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May. 1st, 2018 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyApril books read
* Withering-by-Sea - Judith Rossell (2014) ★ ★ ★
I found this at a second-hand book fair, and a nice little find it was. It's by an Australian writer, although set in Victorian England; it's a little bit Wolves of Willoughby Chase and a little bit Harry Potter with a tiny splash of Lemony Snicket, although it reads younger and simpler than any of those books. Eleven-year-old Stella Montgomery lives with her three awful aunts in a hotel in Withering-by-Sea. Reading in the hotel's greenhouse, she sees a man hide something before he's stabbed, and that starts off a train of events that leads to her and some new friends foiling a dastardly plan and beginning to unravel the mystery of what happened to her parents. I'd sum it up as gentle and pleasant.
* The Stolen Bicycle - Wu Ming-Yi (2015) (translated by Darryl Stern, 2017) ★ ★ ★
At the end of this book is an author's note, saying that one of his previous books featured an unattended bicycle and that a reader had written to ask him what what happened to it, so he wrote this book in response... in which an author writes a book featuring an unattended bicycle that inspires a reader to write and ask what happened to it. In the book, the bicycle is real, ridden by the author's father on the day he disappeared, and the reader's question inspires the author to find it in the hope that he will also find out what happened to his father. Thus begins a quest through Taiwan's vintage bicycle enthusiasts, each with her or his own story inside a story about a bicycle, the history of Taiwanese bicycles, elephants, and the use of bicycles and elephants in World War II, along with a brief diversion into butterfly handcrafts. Near the end the author rides a bicycle through a dreamscape of time and place, which is very much what reading the rest of the book felt like: beautiful, slow-moving and a bit confusing.
* Wormwood Mire - Judith Rossell (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
I enjoyed Withering-by-Sea enough to look up this second instalment in the series, and that was a good choice. In this one, eleven-year-old Stella is sent to live with her foreign cousins and their governess in their family's old home, Wormwood Mire, and the three children have an adventure involving an evil travelling dentist and a monster that turns things to stone. It's gently exciting and a step up from the first book.
* Winter - Ali Smith (2017) ★ ★ ★
This is the second in a seasonal quartet, an experiment in (almost) real-time novel writing. Events in the story are firmly anchored in time by the news that the characters note in passing — and it's current news, Brexit and Trump, so this is clearly a story about our time. It's a Christmas story, and there are vestiges of more traditional stories in it: —people seeking shelter have to sleep in a barn, a mysterious stranger who helps the central family find (a sort of) peace, a Christmas miracle that makes everyone happy — but it's very much its own beast, as dopey Art brings a strange girl he meets at a bus-stop to Christmas dinner with his mother, the former owner of a retail empire, and aunt, a lifelong protester. It's beautifully written (although the dialogue lack-of-formatting annoyed me), but bleaker than the first volume, Autumn. Which is the way of the seasons, so I suppose that's the point.
* When Marnie Was There - Joan G Robinson (1967) ★ ★ ★ ★
What a lovely book. This is the story of Anna, a lonely girl who lives with her adoptive parents. After being ill, she is sent for a holiday by the coast, where she finally makes friends: first with a girl called Marnie, then, when Marnie moves away, with the family who move into Marnie's house. Anna is so believably unhappy and awkward it's almost painful to read her; and it's such a relief that the book has a sweet ending (and not at all the one I was expecting).
* The Pedant's Revolt: Why Most Things You Think Are Right Are Wrong - Andrea Barham (2005) ★ ★ ★
This is a fun little book, more for dipping into rather than reading straight through. It spends anything from a paragraph to two pages debunking popular myths. Here's where you can find out why margarine was originally meant to be pronounced with a hard g (like Margaret), why getting off scot free has nothing to do with Scotland, and that droit de seigneur was actually a tax paid to consummate a marriage. Definitely a book for reading parts aloud to amaze and entertain your loved ones.
* The Fountain in the Forest - Tony White (2018) ★ ★ ★
I didn't enjoy this as much as I'd hoped. It's a literary crime novel in three parts: it begins in present-day London, where Detective Sergeant Rex King is investigating a murder while being investigated for his role in an old death in custody case; it moves to a commune in rural France in 1985; in the third part it moves back to present-day, with occasional flashbacks to tie it all together. There's a weirdly stilted quality to the writing, with some words bolded, which turns to be because the writer is using a mandated vocabulary (a list of answers to daily crossword puzzles); chapters are also named by dates of the French revolutionary calendar, which are sometimes also worked into the chapter itself too. So: it's interesting (it did not fall together the way I was expecting), it's busy, but it's not quite as clever as it thinks it is.
* A Garden of Lilies: Improving Tales for Young Minds by Prudence A Goodchild - Judith Rossell (2017) ★ ★ ★
In Wormwood Mire (see above), Stella is given a book of dreary Victorian morality plays as wholesome, inspirational reading. It's this book, in fact, which has been released as a tie-in to the series. Interspersed with some parlour games, fun facts and pieces of advice ("Never meddle with gunpowder by candlelight") is a collection of tales about children who are slightly naughty or make a small mistake, only to suffer horrendous consequences. Poor Lucretia, for example, who spilt a drop of ink on her letter writing paper and was squashed by a marble bust of Prince Albert. It's a lot of fun, mostly in trying to guess what terrible fate will befall them.
* The Forensic Records Society - Magnus Mills (2017) ★ ★ ★
Another dreamlike allegory from Mills. This time, two friends start a society to listen to records, meeting weekly in a pub, spawning a number of competing and breakaway societies. The unnamed narrator doesn't understand what's going on, and neither do we, lost in a maze of rules and factions and alliances and weird time-keeping. It's enigmatic all the way through, right up to the abrupt ending.
