Or rather re-reading.  I remember reading and loving this book many years ago.  I wanted to check I still did, before putting it in my Top 10 Books of all time list.

A big Thank You to my Secret Santa for introducing me to the writings of Sarah Waters – I can’t wait to get my hands on another one! Unlike everyone else reviewing this book, I haven’t read any of her much aclaimed ‘lesbian Victorian romps’ and so cannot comment on her change of direction ‘exchanging petticoats for an austerity cut’ as she moves to Wartime London.

I can say though I absolutely loved this book!  It is written as a reverse chronology, describing events in the lives of four people in 1947, in 1944, and in 1941. Hence we discover the characters as we would get to know real people, by sharing parts of their everyday lives with only occasional flashes of  past events  revealing how they came to be.

Kay fills her days wandering the streets in a man’s suit and dropping into picture houses often half way through the film. Duncan lives with an old man whom he describes as his ‘uncle’, and seems satisfied with a menial factory job. Vic and Helen work in a lonely-hearts agency, and both habour secret lovers. Nobody talks much about what the war meant for them, but seemingly ordinary incidents bring past events to the surface.  The era is brilliantly brought to life by the writer’s descriptions and by the dialogue. There is an enormous list of references at the end of the book, so she obviously spent a great deal of time in research, yet the end product appears effortless.

I’m sure a second reading will be even more enjoyable. And then… which one next?

A man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck by a white blindness. A stranger offers to drive him home, but later steals his car. His wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor’s office. Soon the man’s wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. In an attempt to limit the spread of the epidemic the authorities begin quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum where they are guarded at gunpoint.

A tale of the breakdown of society translated from Portugese and written in a barely-punctuated style, of long sentences and long paragraphs, and embedded speech.  The narrative follows the fates of the characters mentioned above but never gives them names.  Even the first character is referred to as ‘the blind man’ when before long that could mean half the population.  An interesting device, which I thought helped convey that these people had lost somthing of themselves when they lost their sight, that they were somehow less as people, and undeserving of given names.  One of the characters says it doesn’t matter what my name is, the blind don’t have names.  It also leaves the reader to imagine the setting, and reinforces the idea that such a breakdown in society could happen in any city, in any country of the world.

It would be interesting to hear what others thought of the book, especially those of you who read and loved ‘The Road’ for it’s bleak depiction of a crumbling society. I strongly recommend you avoid the recently released film, and pick up the book. The writer won The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 and there are eight other titles available in English, including the cleverly named The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. I’m looking forward to the next one already.

Our book club Christmas Do is tonight and I haven’t got a book sorted for the Secret Santa give away. Reading Malcolm’s blog about the problems he had doing the same has got me thinking…

Giving away books… a difficult thing for me too, but for a different reason. I used to be a horder, but when I got married and moved house I allowed myself to be persuaded that having shelves full of paperbacks that you’re very unlikely to read again was not the best use of space. ‘If you really want to read them again you can always borrow them from a library! or even buy them again.  Surely its better to have less clutter to move and dust?’ 

I sold them all at a car boot sale, many to (I realised later) other stall holders who specialised in books, so I didn’t even get that much money for them.  Of course it’s not healthy to habour regrets about the past, but if I were to allow myself to I would probably admit to wishing I hadn’t got rid of them all. Maybe I could have kept a few special ones, I should have held onto the early collection of David Lodge novels (one of which was actually my Dad’s – gulp!) and if I still had the Memoirs of a Geisha I could have reread it when everyone else was talking about the film, and if I’d kept my Primo Levi I could have lent Rosemary ’Periodic Table’ when she said she’d like The Truce so much, and ….

Since sweeping my shelves clean I have avoided the problem of what to do with paperbacks, by not buying tham in the first place. I’m in the library alot more now with my girls, an old friend of mine always gives me something she’s read when I catch up with her, and of course there’s the Book Chat box.

Since joining the book group I’ve had more reason to want my shelf full of books ; its a record of your reading history, a reminder of what you enjoyed and when, it would have been a lot easier for me to write a ‘Top 10 Books’ for my Blog.

And of course I would have a rich resource to pick a book out to give away for the Secret Santa sack…

 

Ooo, don’t you just love that post-meeting feeling when you’ve got a crisp new book to get stuck into?!

As usual I have not read the back-cover, mini-biog or ‘praise for’, so all I know is the title, author and weight of the book. If I know I’m going to read a book then reading these serve only as a distraction; they either tell me what’s going to happen, or what the book is about. Isn’t it up to the reader to decide what a book is about?

Gilead - of course – it’s this month’s book, and I’m on track to finish by next Tuesday.  I decided to have a little break, just for a change of pace and went in search of To Kill A Mockingbird.  I covered an English class while on supply last week and was left floundering with a lower set Year 9 group, trying to make sense of a couple of extracts from Great Expectations (No probs – see December’s book last year…) and To Kill A Mockingbird (all sorts of probs – never read it!) Hey, here’s a quiz for you… what theme could you find in both these novels? Clue, of particular relevance to younger readers?

I had a look at Moira’s Top 10 or so books, and it got me thinking.. and blogging..

I thought it an interesting list of titles… somewhat similar to the most recently read Belper Book Chat books… what came first?  Does she love ‘em cos we read ‘em, or did we read ‘em cos she loved them?
All Quiet on the Weatern Front was on my English Lit ‘O’ Level (giving away my age!) syllabus, along with Far From the Madding Crowd.  The Hardy I hated on first reading, the Remarque I loved.  Strangely, as we laboured through potential examination questions and model answer essays I found the books had switched places in my affections.  FFTMC revealed its layers,  – its descriptive passages were not just filler! – whilst AQOTWF felt flat, too straight forward.  When it came to the exam I chose not to write about the WWI story – I couldn’t find anything to say! Well I was only sixteen.  Maybe I should give the whole list a reread… see how the adult likes the books the child was subjected to, all those years ago!….Hey! I’ve just thought of a good quiz for the Christmas Meeting!

To Kill A Mockingbird: My husband read it last year as part of a long series of self imposed readings of ‘classics’ He didn’t have much to say about it, wasn’t once moved to read any of it out.  When I picked it up recently, he revealed that he hadn’t really ‘got’ that book, and admitted that he hadn’t understood the point.  Is there a point? Does a book have to have a point to make it enjoyable? Well its on my bedside table as I blog, so I’ll soon find out… or will I ?
Just read What a Carve Up! Saw it in the library in the doorway, on the new aquisitions stand and grabbed it! Loved by Moira, and a Brand New Book – had to have it.  I also grabbed the most recent Joanna Harris from the same place, for the reason that I’d enjoyed the others (Five Quarters of an Orange got me through many nights of lengthy baby feeding sessions) but I had to take it back for renewal without turning a page… Felt a bit guilty when the librarian asked if I ‘had much left to read as there’s a request on it’

This is very much a work in progress – gonna get the pretty bits right first, then i can concentrate on writing something intelligent about some books wot I hav read…

You will notice i use lots of these …