late summer reading - first instalment

 

I haven't shared my reading for a while. I think I'll break this up into two posts, the titles have piled up since my last post in July and I don't want to bore you to death.

In July, I left you with Night Waking by Sarah Moss. I enjoyed this book, but is somewhat difficult to summarise so I'll give you the Goodreads blurb.

Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently-absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women's vexed and passionate relationship with work. 

There are a lot unexplored lose ends and sometimes this bothered me a little, but not too much. If you like  a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, this is probably not for you. If however, you enjoy emotionally rich narrative that leave open avenues to explore with your imagination, go for it. 

I listened to another book by this same author: The Tidal Zone. Again, it is an emotionally rich book which centres around Adam, stay at home dad (and historian) and his older daughter Miriam (15). The central event is the catastrophic collapse of Miriam after suffering an anaphylactic shock (with unknown trigger). She is resuscitated successfully and recovers fully but family life is changed, uncertain and terrifying. The book is about finding a way to carry on with life as normally as possible whilst dealing with  the burden of uncertainty. 

Earlier I listened to 84K by Claire North. It is a dystopian novel about a not too distant (and not unimaginable) future in which we meet Theo who works in the Criminal Audit Office. He assesses each crime that crosses his desk and makes sure the correct debt to society is paid in full. He leads an unremarkable life until one day, he has to assess the killing of his former girl friend Dani. It is a dark novel but that will leave you unsettled because at the end of the day, no matter how fictional this novel is, there is a kernel of our reality in it, with the strengthening of the right wing agenda, big corporate interests and whatnot. I do love Claire North but this newest novel is my least favourite, it requires some concentration to follow the threads of the story, particularly in audio format where you can't go back through the pages easily to make sense of it all. 

For the summer edition of our book group, I listened to two Muriel Spark novels The Girls of Slender Means and Driver Seat. I loved the former and liked the latter. It was a bit creepy and I am failing to grasp how in a time before internet and mobile phones a single person could orchestrate her own murder so efficiently. The narration by Dame Judi Dench was superb. No doubt much has been written about these books and I have not much to add. I did enjoy the glimpse into the life of the group of 1940s girls - women really. I was intrigued by the elocution lessons, having never heard of anything like it before. The thought of these young women squeezing through a tiny window for a bit of fun made me smile, too. Although of course this tiny window turned out to be a death trap. 

My science fiction fix came in the form of the third instalment of the Wayfairers series, A Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers. If you are not familiar with the series, it is set in the very distant future where humankind has been accepted into the Galactic Common - a European Union of sorts on an intergalactic scale. Only there seem to be no Jacob Rees-Mogg types around. These probably stayed behind on Earth, desperately holding onto long dead values. The books are loosely connected in that there are some characters overlapping but each book is really a standalone story. A Spaceborn Few is set on the Exodus Fleet, a relic of a gigantic space habitat that people constructed to leave Earth. 


For the September book group, I read Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. I didn't enjoy this much. I suppose it is best described as a character study of a black American family in Mississippi.  I was quite a while into the recording before I realised it is set in modern times, a reference to hurricane Katrina gave this away. To me, it felt very much like a book set in the 1950s. I wonder if this was intentional? The book does capture the complexities of life as a black American family in the South of the US, as well as the legacy of racism, which is still very an issue.

I'll leave the remaining summer/early autumn reads for another day! What are you reading at the moment?