The Circle, by Dave Eggers

TITLE: The Circle
AUTHOR: Dave Eggers

COPYRIGHT: 2013
PAGES: 504
PUBLISHER: Knopf

SETTING: Near future, in the US
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

Fast, thrilling, compulsively addictive - The Circle is Dave Eggers's timely novel about our obsession with the internet.

When Mae is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the Circle links users' personal emails, social media, and finances with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of transparency. Mae can't believe her great fortune to work for them - even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public...

Mae Holland's humdrum life changes when she gets at job at The Circle, a company that's basically Google + Facebook on steroids. The Circle is the product of a backlash against internet abuse. By linking everyone's online activities into one real identity they have, they claim, brought civility to the web.

Initially, all goes well. The campus-style offices are all about fun and a shared social life, and when her father gets ill, the company ensures her health insurance covers him. She's ecstatic at working for a company that treats its employees so well and that is trying to do good in the world, creating a more civil, transparent society. But soon things cross into territory that is not quite as comfortable. Transparency means that privacy is suspicious by definition, and some of the ways in which this manifests in everyday life makes Mae feel some twinges of discomfort.

The Circle, for all that it is satire, is probably one of the scariest books I've read. It's scary because it's believable and plausible. It's basically taking ideas that really exist in the world today (and which seem pretty reasonable!) to their extreme but impeccably logical conclusions. It's also scary because since its publication, several of those ideas have actually moved in the exact directions posited in the book, and because most of them feel like a continuation of what's already going on. If we've already privatised big chunks of the justice system and are thinking of privatising things like defense procurement, why not the running of elections?

So to me, as a commentary on society and the direction in which we seem to be going, this was great (I think my favourite moment was Mae's grave decision whether to send a frown to some evil Guatemalan paramilitaries, and her thoughts about how brave this made her). But this is fiction, so how does it work as a story, the device Eggers uses to develop his message?

Actually, pretty well. There are issues. There are elements that are predictable (e.g. the identity of the mysterious guy who becomes Mae's secret lover), and it's not exactly subtle (the company has procured and keeps in a tank a rare creature from the deep sea, a transparent shark who devours and destroys everything, including a turtle who looks a little bit like one of Mae's viewers' grandfather... if you don't see it immediately, and without the need for the explicit explanation provided, as a metaphor for the ultimate destructiveness and voracity of the Circle's drive for transparency, then you weren't paying attention). But it works, and that's because of Mae.

Yes, Mae is a bit thin as a character. She doesn't have much agency and is very reactive, almost submissive. But that, I felt, was the point. One of the things I thought was best about the book, and this might be spoilerish, so keep reading at your own risk, is that it turns out we're seeing things from the point of view of a character I didn't expect. I expected Mae would turn out to be someone who'd start out believing, but who'd increasingly feel trapped by the oppressiveness of the Circle. But no, Mae turns out to be a true believer. She's not in denial about the negative consequences (which come through loud and clear to the reader, even through her point of view); she just doesn't see them as negative consequences. She simply cannot conceive of points of view different from her own being other than crazy or antisocial. They are therefore discountable, and the people who hold them need to be brought in for their own good. It's chilling. So, in effect, the protagonist of the book is the villain, and her villainy is of the passive, unquestioning kind. And this comes to a truly fantastic climax with the ending. It was totally the right one.

MY GRADE: An A-.

AUDIOBOOK NOTES: I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator, Dion Graham, was brilliant. We're in Mae's point of view, so I was a bit surprised to see that the narrator was male, but given that Mae is not much more than a vehicle for Eggers' views (even though she herself doesn't espouse them), that kind of made sense. He got the nuances right, and I particularly liked the little bit of dismissive laughter in his voice when Mae made her rationalisations to be able to accept something particularly troublesome.

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Two disappointing DNFs

These are two books I was really sure I'd enjoy. I didn't.

TITLE: Cinder
AUTHOR: Marissa Meyer

I love stories inspired in fairy tales, and a cyborg Cinderella set in a sort of post-apocalyptic, plague-ravaged Beijing sounded really intriguing. Cinder is a mechanic, repairing all sorts of machinery (even other cyborgs) for her family, who exploit her. Things kick off when Prince Kai brings her a favourite cyborg of his for her to repair.

I just couldn't get into this one properly. The world-building is a mess. History and social structures seem either shallow or not thought-out at all, and some aspects are downright contradictory (like the status of cyborgs. I didn't buy that for a minute). I was particularly disappointed to see that Meyer did nothing at all with the New Beijing setting. This could be set absolutely anywhere. The characters don't ring true, either, which in my book, is even worse than bad world-building.

Lots of people seem to like this one, but it didn't work for me at all. I gave up before the halfway point.

MY GRADE: A DNF.



TITLE: When A Scot Ties the Knot
AUTHOR: Tessa Dare

This is about a young woman who suffers from quite severe social anxiety, to the point that she resorts to inventing a fiancé to keep relatives from forcing her to participate in the marriage mart. Problem is, the random Scottish name and rank she invents actually belong to a real man, and he ends up receiving her letters, in which she explains exactly what she's doing (which doesn't make a great deal of sense). Years later, once the war is over, he seeks her out. This is not because he fell in love with her letters, or anything like that, but because she's a property owner and he's desperate to give the men he commanded during the war, and who've been abandoned by the system, a place to settle and build a life. Ergo, she must marry him or he'll reveal her deception.

I didn't have an objection to the basic plot. Dare herself has made me buy more preposterous stuff. I didn't even have an objection in principle to the lack of historical accuracy. Dare herself has written books I've enjoyed which don't even attempt to be historically accurate. But this one just didn't work for me. In my opinion, it failed the internal logic test. The characters and motivations made no sense, even in the context of the situations Dare had created. I kept going "Why ever would she not do X?", and "Why would he do Y?" And the humour, which has always been one of the main attractions of Dare's books, just didn't appeal. The whole thing felt completely insubstantial... very Avon, I'm sorry to say. Not for me. I stopped reading at about the halfway point when I realised I didn't care in the least about these people.

MY GRADE: A DNF.

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An Heir of Uncertainty, by Alyssa Everett

TITLE: An Heir of Uncertainty
AUTHOR: Alyssa Everett

COPYRIGHT: 2014
PAGES: 250
PUBLISHER: Carina Press

SETTING: Early 19th century England
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: None

Yorkshire, 1820

Lina, Lady Radbourne, thought being a countess would rescue her from poverty. Unfortunately, her young groom failed to plan for the future, and his drunken accident left her widowed and pregnant. Now Colonel Winstead Vaughan—Win—will inherit her late husband's fortune…unless she gives birth to a boy. Win is her natural enemy, so why can't she stop thinking about him?

Win is stunned to learn he stands to inherit a vast fortune. He's even more surprised to find himself falling for the beautiful, spirited Lady Radbourne, who is the one woman who stands in the way of a life he'd only imagined.

When someone tries to poison Lady Radbourne, suspicion falls on Win. There's a clever killer in their midst, and if Win doesn't solve the mystery fast, Lina may perish. He needs to win her trust, but how can he prove it's she he wants, and not the fortune?

Lately I've been forcing myself to try more new historical romance authors, as it's a subgenre I used to love and now I've almost abandoned. Way too many have been unsuccessful experiments, but fortunately, this was one of the rare successes.

Lina grew up in an impoverished family. When a young local nobleman became completely besotted with her she decided to accept his marriage proposal and become Lady Radbourne, ending all her financial woes. She didn't love him, but she was fond of him, so it didn't seem very wrong.

But not long afterwards, everything goes to pot. Her young husband is, well, young, and he behaves exactly like you might expect a spoilt young nobleman to behave. His foolhardy, risky behaviour ends up with him getting killed trying to win a bet while hopelessly intoxicated. And now the title and his property are going to a cousin, unless Lina is expecting a child and that child is male.

And it turns out that Lina is actually pregnant. The problem is that right after the accident, in a conversation in which she was still in shock and the magistrate was being a bit too delicate in his enquiries, she gave him the impression that she wasn't. So when the cousin in question, Colonel Win Vaughan, arrives to claim his property, daughter and teenaged brother in tow, it's a big shock to him to find that his future is not as secure as he'd been given to believe.

