I think there really should be a post on my blog that discusses Holiday reading and books.  In fact there ought to be one whenever I take a holiday.  The last was probably for going to Wales, but this was only a weekend and Dylan Thomas remained untouched!

This time it is a week and it is in Northumbria.  Reading seems a more likely proposition.  My Ereader is loaded with “White Tiger” which is this months choice for the Brixton urban bookgroup.  And I have “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”  on load from my library which is the choice of the reading group there this month.  I also have the unabridged audio book of the same work for the car journey, which I am almost certain we shall manage to fit in since the drive is over six hours long, from London to Northumbria.

That gives the context, and I shall be especially interested to compare my experience of the three media forms, audio, Ereader, and paper.  I shall either make additional posts or edit and expand this one to give an update, assuming I am online whilst on holiday.  Should I be offline the posts will appear on my return, in June!

Three books in one bog entry… for me there is one common theme to them too, which is race and the way it is approached in literature.  I should almost like to include Coetze’s “Friday” here, but I think that work deserves consideration alone and in any case four wouuld be, I think, a book too far!

“Home” is a sequel or follow up to “Gilead” which was highly successful for Marilyn Robinson and the January choice of my reading group.  Although I did not make it to the reading group in February it did get to feature on their new blog and I have made a comment there, one which I expect will stand alone since this book group are definitely a fan of the printed page a proper meeting.  There are plenty of other online reading communities and active blogs out there, some in the blogroll to the right.  But back to “Home” and as you will have seen if you clicked through to my comment there is one thing I was left puzzled by, which likely would not have happened to me had I started reading the works with the highly acclaimed “Gilead”.  I had formed the impression the family at the centre of the narrative were black, African Americans to be exact.  It is largely this which gives the common thread to this post so perhaps I stretched the connection.

Gilead is the name of the small, rural Idaho town where the Broughton family home is.  They are a large family and the narrative is told by the youngest daughter who returns home to care for the aging patriarch of the family.  There is a touching portrayal of the return of one of her brothers, perhaps the black sheep of the family.  What I liked best was the exploration of things they shared despite being obviously quite different siblings with different life paths.  The simple fact they had shared the same family allowed them to make connnections they would never have managed as people who were not related.  This was actually the only hopeful part in a rather bleak novel, but only bleak in a realistic sense.  There was plenty touching and encouraging and very beautifully portrayed within that.

Ms Robinson has left herself plenty of scope for another sequel exploring how life goes on for Rosalind, the youngest in my opinion.  Everything we learn about Jack is presented obliquely and in a shadey manner which is a cunning way to paint him since this is the sort of character he is.  A drifter and destined to leave the novel as he arrives, from the street with not a penny to his name and a drink problem that haunts him along with a past relationship.  It was this relationship that finally meant i Had to accept this fammily is white and not black, because Della is the daughter of another minister and definitely coloured.  I did get a little tired of the way Jack’s father tended to dominate the novel, but perhaps that was a reflection of Jack’s life too in that he always felt he had not done enough and was destined not to make his father proud of him.  One could make an interesting criticism of the novel exploring the question of predestination.

You could not say the same of “ Mudbound” the firstl novel by Hillary Jordan which is very directly concerned with the quesiton of race in the American past, but also has a strong element of family drama and patriarchy.  This time the patriarchy is rather less benevolent, althought the elder son of the family whom our “heroine” narrator marries does present a more positive image, perhaps.

Set between the wars in the deep South of America this has many historical scenes directly concerning race - I should love to know if the auther os black and if not I am impressed by her research an ability to portray things convincingly fromt he point of view of Ronson and his family.  She did seem to me to have a very convincing way of speaking from a male viewpoint and understanding his friendship with the younger brother.  I commonly admire it when a male author can convincingly write from a female viewpoint, so here is a counterpoint for a woman author.

