Maybe if you weren’t there, reading Fay Weldon in the 1980s, you just won’t ‘get’ this sequel to her most famous novel, Life and Loves of a She Devil…

I don’t mean that you can’t follow the novel.  It’s decades since I read SheDevil#1 and I’d forgotten the detail of it but Weldon provides all you need to know in SheDevil#2.  I mean that for women of my generation the novel will evoke memories of all kinds of feminist battles large and small and the sense of excitement that came with yes, changing the world.  Today we can’t use the term The Sisterhood without self-mockery, but back then we knew we were working with women across a yet-to-be-globalised world, and we knew with a sense of empowerment that we were not alone.

And we were all very serious about it.  We were reading such serious stuff about feminism.  We were reading The…

In the 80s, my favourite authors were Mary Wesley and Fay Weldon.  Mary Wesley began writing in her seventies, and she died in 1997 so there are only ten novels listed at Wikipedia–which is still amazing, when you consider she was only writing for 14 years, beginning in 1983 with Jumping the Queue and ending with Part of the Furniture in 1997.  I’ve only got four of these novels because I read all the others via the library.  I’ve also got the BBC series based on The Camomile Lawn (1984), and somewhere, also the biography Wild Mary written by her son Toby Eady…

Fay Weldon (born in 1931) started writing in 1967 and is still going strong, with 42 books to her credit at Wikipedia.  Last year I read and reviewed Death of a She-devil published in 2017, the same year that she published Before the War.  She…

First Line Fridays is a feature hosted by Hoarding Books.

TGIF, everyone! I hope you are all ready for the weekend! I know I am! 🎉

Today my first line is from a book I am currently reading:

“Shanghai, 1988. It wasn’t the plane Lina feared, but the sky above the airfield. Acres of space unbroken by trees or buildings made Lina nervous.”

I have read about half of this book and am enjoying getting to know the Zhen family and their unique cultural position. The writing is smooth, and it has been easy to get lost in the story.

Synopsis from Goodreads:

After years of chasing the American dream, the Zhen family has moved back to China. Settling into a luxurious serviced apartment in Shanghai, Wei, Lina, and their daughter, Karen, join an elite community of Chinese-born, Western-educated professionals who have returned to a radically transformed city.

One morning…

First Line Fridays is a feature hosted by Hoarding Books.

TGIF, everyone!

Today my first line is from a book I am currently reading:

New York City May 2013

The evening had turned blue and soft, the way New York does in May, and I decided to walk to the book club and save the bus fare. According to Mimi’s Facebook message, the group was gathering at her apartment on Park Avenue, deep inside the plummy center of the Seventies—at least thirty minutes from my place on Riverside Drive—but I didn’t mind. I was a New Yorker, I could walk all day. Anyway, a brisk hike (so I told myself, scrolling through the Mimi message chain for the millionth time that afternoon) would settle my nerves.

I adored The Forgotten Room written by these three authors. I reviewed it on Goodreads and gave it five stars. I also happen to…

I was disappointed in this book.  The Buddha of Suburbia is listed in 1001 Books You Much Read Before You Die, but I confess to complete bewilderment as to why it should be so.  I found it trashy and boring.

The introduction by Zadie Smith did little to enlighten me either.  She tells us that as an adolescent she was thrilled to find filthy language in a book rather than on walls, and that she was excited to find her familiar Anglo-Indian world depicted in a novel.  She found it funny too, but the humour passed me by.

It’s partly because the book is very dated.  Set in the 1970s with incessant references to pop culture as if it matters, it tells the story of an inane young man called Karim who finds everything (school, his family, life &c) irrelevant and boring.  His coming-of-age includes the discovery of sex…

Housekeeping is such a strange book, I hardly know how to begin.  Marilynne Robinson is world famous, especially after Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, but I didn’t much like Gilead so I was in no rush to read this first novel when in 2015 it arrived chez moi with the first release of Faber Modern Classics. (Which has since gone on to become a list of 21 titles).  Housekeeping sat alone and lonely, abandoned in a box marked 2015, but I couldn’t quite make myself take it to the Op Shop which is the fate of books that publishers have sent me but which fail to spark my interest.  I have no such compunctions with thrillers, crime novels, YA and weepy memoirs, but, well, I am in awe of the Robinson name, if not of her books.

Alone and lonely, abandoned in the care of someone not very interested in its fate… without knowing it, I…

I have been slacking off in my quest to read 1001 Books Before I Die, and, choosing one to read on this trip to Qld, I looked for something on the TBR that I could cheerfully leave behind for my dear old dad to read. I was pretty sure he would enjoy The Talented Mr Ripley; I’m not so sure that I did.

It is said of this novel that it’s different because it’s a crime novel written from the PoV of the perpetrator, and I can see from reviews at GoodReads that there is for some readers a kind of frisson in hoping that Tom Ripley will get away with it.  Some seem to think that he’s a sociopath and others seem to have decided that he is ‘forced into’ committing one of his murders.  *Oops* was that a spoiler? Not really, the blurb says much the same…

Pincher Martin is a most disconcerting book.  First published in 1956, it was William Golding’s third novel after his wildly successful debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954) and while it likewise depicts the human condition in extremis it is not, as Wikipedia describes it, merely a novel that records the thoughts of a drowning sailor.

To explain why, I need to depart from my usual practice and consider the plot, spoilers and all.  You have been warned…

BEWARE SPOILERS

I read the first few pages both enthralled and appalled: the third person narration describes the desperate struggle of a sailor fighting for his life in the cold waters of the Atlantic.  The blurb had told me that he was the sole survivor of a torpedoed destroyer and I could hardly bear to read his frantic efforts to breathe:

He was struggling in every direction, he was the centre of the…

The Inheritors is an astonishing novel.  I picked it up from the library shelves on the strength of William Golding’s name because Lord of the Flies is unforgettable and Pincher Martin took my breath away.  But even so, the imaginative power of The Inheritors floored me.  I’ve never read anything like it.

This is the blurb:

When the spring came the people – what was left of them – moved back by the old paths from the sea. But this year strange things were happening, terrifying things that had never happened before. Inexplicable sounds and smells; new, unimaginable creatures half glimpsed through the leaves. Seen through the eyes of a small tribe of Neanderthals whose world is hanging in the balance, The Inheritors explores the emergence of a new race — ourselves, Homo sapiens — whose growing dominance threatens an entire way of life.

I had thought that this…