I thought An Heir of Uncertainty was really solid. I liked Everett’s writing, which flowed wonderfully and carried me through. Most of all, I enjoyed the characters and the conflict. Both Lina and Win are sensible, grown-up people, and that's one of the things that attracts them to each other. They're placed in an uncomfortable situation by the circumstances, and it's circumstances that aren't really anyone's fault. All, even the magistrate, behaved reasonably. But rather than set Win and Lina up as enemies who lust after each other (as I thought would be the case afer an inauspicious first meeting), Everett has them push through the mistrust that results and get to know and like each other.

I also liked the secondary characters, particularly Freddy, Win's teenaged brother. Freddy is a young man modern readers will most likely recognise as being somewhere on the autism spectrum, with his obsession with pigeon rearing and his difficulties functioning normally in society. Obviously, that's not recognised as such in the time period, and he's just considered eccentric and weird. It's a fond portrayal, and the way Win interacted with Freddy was sweet.

The book also has a pretty strong mystery (much as I liked the romance, the internal conflict was not particularly substantial, so having a strong mystery was good). Someone is trying to harm Lina, either by making her miscarry or killing her. Win would be ann obvious suspect, although it seems he's being targetted as well. It was really intriguing, and I enjoyed trying to guess what was going on. Unfortunately, the solution was not quite as good as I’d hoped, as it relied on a certain motivation that just makes me sigh and I didn't find particularly convincing.

Still this was good. I'd happily read more by Alyssa Everett.

MY GRADE: A B.

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In Her Defense, by Julianna Keyes

TITLE: In Her Defense
AUTHOR: Julianna Keyes

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 300
PUBLISHER: Carina Press

SETTING: Contemporary
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: Follows Time Served

Caitlin Dufresne has never loved anyone as much as she loves winning. A ruthless fifth-year associate at an elite Chicago law firm, she's on the fast track to partner... until a stupid, serious error enrages her bosses. Caitlin's continued refusal to share work—or credit—lands her a forced two-week vacation. She needs to regroup and learn to be part of a team, not just the star.

When she meets Eli Grant, head of the firm's IT department, Caitlin knows the overgrown frat boy isn't her type. But too much alcohol and a very public game of Truth or Dare turn into a dirty, breathless one-night stand. Which turns into a (mostly naked) two-week fling. Which turns into something that makes Caitlin incredibly nervous, despite the great sex.

Eli shows her the many upsides to sleeping in, and for the first time ever, Caitlin has more than the law waiting for her at home. But when she returns to the office and the relentless demands of a high-profile case, Caitlin must decide if winning this one is worth losing Eli forever.

I love difficult heroines, so when I read a few reviews about this book, it was an easy decision to buy it.

Our heroine, Caitlin Dufresne, was apparently the villain in the first book in this series, Time Served. She's a star at her law firm, working harder than anyone else and getting outstanding results. She also makes sure her colleagues see her disdain at their lazy work habits (imagine, doing only 14-hour days!) and that everyone is aware of just how good she is. Her non-stop working habit bites her in the ass one day, though, when sheer exhaustion causes her to make a mistake.

The partners at her law firm are not angry at her, but they are worried and want to make sure she won't just burn out. Their solution is to force her to take a holiday, and while she hands over her cases, they place restrictions on her work times, enforced by limits on when she can operate her computer. This brings her into conflict with the firm's head of IT, Eli Grant, and when they run into each other at a bar after work, the initial antagonism turns into something else.

I liked the idea of a bitchy, unapologetic heroine. However, what I got really wasn't good. My feelings about Caitlin herself were mixed, and about the romance itself wholeheartedly negative.

I'll start with Caitlin. Yes, she's unapologetic about her ambition and her sex life and doesn't suffer fools gladly at all. But at the same time, she's an asshole. There's a particular scene close to the start where she goes off at a guy in accounting who's pointed out to the partners her high level of billing, and the stuff she says to him points at some really ugly attitudes. I just couldn't buy that she'd changed by the end of the book, not without some major introspection. It was a bit like those people who go on racist rants when they're drunk and then try to blame the drink. Sorry, that was inside you, and the drink let it out.

Another problem was that Caitlin's character didn't really gel for me. She's supposed to be this fantastic litigator, but has absolutely no emotional intelligence. Well, we're told she has it when interacting with witnesses and others in the courtroom, but she demonstrates none of it outside of the courtroom. Does she just turn it off? Because she can't understand other people's motivations worth shit, and she makes quite a few decisions and assumptions here that are just plain stupid.

The romance didn't work for me at all. For starters, I found Eli very unappealing. Actually, I thought he was a passive-aggressive little shit. I think the book would have been improved by us readers seeing Eli's point of view, rather than have first-person narration from Caitlin. The way Keyes wrote it, when we have situations such as him blowing Caitlin off and lying to her about what his plans are so that he can hang out with his ex because he's "confused", he feels like a sleazy liar. If we'd been in his head I might have been a bit more sympathetic. I wasn't. I didn't want Caitlin to forgive him. I wanted her to dump him and go for someone better, because I didn't believe he loved her. Nor did I believe she loved him.

I also didn't like that Keyes found it necessary to make Eli the heir of a powerful family, rather than just simply a guy with a normal job, as is initially setu p. I think part of the problem is that Keyes has clearly no concept of what being head of IT in a corporate setting actually looks like. She (and by extension, Caitlin) seems to think a head of IT would be a basement-dwelling nerd who repairs computers (she even has him drilling holes in the walls in the new office). Erm, no, it's a corporate, management job, at least at the sort of level and in the sort of company she's describing here.

I also had issues with the portrayal of other women: they're either bitchy and desperate for men (Caitlin's colleagues, the women who are after Eli), or oblivious and unbelievable (Caitlin's sister). Ugh!

I even had problems with the cover! I know that the stuff at the bottom of the image is supposed to be a bedsheet, but my eyes keep reading it as the guy's shoulder and back, and that grip looks painful!

MY GRADE: A D. I did finish it, at least, but I enjoyed very little of it.

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Man Booker Prize reading 2015

The Man Booker Prize winner for 2015 will be announced tomorrow, so I thought I'd post my impressions of the nominated books. As I have for the past few years, I have read (or at least, had a very good go at reading) most of the books on the longlist and all of the ones on the shortlist.

I should stress that I do this not out of a sense of obligation, but because in previous years I've discovered many truly wonderful books on these lists. Not one or two, but several, more than enough to make the whole thing worth it.

This year it was different. I had a really high proportion of DNFs, and this was DNF after reading a good portion, at least a third and more than that in several cases, so I did invest a significant amount of time in those books. Half of the six books on the shortlist were DNFs! There were a few ok books, and only a couple that truly worked for me.

I don't think it's necessarily that it was a bad selection, more that the judges' concept of a good book does not ring my bells. It seemed to be very much a writers' selection (and yes, I realise not all of the judges this year are authors), in that formal experimentation seemed to be more important than whether the books delivered.

All that said, the two books that worked best for me are actually on the shortlist, which is unusual (my favourites usually don't make it through).



A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler, was the one I enjoyed the most. It is the story of a family. At first sight it's a very domestic story, and when you go deeper, it still is a domestic story. And that doesn't mean that it doesn't deliver important insights or striking moments of truth. I loved that about it, as I loved that it was also a really good, satisfying read. The structural experimentation (shifting points of view, non-linear timeline) really worked for me here. Full review here.



A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara was one I really wasn't looking forward to, based on all I'd heard about it (and it was probably the most talked about book on the list). I can't say I enjoyed it, but it was actually really good. It starts out as the story of 4 friends in New York but ends up being mainly the story of one of them, Jude, a man who survived horrific abuse as a child. This abuse has left him badly damaged, both physically and psychologically, and Hanagihara explores this in long, harrowing detail. It's tough to read but very powerful. However, I think it would have been even more powerful if the author had not made the childhood abuse quite as extreme, to the point that it made me disconnect because I found some of it unbelievable. I think a little bit less would have been more in this particular case. Anyway, I read it late and finished it while on holiday last week, so no review yet, but I think I'll do a full one soon.


