Apples Never Fall - Liane Moriarty

 

68%

10.01.22

This was the Moriarty book I should have been reading (for book club) over Christmas. As much as I resented having to pay £9.99 for the Kindle ebook, it was infinitely better than Nine Perfect Strangers. The characters were vividly drawn, and every detail of the story became satisfyingly relevant in some way - until it was spoiled by the silly pandemic chapters at the end, which not only made the book 50 pages too long but also read as if the publisher had asked the author to shoehorn them in at the last minute to make the story 'current'. It was a shame as, until then, the delicious unlikeliness of almost everything in the novel had been what made it so enjoyable.

Side note: I plan to avoid the current pile of pandemic-set stories. I understand publishers like current affairs, and authors like the challenge of deciding how their characters might react to lockdown, but I read novels to experience other worlds - if I wanted contemporary realism, I'd read the news. Still, I've started a new pandemic label, in case I can't avoid it.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind - William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

 

56%

07.10.21

Interesting from a cultural viewpoint - accounts of everyday life, poverty and starvation in Malawi usually go unchronicled. But otherwise not emotionally gripping, and problematic in terms of the Western privilege of 'choosing' a boy to fund and champion.

They Both Die at the End - Adam Silvera

 63%

23.09.21

I really didn't want to read this month's book club choice. Why would I, when <title>? Not that such an ending is unusual, but it is unusual for the whole book to be about that ending. And indeed it was brutal - but also intriguing to explore the idea of whether it's about the journey or the (final) destination.

The Dictionary of Lost Words - Pip Williams

 48%

20.08.21

You'd think I'm the ideal audience for this novel - I've studied, lived and worked in Oxford and work with words now. But the story was so dull, the characters so two-dimensional, the dialogue so unlikely, and the author so keen to show off her conscientious research and ruminations on the nature of words that I just didn't care.

Note: I'm might also start keeping count of books where women become pregnant after having sex once. Spoiler: It's most books with unmarried female protagonists, especially when they're set in the past.

New label: pregnant first time

The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett

 

69%

12.06.21

This is June's choice for both my reading groups and I was expecting such a trendy book to be political and preachy and worthily hardgoing. But, on the contrary, it's a lyrical, engaging account of the shifting nature of identity. Yes, it's a little heavy handed at times and, yes, nothing much actually happens, but it's an easy read with a sophisticated structure.

Midnight Blue - Simone van de Vlugt

 

53%

15.05.21

Nice cover (though that's irrelevant on a Kindle) and interesting insight into Dutch history, but a rather tedious story with a stilted translation that did it no favours.

Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart

 

51%

08.04.21

I would never have chosen to read something so unrelentingly bleak but, hey, this won the Booker Prize, and was the first choice of my new reading group so sometimes the challenge is worthwhile. Not in this case. It was heavy in every sense: weighed down by endless, meaningless adjectives, metaphors and similes, by the interchangeable sex-and-power-hungry men, by the interchangeable weak-and-untrustworthy women, by its lack of nuance, by layer upon layer upon tedious layer of Bad Things Happening. A grim semi-autobiographical novel isn't automatically a good novel.

Merivel: A man of his time - Rose Tremain

66%
07.09.16

Tremain's books are always varied - if you don't like one, there's always another completely different story to try. But here, unusually, is a sequel. I read Restoration years ago - before I started my reviews, it seems - and remember little but it didn't matter much. Merivel is such a vivid character, strangely sympathetic despite - or because of - his many flaws, and doing the best he can with the times and means given to him. It's both a tragic and hopeful book - much like Restoration, actually.

Human Traces - Sebastian Faulks

Didn't finish
10.09.15

This started out promisingly, with vivid descriptions and a feisty-yet-historically convincing heroine, but it soon became flabby and dull. I read about half of it but, when I realised I couldn't go to the reading group meeting that would discuss it, I didn't see the point in battling on.

The Little Old Lady Who Broke All The Rules - Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg

52%
08.07.15

I used to want to learn Swedish and maybe I still should because something was lost in translation here. The stilted prose drained away the humour and character development and made what could have been a quirky story really rather dull.

Death Wore White - Jim Kelly

48%
02.04.15

I should know by now that novels that are supposed to be set in my part of Norfolk are going to be geographically inaccurate but this was barely recognisable. It was therefore just another murder mystery hat I'll hardly remember in a few months, with rather a high body count and killer(s) with complicated and unlikely motive(s).

Elizabeth is Missing - Emma Healey

72%
08.03.15

I do like an unreliable narrator and this is a tour de force. Beautiful language, clever structure and careful pacing - one of those novels I'll be recommending to anyone who so much as mentions they're looking for something to read.

The Invention of Wings - Sue Monk Kidd

62%
01.02.15

We're asked to believe that the 11-year-old daughter of a slave owner, brought up in that strict culture with no outside influences, is an abolitionist. A modern mind in an historical body doesn't quite ring true, and many of the characters are ciphers. But get past that and it's an engaging, if rather educational, story of a shameful past, certainly better than Monk Kidd's previous novel.

Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

65%
05.01.15

Adichie is an astonishing writer, really - all her novels are so different in style and tone but share a powerful use of language and character and an unusual insight into Nigerian life and politics. This is a surprisingly complex story that would bear a second reading, though the ending seemed rather stunted.

Silas Marner - George Eliot

55%
22.11.14

Despite my degree in English Literature, I've managed to avoid Eliot's novels up till now - although we did seem to spend 3 or 4 tutorials analysing the first page of Middlemarch. This was so instantly forgettable that I almost forgot to review it. Not as deep as people think it is.

Gillespie and I - Jane Harris

64%
05.10.14

I like an unreliable narrator (see here and here), and this one is so unreliable that you're never sure whether she's unreliable at all. Thrillingly sinister and very clever, but not quite as satisfying as Harris's first novel, The Observations.

A Passage to India - EM Forster

57%
08.06.14

I'm sure I've read this before, probably 20 years ago when I thought EM Forster was the poster boy for early-20th century society skewering. But tastes change. While this is an angry dissection of the corrosive effect of colonialism, it's also a product of its time - wordy, philosophical, trapped in cultural expectations. Angry's fine but these days I like my social criticism direct.

The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul - Deborah Rodriguez

48%
06.05.14

I wouldn't have finished this if it wasn't for my reading group. In fact, I read two other books in the middle. It's quite an achievement to make vibrant and violent Afghan culture seem so dull, but then it's run through the Western filter of irritating, self-obsessed American ex pats. It's just so patronising.

Longbourn - Jo Baker

65%
12.03.14

I really wanted to like this. And I did, really. And yet... at times the quality of the writing is beautiful, and yet it's littered with snagging cliched phrases. The parallel with 'Pride and Prejudice' is clever, offering new perspectives on Mr Collins and Mr Bennet in particular, and yet the below-stairs story is somewhat pedestrian. The insight into servants' lives is fascinating and yet it doesn't quite ring true. So, a good read but not the great one the hype suggests.

The Cellist of Sarajevo - Steven Galloway

61%
26.02.14

The suffering of the people under siege in Sarajevo is almost incomprehensible and this book does a good job of recreating its horrors, provoking me into further research on atrocities not so long ago and not so far away. But doesn't work as a novel; you can almost see the interview transcripts that inspired the rather bland characters. Does it matter? It does if you're passing it off as a work of fiction. This is more education than art.