Recent reads.

The book up for discussion last Saturday was 'Snow Country' by the Japanese Nobel prizewinner Yasunari Kawabata. I found it hard going from the very first page, wondering if the problem were one of poor translation.

I could feel no point of contact, no affinity with the characters, the cultural differences were too great for me to appreciate. Descriptions of the landscape were beautiful but every other element of the book I found very lowering and I'm happy to forget it!

I enjoy Maggie O'Farrell's writing, she is a good story-teller. The central character, Esme, is an odd one and the story has something of the fairytale about it. (And you know that bad things can happen in a fairytale!)

This week the library reading group meets to discuss 'H is for Hawk.' What a lovely book cover it has. The factual story inside I found sometimes deeply moving and other times annoying.

Helen Macdonald is a clever, articulate writer who describes in detail how she worked through the extreme grief of unexpectedly losing her father by raising of a goshawk. I found some of her expressions of grief very hard to read, reminding me of the loss of my own father. At other times I was irritated. But overall it is a beautiful book.