The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)

I expected to love The Year of Magical Thinking, because I'd read so many glowing reports of it. I had never heard of Joan Didion prior to reading about this book, but she's obviously a very well known author - perhaps if I'd known more about her style, I would have had a better idea of how much I would have enjoyed Magical Thinking.

Magical Thinking is a memoir of a year after Didion's husband dies of a heart attack while they are sitting down to dinner together, after having visited their gravely ill daughter in hospital. It is an account of grief. Magical Thinking is quite spare, in both its style and length. We are drawn deeply into Didion's emotions during this time, and while this is certainly affecting, it is hard to relate to them. We don't get to know her husband, and I certainly found it hard to grieve for him.

I suppose that wasn't the point of the book - it is a very personal study of grief, rather than an effort to have us grieve along with the author. But the affect of this left me rather cold - despite Didion's skill as a writer, I didn't become involved in Magical Thinking, and don't think I'll be seeking out any more of her work. Her style isn't for me.

The Spiral Staircase (Karen Armstrong)

The Spiral Staircase is a fascinating memoir by religious scholar (if that's the right term for it) Karen Armstrong. I love Armstrong's writing - I read The History of God at University, and enjoyed it enormously (and I didn't usually become so absorbed in my academic texts). The Spiral Staircase is an account of Armstrong's life after she spends 7 years as a nun, and how she adjusts to the secular world. It made me want to read more of her books, which is always a good sign. Five out of five.

Layla's Story (Vanessa Gorman)

This memoir is about the breakdown of a relationship, and the loss of a child - not an uplifting read, but an interesting one, especially seeing the dissection of a relationship breakdown, and of grief.

Vanessa's daughter Layla dies a few hours after birth. She has a troubled relationship with her partner, Layla's father. Layla doesn't die until at least half way through this book, so we have an intimate knowledge of their relationship (very intimate, if you know what I mean). The book examines, almost equally, the deep wanting of a child, the breakdown of a relationship when both partners want different things, and the grief of losing a child.

Gorman makes the point that losing a child right after birth is somehow considered a lesser death - she recounts people saying things like, "Well, at least you didn't get to know her," - and one of her aims in writing the book is to counter that rather wide-spread belief.

It's a book I found uncomfortable in places, partly because of its very raw and wide-open nature, but it is wonderfully written, and a fascinating insight into someone else's life. Four out of five.

Mao's Last Dancer (Li Cunxin)

This is an autobiography by a ballet dancer, trained in China several years before the death of Mao. He travelled to America several times on a cultural exchange, eventually defected from China and married an American woman. English is his second language, and it's apparent in his writing - it's not terrible writing, but it's not a book I could enjoy purely for its writing.

I most enjoyed his descriptions of his peasant upbringing and his ballet training as a teenager - his drive and determination to be a fantastic dancer are phenomenal, and his longing to succeed in order to give something back to his family is very touching. In fact, I think the simplicity of the language used makes this come over more intensely.

All in all, a very enjoyable autobiography, and a wonderful evocation of China during the last years of Mao's reign (although I must admit, during parts I kept comparing it with Wild Swans, to its detriment). Four out of five.

Eating the Underworld (Doris Brett)

Doris Brett is an Australian poet and author, but the only reason I knew her name is because I own (or more accurately, stole from my mother) an extremely battered copy of her Australian Bread Book. A Google search reveals that it's not only out of print, but quite rare, so I should take better care of it, rather than dropping splodges of batter on its pages. (I can always easily find my favourite recipes in books - the pages are terribly stained).

Eating the Underworld is, according to the subtitle, a "memoir in three voices". It tells the story of Brett's encounter with cancer, in a journal, in poetry, and in short bits of fiction, although the journal is by far the dominant voice.

While cancer is the initial focus, the memoir also branches out into Brett's professional work as a psychologist and her family relationships, especially a particularly fraught and abusive relationship with her sister. It's a fascinating work - Brett writes beautifully and richly about her own emotional and physical experiences, and I really enjoyed the poems that, neatly chronologically, bookended each chapter.

]It was an inspiring book, about a woman who managed to reap great rewards from a terrible experience. It almost makes you believe that you would approach such hardship in a similar way. Very much recommended, if you enjoy memoirs, and if you can find a copy.

Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azar Nafisi)

This is the July book for our book club discussion, and it went down well with our group of feminists. Reading Lolita in Tehran is ostensibly a book about a book club, women meeting in Tehran to discuss Western literature. However, the group is not a book club in the usual sense, but a group of selected students of University lecturer Nafisi, and the discussions take place under her guidance. Her notes and recollections of these discussions make up roughly half of the book, but the other half contains Nafisi's (and her students) experiences of the Iranian revolution.

Not knowing a great deal about Iranian history, I found that Reading Lolita sometimes jumped time too abruptly for me, and I would be momentarily lost, trying to figure out what was happening now. On a second reading, however, the narrative flowed much more smoothly - incredibly dense and layered, it's certainly a book that benefits from a second reading.

Nafisi spends a lot of time trying to make sense of her restricted life in Tehran using fictional stories. What I like most in Reading Lolita, I think, is the discussions on the books. The only books I'd read that were discussed were The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice (although my idea of Pride and Prejudice is very influenced by the BBC drama, which I saw before reading the book), but I enjoyed just as much reading about characters that I've never come across before. Reading Lolita made me want to read Henry James and Nabokov.

In fact, I think that I felt closer to the books in this story than the women. The characters of the women were revealed, in a way, by how they reacted to the books, and in the end, I felt like I'd learned more about the books. I love stories with so much to them that they reveal more every time you read them, and I'm looking forward to reading Reading Lolita again in a few months. In the meantime, I should probably attempt to plunge into Henry James.