Satin Island, by Tom McCarthy, was a weird one and I still don't know what to make of it. It's basically a guy philosophising about random stuff, as I said in my review "the sort of moderinst crap I detest: pretentious, self-indulgent, uncaring of the reader". But I actually enjoyed myself while I was reading it, so maybe it's not as uncaring of the reader as it might seem. I'm not sure I got the point of it (reading reviews, the theory that resonates the most is that it's satirising how people these days feel that every minute detail of their lives is significant of worthy of being examined in detail), but I found it compelling and still remember quite a few haunting images from it. Full review here.


I had high hopes for The Fishermen, by Chigozie Obioma. It tells the story of four boys in a small town in Nigeria. However, the writing just didn't work for me at all and I didn't connect with the characters, so I gave up when I was about 40% in. A shame, because it sounded like the story was right up my alley. Slightly longer review here.



I really liked the first sections of The Year of the Runaways, by Sunjeev Sahota. It was a story I wanted to read, an imagining of the real people behind the tabloid headlines about illegal workers and sham marriages. I liked the variety of the characters' backstories and the writing. And then I got to a scene in which a previously really sympathetic character tries to rape a young woman and it's portrayed in the vilest, most toxic way, the narration making it clear that it was just that he was overcome by his feelings. I quote the offending scene in my review. No. Just no. I lost all trust in the author right then, and put down the book.



Finally, the last book on the shortlist is A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James. It tells the story of an assassination attempt on Bob Marley, and through it, the violent history of Jamaica in the 70s and 80s. There are a lot (and I do mean a lot) of characters and a fair bit of stream-of-consciousness narration. It was the last book I picked up and I did so while I was on holiday, so I possibly wasn't able to give it the sustained attention it needed. I ended up DNFing it as well, I'm afraid.

In addition to the books on the shortlist, I read most of the books on the longlist (mainly before the shortlist was announced... I'm always crap at guessing which ones will go through!).



I liked The Moor's Account, by Leila Lalami, but it was one that felt more insubstantial in hindsight than while I was reading it. It tells the story of a real and doomed 16th century expedition to the Americas, told from the point of view of a black enslaved man whose perspective has been excised from recorded history. It felt fresh and I liked some of the things it had to say about erasure and the importance of being able to tell your own story. However, thinking back, a lot of it feels episodic and repetitive. Full review here.


I really disliked Anuradha Roy's Sleeping On Jupiter. It's the story of a young orphaned girl, Nomi, who grew up in an ashram in an Indian temple town, a place where the spiritual front shown to spiritual tourists covered horrific abuse perpetrated by the guru. Years later, Nomi returns to the town, ostensibly to film a documentary. Interspersed with her story are two other threads: the story of three old ladies on their last holiday together and that of a local guide who's sexually obsessed with a young man. The book started out well, but it soon unraveled completely. The different threads felt really disjointed, and none of them were developed into anything that made any sense. The whole book felt pointless. Review here.


I wasn't sure what to expect of Lila, by Marilynne Robinson. I tried to read Gilead a while ago and although I really liked the characters and the voice, the lack of any narrative drive whatsoever made it very easy to put down and gave me no incentive pick it back up. Lila had what I liked about Gilead (genuinely decent characters and some really lovely humour), but it also had a bit more stuff going on and propelling the book forward. I thought it ended with a bit of a whimper and kind of fizzled out, really, but on the whole, I enjoyed it.


Anne Enright is an author I've long wanted to try, but The Green Road was a disappointment. It's the story of an Irish family, but the writing did not engage me in the least. In fact, I found it kind of repellent, and gave up. Review here.


The Chimes, by Anna Smaill was probably the title on the longlist that sounded most intriguing. It's basically a futuristic dystopia, set in a world where the titular chimes erase people's memories every day. My problem with it was that I didn't find the way it dealt with this particularly convincing (i.e. the things that were remembered and forgotten didn't make much sense to me). So it was another DNF. Review here.

The other two books on the longlist, which I didn't get to in time (and I'll be honest, they didn't really interest me) were Did You Ever Have a Family, by Billy Clegg and The Illuminations, by Andrew O'Hagan.

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So, predictions. A Little Life is the bookies' favourite and if it wins, I would be happy with the decision. I did have some issues with it, but it's got substance and style and it's really good. I enjoyed A Spool of Blue Thread more, and it would probably be my pick, but I don't really have much hope that a novel that is so much about the domestic could win. It did get on the shortlist, though, so I won't abandon all hope! I have a feeling The Year of the Runaways might be the dark horse here, as the story it tells is very relevant, but if I had to put money on it, I would probably go for A Little Life.

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Two books from the Man Booker list

Quick catch-up post covering two books from my Man Booker prize readalong. Not great successes with me, I'm afraid.

TITLE: The Fishermen
AUTHOR: Chigozie Obioma

The Fishermen is one of the six books that made it through to the shortlist. It tells the story of four boys living in a small Nigerian town in the 1990s. When their strict father is sent by his employers to work in a distant town and leaves the boys with their mother, they take the opportunity to skip school and go fishing in the forbidden river. And that's when the trouble starts.

I'd heard nothing but good things about this book. Everyone seems to love it. Me? Not so much. I just didn't connect with the writing or the characters. I was interested in what it sounded like the story was about, but I didn't really like how it was told, and the characters annoyed me. I read maybe about 40%, but that was enough for me. Also, I'll be completely honest: if I'd picked this up right at the beginning of my Man Booker reading, I might have persevered for a bit longer. However, I came to it close to the end, and knowing I still had 2 bricks to read, I didn't see the point in keeping on with something I wasn't enjoying.

MY GRADE: A DNF.



TITLE: Sleeping on Jupiter
AUTHOR: Anuradha Roy

Sleeping on Jupiters is a very disjointed book. There are three story threads. There's a young woman, Nomi, coming back from Europe to the temple town where she was brought up, trying to find the ashram that was the site of her abuse as a young girl. She's ostensible there to work with a guy called Suraj on a documentary. There's the three old ladies taking a last trip together to the seaside, two of them worried that the third is slowly succumbing to dementia. There's Badal, a local guide, sexually obsessed by a young man. I think these threads are supposed to come together in some way, but they just don't. I have no idea why they were together in one book or what the point of them was.

I also didn't think any of the threads were particularly good on their own. I somewhat enjoyed the story of the old ladies, but things just fizzled out completely. The other two threads were basically predictably dreary stories peopled by characters who did not behave with any internal coherence. I did make it to the end with this one, mainly because the beginning was quite promising, but I wish I'd abandoned it as soon as it started unraveling.

MY GRADE: A D.

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Satin Island, by Tom McCarthy

TITLE: Satin Island
AUTHOR: Tom McCarthy

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 192
PUBLISHER: Jonathan Cape

SETTING: Contemporary
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

Meet U. - a talented and uneasy figure currently pimping his skills to an elite consultancy in contemporary London. His employers advise everyone from big businesses to governments, and, to this end, expect their 'corporate anthropologist' to help decode and manipulate the world around them - all the more so now that a giant, epoch-defining project is in the offing.

Instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meandering through endless buffer-zones of information and becoming obsessed by the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions, zombie parades. Is there, U. wonders, a secret logic holding all these images together - a codex that, once cracked, will unlock the master-meaning of our age? Might it have something to do with South Pacific Cargo Cults, or the dead parachutists in the news? Perhaps; perhaps not.

As U. oscillates between the visionary and the vague, brilliance and bullshit, Satin Island emerges, an impassioned and exquisite novel for our disjointed times.

Another book from the Man Booker Prize longlist. U (yes, just "U") is an anthropologist working for a consultancy. His big, overarching project is to deliver a Great Report, which will use cutting-edge anthropological theory to decode the world. And while he's supposed to be hard at work on that, he muses on stuff. Nothing much really happens to U. He becomes fascinated by a series of news stories about parachutists having accidents. He delivers a lackluster presentation and fantasises about what he should have said instead. He gets involved in a project where he doesn't really do anything and yet he gets fêted. His tepid relationship with a woman limps along, and she tells him a weird anecdote. One of his colleagues dies.

