A Work in Progress

A few Reading, (and watching, and borrowing) Notes

Last week when I tried to post here Typepad would not let me in, better luck today.  Apparently there is also an ongoing issue with adding books to the sidebar current reads list as well.  I still hope to migrate to a different platform--I wonder if Typepad is simply aging (I think they no longer take new subscribers).  Ah, the joy of technical problems for someone not inclined to too much technical savvy.

In that vein, I listen to podcasts on my android phone using Google Podcasts and that is also going away at the end of the month and I still need to sort that out.  Any suggestions for another service (free if possible) that I can easily use to listen on my phone?

Last weekend my turn came up (quicker than anticipated) for a copy of Kristin Hannah's The Women.  I think when I got in line I was about #144 and thought that sounded like a long wait, but when I checked out my copy I noticed that the line behind me has extended to well over 450!  That means there will be no renewing the book.  I have paired it with a book I own, You Don't Belong Here by Elizabeth Becker, which is a biography of three women journalists who reported from Vietnam.  This is the first Hannah book I have read and so far I am very much enjoying it.  It's interesting that it has become quite the hit with readers--maybe having a period of history that is not much written about (in fiction--women's history in the war that is) has struck a nerve for readers.  I wonder if this will begin a trend?

I have been looking for other novels about the period (preferably with women characters) and have come across a few, so I will share my list soon.

There are a number of books on the Women's Prize longlist that I find appealing and hope to read, and I have finished the first, which had already been on my reading pile.  Claire Kilroy's Soldier Sailor is a visceral reading experience and quite well done.  I could literally feel her (very emotional) pain.  I do not have children but I could empathize with the attitudes about mothering.  I dog eared pages as the narrator's observations, and her struggles and fears and hopes were so very astute.  Next I have picked up Isabella Hammad's Enter Ghost.

I was lucky to be able to grab a galley copy of Colm Toibin's Long Island from the bookstore I help out occasionally.  I recently reread Brooklyn, which I loved just as much the second time around as the first.  I plan on watching the film again, too.  I loved Long Island and it cemented my appreciation for Toibin's writing in general.  His prose is very straightforward and almost simple, yet he writes in such a way as to really capture the feelings and inner workings of his characters.  I find Eilis really interesting and sometimes, I thought, sort of prickly.  But the more I think about her, and how she always keeps her cards close to her and not reveal things in a hasty manner, the more I admire her.  Toibin presents small town Ireland and the closeness of families and how they present themselves to each other and the world at large, absolutely pitch perfect.  I feel like Eilis, despite the period and being a 'foreigner' in America and with her large Italian extended family, and then a now 'foreigner--American' upon her return visit to Ireland as someone who actually has a lot of agency.  She navigates it all so well, if not always perfectly.  There are a couple of 'love?' triangles going and the complexity of how they all orbit each other was riveting.  I am only disappointed that the ending leaves many things unresolved.  I do hope Toibin is at work on the rest of the story!

As for my watching, my Sundays are generally dedicated to PBS in the evenings, and now I have two new shows to follow.  I love Alice & Jack, though it is very different (not in a bad way) than I was expecting.  I like the three main actors and find their story really fascinating.  It is the sort of story I want to find a book just the same to read for a similar experience.  Nolly is also great fun and how could it not be with someone as talented as Helena Bonham-Carter!

A few links I had been saving up and had planned to share previously:

I am looking forward to reading Xochitl Gonzalez's new book, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, and here is a review.

I think Pat Barker's books have inspired me for some 'paired' books reading (as in reading two of her three set books--more on that later, too).  I read Up the Junction a few years ago and this makes me want to revisit the book.

More books to explore on the Carol Shields Prize Longlist.

I wasn't sure about a remake of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, but I do love Andew Scott and maybe it will be worth a look when it comes out after all.

This looks yummy and I want to try this, so I leave you with a mug of chocolate cake!

Happy reading everyone.

