Starting over with a new name

Ladies of power, let's begin. This is our new blog as I gave up on last one. Couldn't work out how to begin a new post. Anyway, we have expanded our brains since the last postings begun in June 2008 and are now professional anacoluthons, not so?

Let's record our reading on this blog as we go so that our monthly bookclub meetings can be for catching up on news, sharing, eating and drinking.

Right! As soon as I got home from Tracy's I started Zoe Heller's The Believers. This is the author of Notes on a Scandal, now made into a rather good movie which you can watch on DVD. The Believers begins in London in 1962 with a young woman who seems cut off from the world and rather shy but who, as the novel progresses, becomes one of the most awful woman in literary fiction. Heller does this rather well, vide the ageing lesbian teacher in Notes on a Scandal. She, Audrey that is, in The Believers (the awful woman) marries a man she hardly knows, lands up in America, and dominates the novel since poor old husband is in a coma for the rest of the plot. But his secret history emerges in the form of an unknown affair and a child and the rest I'll leave to you. I would rate this around 7/10. Not absolutely fabulous but interesting and readable.

Then I read Eileen's book, Chasing Daylight: How my forthcoming death transformed my life. Interesting how books cluster together periodically along the same fault lines. I had recently read Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture so could compare that with this. What I found interesting was that this man was faithful to his personality type until his death. He might be labelled a boring accountant because he set about ordering his death and the family's affairs with amazing tenacity. But the centre of the book is his plan to have one "unwinding" session with each of the people in his life and that turned out to be quite a few. During this "unwinding" session, he would focus on the one perfect moment he had with each of these people. This was his way of saying goodbye and sharing the different kinds of relationships he had with different people. I can see Karen's toes starting to curl at this point, but it's a thoughtful book on a thoughtful theme and I liked it.

But my number one is Tim Winton's Breath. It is quite magnificent written in a new fresh style and with such a light touch. It's basically about surfing which is hardly a topic that would attract me but with such fine descriptions of the ongoing relationship between humans and the sea that I found myself gasping at times (literally holding my breath) and recalling times when I had been dumped by a vicious wave, being rasped by the sand at the bottom of the sea, being terrified of being swept against the rocks and so on. Besides the power of his words, this book also holds together like a poem. At first, one doesn't understand the relevance of the opening scene of the "suicide" of a teenager, but by the end, the meaning of 'breath' is perfectly clear.
i can't do justice to this book but read it. This is major new talent.

OK. I have Agaat to look forward to and the new Wally Lamb which I couldn't resist buying as there it was in Exclusives, asking me to take it to the checkout counter. I could hardly refuse. It's called The Hour I First Believed and it's 728 pages. Typical Lamb pattern. Huge, unputdownable books. Can't wait.