* Withering-by-Sea - Judith Rossell (2014) ★ ★ ★
I found this at a second-hand book fair, and a nice little find it was. It's by an Australian writer, although set in Victorian England; it's a little bit Wolves of Willoughby Chase and a little bit Harry Potter with a tiny splash of Lemony Snicket, although it reads younger and simpler than any of those books. Eleven-year-old Stella Montgomery lives with her three awful aunts in a hotel in Withering-by-Sea. Reading in the hotel's greenhouse, she sees a man hide something before he's stabbed, and that starts off a train of events that leads to her and some new friends foiling a dastardly plan and beginning to unravel the mystery of what happened to her parents. I'd sum it up as gentle and pleasant.
* The Stolen Bicycle - Wu Ming-Yi (2015) (translated by Darryl Stern, 2017) ★ ★ ★
At the end of this book is an author's note, saying that one of his previous books featured an unattended bicycle and that a reader had written to ask him what what happened to it, so he wrote this book in response... in which an author writes a book featuring an unattended bicycle that inspires a reader to write and ask what happened to it. In the book, the bicycle is real, ridden by the author's father on the day he disappeared, and the reader's question inspires the author to find it in the hope that he will also find out what happened to his father. Thus begins a quest through Taiwan's vintage bicycle enthusiasts, each with her or his own story inside a story about a bicycle, the history of Taiwanese bicycles, elephants, and the use of bicycles and elephants in World War II, along with a brief diversion into butterfly handcrafts. Near the end the author rides a bicycle through a dreamscape of time and place, which is very much what reading the rest of the book felt like: beautiful, slow-moving and a bit confusing.
* Wormwood Mire - Judith Rossell (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
I enjoyed Withering-by-Sea enough to look up this second instalment in the series, and that was a good choice. In this one, eleven-year-old Stella is sent to live with her foreign cousins and their governess in their family's old home, Wormwood Mire, and the three children have an adventure involving an evil travelling dentist and a monster that turns things to stone. It's gently exciting and a step up from the first book.
* Winter - Ali Smith (2017) ★ ★ ★
This is the second in a seasonal quartet, an experiment in (almost) real-time novel writing. Events in the story are firmly anchored in time by the news that the characters note in passing — and it's current news, Brexit and Trump, so this is clearly a story about our time. It's a Christmas story, and there are vestiges of more traditional stories in it: —people seeking shelter have to sleep in a barn, a mysterious stranger who helps the central family find (a sort of) peace, a Christmas miracle that makes everyone happy — but it's very much its own beast, as dopey Art brings a strange girl he meets at a bus-stop to Christmas dinner with his mother, the former owner of a retail empire, and aunt, a lifelong protester. It's beautifully written (although the dialogue lack-of-formatting annoyed me), but bleaker than the first volume, Autumn. Which is the way of the seasons, so I suppose that's the point.
* When Marnie Was There - Joan G Robinson (1967) ★ ★ ★ ★
What a lovely book. This is the story of Anna, a lonely girl who lives with her adoptive parents. After being ill, she is sent for a holiday by the coast, where she finally makes friends: first with a girl called Marnie, then, when Marnie moves away, with the family who move into Marnie's house. Anna is so believably unhappy and awkward it's almost painful to read her; and it's such a relief that the book has a sweet ending (and not at all the one I was expecting).
* The Pedant's Revolt: Why Most Things You Think Are Right Are Wrong - Andrea Barham (2005) ★ ★ ★
This is a fun little book, more for dipping into rather than reading straight through. It spends anything from a paragraph to two pages debunking popular myths. Here's where you can find out why margarine was originally meant to be pronounced with a hard g (like Margaret), why getting off scot free has nothing to do with Scotland, and that droit de seigneur was actually a tax paid to consummate a marriage. Definitely a book for reading parts aloud to amaze and entertain your loved ones.
* The Fountain in the Forest - Tony White (2018) ★ ★ ★
I didn't enjoy this as much as I'd hoped. It's a literary crime novel in three parts: it begins in present-day London, where Detective Sergeant Rex King is investigating a murder while being investigated for his role in an old death in custody case; it moves to a commune in rural France in 1985; in the third part it moves back to present-day, with occasional flashbacks to tie it all together. There's a weirdly stilted quality to the writing, with some words bolded, which turns to be because the writer is using a mandated vocabulary (a list of answers to daily crossword puzzles); chapters are also named by dates of the French revolutionary calendar, which are sometimes also worked into the chapter itself too. So: it's interesting (it did not fall together the way I was expecting), it's busy, but it's not quite as clever as it thinks it is.
* A Garden of Lilies: Improving Tales for Young Minds by Prudence A Goodchild - Judith Rossell (2017) ★ ★ ★
In Wormwood Mire (see above), Stella is given a book of dreary Victorian morality plays as wholesome, inspirational reading. It's this book, in fact, which has been released as a tie-in to the series. Interspersed with some parlour games, fun facts and pieces of advice ("Never meddle with gunpowder by candlelight") is a collection of tales about children who are slightly naughty or make a small mistake, only to suffer horrendous consequences. Poor Lucretia, for example, who spilt a drop of ink on her letter writing paper and was squashed by a marble bust of Prince Albert. It's a lot of fun, mostly in trying to guess what terrible fate will befall them.
* The Forensic Records Society - Magnus Mills (2017) ★ ★ ★
Another dreamlike allegory from Mills. This time, two friends start a society to listen to records, meeting weekly in a pub, spawning a number of competing and breakaway societies. The unnamed narrator doesn't understand what's going on, and neither do we, lost in a maze of rules and factions and alliances and weird time-keeping. It's enigmatic all the way through, right up to the abrupt ending.