almost time for new year resolutions

I've been thinking again about blogging and its appeal, especially when one's blog is unread. There has to be a space for recording the reading one does, since I for one read something in some form for just about 90% of my waking day. That's scary. Where does it all go, especially when, like Nora Ephron, I REMEMBER NOTHING.

So, although it's a little premature, I am making a New Year resolution to record more of what I read, for my memory bank, for others if they ever find me here, tucked cosily away under a weird name, and as a reference tool, in case I need the name of a book or article. A friend of mine has been blogging publicly every week for almost nine months of this year. It's part of his job but it makes him buy a book a week, read it then write about it. I so enjoy reading about his reading and it's a wonderful service to those of us who are reading other books yet are interested in other things to read.

I have had a spate of successful reading over November with far and away the best book being Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor, about John Synge and told through the voice of Molly Allgood who was also the actress Maire O'Neill and beginning when she is in her sixties, destitute and an alcoholic. It is exquisitely written with Molly's thoughts and words captured in a lilting Irish brogue, funny, sad, beautiful.

Then Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room also captured my imagination. Switching between the first and third person it seems to be a memoir but I suspect it is a "clever" memoir in the same way as Boyhood and Youth are memoirs for JM Coetzee. One is not quite sure. Nevertheless, I found the central character whose name is (wait for it) Damon, sympathetic, easy to relate to, a loner who hates himself for not making the right connections when they make themselves available. It is a book about journeys, not travel, and discoveries about self, also about death and dying.

Finally, Birth by Peter Harris which couldn't be more different in style and tone but what a gripping read, like a thriller. Told from an uncomfortably close perspective, this is the story of how our first democratic election nearly became a national disaster. With the joint forces of the AWB and Inkatha waging a war against the efforts of the Independent Electoral Commission to organise a successful, free and fair election, one reads about the enormous strain, the ungodly working hours and obstacle after obstacle, bomb after bomb, the names of the dead listed like an apocalyptic roll call. It is horrifying. The title refers not only to the birth of the new nation, South Africa, but also to the writer's own twin boys. The two stories, personal and political are nicely interwoven to make this a moving and intensely interesting book.

Two new books found in Cape Town

I bought the new Anna Quindlen, Every Last One, and the new Jonathan Coe, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim while in Cape Town a week ago. Both are eminently readable as they say, why I am not sure now. Why eminently? Anyway, I could have finished them both in a flash but savoured them slowly, especially the Quindlen. This is sounding horribly sickly and I apologise.

Every Last One is half Wally Lamb but uniquely Quindlen who invariably writes with compassion and care but who also writes about critical moments in people's lives (dear God, I should abandon this blog right now).

This book is just what I needed, the first half anyway. It begins thus:

This is my life....

and ends with an echo of these words, but what happens in the space between their utterance is too terrible to bear, almost.

Naturally I can't tell you what happens, but from the moment I started reading, I was.... what? captivated, entranced, engaged, utterly there, completely content to read about this woman's every day life with her every day family, hoping against hope that disaster wasn't looming but of course it was. This is Anna Quindlen and she prefaces the book with that beautiful but ominous poem by Philip Larkin:

There is an evening coming in.......

Read this book.

Jonathan Coe's book is clever and also "eminently" readable (I haven't improved my writing ability in the past half hour obviously). It's like, if we are to pursue comparisons, a not so clever JM Coetzee, certainly a less pretentious JMC, in its surprising last chapter. I thought I had the mystery of the book all wrapped up until I read the last few pages, then felt mildly cheated but grinned nevertheless. Think about Slow Man, JMC fans.

While its technique is a little too foregrounded, I enjoyed the various transitions between narrative and intervening letters, short stories, emails etc all of which our protagonist is reading during the rather strange journey he's on beginning in Australia and ending there too, again, think Slow Man.

Despite my woeful attempts at book reviewing this sunny Sunday, I can heartily recommend these two books (there she goes again, "heartily", huh!).

Sunday morning with William Fiennes

I woke as usual around 6.30 and made my early morning tea. I knew what I was going to do this sunday, go to the gym and walk on the treadmill in the (vain) hope that my tummy would shrink and that the strange and new stiffness in my right leg would ease. Why I thought about The Music Room I don't know, but I dragged my bookclub bag onto the bed and started reading. It's now 9,36 and it's over. I read it in one fell swoop but I would like to return to it one day. It's simply beautiful, a book about boyhood in a magical place, a ancient castle, a family heirloom, greatly loved by all who live there and conjured up in this book as a reverent memory still wholly alive. The upper classes of Great Britain are an endearing lot. They struggle with money like the rest of us but on a different plane. To keep the castle in some kind of decent order, the family entertains the public throughout the summer, with Dad acting as ticket keeper and Mom as tour guide. But this is no sentimental gush about a lost past, it is a sharply focused memoir suffused with detail about birds, plants, lineage and, above all, about the human brain and the history of medical procedure and research into epilepsy. Rich, Williams much older brother acts as the focal point of this book. His charm and ferocious strength alternate with his joy in using language like a poet. His rages are terrifying but the family cocoons him with loving protection. The ending is a marvel, once again, bringing me to tears. I am definitely getting old.

