, and so took advantage of the free wi-fi to get the whole series, which I also enjoyed. Max is an historian who joins St Mary's, an institute which sends out parties of historians to observe events first hand. They were funny, rather sad (actual tears!), a little bit saucy, and very very readable and good. They did feel a little bit episodic at times, but that might just have ben the effect of reading all ofthe series right the way through at once. I highly recommend them - and would also like someone to tell me if her non-St Mary's books are as good, and if so which to read.

I can never remember which Wodehouse I've read before, so I usually just pick any of them up and wait to find out after a chapter or two if it's a repeat, because I can be reasonably sure I'll enjoy it either way. I think, but cannot be sure, that Aunts Aren't Gentlemen was new to me. Either way it was bally good, and I did like the cat appearing and disappearing while all the plots cross right across Bertie.

I liked the title of Ron Jeremy's autobiography The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbusiness, and it was pretty interesting. I felt like he glossed over a lot of things - on the one hand assuring us that the porn industry wasn't exploitative and the women loved their jobs, and on the other hand there were a lot of anecdotes with women being given to men by other men with less agency than one might hope for - all represented as the women enjoying it, which they may very well have done, but it grated a little.

It is probably very ill-something of me to be mostly pleased to have read Things Fall Apart because it appears on so many "100 books every well-educated person swoons over" lists, and now I get to tick another one off. However, as well as that there was the bonus that it was very, very good. I liked reading a book that was set in a more rural Africa, as I feel that most of what I've read recently (of books outside the US/UK) has been modern cities. Anyway, it was very good. I recommend it.

Murder on the Flying Scotsman is the last book in the ebook quartet by Carola Dunn that I bought a while ago. I've quietly enjoyed them all, but shan't imagine that I'll be seeking out the others - more like I shall read them quite happily if I come across them in a holiday cottage and I don't have anything else pressing to do. I rather like the relationship between Daisy and Alec, where the class implications and attitudes of both sets of friends/family are not just ignored. I liked the plot of this, with having all the relevant family locked in the train, then locked in the hotel so you didn't have to do too much traipsing around with the police to keep up.

The Little Stranger felt like it was not quite Shirley Jackson, but somehow not suffering from not being by someone who excels at writing this sort of thing anyway. That doesn't explain it very well. It was good, and not suffering by a comparison that it doesn't come out as well from. I assume that the Doctor was in fact the evil spirit that was killing people and ruining the house.

I don't know much about Olivia Munn, other than that she's sort of geeky and sometimes US feminist blogs write that she's awful and sometimes US feminist blogs write that other US feminist blogs are awful for thinking she's awful. She wrote a book about how geeky she was as a girl, and includes lots of pictures of fans drawings of her, and is mildly funny about things.

I found the changing voices in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao a little confusing - but I found the chapters on his mother's life the best. Her tonedeafness with the neighbours as she tried to make herself the life she deserved through sexual connections was painful to read.

Talk Sweetly to Me is the last novella in the historical romance series by Courtney Milan, lots of women's rights and forbidden love and breasts popping easily out of corsetry, which was all very good. This one is about a black woman in late 19th century London, who is an excellent mathematician and astronomer and is trying to resist falling in love with an Irish writer.

I don't know much about Chelsea Handler either - the book was quite amusing, but doesn't make me particularly yearn to learn more. I remember very little about it, other than quite a nice story about lying that she was going to be in a film with Meryl Streep when she was at school, but I think I remember being pissed off with some racist attitudes.

A reread of Soul Music after news of Terry Pratchett's death, after I'd earlier in the year not really enjoyed my reread of Moving Pictures. DEATH is always great, of course, and I think I probably picked up more of the puns this time round, but I am not very musically savvy so I'm almost certainly still missing a lot. I think that Terry Pratchett might be an author that doesn't work for me in e-book (possibly the need to move to a different page to see footnotes?) - I think possibly because getting a new physical Pratchett book when they came out was always such a delight, and my memories of the books are about holding the very distinctively-covered physical objects.

I don't know Steve Martin much beyond his acting work, in particular Parenthood and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and the little bits I've seen about his own act has mostly left me cold, but I got his memoirs of becoming a comedian in a bundle. It was really, really good, both reflecting on his emotional upbringing and his poor relationship with his father, and how he honed his work, understanding what was for him and what wasn't, and reflecting on how he decided to stop performing live comedy before he got too past it. I still don't think that I'm likely to adore his stand-up, but I do want to seek it out and see it for myself now.

Comments

[girlofprey.livejournal.com]

Man, I read Things Fall Apart in University and loved it. That bit at the end when the language changes is just mindblowing.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Yes! Just magic, and I wish I'd read it much sooner.

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

I've just read The Nothing Girl by Jodi Taylor and was wondering what the time travel ones were like. I might give them a go. TNG is quite sweet, no real surprises, but at least it's not yet another bloody love triangle. It's a little bit Joanna Trollope, with a bit of magical thinking (if that's the right term, but I'm trying not to be spoilery). The heroine is a bit Fanny Price, which may not appeal to some people.

I read Courtney Milan's The Duchess War and was disappointed because there were not enough duchesses and not enough war between them. I haven't been tempted to read more by her yet.

I read one of the Carola Dunn books a while ago, mentally categorised them as "not as good or as fun as Phryne Fisher", and like you, I think they'll be fun if found in a holiday cottage but I won't seek them out.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I have yet to read any Miss Fisher books, though I think I have the first episode of the adaptation on a hard drive somewhere around here. I'll look out for them, I would like some more fun books about women.

I found all the Brothers Sinister ones together a bit much. I very much enjoyed The Countess Conspiracy, though, with its scientist stuff.

I shall try The Nothing Girl - I rather like Joanna Trollope, so that sounds good to me. The time travel ones are good, no love triangles at all!

[girlofprey.livejournal.com]

Hell (again) friend, have you heard about the female fake Jump Street thing? Thought the news might interest you.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Hell to you too!

I had NOT heard! I really like the idea of that, though if they don't bring Hoffs back in to play a leading role then they are monumental, absolute arses. She was astounding, and Holly Robinson Peete would be great at being a mentor (she be great at playing one of the leads, or possibly BOTH OF THE LEADS, but I assume hollywood wants young people)/

[girlofprey.livejournal.com]

Well that was unfortunate, I do not wish hell upon you. For the record.