Not easy to rate. It's not a mystery/thriller so much as an exploration of how inter-generational mental illness impacts upon family relationships. In the doing it makes for characters (people!) who are not easy to warm to. Emma Healey crafts a fine sentence and the varying chapter lengths emphasise the fractured, on/off mother/daughter relationship. It's good but I wasn't struck by the ending and all-in-all I found it a bit... unrelenting.

I'm soooo grateful that Miss K and I have a much easier relationship than do Jen and Lana. Nevertheless... 💔

There's something about October weather that brings on a hankering for Victorian gothic! This has been compared to "The Woman in White" but reminded me more of du Maurier's "My Cousin Rachel". The setting and atmosphere are great, allowing the intriguing beginning to draw me in. Unfortunately, several interesting storylines were introduced but not developed and the main plot took a turn which, by the end, was a bit silly. Starts well: ends meh. 3*

Read for my library book club.
It's good: Belinda Bauer is a safe pair of hands (if that's not an entirely ridiculous thing to say of a crime writer!) but I'm perplexed by its inclusion on last year's Booker Prize longlist: "fiction at its finest"? For one thing I thought the motive was rather weak, and it's not especially ground-breaking. However, Jack is a great character and the story moves at a cracking pace and kept me thoroughly entertained.

Gorgeous poem!
"Day, with Hawk" by Vahni Capildeo

Black mud, brackish water, foxes, eels, hunger and desire! As with Everything Under, there's the feeling of a myth running beneath these stories and unifying them, although here that myth remains submerged throughout and never quite breaks the surface. It all adds up to a collection of strange and unsettling stories that some irresistible impulse had me reading aloud to myself beneath my breath. A fantastic read of an October night!

Future-book related! 😉
So here's a thing...a story I wrote made the final ten for this event and I'll now be performing at Stroud Book Festival!

Today was a pukka writerly day. I went to the Faber Poetry event at Cheltenham Literature Festival, then spent an hour people-watching and writing absolute shite in Waterstones cafe and rounded the afternoon off nicely with a perusal of the stacks in the library. 😁

The chowder's simmering nicely for a few minutes so I'm making a start on my next library book club read.

Great premise: who hasn't wondered at some point "What if I'd done X instead of Y?" and I like to think about parallel worlds now and then. Also there's the hugely important message about appreciation. But then halfway through it got all Jason-Bourne-meets-Enid-Blyton's-Magic-Faraway-Tree and went downhill from there. And I'm not at all happy that Daniela (MC's wife) ended up as a prize to be fought over/competed for.

Whereas I feel like he's just done an info-dump on me.
So now I must wonder, is this a male fantasy/delusion (that women are turned on by this kind of behaviour) or is it a parallel world? (It sure as hell isn't mine.)

Ok, now you've got my attention!

I wasn't expecting to like this, much less to read it in a day! The hype led me to expect it to be more flippant: it's not without humour but I found it sharp rather than darkly comic. Despite the title it's Korede's book, the plain elder sister whose cultural and personal upbringing predetermine her to look out for gorgeous Ayoola. Is Ayoola really the villain of the piece, though, or is it the family, in which violence is perpetrated and hidden?

I struggled to connect with Celie at first because she's so resigned to the horrendous things that happen to her and her family. Her letters to God read like she's filing police reports: just the facts, ma'am; none of your emotive commentary. As I got used to her voice, and as she grew into herself, it was increasingly difficult to put her story down. It's a tough read but, goodness, I wasn't expecting it to contain such deep abiding joy as well!

I've got tickets to go and hear her read!
Three long-form poems: "You Very Young in New York", "Repeat Until Time", and "The Sandpit After Rain". Both autobiographical and philosophical, exploring the paradoxical nature of time as simultaneously linear and circular (and the habit the events of our lives have of happening out of sync.) It's a collection that I admired rather than loved, but there's much to appreciate.

All the horrible things that have happened to Celie since page one and her only source of hope and comfort is a white God that reminds her of a bank clerk! I don't know if I'm more sad or angry.

Read it years ago but this BBC radio version was my latest cardio-workout partner.
Antoinette is the daughter of former slave owners in the Caribbean. She has no sense of belonging anywhere, nor of basic safety. Then along comes Mr Rochester (yes, him!) to marry her for her money. It's something of a conundrum, the book comes across as fragmented and disorienting as Antoinette's mental state inevitably becomes. I'm just not sure how deliberately.