Last but not least Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman is a ficitional work of a very real hisorical event.  The reading group by large had not heard of the eventpersonally I was also surprised that it has faded from modern consciousness.  So as a work that reminds one of the historical sweep of the case and the historical background perhaps this book has some merit.  But as a work novel in it’s own right I found it extremely lacklustre, the characters felt very thin, almost to the extent of being cardboard cutouts.  We are only really presented with two protagonists, both female.  Everyone else is a walk on character and it seemed to me there were few and far between strong male roles here, which somehow seemed a lack when the tragedy of Scottsboro is the prejudice and biggotry leading to the wrongful arrest of nine black men whose lives were effectively ended thereafter.  I found myself far more interested in how events may have affected those men and frustrated by the way the novel would not go there.

If you are interested in the journalistic process and dilemmas it throws up then perhaps this book my hold more for you, since the leading lady is presented almost solely in the light of what was no doubt quite a pioneering career for a woman in those times as she works for a left wing journal covering events.  The role of the communist party is mildly interesting too and no doubt informed somewhat by the figure of Ruby Bates who seems really rather a stereotype of underclass suffering an dmakes me feel the book is almost parodying the liberal feelings of our protagonist.

All in all I did not really enjoy it, although the story if made somewhat compelling.  Others might get more form it though and no doubt it suffered coming after other books all of which had involved race to some degree….

I think I have also learned not to break off a posting in the midst of writing it (these last four paragraphs were written some days after the main substance).  I shall try to avoid doing that in future and hope this posting has not suffered as a result.

I approached this book, the last months for my library book group, with eager anticipation.  Then I attended the group before getting through more than a couple dozen pages, and listened to the book be roundly criticised.  And then I read the rest of the book.  So it is interesting to me how I now react to the book.

One of the reasons I was eager to read the book was simply what I think is a great title.  I am fairly convinced the title alone is a large part of the reason for th ebooks apparent success.  The other reason is that one of the main subjects in this fictional account is the figure of Nicola Tesla.  Throughtout my youth my father and a friend were often fiddling with a Tesla coil in the basement and placing razor blades in the middle of pyramids to sharpen them, and other such weirdly trendy things in the zeitgeist of the times.  So I was eager to find out more.

The book is written with some engaging language, in places the descriptive prose is positively poetic.  The research seems to be fairly sound, and I have to admit I was quite well engaged with the New York of the times the novel is concerned with, primarily around the thirties and forties one imagines.  However the main “meat” at the centre of the novel promises much but fails to deliver anything one can truly get ones teeth into.  Someone at the reading group said I may as well ready the first thirty pages and the last thirty, I would not be missing much.  I could not take this advice, but looking back over the book I can see just what he meant!

The other problem is that one is unsure how accurate the impression one gains of Nicola Tesla is.  Granted, Ms Hunt is creating a fictional character, but there are so very many direct quotes and facts which she has drawn on and placed within the work that I think it is flawed if it does not try to faithfully recreate at least the author’s impression of the character.  And do so without adding a mish mash of fiction to muddy the waters.  Now the only test of this is to research oneself - and I have not yet done so, but if I have time intend to, look into the life of Mr Tesla.  In this case there is plentiful material to draw on.  Someone from the book group had looked into his own autobiographical volumes and I imagine they could be fascinating.  There was one aspect I seriously enjoyed and which the reading group surprisingly overlooked; this was the description of a newly opened and extensive public library in New York.  If I ever get to visit New York I should like to trackthis building down and visit it (assuming it is based in fact and still exists).  I enjoyed the use of this setting thorougly and thought it was quite cleverly deployed, far more so than the New Yorker Hotel which I became bored by.  Also after looking the hotel up in Wikipedia I do believe I actually stayed there when visiting New York in the ninetties and I am sorry to say it had none of the features on display that are so well portrayed in the novel. Perhaps it says something that I found the locations more engaging than most of the characters!

Having said all this there is something the book tries to do which I think is what it was intended to be about.  I am not sure I would get it from the first and last thirty pages.  I believe the intense relationship between a father and a daughter is sketched in a little after the opening of the novel.  Then in concluding the prose seems to shift up a gear as the daughter deals with the death of her father and her future after the loss.  I do believe this is what Samantha Hunt might have taken as the central theme, but then again it could have been a love triangle which seems to be sketched in (and how much truth in that?), it could have been a romance (one is always tantalisingly offered but not really portrayed in the novel), it had many possibilities but ultimately tried to approach all of them and therein lies the failure in my opinion.