It's been a week or so since I finished this book, and I really don't know what to make of it. On one level, it's exactly the sort of modernist crap I detest: pretentious, self-indulgent, uncaring of the reader. But on another, at least it's not actively hostile to the reader. While the themes are modernist and avant-garde and the form is somewhat experimental, at least it's accessible. Also, I found quite a bit of the content strangely compelling. There were images that stuck in my mind, and some moments that felt true. The Minister in her tiger-striped shoes, rubbing them together to button and unbutton them all through a boring meeting. The rocks made more rocky by an oil spill. Parachutist mysteriously falling to their deaths. A man dying of cancer speaking of how he'd always lived interesting and important events in his life thinking of how he was going to tell people about them, and disturbed that he was about to go through the biggest one, death, and wouldn't be able to tell anyone. Those moments were what kept me reading.

Sometimes U would go on and on about something and I'd struggle to make sense of what on earth he was on about. But some of U's ponderings were actually quite interesting. The thing is, even that didn't feel comfortable to like, like I wasn't meant to find them interesting. Was McCarthy genuinely interested in this or were these sections merely telling me about U and about his world? I got the feeling somehow that they were supposed to be making the point of just how banal and stultifying these sorts of anthropological disquisitions were, and that by finding them interesting, I was proving just how bourgeois and intellectually puny I was. There's a line in the Guardian review that resonated with me: "Perhaps McCarthy’s primary purpose after all is to expose as an empty delusion the bourgeois reader’s pitiable need for alluring characters, emotional heights and narrative closure." Well, who knows.

MY GRADE: A B-. Not mediocre, but very mixed.

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Falling in Love with Hominids, by Nalo Hopkinson

TITLE: Falling in Love with Hominids
AUTHOR: Nalo Hopkinson

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 240
PUBLISHER: Trachyon

SETTING: Various, mostly contemporary
TYPE: Short story collection
SERIES: None

Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring, Skin Folk) has been widely hailed as a highly significant voice in Caribbean and American fiction. She has been dubbed “one of our most important writers,” (Junot Diaz), with “an imagination that most of us would kill for” (Los Angeles Times), and her work has been called “stunning,” (New York Times) “rich in voice, humor, and dazzling imagery” (Kirkus), and “simply triumphant” (Dorothy Allison).

Falling in Love with Hominids presents over a dozen years of Hopkinson’s new, uncollected fiction, much of which has been unavailable in print. Her singular, vivid tales, which mix the modern with Afro-Carribean folklore, are occupied by creatures unpredictable and strange: chickens that breathe fire, adults who eat children, and spirits that haunt shopping malls.

Nalo Hopkinson is a new author to me. This short story collection was mentioned in a podcast I listen to and it sounded great, so I picked it up straight away.

The book collects some 20 stories written and published over the last 15 or so years. They all mix, to varying degrees, the realistic and mundane with the fantastical. What I particularly liked was the nature of the fantastical that Hopkinson uses. It's not your usual; it feels innovative and imaginative and fresh and often wonderfully weird. I also loved the matter-of-fact diversity of the characters.

That said, I liked the first half of the collection a lot better than the second. In the first half, there was more of the reality. The fantastical was still a huge part of things, but the stories seemed more rooted in reality and a recognisable world. In the first half we get stories such as the very creepy and tragic Easthound, a sort of post-apocalyptic zombie/werewolf story, Emily Breakfast, where Hopkinson combines the sweetly domestic with chickens which are descended from dragons in a very real sense, and Old Habits, where ghosts wander in the shopping mall where they died, periodically reenacting their deaths.

The stories in the second half were much more into the magical realism realm. They were much more fantastical, with weird things happening without anyone batting an eye or reacting how a normal person would. Magical realism is not my favourite thing in the world. I tend to prefer it when there are rules in my fantasy, when it's clear the author has an alternate world fully formed in their mind, and that this world makes sense. When absolutely anything can happen, I tend to stop caring. What's the point? Good magical realism somehow gets around this, and it can work for me, but Hopkinson didn't really pull it off, I'm afraid.

I thought the stories might be arranged chronologically, and that this would explain the difference between the first and second half, but from looking at the copyright dates, it doesn't appear that this is the case.

MY GRADE: A B-. The first half was more of a B+/A-, but the second half was a C, if that.

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The Year of the Runaways, by Sunjeev Sahota

TITLE: The Year of the Runaways
AUTHOR: Sunjeev Sahota

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 480
PUBLISHER: Picador

SETTING: Contemporary England and India
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

The Year of the Runaways tells of the bold dreams and daily struggles of an unlikely family thrown together by circumstance. Thirteen young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in desperate search of a new life. Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his past in Bihar; and Avtar has a secret that binds him to protect the chaotic Randeep. Randeep, in turn, has a visa-wife in a flat on the other side of town: a clever, devout woman whose cupboards are full of her husband's clothes, in case the immigration men surprise her with a call.

Sweeping between India and England, and between childhood and the present day, Sunjeev Sahota's generous, unforgettable novel is - as with Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance - a story of dignity in the face of adversity and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.

This almost never happens, but sometimes a single scene can just make me stop dead and not want to continue reading an otherwise enjoyable book.

The Year of the Runaways is another book from the Man Booker longlist. It tells the story of a group of young Indians. As the book starts, the men are living together in a cramped little flat in Sheffield, working illegally and putting all their energy into their objectives. The action then moves back to India for each one, showing us what brought them to Sheffield and what they're working towards.

Initially, the comparisons to Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance made me give this the side-eye a bit, as I found that book unbearable. But this is very different. Bad things happen, too, very bad, but there is a fair bit of decency and goodness from characters big and small, and that makes it bearable. It also doesn't minimise the tragedy and unfairness in the least. In fact, I feel it makes the structural injustice and the horrible stuff work better, because it all becomes more believable. When everything is horrible and there's no one drop of goodness at all, my mind sort of shuts down and I stop caring about the characters, because I just don't believe the situation. The way this was written in this book made the tragedy even more tragic and affecting.

It's a nice, diverse group of people, as well, with very different backgrounds. There is no one motivation for immigration and no one story. These were stories I hadn't read before. I was looking forward to reading more.

But then I got to the scene I found unacceptable. This was at about 1/3 of the way in. In this scene, a really sympathetic character tries to rape a young woman. This is portrayed as him being overcome by his love and need for this girl, rather than, say, an attempt to punish or to control. My mind just stopped and went "No". This conception of rape as being about men not being able to control themselves because they just feel too much (lust, love, whatever) for the woman is toxic and harmful and disgusting. It's not a character self-justifying, which I would have been fine with (some men do, after all). The problem is that it's the narrative portraying the rape attempt this way. I might be overreacting. I've had a look at several reviews and no one even mentions this. Do you think I'm overreacting? The scene I section I object to is below. And in case you're wondering, the man is stone-cold sober at the time, so his obliviousness is not about that. Also, he's previously been a real sweetheart.

"You're the only one who understands", he said, easing her down, her head on the pillow. A nervous look crossed her face, which she tried to smile away. They resumed kissing. Her hands roved around his back as if not sure what they should be doing. His were on her waist, then her bottom. She pushed against his shoulders, but when he insisted on kissing her neck, she seemed willing to let him. He wanted to show her how much he loved her. How much it meant to him that she understood. He pushed up her top and couldn't believe that under it were her breasts. Just there under this thin top. The pink-brown tips revealed. He heard her say something and try to move away but he knew she liked him and he held her arms and kissed her breasts. She was saying it louder now, and the louder she said it the stronger his grip, the more fiercely he applied his mouth to her body. He felt her knees in his stomach, pushing him away. That didn't make sense. He rubbed his cock against her and she screamed, but he was groaning himself and he bit her breasts and dug his fingers into the maddeningly soft flesh of her arms and pushed his weight down, down on her. He was telling her how much he really loved her when he felt a pair of arms around his waist yank him violently away."

