I put off reading this book as I understood it to be grim and I find grim Irish family stories hard to take. Tony’s Book World, however convinced me it was worth the effort, and as usual, he is right. I love his first paragraph about this book: “The world was beginning to seem just too bright and cheerful for me again. It was time to read Anne Enright.” The book opens in 1980...
Oh, what a wonderful book and so beautifully read by Michael Kitchen. I miss it already. Last year I listened to Our Man in Havana and loved it. This one is very different and even more admirable. It has a pleasingly complicated plot with twists as painful as the Guy de Maupassant short story “The Necklace.” In that story a couple makes a great sacrifice to replace a necklace they...
I am a fan of this Australian writer: her Five Bells, set lovingly in Sydney, and Sixty Lights, a wide-ranging, beautifully written book, were outstanding. This one has the same name as a short story by Vladimir Nabokov and is set in Berlin where he lived from 1922 to 1937. I am confident that I missed much in this book because if I have read anything by Nabokov other than Lolita, I...
Barbara Pym, a British writer who flourished in the 1950s, is regarded as the quintessential writer of British social comedies and according to an article in The Guardian, one of the most amusing. I have seen her name mentioned in the same paragraph with Jane Austen more than once. So I chose Excellent Women, described as perhaps her best book. Despite being a fan of British women writers...
This audiobook gave me almost 13 hours of pleasant listening as I walked, cooked, or pulled weeds. What a treat. Jane Austen has such nice insights into human behavior and writes so pleasingly. The contrast of Elinor's sense to Marianne's sensibility is appealing and the sisters' devotion to each other is reminiscent of Elizabeth and Jane Bennett in Pride and...
A book that attempts to deconstruct an artist is not going to be straightforward. Occasionally one has insights into the interplay between the individual and the art he creates. In this case the artist is born into a family that has fallen by gambling and other misfortunes such that Frank Harland is sent to live with his aunt and uncle when his mother dies. In that house haunted by the death of a...
In April this year came news of the escape of Inky, an octopus in New Zealand, from his enclosure, who went down a 50-metre drainpipe and on to the sea. Over the course of a week I heard or read this story several times, told with great interest and much respect for the determination and ability of octopuses to escape. I learned that the plural of octopus is not octopi, as many would guess. This...
This is a book that I learned about from ANZ Litlovers. And like The Secret Son, another book I encountered there, this one is both a candidate for a favorite for the year and not well-known in this country. A Girl Made of Dust is set in the battleground of Lebanon in the early 1980s, when Israel invaded Lebanon in a struggle with the PLO. It is the story of three generations of a...
When I put this on my TBR list, I noted that Tony found it devastating for a humorous book. It does take a light-hearted approach to the disturbing story of Harriet. It is presented in the style of that old TV show, “This is Your Life,” and tells Harriet’s life by recounting moments throughout her life that are not in chronological order. SPOILER ALERT! As is often the case I...
This book of fiction centers on an actual Australian character I first encountered in The Secret Son by Jenny Ackland: a man named E.W. Cole known for the E.W. Cole Book Arcade in Melbourne. He was born in 1832 in England, migrated to Australia in 1852 and worked on the goldfields. He began selling books in a stall in 1865 and opened the Arcade in 1883 which eventually grew to have one of...