Inaugural Women's Prize Nonfiction Longlist

I've been looking forward to the announcement of the inaugural Women's Prize for Nonfiction longlist.  Every year I eagerly await the fiction list, think I'll tackle reading some of the titles that are listed, buy or borrow more than a few, but then am lucky to read one or two!  Typical of me, I want to read everything but never enough time and my attention all over the place.  

So for this list, I am curious and am happy to discover some new books and maybe I can manage to read one or two ... ?  The thing with nonfiction is I can usually only manage one at a time (as opposed to a whole stack of novels on the go at once).  I always want to read nonfiction slowly to take in as many details as I can.  I do have a couple of nonfiction starts on my nightstand, but they have been woefully neglected for weeks now.

So, here is the list of possibilities:

The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom by Grace Blakely

Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon

Intervals by Marianne Brooker 

Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by Joya Chatterji 

Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming

Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in the Philippines by Patricia Evangelista

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder

Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood by Lucy Jones

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles

Code-Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie

Young Queens: The Intertwined Lives of Catherine de’ Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary, Queen of Scots by Leah Redmond Chang

How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair

I'm familiar with only a few titles, had previously checked out Anna Funder's book from the library (but being slow had to return it unfinished -- it comes out in paperback in the UK in March, however, so easier to tote around and read slowly without due dates).

I follow a couple of Booktubers and they have interesting videos about the longlist, if you want to hear more about the titles:

LouiseSavidgeMuses (along with her son, Simon, also fun to listen to) And the Lonesome Reader.

Any favorites, interesting-looking books or must reads?

Weekend (trying to) Reading Notes

Week three of working from home (and I know some of you have been doing this longer than me, so kudos!) is coming to an end.  Early this week it was 86F, yesterday sunny but incredibly windy, today sunny but chilly and Sunday is forecast measurable snow!  It feels like all four seasons within the span of a week.  One upside to working from home--not having to get up and go to work in the cold.  And while I have no reason to complain compared to what others are enduring (and my empathy meter is going crazy these days and it is emotionally exhausting), I have to say some days are pretty good, and others are challenging.  As a naturally solitary person I thought being inside and on my own would be natural, but isolation can be a little nerve-racking sometimes.  

Just a few bookish notes today.  My reading is still all over the place, but while it is slow going I am still reading and enjoying my books.  With nowhere to go and nothing to do and only food and basic necessities to buy, I admit that I have been caving in more than I should to book ordering.  I am trying to just order from smaller bookstores online--used mostly. 

I am spending more time online and am bombarded (but in a good way?) by bookish emails and newsletters.  We book people are all trying to stay sane and naturally are migrating towards books for solace and mental sustenance, right.  But I read about so many other reader's bookish experiences of late and am tempted into this story or that book or maybe that collection.  If my connection to the outside world is on hold, I am at least getting some somewhat regular bookmail.  I need something nice to look forward to.

This week I did manage to (finally) finish a book--an entire novel (not just a graphic novel or a one-sitting comic-but those are okay, too).  I absolutely loved Angie Cruz's Women's Prize longlisted Dominicana and I can warmly recommend it to you.  It is the story of a young woman who lives in the Dominican Republic.  She is very close to her family but knows she must do what is right to help them, which means being married off to a man much older than herself.  The added benefit is he lives in NYC and will take her there and later she will bring her mother and siblings.  So this is not just an immigrant story, but the coming of age story of a young woman learning not only how to be a wife and mother, but a woman in the changing world of 1960s America.  Ana has such a wonderful and earnest voice and it is inspiring to see how she must navigate a new world and situation and how to become independent and happy.  Or as happy as a woman can be in those times and in her situation.  I really loved it and likely it will be high on my list of favorites later this year.  

As you see above I have several more longlisted books and I want to pick another one soon.  These are the titles that appealed most right off hand, but I am sure I will continue to explore the list.