Some books are mirrors: others are windows. For me, this is a window-book. It tells the stories of 12 people, predominantly women, predominantly of colour, of diverse social standing, all with connections to eachother in some way. I loved its vibrancy! It did verge on preachy from time to time but pulled it back with an ending that was entirely satisfying. I'm happy to see it on the #bookerprize shortlist.

Yesterday was Miss K's birthday. I was so pleased she chose to spend part of it with me (I mean, who wants to celebrate with their mum?). We went to see Vita and Virginia and had afternoon tea. Not bad for two little hobbits from the Shire! 🎂🍰

Well, now, what have we here? Would that be a programme for Cheltenham Literature Festival?
Why, yes, it would.

Two days after I clambered back aboard the book-buying-ban wagon I learn that my favourite contemporary poet has a new book out.
Poetry Book Society Bulletin, you are sorely testing me!

Where do I start with this self-consciously erudite, slow-paced, "thinky" book? I loved it. No, it's not "right" that the telling of the sad break-up of a marriage and young family foregrounds that of the suffering of refugee children. Yet here we are. I liked the structural echoes. I liked the characters' anonymity. I liked the parent/child relationships. Mostly I liked pondering what she was driving at in the pursuit of echoes of lost things.

Bearing in mind that the MC is dead before the first page even drops, it's a book that celebrates vitality and, considering the shitty life experiences that Leila and her band of warmhearted social misfit friends go through, it has remarkable joie de vivre. I loved the first part, then, but what to make of the second half? I enjoyed getting to know Leila's friends better but the plot went abruptly off-road into the hinterlands of broad farce.

A haul of two halves!
Fiona Benson's "Vertigo & Ghost" is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.
Mary Jean Chan's "The Window" (here in "Fleche") is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
"Ducks, Newburyport" is the only Booker Prize nominee that I have actually bought. (The others I've read I've borrowed from the library.)
Lastly, "The Poisonwood Bible" is a treat, courtesy of my Waterstones card. ?

How beautiful is this?
Miss K and I went to see the final part of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery's Japanese print exhibition: nature and seasons. I thought of the Littens even here as there were some prints by Utagawa Hiroshige from a series called "Famous Places in Edo and Murasaki's Genji". This is "Autumn Moon at Ishiyama Temple" where Murasaki is said to have begun "The Tale of Genji" on the night of the full moon of the 8th month of AD 1004.

Ugh, just NO!
Interesting themes (AI, its parallels with Frankenstein, machine learning, personhood) and I liked the Shelleys' sections. The contemporary bits are a hot mess of ideas spouted by infuriating "characters": vulgarian Ron Lord; superior Victor Stein pontificating while fetishizing Ry's body.
Is the single entendre a thing? The brain is not the primary organ here!
AI? I've little faith in *human* intelligence on this showing.

I'm a hundred pages in, now, and (predictably enough) am enjoying the bits with the Shelleys and really disliking the bits with the sexbots. What's the verdict, dear Littens? Shall I persevere? #bookerprizelonglist

Two hundred years to the day since the Peterloo Massacre, on occasion of which Shelley wrote "The Masque of Anarchy".

I'm not convinced this is entirely successful (it has that "just missed" feeling) but it was hard to put down and I'll be thinking about it for some time.
What makes us human? Is it the need to tell our stories and have them witnessed? (Does that mean we are less human when we cannot do so?) And/or is it our apparent inability to inhabit the present moment without under-layering it with a remembered past we can't let go of? Intriguing stuff!

(Sorry, couldn't help myself! 😁)
#bookhaul

Don't get me wrong: this collection of short stories isn't a bad book by any means. However, it's like eating a whole packet of chocolate digestive biscuits. Nice, but I kind of know what I'm getting after two or three and can't help but think I'm spoiling my appetite for more satisfying and nutritious fare. 🙊

Hmmm... I admired her story-craft but didn't actually enjoy the stories all that much. She's great at presenting off-kilter characters and showing all the ways in which they delude and sabotage themselves and each other but a whole bookful of such got rather wearing.

Gorgeous, gorgeous book!
Gerry and Stella are taking a long weekend together in Amsterdam. Except that Gerry is spending much of his in the bottom of a whiskey glass and goodness knows where Stella is sneaking off to! They are good, ordinary, people who think the world of each other... but more than 40 years of shared personal history now demands a reckoning.
It's a wonderful, quiet, humane book. I loved it.

Not my usual kind of book but when I saw this in the library last week I recognised it from Litsy and decided to give it a go. I enjoyed it. Aaron Falk's an interesting character, I didn't guess the plot, and it turned out to be a quick read for all its 450 pages: it grabbed me by the hand and pulled me along at a cracking pace!