I'd also been bothered before this scene by how all the women were grasping and needy and selfish and constantly put the men under huge pressure to give them money: their husbands, their sons, all of them. But I was hoping that this characterisation would become more nuanced as we got to know more female characters. After the above, though, I just don't trust the author, and I refuse to read any further.

MY GRADE: A DNF.

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A Wish Upon Jasmine, by Laura Florand

TITLE: A Wish Upon Jasmine
AUTHOR: Laura Florand

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 323
PUBLISHER: Self-published

SETTING: Contemporary France
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: Part of the La Vie En Roses series

Ruthless. That was what they said about Damien Rosier. Handsome. Wealthy. Powerful. Merciless. No one messed with his family, because to do so they would have to get through him. No one thought he had a heart. Not even the woman he gave his to.

Cynical. That was what they said about Jasmin Bianchi. A top perfumer of her generation, Jess had achieved commercial success by growing a protective shell over a tender heart. The one time she cracked it open to let Damien in, he crushed it--after a night of unbelievable passion.

Lovers. That one magical night couldn't survive the harsh light of dawn. When Jess woke up to discover the man in bed beside her had stolen her company, she fled.

Enemies. Now she's come to the south of France with something of his. If he wants to reclaim both his family heritage and the woman who walked away from him, he's going to have to fight as dirty as only Damien can.

But Jess knows how to fight dirty, too. And these days, she has nothing left to lose.

Certainly not her heart.

Come explore the south of France, a world of heat and fragrance and tales as old as time, through the stories of the five powerful Rosier cousins and the women who win their hearts. A Wish Upon Jasmine, book two in Florand's addictive new series, La Vie en Roses.

Jasmin Bianchi is an extremely successful perfumer, the creator of Spoiled Brat, a scent that has been high in the list of most ordered perfumes for years. It's also a scent that has typecast her, to the point that all the briefs she gets (get me, speaking the lingo!) are for similar superficial, cynical fragrances. When she receives a gift of a small perfume shop in Southern France out of the blue, she sees it as the opportunity to escape the stereotype and decide what she wants to do.

The only problem is, the powerful Rosier family, hugely influential in the world of perfume, consider the shop a crucial part of their ancestry. It might legally belong to their old aunt Colette, but she doesn't have the right to just give it away, even to the descendants of her long-lost adopted son. The obvious person to send out to sort this out is Damien, the merciless money man who has made Rosier SA into a huge, strong business and whose work allows the family's artistic members to do what they do without worry.

But Damien and Jess have a history, a one-night stand some 6 months earlier which ended badly when Jess realised who Damien was and that he'd just taken over the new business venture on which she'd pinned all her hopes for change.

Sigh. It's looking more and more like Florand is just not for me. The annoying thing is that I could have loved this book. Damien was a type of hero I really love: the guy who's been placed by his family in the role of the hard-hearted enforcer, and who's now perceived as being just that in personality as well. Meanwhile, the guy is desperate for some softness and warmth and romance. I felt Damien was very well done in that sense.

And Florand can write a good, angsty scene. There's a stretch round the mid point with Damien and Jess remembering what happened when they first met, the feeling of warmth and trust when they made love, and then Jess's feeling of betrayal when she realised who Damien was, and Damien's desperation when he felt something precious that had been offered to him had been withdrawn. And then when he realises all that had been going on in Jess's life when they first met! Oh, I had such a lump in my throat while I was reading that!

I'd been struggling with the book a bit before I got to that section. There's a lot of clutter here, backstory here that must have been introduced in the previous book in the series. There's all the stuff around the hunt for the long-lost son's descendants and how that got started during the 2nd World War, when Aunt Colette and her brother and the child's birth mother were part of the Resistence. There's pointless matchmaking and a constant stream of happy couples from previous books. There's sequel-baiting with references to characters who have nothing to do with this particular story.

I was getting bored with all of that, and I wasn't too engaged with the romance. I'm getting sort of humourless these days, not willing to buy into the fantasy aspect of how romance heroes behave and seeing it all too literally. Damien's behaviour kept making me go "inappropriate!!!" in my mind, and that was annoying. Plus, the writing. Oh, man, Florand's writing drives me crazy. I find the way she does dialogue almost unbearable. There are looooong bits of internal monologues in between every single bit of reported speech. A bit of that is fine, but this is just way too much. My mind kept wandering away.

And then I got to that lovely, angsty stretch and thought "Oooh, this is getting good!". Well, the second half was a tiny little bit better than the first. There's some interesting stuff about family expectations and beign typecast, and two characters finding out what they want from life and each other and going for it. But it was just much too long and unfocused. Once Damien and Jess had had their confrontation, there really wasn't much conflict there. Florand tried to stretch it out, but their behaviour ended up not really making sense to me. They kept going round and round and it all felt pointless.

And, while Damien mostly made sense to me as a character, Jess did not. Her past is sketchy and doesn't really explain why she is who she is: how she developed such a lack of belief in herself when she's been so incredibly successful in her career, why she's still such a sexual innocent (we get absolutely nothing on her romantic past). It needed more development.

According to amazon, this book is about 320 pages, but I'm pretty sure it's quite a bit longer than that. And it should have been shorter. About a third of it could have gone and it would have improved the book.

MY GRADE: A C+.

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Two DNFs from the Man Booker longlist

One of my "rules" for my yearly Man Booker reading is that, although I will try as many of the books as possible, even the ones that sound like they really won't be my sort of thing at all, I am allowed to DNF them as long as I've read enough of them to get a good sense of what they are like. These two really appealed to me a priori, but both turned out not to be for me.

TITLE: The Chimes
AUTHOR: Anna Smaill

The Chimes is set in a sort of post-apocalyptic London. The written word is not available any longer, and people's lives are a constant struggle to keep memories. Anything not somehow anchored (as bodymemory, on an object) fades away pretty quickly. The whole world is music, from the Chimes several times a day (which seem to have a strong mental effect on the entire population), to the way people communicate (complex directions are always given in song).

We meet Simon as he arrives in London, not long after his mother's death. On his first day he follows a mysterious song and finds a lump of a very special metal (or mettle, as the word has evolved), which brings him into a small group of mudlarks who hunt for that mettle in a certain part of the river.

The beginning of this book was a huge struggle. Everything was really confusing, and it was tough to understand what was going on. After the first quarter or so I started to get it a bit more, but unfortunately, it still didn't work for me. I think the main problem was the issue of memory. I just didn't feel the way it was supposed to work here made sense. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to what people remembered and what they forgot after sleeping.

And the characters didn't make much sense to me either. This is something that is probably a problem with me as a reader, since unbelievable characters clearly are no obstacle to books being considered "Good Literature", but I personally need characters that make sense and who react in ways that feel believable. This doesn't mean that they have to react like me; in fact, some of my favourite books have characters that, because of where or when they live, or because of their past experiences, react in ways that are completely foreign to me. That's fine; it just has to make sense. Here, it doesn't, and this is an issue I've had with quite a few Man Booker longlisted books (e.g. the much-adored How To Be Both, last year, or Swimming Home, a couple of years earlier).

Anyway, I gave up after about a third. Too bad, because the premise sounded interesting, a bit like Philip Pullman's The Dark Materials books!

MY GRADE: A DNF.



TITLE: The Green Road
AUTHOR: Anne Enright

Like A Spool of Blue Thread, which I loved, The Green Road is about a family. Unlike in the former, though, the author's voice got in the way of my enjoyment of the latter.

The premise is that the far-flung members of an Irish family reunite after many years. I didn't get very far into it. I saw the beginning, when eldest son Dan decides he's going to be a priest, sending his mother into paroxisms of grief. Then I saw the second part, a few years later, when we see Dan living in New York in the early 90s, trying very hard not to be gay. I gave up not long after that, after about a third, so I didn't read the stories of all the other siblings. I did push on long after I started wanting to put it down, but gave up after a few days of forcing myself to pick it up.