I am getting into the thick of things with Kinsey in Q is for Quarry and the story is once again touching on family she did not know she had.  She is working on a old case with two retired detectives--an unsolved murder of a young woman in 1969.  She was never identified and her killer never found.  It is gripping.  I am trying to read a very manageable one chapter a day of The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki.  Another story I am very immersed in and plan on watching the movie adaptation when I finish the book.  I think I am even just past the halfway mark of this thick classic.  When I finish (not to think too far ahead) do I pick another classic or another chunky book?!  I have ideas in mind for both options.  Still contemplating which new prompt book to choose, but mostly I want to finish The Handmaid's Tale, which I am reading along with Stefanie at Weeds (formerly So Many Books).  The incentive to finish sooner than later is a planned next book to read together--a NYRB classic--something we each have on our shelves.

***

It's always a pleasure when you read a passage that minics life as we know it now, and there are two passages I want to share that caught my eye this week.

From the Handmaid's Tale, Offred is living in isolation as well, but in her case it is complete as every semblance of who she first was has been rinsed away, and she reflects:

" . . . Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead to nowhere.  Otherwise you live in the moment.  Which is not where I want to be."

"But that's where I am, there's no escaping it.  Time's a trap, I'm caught in it.  I  must forget my secret name and all ways back.  My name is Offred now, and here is where I live."

"Live in the present, make the most of it, it's all you got."

***

And in the Makioka Sisters, they are also dealing with sadness and feelings of loneliness.  In this case there are also the rumblings of a possible war in Europe.

" . . . Sachiko too was bored.  She practiced her calligraphy and gave koto lessons to O-haru.  One day she remarked in a letter to Yukiko: 'Etsuko is not the only one who is lonely.  Everything seems sad this autumn.  I wonder if it is a sign of age--I have always liked the spring, and this is the first time I have understood the autumn'."

***

I am, weirdly as this sounds, looking at books in consideration of world events, about world pandemics.  Maybe not the 1918 Spanish Flu, maybe the Plague?  I am not sure--just looking now.  I have three books I am looking at and dipping into for my prompt and a couple of other nonfiction books that have caught my eye--it is definitely time for some nonfiction.  And then there are all those other piles of books that just seem to wander into my room and plant themselves next to my bed . . .   Now where did you just come from, hmm?

Please stay healthy everyone and many hours of happy reading, too!

Normal People by Sally Rooney

I posted this photo on instagram today mentioning that I had finished reading Salley Rooney's Normal People. which has won many awards and is on the Women's Prize for Fiction longlist, and most people were more curious about what I thought of the book rather than offering a suggestion for what I should read next.  So see above photo for the stack of books from which I am now considering my next longlist read.

Sally Rooney's writing has garnered much acclaim and her books have won awards and I do think they are much deserved.  I had been wanting and meaning to get to her work and the longlist gave me the nudge to do so.  So, what did I think of her second novel?  I liked it very much, and I found a lot to appreciate about it, but I liked it with reservations.  I love her writing, I like that pared down, crisp prose and I think she has a lot to say about love and relationships and class and how one must navigate the world today.  The beginning totally drew me in and I liked the ending, but somewhere halfway through the story it sagged for me and I found myself getting impatient with the characters.  It was so angst-ridden and the characters were often so very self-absorbed that I started losing sympathy for them.  And there were moments I cringed when Marianne allowed men and family to mistreat her.

This is a book that has been much talked about, so you likely already know the premise.  The story opens with Connell coming to pick up his mother, who is a cleaning lady, from the home of a classmate.  Connell is smart and attractive and well liked by his peers, but he comes from the wrong side of the tracks so to speak.  His mother is a single mom who had a child out of wedlock and they are not from the wealthier part of Carricklea, which is in the western part of Ireland. 

Marianne is opposite in many ways, though in some of the essentials they are quite similar.  Her family is wealthy and she is also quite bright, at least as much so as Connell.  She is not in the popular group at school, as a matter of fact she is often maligned as being a little too quirky.  She is content to be on her own, but she is very much an outsider.  It's hard to tell at first if she minds as she seems to cultivate this, yet her classmates (as kids can be) are at times very nasty to her.  Later in the story we see that her family is not much better.