Still, great title it must be said! I wonder if the title helped garner the Orange prize nomination and other awards?  Somehow I suspect contacts and networking are everything there and the title largely incidental…  By the way I like the openning page of her website linked above - worth a click, though I suspect completely opaque from an accessibility viewpoint.

I first read this book as a random find by a new author at my library when it had just been published in paperback, which must have been about two years ago.  Last night we discussed it at the library bok group.  I did not have especially good memories of the book so it came as a surprise when it was quite well received.

Undoubtedly the language takes a little getting used to because the narrator is “N” a user of the mental health system in more or less present day Britain.  I think there is one short chapter in which the phrase “Do you know what I’m saying?” crops up four times, for example!  There’s also an ample sprinkling of profanity which may offend the more prudish reader.  Beyond that there are a few devices the author employs which could annoy; I think every character seems to have some adornment to their name, like “middle class Michael”, “Slasher Sue” and so on.  The chapter structure is short and choppy and “N” is a little conversational, advising tht you can skip chapters if you have been to the daycentre, for example.

Although I didn’t have time to reread the book properly and frankly would not chose to do so I did have a quick scan and was surprised that these annoyances did not get in the way for me the second time around.  Perhaps they are things one gets used to?

During the book group I also learned that the author speaks from experience having spent ten years as a user of the health system.  Some elements ring true - the way a group of patients may form a collectve community for example.  Many elements are exagerated to comic effect, like the idea of “Mad Money”, an epithet for the benefits available to service users, for which it is required that one prove madnes to claim.  This sets up a reverse Catch 22 situtation for Poppy Shakespeare to prove she is mad, something that is played upon for most of the book and makes a plank for the plot.

Personally I could not help thinking the author was heavily influenced by Catch-22, One flew over the cuckoos nest, and Cold Comfort Farm.  The last is the most tentative, but there were elements of the writing which I found rang bells with my memories of Stella Gibbons work.  I have to be honest and say they are elements that do not endear the authors to me, but for all that I guess it’s still worth a read.  I cannot help feeling her ending is extremely dark and bleak and I’m not sure why - at the book group we wondered if it might be because the book is dedicated to someone who was a user of the system for whom things did not go well.  That would not surprise me but it does depress me

Today was a very lucky day for me full of synchronicities and lucky happenstances.  I sometimes think we make our own luck so perhaps I was just on the ball.  Anyway, it began with a job application for a Library Assistant vacancy.  God, how I should love to get that job, even if it pays barely enough to live on.  Then a little more nano writing, not enough, but with some research involved so fuel for ongoing later tonight into the wee small hours I hope.  Then a jobcentre appointment because I have reached the eighteen months out of work point.  This was sad because my interviewer told me about the death of one of their children from septacemia ten years ago, if remembrance day did not move me to tears then that did!  But I did get the half price travel card thing that comes with the New Deal and I get assessed next Monday, we’ll see.  Also completed my Quaker Homeless Action Christmas volunteer form and got that off in the post with a reference from the warden (Angela Schultz).  By return of favour she had a word about her concerns for the new website and we chatted, then she asked me to help with her MacBook and I’ve agreed to go around to try to help with that after she spoke with my new choir buddy David Sambraus. They are adjacent on my blogroll and I “introduced” them on the ‘phone to sort out her photoshop situation.  I kind of like the experience of working with Macs (other peoples, can’t afford one for myself!), always good to add more techie skills to the inventory.

Coming to the subject of the post my reading group was covering Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” tonight.  We had a good chat about it and I’ll not bore you further with the details of that, but afterwards the librarian had arranged we watch the movie too.  There was even wine and nibbles too!  A true multimedia, hospitality event.  It was nice to see a couple of new faces there.  I had read the book when it first came out seven odd years back, and remembered sketchy impressions.  It is most definitely not one of his finest.  The movie was, I think in some ways, a superior rendition to the book - and Kiera Knightley was only mildly annoying in all her skinny beauty poutiness!   Brenda Blethyn was a pleasure - as always!

So the day started and ended with libraries featuring I guess!  I really should be on their user group or focus committee or something… But right now I need to post this and hop to it with the nano!