My problem with The Green Road was mainly the voice. It put me off terribly. It's always hard to pinpoint why a particular writing style doesn't appeal, but basically, I found the style pretentious and annoying, and saw the author behind it a bit too transparently. The second section should have been great. It was a tragic time for the community she was portraying, right during the AIDS epidemic. It just felt horribly objectifying. The voice in which those young men were portrayed was very clearly from the gaze of the opposite sex and felt prurient and horrible. I also felt very detatched from the characters. I didn't care.

MY GRADE: A DNF.

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A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler

TITLE: A Spool of Blue Thread
AUTHOR: Anne Tyler

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 368
PUBLISHER: Knopf

SETTING: Contemporary and 20th century US
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

“It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon. . .” This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture. Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.

Brimming with all the insight, humor, and generosity of spirit that are the hallmarks of Anne Tyler’s work, A Spool of Blue Thread tells a poignant yet unsentimental story in praise of family in all its emotional complexity. It is a novel to cherish.

A Spool of Blue Thread is another of the books on the Man Booker longlist. I seem to have started with the female authors, and I suspect that's the way I'll keep going for a little while, as those books are the ones that appeal to me the most.

This is the story of a family, the Whitshanks. It's about the individuals that make it up, but it's also about a lot more than that, about the things that make them a more than just a collection of individuals with the same name. It's about the relationships between them all and about the stories that they've accumulated and give them a sense of themselves.

We start out in the present, with Abby and Red Whitshank and their grown-up children and their children. But we don't stay there for the whole book, and we get to see what's behind some of those stories that the family tells, as well as the ones they don't.

It's a very domestic book, one about a pretty ordinary family, and if you look at it superficially, there's nothing unusual going on. Nothing hugely dramatic, just the usual stuff that happens in normal families. Big stuff for those families, but nothing surprising or particularly remarkable. It's boring, you might say. You'd be wrong. I was completely gripped by this story. I think the key is the way this feels true. Every few pages I'd find a little insight that made me stop in my tracks, a little twist in a character that made me reevaluate and see them in a different way, a little moment that made me want to cry. It's beautiful writing, with characters drawn by just a couple of strokes who feel much more real than some characters after an entire novel, and a low-key, subtle humour that, nonetheless, often had me laughing out loud.

It cut a bit too close sometimes. Denny, one of Abby and Red's sons, felt so familiar that it was on the verge of being upsetting. Tyler shows the way he punishes the parents with his absence and withdrawal so effectively that they end up walking on eggshells around him, terrified of asking any question and being punished for their nosiness by Denny disappearing again, and I kept thinking "Yes, yes, that's what he does!" There's also the fear of parents getting old, something I'm experiencing at the moment, only here we also see it from the point of view of the parents themselves, which was something I probably really needed to see.

So yeah, this is all about about domestic life and families, and I love it that this is recognised as valuable and important and deserving of a Booker nomination.

I read an Anne Tyler book many, many years ago (The Accidental Tourist) and it didn't make a huge impression on me. If A Spool of Blue Thread is a good example of what her writing is like, I suspect I might have been a bit too young for her at the time (I was in my mid-teens, I think). I look forward to exploring her backlist, including reading The Accidental Tourist again. I'm sure I'll appreciate her more these days.

MY GRADE: An A-.

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Day Four, by Sarah Lotz

TITLE: Day Four
AUTHOR: Sarah Lotz

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 352
PUBLISHER: Hodder & Stoughton

SETTING: Cruise ship in the Caribbean
TYPE: Horror
SERIES: Related to The Three

The trip of their dreams becomes the holiday of their nightmares: DAY FOUR is Sarah Lotz's extraordinary, unmissable follow-up to the book that made headlines around the world, THE THREE - perfect for fans of The Shining Girls, The Passage and Lost.

Four days into a five day singles cruise on the Gulf of Mexico, the ageing ship Beautiful Dreamer stops dead in the water. With no electricity and no cellular signals, the passengers and crew have no way to call for help. But everyone is certain that rescue teams will come looking for them soon. All they have to do is wait.

That is... until the toilets stop working and the food begins to run out. When the body of a woman is discovered in her cabin the passengers start to panic. There's a murderer on board the Beautiful Dreamer... and maybe something worse.

I loved Lotz's The Three. It wasn't perfect, but it was immensely creepy and gripping, and I enjoyed every minute I was reading it. When I heard she had a book coming out that was sort of along the same lines, it went straight on my purchase list.

The action here takes place on a cruise ship sailing the Caribbean, with the narration moving between a small number of characters in each chapter. There's a young woman working as assistant for a dodgy celebrity psychic, there's a blogger determined to expose the psychic, there's a Filipina cabin attendant dealing with an unwanted pregnancy, and several more, including a rapist, a drug-addicted doctor and an older woman who's part of a suicide pact.

Everything's going well until the fourth day of the cruise, when a fire breaks out. It's not a huge fire and it gets put out soon enough. Should be easy enough to do some quick repairs and get going again. Except that doesn't happen. The ship is dead. It's not moving and none of the communications systems are working. Generators keep things working for a little while, but then, little by little, all systems begin to fail. No running toilets, no electricity, no air conditioning. Not to mention a lot of really creepy things going on.

This was mostly fun, but quite disappointing. I think the style in The Three served to cover the shortcomings of Lotz's writing, which were unfortunately evident here. She's very unsubtle and unconvincing in her psychology. In The Three, since the book was structured as a collection of different bits of material -interview transcripts, online chats, reports- we were looking at characters from the outside. Sometimes the lack of subtlety shone through anyway (especially in the case of the religious loony American characters), but mostly, it was ok.

In Day Four, we get chapters cycling through the different main characters, and it's third person point of view, from deep in each of their minds. The problems are obvious, and the psychological make-up of the characters completely unbelievable. I keep using this word, but "subtletly" is the key. These characters are not complex in the least, and therefore they feel like stereotypes, not real people.

The creepiness was ok, but again, not as disturbing as in The Three. It seemed a lot more based on gross-out and what in a film would be the classic "quiet, quiet, quiet, LOUD!" tactic.

There was also something that bothered me as I was reading, having read The Three. I mentioned one of the characters, Celine, is a show-biz psychic. We know she's a fake (her assistant, Maddie, makes it clear that part of her staff's jobs is to dig for info on the audience and feed it back to Celine). The blogger character who's on the ship determined to expose her is particularly angry about a recent case, where Celine insisted that a little boy and his mum had survived a plane crash, and made the kid's grandmother spend a fortune trying to find them. Turns out the bodies of both were then found in the wreckage and identified by their DNA. Who were these? The boy was Bobby Small, mum was Lori, and the grandma Lillian. Readers of The Three will recognise those names. Bobby was one of the Three, one of the children who survived, and he was found immediately after the crash. I didn't quite know what to make of the inconsistency. Well, I'll just say that this made sense in the end!

Which brings me to the ending. I won't spoil it. I'll just say it didn't completely satisfy me, but things did make some sort of sense. And the very final bit was really properly creepy, which was great!

MY GRADE: A C+.

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The Moor's Account, by Laila Lalami

TITLE: The Moor's Account
AUTHOR: Laila Lalami

COPYRIGHT: 2014
PAGES: 336
PUBLISHER: Vintage

SETTING: 16th century North America, Barbary and Spain
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

In these pages, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America: Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico. The slave of a Spanish conquistador, Estebanico sails for the Americas with his master, Dorantes, as part of a danger-laden expedition to Florida. Within a year, Estebanico is one of only four crew members to survive.

As he journeys across America with his Spanish companions, the Old World roles of slave and master fall away, and Estebanico remakes himself as an equal, a healer, and a remarkable storyteller. His tale illuminates the ways in which our narratives can transmigrate into history—and how storytelling can offer a chance at redemption and survival.

For the last few years I have read (or, at least, attempted) as many books as possible on the Man Booker longlist, and all of the ones on the shortlist. Last year was a particularly good one, and I discovered several books that ended up on my Best of 2014 list (if you haven't read them yet, do pick up The Wake, We're All Completely Besides Ourselves and The Bone Clocks; they're fabulous).