The two, however, do seem to share common ground.  They like each other and can talk on a level that is intimate and friendly, but being teenagers, they both know those unwritten rules when it comes to how they deal with popularity and social hierarchies that come along with high school and adolescence.  The pair embark on a relationship that is essentially clandestine.  In private they get on well, but in public they stick to their roles.  Connell is perhaps the one who most pretends yet Marianne lets him.  He knows it’s wrong, they both know, but they leave that part of their lives unspoken.  Connell's mother sees it and finds it reprehensible (yet she is always supportive of him even as she is critical), and Marianne's family is somewhat aghast that she would have a relationship with the son of their cleaning lady.

So fast forward a bit and they both go off to Trinity College in Dublin and things flip.  By now they have broken up, their relationship unsupportable as they are managing it.  They are both unknown in Dublin and on new ground.  Marianne finds her feet and appears to be a success and Connell finds it hard and doesn't quite jive with the rest of the college community. Where Marianne was a loner in their hometown, now Connell doesn't quite fit in.

The story follows them over the course of a few years as they come together and fall apart.  More friends than lovers at Trinity, but at that they are more wary of each other.  I won't say more than that--as you can see there is a lot to mull over in this story and I like how Rooney riffs on the idea of what is "normal".  It's a great book to discuss.

But.  I wonder if I am just not quite the right audience?  This is a story of Millennials.  It's a different world for them than it was for me.  In many ways, that angst is much the same and those feelings of inadequacy and not fitting in are what we all go through and nit only as teenagers but also adults.  I wish there had been more--something else.  There was this constant circling of each other and endless rehashing of the same situation.  Maybe less of the constant navel-gazing, and more growth of the characters.  There were moments I wanted to tell Marianne--please, please just walk away.  Don't let him (and him being all her romantiv partners) do that to you.  She would eventually, but there were some painful moments.  Somewhere past the middle mark I just wanted to be done with the story--if that doesn't sound too awful.  I am happy I read it, and I will read more of her work, but I was not sad to finish the book and drop it back in the library slot. 

So, have you read it?  Did you love it, or maybe less so?  I am curious to know what others think.  Did I miss something important?  I am ready to move on to another book from the list now, however!

Teaser Tuesday: Normal People

I know I am not the last person to read Sally Rooney's Normal People (it has not even been published here in the US yet--due out in mid-April), but it feels like it.  I have heard really wonderful things about Sally Rooney--her books have won awards and acclaim and now this newest (though published in the UK last year) is longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.  I shamelessly have had it checked out from the library for longer than I care to admit, so I shall start here with the longlist.  By the way, if I manage to read even a small handful of the books listed (and that over the course of the year!) I will be pleased--particularly those books I have owned for a while now.

I suspect Normal People will have a very good chance of making it to the shortlist, and it feels like it will read quickly (and then I will be in on the conversation finally . . .).  It has been, or rather Rooney, has been hailed as the first great Millennial novelist.  Maybe that is where my hesitation has come from?  The gulf between me (I guess I am a Gen-X'er) and the Millennial generation seems wide indeed.  I don't think there is such a thing (not really anyway) of being too old or too young for a book, but my experiences and viewpoint will likely be vastly different.  However, maybe it is a way of bridging the gap and understanding?  

I like the premise of the book--Marianne and Connell are high schoolers when the story opens, but they come from very different backgrounds.  His mother is Marianne's family's cleaning lady.  Despite that he is quite popular in school and she is an outsider--happy in her intelligence and solitude.  Things may flip by the time they begin college and I am curious to see where their lives take them and if they tackle growing up together or apart.

I do like her writing very much and I love the descriptions she gives, particularly of Marianne, which is what I want to share here.  This is Connell's perspective by the way.

"Marianne is grinning now.  She exercises an open contempt for people in school.  A lot of people really hate her.  Her father died when she was thirteen and Connell has heard she has a mental illness now or something.  It's true she is the smartest person in school.  He dreads being left alone with her like this, but he also finds himself fantasizing about things he could say to impress her."

