A Gentleman in Moscow

Read 29/04/2017-30/04/2017

Rating: 4 stars

Read for the Reader’s Room March Madness Challenge

I’ve been itching for an excuse to read A Gentleman in Moscow for a while, so I was pleased when it came up as one of the reads for the March Madness Challenge over at The Reader’s Room. I was even more pleased when my local library accepted my request for it to be added to their stock. It only arrived on Thursday, though, so I didn’t have much time to read it in. Fortunately, it was gripping.

Now that I’ve read some Zweig, every time I think a novel reminds me of a Wes Anderson film, I’m going to remind myself that it’s Zweig I’m thinking of.

The beginning of A Gentleman in Moscow made me think of Zweig. Moscow in 1923. The early days of the Bolshevik regime. Sasha Rostov, who may or may not have been on the side of the revolutionaries before they brought down the bourgeoisie, finds himself firmly viewed as an opponent of The People, if not quite their enemy.

Winterhill 2: Ghost Requiem

Read 27/04/2017-28/04/2017

Rating: 4 stars

I’ve made a return to the Winterhill series. I picked up the first volume on a whim and enjoyed it. I decided I was going to whittle down my TBR before I invested in any more in the series, though, but then last month the author announced that any profits on sales of the book would be donated to the charity Hope for Hypothalamic Hamartomas. So I bought the next three.

Ghost Requiem is the second book in this pop culture sci-fi series about amnesiac archaeologist Professor Rebecca Winterhill. It opens with Winterhill and her travel mates Madagascar Talifero and Tareku Wamae resting up on a mini cruise on the planet Kalumpah.

The Restraint of Beasts

Read 25/04/2017-26/04/2017

Rating: 3.5 stars

I’m making my way through Magnus Mills’s back catalogue in a random manner. It suits the structured randomness of his writing.

The Restraint of Beasts was Mills’s debut. I’m finding it difficult to define as a novel. Is it whimsy? Is it satire? Is it crime? Whatever it is, it’s about an Englishman employed in Scotland as a fence layer.

The Field of the Cloth of Gold

Read 24/04/2017

Rating: 3 stars

In an unnamed country, alongside an unnamed river, a tented community grows. The first settler is Hen. Then comes the unnamed narrator. A third man, Thomas, joins. He has a fancy octagonal tent. Then Isabella arrives with her red tent and her penchant for swimming naked in the river. It’s a community of individuals who do little but lead a quiet life in their tents alongside the bend in the river. But then a fully formed society arrives, organised and structured, and putting noses out of joint among the existing residents.

Three Craws

Read 21/04/2017-23/04/2017

Rating: 4 stars

This was a minor risk. I won Three Craws at a book quiz. I think it was a consolation prize, because we never came first in all the times we went. So, it was free, which is something. I chose it because I knew of James Yorkston. He’s a musician. I’ve been aware of him from his Fence Collective days, but never really paid that much attention to his music. I was interested to see, though, whether a musician could translate the stories he tells through song into a story told through prose.

The Essex Serpent

Read 15/04/2017-20/04/2017

Rating: 4 stars

Read for the Reader’s Room March Madness Challenge

Although the book opens with the mysterious death of a young man in a section of the Blackwater river that flows through Essex to the North Sea, possibly killed by an ancient creature freed from its riverbed prison, The Essex Serpent is a story about a woman and the life she chooses to lead beyond the constraints of conventional Victorian society. Cora Seaborne is a complex and strong willed woman who has had much to contend with in her life already.

Nora Webster

Read 12/04/2017-15/04/2017

Rating: 2.5 stars

Read for the Reader’s Room March Madness Challenge

I didn’t enjoy this book. I was looking forward to it, because I’d enjoyed Brooklyn and Nora Webster is set in the same town, Enniscorthy, that Elly Lacey leaves for Brooklyn. I had no patience with the title character in this companion piece.

There was something lackluster about the writing, almost as though Tóibín was too familiar with the characters and setting, and couldn’t be bothered injecting any passion into the narrative. It felt too safe, steadily going along, describing one woman’s life in the aftermath of her husband’s death. I found my mind wandering as I read.

Crow

Read 10/04/2017-11/04/2017

Rating: 4 stars

I have never read any of Ted Hughes’ poetry for grown ups. I’ve only read his books for children, The Iron Man and How The Whale Became. I remember really enjoying them, and getting a dark thrill from how inventive and other worldly they were. I wouldn’t have put it like that back then, it was probably more of a gut thing.

I decided I would read Crow as a result of reading Grief is the Thing with Feathers. I get what Max Porter has done with that novel in a different way now. I see the origins of Crow in that book more clearly.

Hidden Figures

Read 07/04/2017-10/04/2017

Rating: 4 stars

What I wanted was for them to have the grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved, the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as a part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic.

So says Margot Lee Shetterly in the prologue to her history of the black female mathematicians working at NASA from the 1940s onwards. Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Virginia. Her father was an engineer at Langley, working for NASA. She grew up among the women who worked alongside her father as human computers. Until a chance remark made by her father on a visit Shetterly made with her husband in 2010, she had no idea about the pioneering work these black women carried out, or about just how many black women worked at NASA. And so began her research into the subject.

Homegoing

Read 01/04/2017-07/04/2017

Rating: 3 stars

Read for the Reader’s Room March Madness Challenge

Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel is an ambitious one. It charts the lives of two half-sisters from Ghana who have very different experiences of slavery. The book sets off in the 18th century and follows the descendants of each sister to see how slavery impacted on African women depending on the form their slavery took.