Small Island

Who ever thought I would like a book that held the sentences "Me nuh know, Miss Hortense. When me mudda did pregnant dem seh smaddy obeah'r. A likkle spell yah no"? Certainly not me. But I did like Andrea Levy's Small Island very much. It's a story of the Jamaican experience of England back after the Second World War. Something you never hear about. The Jamaican men have fought for England, their motherland that they have learned about ever since they were small at school. They're taught to revere it, expected to fight for it but are completely unwelcome when they arrive on it's shores looking for a home and work. Despite the above horror she does capture the cadence of the voices nicely. The ending is a bit over the top but still it's quite a good book. And something that me nuh know nutin about, until now.

Lest We Forget

In all the bustle forgot I read this too in June and the Unattached House by Emily Eden too. Oh wait---is that the collected works of Proust right next to Kate Atkinson??? Hmm...must of read that too....funny how I forgot....

Surprise!

I knew nothing about this book and read the first chapter sample on the Kindle. I couldn't stop reading it. It was the literary equivalent of Memento or the Usual Suspects where you had to constantly be realigning your understanding of what was going on. It's three separate storylines that become interwoven in the end. Very clever.
The fun too was since I read it on the Kindle I had no physical measure of how much further the book was going. I was too involved in the story to keep an eye on the percentage on the bottom of the screen.  I had just figured everything out and ---pouf---it was over!

Staging a House for Sale

The Bradshaw Variations

I guess Rachel Cusk doesn't watch Sex in the City or she'd have known to give her characters different last names. Bradshaw is taken! But Rachel Cusk does not seem to be watching much TV. Not like Lorrie Moore's whose book seemed jammed with pop cultural references, Cusk's writing is lovely and perfect. There is no TV or cable in Cusk's house, her writing exists in it's own rarified atmosphere. The book is about different people in the same family (Bradshaw), some of who are unpleasant and some who aren't ,or at least you're not sure what they are. It's told in short chapters that exist on their own which serves to make each of the characters lonely and distant.

She's such a good writer that in the end I forgave her that not much goes on in the book.

She herself wears old clogs, a poncho, flared cordoroy trousers. When Howard met Claudia she was still a student at art college. It is part of the mythology of Claudia and Howard's life that he carried her off before she could finish her degree.The myth makes it difficult to remember exactly what happened. Claudia has a painting studio at the bottom of the garden, a kind of memorial to her forsaken career. To Thomas her clothes are sysmbolic too, commemorative, like the uniform veterans wear on Remembrance Day to remind people of their sacrifices.

In the next to final chapters there is end a moment of high drama and then a new chapter starts. She leaves the high drama dangling without any closure at the end of the book and since, I doubt there is a Bradshaw Variations Part II in the works, not finishing the story seems much more pretentious a move than I would expect of Rachel Cusk. So maybe she is watching a little TV on the sly and hoping for a regular series with her use of cliffhangers.

The Imperfectionists

This was very good. Some loosely woven stories of a failing newspaper. All the blurbs and reviews go on and on at how funny it is yet I actually found it kind of heartbreaking. Mostly about sad and dysfunctional people muddling through their lives. One of the stories about a young primatologist who in an effort to switch careers goes to Cairo to try out for a newspaper stringer position is quite funny but the rest are just sad. The writing is very good and clean, there are no pretensions in it. The last few stories sort of fizzle out and it loses it's earlier momentum but in the end maybe that's what is happening to the newspapers. Out with a fizzle, not a bang.

Tween Anxiety

An emergency pitstop for the Chain Reader when I was overcome with Middle School anxiety. This is basically a self-help book for the anxious Middle School mother. Some of the information is helpful---"Adolescence is a beauty pageant and every girl is automatically entered into it whether they want to be or not."

Every girl in the clique is described as a type----the Queen Bee, the Sidekick, the Target, the Conflicted Bystander...you want your daughter to be the Floater who is part of no clique and sails above the fray. Then Ms. Wiseman moves her steely eye on to the parents....like a Cosmo self quiz I anxiously tabulated the results wanting to proclaim myself the Hard Ass Loving Parent which according to Ms. Wisemen is the only good choice. Sadly I fell in the Benign Neglect Parent slot.

After that I didn't have the heart to go much further. Livvie's hardly the age where she's going out the back door at midnight to meet boys. She'll be fine.... I decided to return to my Benign Neglect and reached for the next book of fiction of the nightstand....Lolita ...The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie...Lord of the Flies....hmm ...maybe not those today.