#libraryhaul
No reading today as I am recovering from the migraine that hit me yesterday. 😥
I did, however, go to the library's book group (good discussion of The Light Between Oceans) and of course I picked up a few books to bring home. I was pleased to find MW of W: now I just need to read Act 1 in the next couple of days for #Skakespearereadalong .

A summer's re-enactment of Iron Age life, my stomach was clenched from start to finish. The women forage, cook, and wash clothes while (Molly aside) condoning (from fear and habit) the physical and emotional violence meted out to them. The men are too busy indulging macho fantasies and sparring for dominance to contribute much of use before bonding when the "experiment" goes full-on Lord of the Flies. It's not really about the Iron Age, is it?

Experiential archaeology student Molly is talking to teenager Silvie about her professor (Jim) and about Silvie's dad. They're living as the ancient Britons did, or in accordance with Silvie's dad's notions of what that was which (surprise, surprise!) involves curtailing the women's freedoms, spouting off about racial purity, sulking whenever the professor contradicts him and taking it out on the women. How very contemporary!

I enjoyed this! Maud has dementia and nobody listens when she tells them her friend has gone missing. But is it really Elizabeth she is fretting about? With moments of great poignancy and flashes of humour, Healey still allows this to be a dark tale at heart: it's never twee (it's no "My Grandmother..."). There is necessarily a fair amount of repetition at sentence level, but I rather liked the reverberations of birds, lipstick, marrows and all!

#libraryhaul
I'd reserved the tagged book: the others were sheer opportunism! 😀

Ooof! In a very similar vein to Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns" (you have been warned!) parts of this book are brutal but it's the matter-of-fact way in which Weili/Winnie tells her story that makes it so devastating. Wen Fu is all the more horrendous for not being introduced as a fully-fledged villain but rather growing steadily more deplorable as the story progresses.
Does anyone write the mother/daughter dynamic quite like Amy Tan?

I may have gone a bit wild with my #library reservations this morning!
I'm a backlist reader usually but thought this year I'd have a go at *some* of the #bookerprize longlist, at least. The tagged book is the only one I've already read.

One for the UK Littens: Wakenhyrst is one of today's Kindle daily deals. #99p

Heady stuff! I first read this at age 20 (borrowed from my then girlfriend) and nostalgia got the better of me when I saw this copy in Waterstones. Hmmm... I like it less now than I did before. The writing is either luscious or overblown, depending on your view, and there is something at once beautiful and monstrous in Smart's giving of herself wholesale to this great love of hers, the misery of it no less than the ecstacy, and expressing it so.

From the poem "I Want the Confidence of"

Bring on the playful artifice! Hell yeah to defiant gestures and attitudes of vengeful endurance! I was stuck on my "proper" writing so wrote a villanelle about the BBC news instead. (If anyone would like to suggest a suitable emoji for such an occasion, I would be most grateful.)

Amazon freebie. Not my usual fare, but I wanted an easy read for a change.
The writing was nothing special and the plot points were visible from space. Veronica's decisions were absurd: yes, she wants to wrap her young daughter in cotton wool but *really*?! But I wanted undemanding and I got undemanding. It felt a lot like reading The Girl on the Train: if you liked that you might like this. Evidently this kind of thing is not for me, though.

Rather wonderful! Arguably, some of the shorter pieces might be more accurately called situations rather than stories. On the other hand I appreciated the absence of gender-markers in many stories, leaving things open to reader interpretation. The collection as a whole is a word-nerd's dream! It focuses on the oddities and limitations of language in the minds and lives of verbally-compulsive characters. It's clever but playful. One to be re-read.

I adored "To the River" and was expecting something in a similar vein here. She does write about her own loneliness (as distinct from solitude) when adrift in New York but it's primarily about artists and the work made from their experience of social isolation and/or exclusion. No doubt I'd have enjoyed it more if I were already familiar with the artists and their work (she's made me want to look up David Wojnarowicz now). I do love her writing.

For bookgroup. I can see why this is popular: strong characters, emotion, a moral dilemma. And it follows the formula of making the characters want something, preventing them having it and seeing how they respond. I enjoyed it until I lost interest towards the end when the emotion turned to outright flailing. Most days I'd lean towards a so-so (don't like blatant attempts at plucking my heartstrings) but it was a good holiday read so it's a pick.

"How pointless all human thoughts, words and deeds must be, if things like this are possible! Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilisation weren't even able to prevent this river of blood..."

I saw a film of this book when I was in my late teens (the same age as these soldiers). For several days afterwards I didn't want to look at people. The book is a tough read, just as it bloody well ought to be!