I start as soon as the longlist is announced, so I always read a few that don't go through as well. I have previously tried to guess which ones would go through and start with them, but I'm crap at guessing. I will therefore just start with whichever one sounds most interesting to me. This year, that was The Moor's Account.

The Moor's Account tells the story a young man from what's now Morocco who becomes enslaved by the Spanish and is taken by his master on an expedition to La Florida. We know from the start that the expedition was a disaster, and that he was one of only 4 survivors.

The official accounts of this (very real) expedition are based on the testimony of the three Castillian survivors. All we know about our protagonist is statements that the fourth man was a Moorish slave called Estebanico. Lalami imagines this man's story and gives him a voice and a name, Mustafa al-Zamori, distinct from the one imposed on him at his (most likely involuntary) conversion.

We see his early life and the circumstances that lead to him being enslaved. We also see the Spanish expedition and the interactions between Castillians and Native Americans through the eyes of a man who is neither, one whose self-interest sometimes clashes with his ideals of justice.

Mustafa is an interesting character. He starts out as someone whose loss of freedom has led to a loss of hope. He sees principles as a luxury he can't afford, as a slave and sees his only chance of freedom as being a favour from a grateful master. But as disaster and suffering equalises master and slave, he changes and becomes a different man, one who realises he can't rely on someone who would own another man and can only take his freedom himself. It's a really interesting character arc, but the morality tale element of his story is maybe a bit too 'on the nose'. He's now a slave, but when he was a merchant, he traded in slaves. He was too enamoured of the process of buying and selling, he's now the object of buying and selling. It feels almost too neat.

In the end, though, what worked for me most was that this is about erasure and the power of being able to take your own story. Lalami's account tries to undo the erasure from the official record of both a particular man and of the brutality and evil of the Conquest. The message is that stories and histories have power. The official, cleaned-up account of the expedition had power, but so does this story.

MY GRADE: A B+.

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July 2015 reads

Still very busy, but I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Regular blogging should resume soon! :)


1 - Why I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, by Mike Brown: A-
review here

Astronomer's memoir covering the discoveries that led to Pluto being demoted from being a planet. Really fun and exciting, loved it.


2 - The Casual Vacancy, by JK Rowling: A-
review here

I read this a while ago and thought it was fantastic. I reread it this month for my book club, and it held up very well to a reread. It was, however, really dispiriting to read this after the election in May. All I could think was "That vile Shirley Mollison has won".


3 - Beneath the Surface, by Kate Sherwood: B+
review coming soon

Romance between a farmer and a lawyer doing PR for a company building a gravel pit next to his (the farmer's) land. This had the mix of low-key romance and family angst that I like so much in Sherwood's books.


4 - Finders Keepers, by Stephen King: B+
review coming soon

Connected to Mr. Mercedes, which I loved (different case, but Hodges and the gang get involved). Really fun plot, all about obsession with a writer's work.


5 - Trust No One, by Jayne Ann Krentz: B-
review coming soon

The good news is that JAK has now moved completely away from the Arcane Society. The bad news is that she's still fond of overcomplicated suspense plots that really don't come off. Still, a nice enough romance and elements that were reminiscent of my favourites by her.


6 - The Ghost Network, by Catie Disabato: DNF
review coming soon

It sounded interesting: investigation into a mysterious disappearance, secret societies, a "found document" format. But I couldn't really get into it, mainly due to the fact that pretty much all the characters were celebrity-obsessed and had their heads far up their own arses.


7 - Sweet Deception, by Heather Snow: DNF
review coming soon

I'm having trouble getting into your average historical romance these days. The subversive ones I'm ok with, but the trops I used to be absolutely fine with just grate. Nothing wrong with this one, I was just rolling my eyes too hard at things like "If I'm right I get a kiss".


8 - Speak, by Louisa Hall: still reading
review coming soon

What sold me on this one were the comparisons with Cloud Atlas (I do adore David Mitchell). It's made up of several different stories from different time periods, from the 17th century to 2040, all somehow connected to the issue of artificial intelligence. Really intriguing so far.


9 - The Moor's Account, by Laila Lalami: still reading
review coming soon

On the Man Booker longlist, which I'll be reading as usual. This was the most interesting to me of the lot, so I started with it. It's an account of a doomed 16th century Spanish mission to La Florida, from an enslaved Moroccan man. So far so good.

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To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

TITLE: To Kill a Mockingbird
AUTHOR: Harper Lee

COPYRIGHT: 1960
PAGES: 384
PUBLISHER: Grand Central

SETTING: 1930s Southern US
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: Hmmm...

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.

Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

I thought this was going to be a reread. When we decided to pick To Kill a Mockingbird for my book club, I thought "Good, I haven't read it in ages!". But when I started reading it, I quickly realised that I actually never had before. I might have watched the film, and I have certainly read many a discussion about it, but this was my first proper read of the book, and it was an interesting experience.

I read it in May, long before Go Set A Watchman came out, and intended to post a review before then. I made my usual disjointed notes as soon as I finished it, but then I hit a really busy patch in the last few months and all blogging went out the window. It would be pretty much impossible to write a review now that's not coloured by what I've heard about Watchman, so what I'll do is to simply copy those few notes (with some minor edits for grammar and readability -they really were disjointed!) below and be done with it:

- I didn't expect the humour. There were scenes that had me laughing out loud, like Scout's first teacher and the ladies' tea party.

- The characters, even many of the secondary ones, are so well-realised that I could see the events in this book being written from several points of view. The story would then be about something else, though. Which might not be a bad thing...

- From all I knew about it, I expected the book to be about Tom Robinson's case and the trial. It wasn't. It was about Scout and Jem growing up and understanding the world they're living in. Tom Robinson's story was unimportant, other than as an example of injustice. The whole point of it was to be the catalyst for Scout and Jem's coming of age. Very uncomfortable about that. Feels like when the whole point of a disabled character is to change the life of the able-bodied protagonist, that sort of thing.

- This reminded me of Lean In, in that it seems to be all about learning to live in a fundamentally unfair, imperfect system and how to manipulate it to get a little bit of justice. I lost a lot of respect for Atticus for seeing enough value in the system to want to continue living in it, to think it was worth the effort. Probably immature of me. I wanted him to want to change the system. I wanted him to recognise that a system that works as his society did has no value. I wanted him to want to say "fuck the system" and want to tear it down and burn it to pieces. Because that society? That's what should have happened to it. And someone who would be part of a lynch mob is not "basically a good man", just with some blind spots. I found that attitude really troubling.

MY GRADE: It feels like sacrilege, but although I recognise how good a writer Lee was and I enjoyed the story while I was reading it, too much about it bothered me. It was a B for me.

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Why I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, by Mike Brown

TITLE: Why I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
AUTHOR: Mike Brown

COPYRIGHT: 2010
PAGES: 288
PUBLISHER: Spiegel & Grau

SETTING: Contemporary
TYPE: Non Fiction
SERIES: None

The solar system most of us grew up with included nine planets, with Mercury closest to the sun and Pluto at the outer edge. Then, in 2005, astronomer Mike Brown made the discovery of a lifetime: a tenth planet, Eris, slightly bigger than Pluto. But instead of adding one more planet to our solar system, Brown’s find ignited a firestorm of controversy that culminated in the demotion of Pluto from real planet to the newly coined category of “dwarf” planet. Suddenly Brown was receiving hate mail from schoolchildren and being bombarded by TV reporters—all because of the discovery he had spent years searching for and a lifetime dreaming about.

A heartfelt and personal journey filled with both humor and drama, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming is the book for anyone, young or old, who has ever imagined exploring the universe—and who among us hasn’t?

The excitement about the wonderful pictures of Pluto coming from the New Horizons probe reminded me that I had this audiobook in my mp3 player. There wasn't going to be a better time to listen to it!

This is basically a memoir, covering the years in the early-mid 2000s when Brown, an astronomer at Caltech, was heading a succession of projects looking for planets. These projects culminated in a discovery that forced astronomers to reconsider the very definition of what "planets" are. And thus, Pluto's demotion from one of the planets to a "dwarf planet", one of many, and Mike Brown's alter-ego of "Pluto killer".