***

"She wears ugly thick-soled flat shoes and doesn't put make-up on her face.  People have said she doesn't shave her legs or anything.  Connell once heard that she spilled chocolate ice cream on herself and took her blouse off to wash it in the sink.  That's a popular story about her, everyone has heard it.  If she wanted, she could make a big show of saying hello to Connell in school.  See you this afternoon, she could say, in front of everyone.  Undoubtedly it would put him in an awkward position, which is the kind of thing she usually seems to enjoy.  But she has never done it."

Did I mention that I my weekend reading was almost nil and that I didn't finish books or make progress in others when I had hoped to?  It has been making me a little antsy, so starting a new book is definitely just what I need.  And an Irish author in March, so it works out doubly well.  And while I am still reading my February prompt book, it is time to think about March now as well!

2019 Women's Prize Longlist!

It's that time again.  The 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist has been announced.  Is it just me, or does it seem a little on the early side?  (Not that I am complaining of course).  I was thinking it would be next week, or at least midweek, but it surprised me to open my email and see the list there all ready for my perusal first thing in the morning. 

And even more surprising that the library where I work already has all but three of the books.  A few are checked out, one is on order and another is on my reading pile at home that I had brought home prior to even thinking about the list (Sally Rooney's book).  I think the list this year is heavy on US authors perhaps?  Usually I have to order quite a few titles from the UK for the library collectio.  Not surprising I have yet to read any of the books, but also not surprising I have three (Anna Burns's not on my pile in the photo) on my TBR pile.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
Remembered by Yvonne Battle-Felton
My Sister, the Serial Killer Oyinkan Braithwaite
The Pisces Melissa Broder
Milkman Anna Burns
Freshwater Akwaeke Emezi
Ordinary People Diana Evans
Swan Song Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott
An American Marriage Tayari Jones
Number One Chinese Restaurant Lillian Li
Bottled Goods Sophie van Llewyn
Lost Children Archive Valeria Luiselli
Praise Song for the Butterflies Bernice L. McFadden
Circe Madeline Miller
Ghost Wall Sarah Moss
Normal People by Sally Rooney

Now I need to choose one (just one?) to read.  I never manage to read all or even most of the list, but there are definitely a handful I am really interested in.  I may begin with Sally Rooney, as well as the Madeline Miller and the Pat Barker.  Any favorites or books you have read and loved (or maybe didn't quite love)?

July Prompt: Sailing the Seven Seas

I literally just finished the June prompt book yesterday, but I have been thinking about July for a while now.   My prompt is sailing the seven seas, so something set on water.  Since last month I read a thriller, I want something a little different this month and I seem to have mostly reached for historical fiction.  I could have added a few more to the pile, but I am already going to have a difficult decision. 

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje -- "By turns poignant and electrifying, The Cat’s Table is a spellbinding story about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood, and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage."

Hornblower and the 'Hotspur' by C.S. Forester -- This is the third book in the series about Horation Hornblower (on whom I have had a longstanding crush--the man is a gentleman among men!).  I really need to get back to these books but it has been so long I wonder if I should start from the first one again.  April 1803. The Peace of Amiens is breaking down. Napoleon is building ships and amassing an army just across the Channel. Horatio Hornblower-who, at age twenty-seven, has already distinguished himself as one of the most daring and resourceful officers in the Royal Navy-commands the three-masted Hotspur on a dangerous reconnaissance mission that evolves, as war breaks out, into a series of spectacular confrontations. All the while, the introspective young commander struggles to understand his new bride and mother-in-law, his officers and crew, and his own "accursed unhappy temperament-matters that trouble him more, perhaps, than any of Bonaparte's cannonballs."

A Summer of Drowning by John Burnside -- I loved his short stories that I read last year!  "A young girl, Liv, lives with her mother on a remote island in the Arctic Circle. Her only friend is an old man who beguiles her with tales of trolls, mermaids, and the huldra, a wild spirit who appears as an irresistably beautiful girl, to tempt young men to danger and death. Then two boys drown within weeks of each other under mysterious circumstances, in the still, moonlit waters off the shores of Liv's home.  Were the deaths accidental or were the boys lured to their doom by a malevolent spirit?"

