Beyond Black (Hilary Mantel)

This 10th novel from Hilary Mantel has been put in the long list for the Booker Prize this year. I'd never read any of Mantel's books before, but she's a long established and respected English author, and I'm looking forward to reading through her older books. So, as you can imagine, I enjoyed this one.

Alison Hart is a psychic, travelling around with her assistant Collette, her horrific medium Morris, and a whole pile of memories and ghosts from her childhood. Despite the characters, and a proliferation of dead people, it's not really a fantasy novel, but one with a much more personal scope. The real story is Alison and Collette, and their pasts that creep along behind them.

This is a dryly humerous novel, in parts, but I found it too dark and disturbing to describe it as funny. It's an excellent read, though - I love the way Mantel writes, and the way the bulky character of Alison treads through the pages. It also, on a note unrelated to the writing, made me want to use my tarot cards more regularly again - as long as Alison's fiends don't accompany me as they do her.

The Resurrectionists (Kim Wilkins)

Kim Wilkins is a Queensland author, whose usual genre sits around the fantasy/horror mark. The Resurrectionists is desribed on the cover as chilling horror, but I think I'd classify it more firmly as fantasy. Somewhat scary fantasy, certainly, but I don't think it contains enough gruesome detail to call it horror. And that's a good thing - I'm not a big fan of horror.

Maisie, dissatisfied with her career, her partner, and her life, heads to England to find her grandmother, who has been long estranged from Maisie's mother. From those beginnings, the story veers headlong into witchcraft, sorcery, ghosts, ancient diaries and good-looking gypsies.

Unfortunately, my excitement in the story began to wane two-thirds of the way along. Maisie can be an irritating character - she never knows what she wants, and she's not appealing enough in other ways to make up for the constant vacillating. The story she's living is set up well, but suddenly races towards what I found to be a dissatisfying conclusion. It's a 3 out of 5 book - exciting, but not well plotted enough to sustain it til the end.

The Reading Group (Elizabeth Noble)

This book probably comes under the category of chick-lit. Although, while I tend to think of chick-lit as books aimed at women readers, I think it actually refers to books with young women protagonists. The Reading Group has characters of all ages and both sexes, although the main ones are women.

The Reading Group involves a group of women meeting once a month to discuss a book. Their meetings and discussions form a relatively small part of the story, while the rest of the book branches off into the many directions of their different lives.

There's not a great deal to say about The Reading Group. While it's what I'd consider a fairly light read, the characters aren't cardboard cutouts, and the story was sufficiently exciting to keep me reading eagerly. It's good, a bit bland - it's just nice, really. It was a three out of five for me.

Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)

Persepolis is a graphic novel, an illustrated story, a comic book. But there's no superheroes or magic here - just a rather simple memoir of growing up as a girl and woman in Iran, during the revolution.

I'd read Reading Lolita in Tehran just before I plunged into this, so I was fairly conversant with the recent history of Iran, pre and post revolution, and how it's affected women. But Persepolis is a very different view of that revolution, through a child's and then teenager's eyes.

I loved the spare black and white drawings, the stout little girl who longs to go to a demonstration, and wishes her father were a hero of the revolution. Satrapi portrays horrifying facts and figures in a very simple way - I'm thinking especially of the drawings of bodies layered on top of one another, after a massacre. It's very powerful.

In conclusion - a simple, elegant, powerful story. Satrapi has writtten a sequel, but I've heard it's not as good. I always wonder whether to read such books, usually do, and am almost always disappointed. I may read Persepolis 2 regardless, just for more of those little black and white drawings, marching across the page.

Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

I've never read any of Ishiguro's work before, and knew him vaguely as the author of Remains of the Day. This is his latest book, and I'd read several excellent reviews of it before getting it out of the library. It has a slightly futuristic, dystopian theme which attracted me to it.

Reading the reviews spoiled the story a little for me, as while you're reading the voice of Kathy H., you're slowly let in to the world that Ishiguro has created. I would have liked to have that suspense, so I'm not going to reveal any details of the storyline here, as they're easy enough to find elsewhere.

Suffice to say, while it is set in a dystopian future, it's not a completely dark tale, although it's certainly depressing enough. But Kathy H.'s naive, hopeful voice carries you through the story with a lightness that relieves the despair that tends to crush down upon you as you race towards the end.

Ishiguro's characters are very real, but there's also an element of distance from them in his writing I found, although it was a vague disatisfaction that I can't really describe further. Other than that, I very much enjoyed this - a quiet, dark story, with a feeling of clinical calm to it.

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.

Snow Queen (Mardi McConnochie)

I'm not sure where I heard of this book, but I did put it on hold at the library, so I must have had a reason. Mardi McConnochie is an Australian author, and this book, set mostly in Adelaide, tells the story of Galina, a Russian ballerina and teacher, and her relationship with the younger Teddy.

One of the reviews described above describes McConnochie's writing as "cold", and I would agree - I would read along, not being touched by anything in particular, and then be suddenly pulled into a character's passion or pain. I found it effective for the story she's telling.

I got this out because I have a nostalgic fondness for stories set around ballet dancers, and this didn't disappoint - while the story centres around relationships, there's also a great deal of description of ballet training and touring.

While I wasn't stunned by the writing, or the story, it did draw me in - I'd give it 3/5.

The Plan

I've been keeping track of all the books I've read since the beginning of 2004. I'm a fast reader, and I read a lot. During 2004 I was studying, and had the corresponding leisure time. Now, in 2005, I'm working fulltime, but have two hours of commuting time in which to read, and consequently, I'm still getting through a lot of books.

I wanted to challenge myself to read more critically, and in order to do so, I'm going to write reviews of every book I read (and some of the ones I've read before). I find this prospect somewhat daunting, as I've never been particularly eloquent when it comes to describing exactly why I like something, and envy those who are. So this is partly a challenge to myself, to improve my abilities at description and reading with a sharper eye, but it's also simply for fun, and a way to share literary discoveries with others.

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

Rather than reading this classic, I listened to it on about 16 CDs over several weeks on the train to and from work. I'd heard of Jane Eyre, of course, and had watched a movie version, so the general sweep of the story wasn't a surprise to me. But it's the sort of dense, description heavy book that I avoid reading, knowing that I'll skim read sections, and spoil the book.

I'd never listened to an audio book before, and I loved this one. Listening to someone read to me means that I get swept up in Bronte's lengthy passages on the weather sweeping across the moors, rather than skimming past them to get to the action. I found my writing altered a little while I was doing my listening - it was more formal and structured, just like the voice I listened to for two hours a day. It was a great experience, and I loved knitting away on the train as Jane gradually fell in love with Mr Rochester.

I loved the Gothic, throbbing romance of the story, and its dramatic ebb and flow. And Jane, of course - Jane is a wonderful character. So determined and independent, that despite growing a little weary of her emotional highs and lows towards the end, I still felt greatly affectionate towards her.

I rather surprised myself in enjoying this book so much. I mean, it's esentially a romance story - an enormously dramatic romance, but still a romance. And I've never been interested in romance stories - I find it rather dull when the process of two people falling in love is the entire focus of the novel, and you know they're going to get together in the end, because that's the whole point. But perhaps I've been reading bad romance novels. Because all those criticisms apply to Jane Eyre, and it's still wonderful.

I imagine that people have written reams on the underlying themes and meanings of Jane Eyre, and I can't possibly add to that. It was just a wonderful story, with great pace, and a heroine who has stuck in my mind, dark and small, walking away down a country path with Mr Rochester striding beside her.

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.