William Fiennes. The Music Room. Picador. 2009.

hilary mantel

Look at that face. Before I found this photo on Amazon I had imagined Hilary Mantel as dark and studious, but she's a pixie, an mischievous elf, with upturned eyes and a wry and slightly wicked smile. Which matches my enormous pleasure in reading a 2007 novel of hers called An Experiment in Love which is absolutely not what it seems. The title would appeal to Siri Husveldt readers, something evocative and soulful. But this book is about young women as friends and foes, living together in the 1950s in a university residence in London and the book has the most remarkable Roald Dahlish denouement. Read it and find out.

After Wolf Hall and now this, I'm a dedicated fan.

Reading again

It's pathetic really the way I am (not) managing this blog. I think it's because I'm the only follower (je suis meaning I am and I follow quite appropriate here I think, are you there Karen?) and there's no pressure to write. But also because until this morning, I have not read anything that made me really want to write. Until this morning.

OK. The book in question is Paul Auster's Invisible and it was absorbing from the first page as all good books should be. He's difficult to describe in terms of literary affiliations, lots of Henry James, a little of JMC (or perhaps JMC takes his cue from PA?) something of Ian McKewan. Maybe, all the male writers of a certain age (late fifties, early sixties), the baby boomers, are all circulating around similar themes including the BIG one which is what we are doing to our planet. Ian M has done this directly in Solar, Auster does this very indirectly in Invisible. But as I reluctantly but furiously came to the last pages of the book this Sunday morning, I did what I always do when a book knocks my socks off. I say "Jesus". Then I read the passage in question again, and I repeat. Then I do a lot of gazing out of the window, then I read it again. Then I look to the back cover (note my copy has a beautiful and relevant photograph of a young couple sitting on the edge of the Seine in Paris)to see if some clever critic has said something clever (no such luck here) and i look at the cover, then I put the book down very gently and get typing on my Macbook.

This is a very illusive book about the invisibility of authors and authors within authors but it tells a cracking good yarn at the same time through multiple authors who seamlessly glide into each other while being controlled meticulously by the "REAL AUTHOR".

The ending brought me to tears. It was so utterly unexpected, not in terms of the plot which it seemed to abandon as if it was of little importance but because of the subtlety of its vision of an oh so cruel and imperfect world.

Read it and see.

Booker Prize Week

So Hilary Mantel did it and I didn't. Let me explain. Di and I were standing in Waterstones, mulling over which of the new books to buy, all of them shiny harbacks with enticing covers. Di chose Wolf Hall, the winner of the Booker, I didn't. Well done Di. Now the question is, what did you think of it?

I chose the new Iain Banks and the new Margaret Atwood although if I hadn't faced the prospect of being overweight at Heathrow, I would have bought the Coetzee as well.

I'm not being a good reader at the moment. A few pages into Home by Marylin Robinson (Gilead sequel), a few chapters into Waterlog by the late Roger Deakin, half way through the Iain Robinson, nearly finished The Wisdom of Crowds, almost finished Dreams: A Very Short Introduction (husband has grabbed it from me) and about twenty more books are glaring at me from all over my bedroom, on my desk, at my bedside and on the floor. Husband says he wants to live in a Zen environment and is very annoyed by my clutter. Ah, the joys of marriage.

Our NIKE group

This is for you, Francette.

The first meeting of the NIKE (just do it) group met the day after a new moon in Leo and a partial solar eclipse. This was obviously auspicious since the group seemed (to me at any rate) to be centred and calm yet inspired and inspiring. Alternating waves of laughter and quiet filled the room. I loved it, every bit of it, and wished that we had booked in for the night so that we could be together a little longer.
I had been reading, with rapt attention, a book by Nancy Kline called Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind. Armed with the provocative ideas Kline puts forward about listening, really listening to people, and knowing that I had an awe-inspiring video by Sugata Mitra to share, I felt only positive anticipation about the day's conversations. There seemed to be no tension this time and no bone-wearying boredom either, but I could be wrong about this. It is possibly easier to be the organiser than the receiver on these occasions as one is able to control the flow and pace of the talk.
There will be another blog soon with heaps of information and a synopsis of the day's events but for now that's all, except to say, thank you Colette, thank you Elmarie, thank you Deon, thank you everyone for being so generous with your ideas and reminding me that there is power in the collective.
A luta continua!