Books

Tomorrow I'll be presenting a book that I really love to our reading group. It's "Old Filth' by jane Gardam who died this spring at the age of 96. She started writing in her forties as soon as her youngest child, one of three, started school. Her outlook is very British, her period end of Empire. She treats her characters sometimes with humour, often revealing hidden grief, but always with kindness. I find her work quietly moving. There is a lot to reflect on and the story of Feathers stays clearly in my mind. Rarely can I recommend a book so highly!

By comparison, this recent read was instantly forgotten, I couldn't recall it at all until I picked ithe book up and read the back page blurb.It is written by another well established British writer and is about a brother and sister who have lived quiet, repressive lives, under the thumb of a domineering mother. I found it rather hard to be involved. Perhaps it is a hard act to pull off, a book featuring characters such as these!

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.