The Captain's Daughter by Meg Mitchell Moore -- "By turns poignant, incisive, and laugh-out-loud funny, The Captain’s Daughter is an unforgettable novel about the choices we make and the consequences we face in their wake."

She Rises by Kate Worsley -- "Louise Fletcher, a young dairy maid on an eighteenth-century Essex farm, has long been warned of the lure of the sea - after all, it stole away her father and brother. But when she is offered work as a maid in the naval port of Harwich, she leaps at the chance to see more of the world.  Fifteen-year-old Luke has been press ganged and sent to sea on board the warship Essex. Aching for the girl he left behind, he must learn fast if he is to survive. Louise and Luke's new worlds are dangerous and exciting, and when they collide the consequences are astonishing."

The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar -- "One September evening in 1785, the merchant Jonah Hancock hears urgent knocking on his front door. One of his captains is waiting eagerly on the step. He has sold Jonah's ship for what appears to be a mermaid. As gossip spreads through the docks, coffee shops, parlours and brothels, everyone wants to see Mr Hancock's marvel. Its arrival spins him out of his ordinary existence and through the doors of high society. At an opulent party, he makes the acquaintance of Angelica Neal, the most desirable woman he has ever laid eyes on... and a courtesan of great accomplishment. This meeting will steer both their lives onto a dangerous new course, on which they will learn that priceless things come at the greatest cost. Where will their ambitions lead? And will they be able to escape the destructive power mermaids are said to possess?"

I am all caught up on my previous months reading of prompt selections.  I always want to read more than one book, but I have not seemed to manage more than on, so I am going to have a hard choice to make--they all sound good!

Sight by Jessie Greengrass

When I first started reading Jessie Greengrass's Sight I was so impressed that I was hoping if nothing else it would make it to the shortlist of the Women's Prize for Fiction, which happily it has.  The novel is unusual in that so much of it seems to take place internally in the narrator's mind, so this is a story without much action, but it is thoughtful and elegantly told nonetheless.  Interspersed with her thoughts and reflections are bits of medical history which at first seem a little incongruous and as if the author is wandering off a different storytelling path entirely.

The novel is separated into three sections and one interlude and the medical bits differ from each other yet upon further reflection they actually work quite nicely with the narrator's story enhancing it and shedding a kind of light on what is happening in her mind and in her life. 

The story moves around in time so her reflections on events aren't strictly linear, but they eventually mesh into a cohesive story that is like a mosaic of colorful pieces creating one larger whole.  I think ultimately this is a story of mothers and daughters, yet it is also a story about looking inside and seeing--not just literally but figuratively as well--seeing to understand.

The narrator, an unnamed woman going through some inner turmoil, is expecting her second child at the outset of the story.  But the story goes back in time with her reflecting on meeting her partner, Johannes, and her struggle with the decision whether to have a child or not.  She has just lost her mother to illness and is grieving for her, trying to put her life back in order.  She reflects on her childhood and the summers she spent with her grandmother, her mother's mother, who was a psychoanalyst.

So these are some of the elements of her life that are swirling about, all of them world shifting--life and death, marriage and children, loss and new beginnings.  Each life event quite momentous in its way.  So it makes sense that the stories interwoven in the narrative, scientific medical shifts in world history offer a more cerebral reflection on the way we see the body and mind.  Emotional disruptive events on one side and more thoughtful reasoning events on the other.  They may feel a little incongruous at first but they are also complementary in their way, too. 

Rontgen's work with the X-ray comes at the time she is dealing with the death of her mother.  After all the upheaval of caring for her the narrator is left with time to fill and she spends hours in the library reading about Rontgen and the discovery that we can see inside the body. 

"I began to believe that if I could see how these two events fitted together, the way that simultaneity tied them, then perhaps I might see also through the lens the fame on which my own life had been constructed, its underlying principle, or how it was that I should be considering motherhood when it seemed that I had barely altered from unhappy adolescence."

