Hello St Marks

I think both of these turned up in my Street Library, which is why Kindle is not getting much of my business these days. Frances Liardet's 'We Must be Brave' was lovely, literary fiction about a lost girl and a wounded young woman. Beautifully crafted and set largely in my favourite era for fiction—England during WWII—so I allowed the weepy bits.  'A Crooked Tree' by Una Mannion was more of a challenge. When people behave badly in a novel set in 1942 I can forgive them, but when brainless teenagers and their damaged parents do dangerous, daft things in contemporary Pennsylvania I want to throw things at them. The premise is brilliant and compelling: overstretched widowed mother of five leaves 12 year old Ellen by the side of the road in a fit of pique, and it doesn't go well. I couldn't put the damn book down; my frustrated fury at the behaviour of this pack of well-meaning, self-destructive idiot kids was overcome by my need to see how it all played out. 

How could I forget 'Leave the World Behind' by Rumaan Alam (via Audible)? What a corker it was, prompting many a dinner table and school run conversation about the end of the world. A nice white family staying in a swanky AirBnb is interrupted by a nice Black couple who say it's their house, and something had gone awry in the city. Wealthy Black people? So it's a scam, right? Or hysteria? Or the end of the world for real? And so it goes. Fabulous. 

I've given up reading as many books as I finished in the past fortnight or so. Finished 'Bluebird' by Malcolm Knox. Honestly, I could have killed bloody Malcolm Knox for his wretched cast of loser beach bum layabouts, but I forgave him for his writing, and for the cheeky device of recasting Sydney as 'Ocean City'. So very good, and those bloody losers were brilliantly observed.  Jennifer Haigh's 'Mrs Kimble' dumped me with another wretched man I did not want to spend time with—the eponymous Mr Kimble, the rotter. But was it "beautiful, devastating and complex" as the Chicago Tribune declared? It was.  Dean Koontz is usually reliable but failed me with 'Your Heart Belongs to Me', a truly stupid book about—lordy—a man stalked by the twin sister of his transplanted heart, or some such rot. Definitely not "a terrifying thriller" per the cover line. One star, Mr Koontz. 

My mate Wayne recommended Tana French's 'The Searcher' to me, and so—thanks Wayne—it was fabulous, as promised. It came on the heels of Cate Kennedy's 'The World Beneath', both notable for brilliantly realised voices of people unfamiliar to me but which felt entirely authentic. French's protagonist is a retired Chicago cop seeking peace in a tiny Irish country village; instead of a caricature, French gives us an intelligent, worldly man weighing the risks of probing too deeply into the tightly-knit community he's joined. Kennedy's cast includes a maddening, hippyish single mum, deluded photographer dad and emo 15 year old daughter. I don't know anyone like these people, but the brilliant writing and characterisation took me right there, up close. 

A few embarrassing admissions today. Yes, I re-read Lee Child's '61 Hours'. Again. The perverse advantage of rarely remembering a plot is being able to re-discover books like lightly recalled acquaintances: ah yes, how lovely, hello again. It's the 14th Jack Reacher novel by order of publication, somewhere in the middle of the almost 30 of them in the series, and—yes again—I've read them all.   Just finished is Helen Simpson's 'The Summer Before the War'; the war being WWI. This is a tricky piece of publishing marketing sleight of hand, because the cover is a perky, hand-illustrated, cutesy job, promising English country garden witticisms and light romance. Inside the cover is quite a dense, surprisingly complex and really quite dark account of English village life in the first years of the war. Sold a motsa, apparently.  Also read (via Audible) an utterly daft thriller 'Elevator Pitch' by bestselling hack Linwood Barclay, which asks what would h...

My beautiful Street Library just keeps on giving. Among the recent deposits: Jane Harper's 'The Lost Man', which I immediately whipped out of the box and set on the pile for holiday reading... then almost dreaded reading it. I loved 'The Dry' (2016), but another outback noir? Yeah nah. But when I finally got to it, it was a cracker. Taut, grim but deeply satisfying; set in an otherworldly landscape of radical isolation fraught with logistical complexities as fascinating as the unfolding plot. I'll happily send this one back out into the Street Library for another reader's pleasure. 

It's not fair to compare the next two books although both have white, gay, male protagonists. Actor and comedian—and novelist—Graham Norton's 'Home Stretch' is a good book, heartfelt and with an engaging storyline. But 'Less' by Andrew Sean Greer is a whole different order of excellent. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2018, so. Greer's book is both funny and clever and absolutely beautifully written—hence the Pulitzer. Norton's book caught my interest early with a tragedy and a mystery. But I took 'Less' on holiday expecting to abandon it once read; expectations were low despite the Pulitzer sticker on the cover. That sticker keep me reading despite disliking the main character, but then it caught me and held me and the book came back from the beach having earned a permanent slot on my shelf. A marvellous book. The Norton goes back to Mum. 

I'm back, lightly committed to recording every book I read this year. Sadly, I'm a year too late. 2020 was the noteworthy year for me; as COVID-19 changed everything, I read like a demon, at full tilt. Two or three books a week and—after I was sodden with mostly forgotten novels—remarkable for a line up of really good non-fiction. So last year was, in the end, a year of reading to be proud of. All now unrecorded, unremarked and (recall my Swiss cheese memory) largely un-remembered. Neverthless. I'm starting badly because it's 13 January and I can't recall everything I've read so far. Working backwards: 'American Dirt' by Jeanine Cummins. Best book of the year by far. Really, it's a keeper; I'm confident it'll make my Best Of list for 2021. 'Longbourn, The Servants' Story' by Jo Baker, a re-telling of 'Pride and Prejudice' from the servants' perspective. Now this one sounds like trash, doesn't it? But wasn't a...

I've just fallen a little bit in love with myself, aged 38. I started this blog in October 2008 and I've just rediscovered both the blog and a side of myself I'd almost entirely forgotten. Not the reader, that's remained a constant in the 11 years since I gave up on the blog, but the writer. And I was quite funny back then; who knew? I started 'readingwithdrawal' to record a month without reading. I'd decided I was reading instead of living, and with two little boys that was unconscionable, so I stopped. From the first post: "I read a lot. The usual ways: in bed, over breakfast, on the sofa in front of the TV, Saturday mornings with a cup of tea. The unusual ways: in traffic, brushing my teeth, while cooking, a book propped up on the sill as I do the dishes. On the toilet, of course. And the rest, which I'm not proud of: while driving, while ignoring my kids." So I gave up reading for a month. "Of course, following Barbara's* le...

I think I may have reached the end of this blog, a bit over a year after I started. The goal was to track a year of reading, but I underestimated the burden of it. The writing, not the reading. I've missed a few books - not many, I think, but enough to take the shine off the comprehensiveness of the record. And who knew it would supplant my hardcopy diary so completely? A lifetime habit of putting pen to paper has stopped dead, with barely 10 pages since this time last year, and not a sensible word written. My book reading is documented, more or less, but a year of my kids' lives has passed unrecorded. So, to wrap it up, several posts: Recently read: 'Allotted Time' by Robin Shelton. A lovely memoir about two blokes in England taking on a local allotment. Robin's bipolar, a dad, an unemployed once-teacher, in a darkish place. Lightly told with very little detail, it's an oddly shy memoir (that seems odd, written down, but feels perfect for this modest book). Rob...