Here's what I think is happening in The Beacon.( Read more... )

I don't know what to think about The Beacon. I think I'll have to re-read it because I think I must have missed something vital.

The Beacon is very readable. It's slightly creepy, slightly menacing.

I picked up The Beacon by Susan Hill today in the Cambridge Oxfam book shop. It's one I've held in the back of my mind to look out for. I don't like all Susan Hill's work, actually I haven't read a great proportion - going down the 'also by' list in the front of The Beacon I see I know nine of them, including In the Springtime of the Year which was one I never finished. I do usually finish books if I get beyond the first pages but not always because there are so many books out there and no way I can possibly read them all.

My favourite is Strange Meeting. Very very good. I liked the Simon Serrailler series, too, until SS and his family became too unbearable and the body count in Lafferton too high for me to suspend the disbelief which is so essential when reading.

I had an English teacher, when I was about twelve, who said we shouldn't give up on a book until we'd read eighty pages. I can remember thinking 'but that's nearly half the book' and perhaps that was her thinking too. It sticks in my mind. I still give a book the eighty pages test on occasion.

I'm regretfully coming to the end of The Girl in the Blue Dress. It's been pleasure reading right from page one. Gaynor Arnold has managed the Gibson family very skilfully, I think, so that you know it's a bit like the Dickens family without actually being them.

Being a complete and neurotic pedant about such things I hate to find anachronisms and I only found one very small one which might not be one anyway. Kitty says to her mother (when the mother is fussing about something): "Don't start!" Would Victorians have used this expression, I wonder.

The reason some books get on to my 'really liked' list is only to do with one thing. Does the book stay with me in some way? I read The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver ( Read more... )

This is my novel reading list. Mostly women writers, mostly domestic.( Read more... )

I've always liked Elizabeth Jane Howard, have read all her novels, heard her on the radio and was really excited when she came to read and speak at our local fiction festival a few years ago. For me she could do no wrong so her recently published novel, Love All, was a crashing disappointment.

Apart from the weakness of the plotlines - infuriating in the way characters vaguely arrive, do nothing much to contibute to anything and vaguely dsappear - the characters themselves simply don't come across as anything but superficial. There are various sets of devoted brothers and sisters, two girls, from different generations, brought up by maiden aunts, a few self centred men and a few others (too many) swilling uneasily about on the edges. It could be called something like How I Sacrificed My Entire Life For My Brother Because He Is A God And Once Spoke Nicely To Me or Why Does Nothing Nice Happen To Good Characters or simply, Disappointment. People die, people leave and it was annoying rather than anything deeper.

I kept going because EJH, even at her weakest, is very readable and there are still gems to be found. She hasn't lost her sure touch when writing dialogue between some of her characters or in describing people and places.

Several irritations are minor. The insistence on Percy's Greekness, for instance, when there is nothing Greek about her apart from EJH's insistence. And why didn't her aunt Floy know that her name is pronounced Percy phone - it's not as if she wouldn't ever have heard it pronounced. And if she must carry that nickname, why not at least spell it Persy? Percy is such a self centred tubby little man in a waistcoat name.

And then there's Hatty who is eight for much of the novel but whom EJH suddenly makes rather teenagerish, complete with spots, as if she'd forgotten how old she is.

But that ending! Oh dear!

I've just started to read Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold. It looks promising as far as twenty pages can judge.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society wandered into far fetchedness in the last quarter of the book. The authors obviously rather liked Isolda and put her in the middle of two unlikely episodes and it came across as unnecessary padding, especially when she turns detective. Suddenly I found myself in Famous Five land and it really didn't work. (I love the FF and am currently collecting all of them to rebuild my childhood collection so nothing against them personally!)

A recent good book was The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell. I liked this very much for the interweaving stories of Iris and Esme although I wasn't too sure quite how Iris's relationship with her brother contributed to the overall story.

It hardly seems credible that they shut people (and it seems to be mostly women) away in asylums in the 20th century for such crimes as disobeying one's parents, being ambitious or becoming pregnant and although all this has been well documented elsewhere it still comes as a shock. Maggie O'Farrell writes in a nicely understated way - you don't always see what's coming. In different hands Esme's history could have been turned into an overwritten melodrama.

What makes a book good must be who's reading it, of course, but I'm always surprised when books that I've enjoyed don't hit the spot for other people. One of my absolute favourites remains Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and I've recommended/given it to various people. The most common reaction is lukewarm to say the least so perhaps it isn't that brilliant but I still think it is.

I'm the same, though. If someone raves about a book I approach it with suspicion thinking it can't be that good. I wonder why.

Having changed very definitely to working part time I've got more time to read. I've conscientiously kept a list of everything I've read over the last year or so and I think I'm going to start writing brief reviews so that I can actually remember what the books were about. And lj is a good place to record. By the way if you're reading this anything I write will be full of spoilers.

My current book which I'm on the verge of finishing: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

My niece sent me this one as we do find our tastes in books coincide sometimes - she sends me things she's really liked and vice versa. She waxed most lyrical over this and it is, as several reviewers have said, a sweet story. Thing is, do I like sweet? Glancing over my recent reads I seem to go for less than happy endings but this is a refreshing change. Yes, now and again I do like sweet. Even if the heroine, Juliet, is deeply annoying and most of the Islanders sound and act identical, even if there is the standard temperamental child, Kit, who I wanted to push off the cliff and even if her mother, Elizabeth, is unreasonably courageous. In spite of all this, and the less than brilliant writing, the authors know how to spin a tale - lots of tales because the individual recollections of the Guernsey Islanders suffering German occupation in the war are what made the book compelling reading.

It's set out in letters. No chapters or anything like that and it's not a form I'd think of as workable (as a child I used to skip people's letters to each other in books as boring and irrelevant) but it works here. I've ended up knowing a little about the German occupation although I have to be careful because apparently the Guernsey in the book is not the one some Islanders would recognise. But I liked it. I'm even starting to like Juliet and had to skip to the last page to check that she was going to end up marrying the right man - yes, it's that kind of book, but it has to be. It has to have a good ending. I'm not there yet but I know it will be.

There's something a bit sad about an unused journal, I think. I'm not deleting this time because I know there are some out there who like AF Fanfiction - any AF fanfiction - but I have made it private for the moment because it's not active.

It feels like taking down a note on a notice board!

Anyone who really wants can always read it, just drop a line, but I do feel, like I did before, that anyone who wanted to has already read it so it's served its purpose.

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