She was barely into her twenties when her mother fell ill and she had to turn all her attention to her mother.  It is Freud and his daughter Anna who was also not just caregiver of sorts for her father but also his case study for his own work that sheds light on her relationship with her mother and particularly with her grandmother.  As a child she would spend her summers with her and took to daily journaling (or her version of it) like her grandmother in order to try and outgrow her childhood. It is the last section that for me was the most evocative with John Hunter's medical experiments in human anatomy and his desire to perform a caesarean operation in the 1700s that paralleled so vividly the narrator's own pregnancy.

I wasn't quite sure about it as I was reading but now that I have finished it all seems to come together nicely as a whole and a different an unusual reading experience.  How perfectly the medical stories peel back the skin and even look into the mind in a way that evokes in an almost visceral way the same introspection that the narrator is undergoing.  What I found most relatable was the grief she felt at the start of the story.  Greengrass captures so perfectly that feeling of being at swim when someone close is dying.  After losing my own father last fall it really resonated with me in such a real and truthful way.  I can see where this form of storytelling might not be for every reader, but It was a memorable read for me.

Sight: (After) Tuesday Teaser

I've been very neglectful of late of keeping up on my reading here.  I have hit the busy time at work and most days I come home and am ready to just drop into bed after I eat and get my things ready for the next day.  Last night I pulled out my laptop and turned it on in preparation for a proper Tuesday Teaser, but it just didn't happen.  So, I will share a teaser today (teasers are good any day of the week, right?) of a book that has become a surprise hit for me.

When I was looking about the web for bloggers who were giving their predictions for the longlist before the announcement one book seemed to keep popping up all over the place, Jessie Greengrass's Sight.  I tend to be a pretty predictable reader.  I like certain types of books, certain types of stories and certain settings.  I know I have a comfort zone I mostly stay inside of.  And it always helps when a story is one I can relate to.  Not being a mother I don't often immediately reach for books about  motherhood.  I know it's silly, since reading is about expanding horizons and reading about the not known.  So, when this book kept popping up I thought if it gets on the list I will save it for later rather than sooner.  However, it was one of the books the library had sooner rather than later, so I took it home and dipped in and found I did not want to put it down.  (Lesson to me to never assume I will not like something or be able to relate to it!).

So Sight is an interesting story.  It's about a young woman who is trying to decide whether or not to have a child.  She has just come out of dealing with the illness and subsequent death of her mother.  Interlaced with these storylines are some historical bits about the discovery of the X-ray and Freud's work with psychoanalysis.  While I am not sure how it will all come together in the end, her writing is so lyrical I am moved by it.  More, however, is the story of the death of the character's mother.  Having just dealt with the passing of my father last fall those scenes are particularly poignant and she has had me near tears on more than one occasion.  What I most love about books and reading are these moments where I feel like the author has gotten inside my head and so eloquently tells what I am thinking and feeling and experiencing. 

So I am slowly reading and appreciating Jessie Greengrass's lovely prose and her amazing storytelling abilities.  If she does not make the shortlist I will hugely disappointed.  I'm only reading one other book from the list at the moment (which I am also greatly enjoying), but this is a book that deserves accolades in my opinion.

Yesterday I was reading this bit, which comes just after the death of her mother when she is sort of drifting along trying to find her way once again. 