I loved every minute I spent listening to this audiobook. The science is pitched just right. I know very little about astronomy, but I'm a reasonably intelligent layperson. Brown's explanations had the perfect amount of technical detail, explained in a way that made sense but didn't feel oversimplified or patronising. I have a much better idea now of what an astronomer like him does day to day (including doing a surprising amount of reading about mythology, if they ever discover anything significant!). Most importantly, Brown really conveyed the wonder and awe of his work, what makes the drudgery worth it!

But it's not all descriptions of solid science. There's a surprising amount of skullduggery and plotting and detective work, and this is even before we get to the section on the politicking around the reclassification of Pluto. Those sections were incredibly exciting. I was lucky enough that I was just getting on a train as that part started, so I spent all 2 hours of the journey just sitting there, listening intently.

There's also a really nice balance between the astronomy and the personal stuff. Brown meets his wife around the time when his planet-hunting projects are getting started, and his daughter is born, with great timing, exactly in the middle of a spate of important discoveries. While not the focus of the book, these elements really enhance the astronomy sections and give them yet another layer of meaning.

It all works so well because Brown is a wonderful narrator (that is, someone else reads the audiobook, I mean narrator as in the person from whose 1st-person POV we see the action). He comes across as endearing, both in his enthusiasm about astronomy and the way he's clearly besotted with his wife and daughter. And I appreciated that in the sections where he's basically accusing other scientists of wrong-doing, he seems to be making the effort to be even-handed and give them the benefit of the doubt. I did try to keep in mind that I was getting only Brown's side of the story, so I have done a bit of googling to read the other scientists' accounts, but I didn't find those very convincing. They did make me wonder, though, if the situation had been reversed and it had been Spanish astronomers accusing a US team of the same things, with the same evidence, if they would have had the same reaction from the astronomy establishment.

A fantastic book, and one I highly recommend, even for readers who are not particularly interested in astronomy (by the end of this, you will be!)

MY GRADE: An A-.

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The Liar, by Nora Roberts

TITLE: The Liar
AUTHOR: Nora Roberts

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 512
PUBLISHER: Putnam

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: None

Shelby Foxworth lost her husband. Then she lost her illusions...

The man who took her from Tennessee to an exclusive Philadelphia suburb left her in crippling debt. He was an adulterer and a liar, and when Shelby tracks down his safe-deposit box, she finds multiple IDs. The man she loved wasn’t just dead. He never really existed.

Shelby takes her three-year-old daughter and heads south to seek comfort in her hometown, where she meets someone new: Griff Lott, a successful contractor. But her husband had secrets she has yet to discover. Even in this small town, surrounded by loved ones, danger is closer than she knows—and threatens Griff, as well. And an attempted murder is only the beginning...

I've long been a Nora Roberts fan, although there were periods where some of her books went in directions I didn't like (e.g. her 'glitz and glamour' single titles in the late 80s early 90s). Nora and I kind of are in a period like that now. The In Death books are still hitting the spot, but I haven't been in love with her latest few single title Romantic Suspense novels, nor with her latest trilogy. I still read them them, though, and I picked up The Liar soon after it came out.

Shelby Pomeroy married very young. Her husband was a rich, powerful asshole type, and he gradually undermined her and isolated her from her close-knit Tennessee family. Four years after the wedding, Shelby feels she's worthless and stupid and can't do anything right. Richard doesn't abuse her physically, but he does in every other way, and he controls every detail of her life.

And then the yacht in which Richard was taking a holiday sinks in a storm (Shelby and her young daughter, Callie, were supposed to be with him, but Callie got sick and Richard decided to go on holiday on his own, which tells you a lot about the relationship!). His body is never recovered, but it's clear enough to the authorities that he's dead that Shelby gets the power of attorney necessary to deal with his business (would this happen? Not sure, but I wasn't too bothered and just read on). And when she starts looking into Richard's financial affairs, which she knew absolutely nothing about, she gets a surprise. Their entire life is basically a house of cards, built on massive debts.

And it turns out that this is not the worst of it. It soon becomes clear to Shelby that Richard wasn't simply a crap businessman, but a criminal. And when Shelby decides to move back to her family in Tennessee, the trouble he created follows her there.

I have mixed feelings about The Liar. I enjoyed a lot about it, but there were several major niggles.

I liked how the core of the book is about Shelby building a life for herself after her emotionally abusive marriage. It all starts out with a bit of over-the-top competence porn, as she sells off everything she can to begin paying the massive debts Richard's left her with. This was done in excrutiating detail, but it did establish who Shelby was (as did the fact that she's determined to pay this debt that she could probably have got out of quite legitimately... I know I would have not done what she did). Once she's back in Tennessee her rebuilding is better integrated into the story and the romance, but just as impressive. And it's not just about rebuilding a material life, it's also about rebuilding the relationships that have been damaged by neglect. I particularly liked seeing her tending to her relationship with the woman who used to be her best friend and who was really hurt when Shelby basically cut off communications.

The romance was also nice (much nicer than the fact that I haven't mentioned it up to now might indicate). Griff is your typical Nora Roberts hero: hunky, beta, works with his hands, and is completely bowled over by Shelby the minute he sees her. He's also almost as bowled over by Callie. There's not much internal conflict here, beyond a half-hearted "how can I trust a man again after what Richard did" moment from Shelby, which means the romance is pretty low-key. However, I did like it, and I loved that Griff supports Shelby's rebuilding but doesn't seek to take it over and do it for her.

And now we come to the niggles, and the first is Shelby's family. I had some trouble with them. Part of it, I suspect with embarrassment, might be internalised snobbery on my part. But not all. They are nice, but they felt to me like the kind of "traditional" people who would disapprove of vegetarians and think they're doing it for the attention -you know what I mean? Shelby's mother and grandmother also constantly police her femininity, which got my back up. It's all aggressively heteronormative. Nothing wrong with conforming to societal norms if that's actually what brings you satisfaction (and I did buy that this was the case for the characters here), but I tend to prefer a little bit more subversion in my stories. I did like that Shelby was disturbed by the constant "I'm glad Griff is now taking care of you" from everyone, and that she does save herself in the end, but it wasn't enough.

Another thing that put my back up is how the town is portrayed. It's presented as a wonderful place, somewhere where Shelby can be protected and where people have got her back, but what I couldn't help but see in that was the unfairness of it. It's the way you only get that wonderfulness if you are an insider, "one of us". As an outsider, you don't even get your basic rights respected. Take, for instance, a character who's a private detective and is looking at Shelby. Thinking about it from his point of view, Shelby is suspicious and there's a good chance she knows what her husband did with the money (I mean, a woman living with a man for 5 years and honestly having no idea what he did for money? Hmmm). Investigating her is perfectly legitimate. The guy's actions in coming into her house on false pretenses at the beginning were questionable, but once he follows her to Rendezvous Ridge and starts asking people about her, it's all completely above board. And yet what the guy gets for his troubles is Shelby's cop brother harassing him and forbidding him from doing his perfectly legitimate job, under threat of being thrown in jail (because the judge is a distant cousin, and won't look kindly on someone doing something that upsets his sweet cousin Shelby). I cry foul, especially because there's zero awareness that this is a problem.

I also didn't think the suspense plot was great, mainly because the big surprise is just incredibly predictable, to the point that I'm almost sure that revealing it here wouldn't be a spoiler. Surely we as readers are meant to know that in a book, if someone dies and his body isn't found, they're obviously not actually dead? I get the feeling, though, that it's meant to be a surprise. There isn't a knowing tone in how it's written, it's dead serious. To be honest, I kind of thought less of Shelby and Griff's intelligence for never even thinking of it, even when things about Richard started being revealed. And Richard himself didn't feel particularly believable, especially in the final confrontation. Too much of a cartoon villain.

Finally (and this will seal my status as a total grinch) every time little Callie came on I felt I was in danger of going into a diabetic coma.

MY GRADE: I'm hovering between a C+ and a B-. I think it's a B-, as the issues I had with it didn't really ruin my enjoyment.

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