"All morning in the library I would sit at my desk, flicking through contents pages and indexes, appendices, photo captions, chapter headings, following this lead or that little way until I became distracted or until it was time for lunch, a slice of quiche or tart and a salad in the library cafe, and then often in the afternoons I would give up even that pretense of activity, setting a book to lie open in front of me, the pages rustling softly in the breeze from the open window, and allow myself to drift through the brackish backwaters of the afternoon, the roar of traffic from the road outside a lulling constancy.  I stayed each day until the library was almost closed, until the assistant librarians came round with their trolleys to pick up that day's cast-off texts and until the sound of a hoover started up in a distant corridor; and then at the last possible moment, dragging my feet, I would dawdle back out into the street--and although at the time the sound of pages turning seemed to grind against me until I worried that I might be worn away by it to nothing, now I recall that long summer as though it had been spent within a papery cocoon.  I had been reduced to nothing, and now I sought amongst so many books a new way to understand myself by analogy, a pattern recognized in other lives which might be drawn across my own to give it shape and, given shape, to give it impetus, direction.  The things which I learned without noticing all through that year recur to me still, those images from medical textbooks, the bodies dissected or described, the case notes and the cabinets and all the many ways there are to see inside ourselves, and still I feel that, correctly understood, they might constitute a key--."

Wow.  See, I understand that searching and that drifting as that is what I feel like I am going through now, too.  Even if our choices and situations and trajectories are vastly different, that underlying emotion is exactly the same.  I have a library copy of the book, but I think this is one I am going to buy to keep on my shelves.

The Dark Circle by Linda Grant

I wonder what the inspiration for Linda Grant's Baileys Prize shortlisted novel, The Dark Circle was.  It is not the first book that comes to mind that uses the setting of a sanatorium for a story, but it is perhaps the first that I have read.  Who would have thought that a book about consumptives could be so interesting.  For me the setting isn't what drives the story, but it's the characters that makes it so fascinating--in particular the treatments and how those with TB were treated.  Certainly it was an eye opening read.

It's the two "Hebrews" at the heart of the story that move things along and provide the impetus for change at the sanatorium at the end of the story.  Brother and sister of London's East End, Miriam and Lenny are not the sort of client-rather patient-that the Gwendo was built for.  Not so long ago the only people who could even afford to take up residence at the Gwendolyn Downie Memorial Hospital for the Care of Chronic Cases of Tuberculosis were middle class or better.  But it is 1949 and National Health means that when the pair are diagnosed with TB, it's down to the south of England and the Gwendo they go.  The ambulance driver, used to a better class of patient thinks to himself that these two are common as muck.

Lenny is the one who has been rejected for Army service (and here his uncle had a plan to get him out of it but his worst nightmare comes true, since Lenny really is sick).  He is the one with the serious case and it seems as though Miriam only has the sniffles but she'll be the one who flounders in the treatment.  Inseparable are the two, but upon arrival they are split up (much to their chagrin) and thus does the story begin.  The patients are an odd assortment from a very distinguished and titled lady to, arriving on scene much later, a colorful and very opinionated American serviceman caught and diagnosed on his way home after the war.

I found most engaging the character sketches (one woman described as: ". . .if it hadn't been for the war she would have become one of those unhappily married women who had read everything in the local lending library and drank too much sherry before her husband came home from work.  Then war had given her something decisive and important to do."), and the character dynamics as well as what seems such frightening and (maybe?) antiquated treatments such as the collapsing of a lung to "let it rest" or the removal of ribs, which I still don't think I understand the purpose of. 

Lenny and Miriam do cause quite a stir--class and religion aside--even their dress and behavior, but it's even more exacerbated by Arthur's American-jazzy-pop-culture arrival.  Well, that and the possibility of a new drug that might well cure  most of the Gwendo's TB cases.  It's only a pity that there are a limited number doses available for trial and the doctor in charge must select a very few patients on whom to give the drug.  Life at the sanitarium is thrown into an upheaval the likes of which will send it spinning out of control.  This is what happens when the patients stage a subversive, clandestine revolt.

You wouldn't think that a story set in a sanatorium could have all that much of a narrative arc.  I mean the patients are put on severe bed rest, but the lives of the core group of characters are followed through well into their middle ages taking the story into the Millennium.  There is not so much of a climactic moment of revelation as an explanation of why they end up where and how they do and how their relationships with each other intermingle and ultimately play out.

I've long been curious about Linda Grant and this novel finally gave me the nudge to try her work.  I have at least two more novels by her on my reading stack that I am even more eager now to try.  I enjoyed The Dark Circle, but I have a feeling I might like her other novels a tad bit more.