cyphomandra

Roxane Gay, Hunger: a memoir of (my) body
Ruth Arthur, A Candle In Her Room
Lois Lowry, Anastasia on Her Own
Philip Pullman, La Belle Sauvage
Courtney Milan, The Suffragette Scandal
Courtney Milan, Talk Sweetly to Me
Courtney Milan, The Heiress Effect
Courtney Milan, The Governess Affair
Courtney Milan, The Countess Conspiracy
Lee Child, The Midnight Line

Roxane Gay, Hunger: a memoir of (my) body. Roxane Gay's book is a painful and compelling read; it's about being fat, or more particularly being a fat woman who became so in response to others taking her body away from her. It is exactingly particular on the shame she suffers for doing so, and the desires - the hungers - that also make up her life. It's not right to say I enjoyed reading it, but I'm glad I did; what I'd like to read next are her Black Panther comics, and I've just ordered World of Wakanda from the library.

Ruth Arthur, A Candle in Her Room. ( Three girls move to an old house in Pembrokeshire and find a strange wooden doll, Dido, in a trunk; the doll exerts a malign influence on one of them that will echo down through three generations. )

Lois Lowry, Anastasia on Her Own (re-read). Anastasia's mother, a children's book illustrator, flies out to California to consult on a film project; Anastasia and her father figure that taking care of the household will be simple, especially once Anastasia makes a list. Naturally, her younger brother Sam gets chickenpox and Anastasia has to stay home to look after him, and the domestic disasters mount up to a final dinner party with Anastasia's putative boyfriend (she has a cordon bleu romantic dinner planned) and an annoying ex of her father's. Although I like the personalities of the family and their interactions I think the time in which I would have found the overall plot funny is now well past.

Philip Pullman, La Belle Sauvage. The title is the name of a boat belonging to Malcolm, a pot-boy in his parents' inn up-river from Oxford; unhelpful schoolmates repeatedly change the v to an s. This is the story of Lyra as a very young baby, left at the local priory; Malcolm meets her and is entranced by her, and this entangles him and Alice, a slightly older girl who works with him and is initially antagonistic, in all manner of dangerous events. I liked this more than I expected to. Malcolm is great, as is Dr Hannah Relf, a scholar studying alethiometers. There is an impressive set-piece flood that has a slightly jarring fairy encounter halfway through, and the main bad guy is a creepy sexual predator with an abusive relationship with his daemon, an hyena, and I could have done with quite a bit less sexual predation in favour of more of the concrete fantastic (the bears, the witches) that we got in The Golden Compass/Northern Lights rather than watery allusions. I did feel it fell apart a bit towards the end and I'm still not sure how I feel about Alice as a character/plotline.

Lee Child, The Midnight Line. Reacher sees a West Point class ring in a small-town pawn shop window, deduces a few things about the woman it must have belonged to and sets out to track her down. The Reacher books have some of the worst titles ever in terms of my ability to link the title with what happens in the book and in addition it's been a long time since I really enjoyed one. This is not great. It's not as bad as Make Me and there are a few nice moments, but I'd be much better off trying to work out which Dick Francis books I haven't read yet.

Courtney Milan, The Suffragette Scandal, Talk Sweetly to Me, The Governess Affair, The Countess Conspiracy. ( Most of the Brothers Sinister series )

I’ve had shopping amnesia recently – every time I went to the supermarket I automatically bought eggs, and I only realised what I was doing once I had 3 and a half cartons. So, for the last week, it’s been eggs for dinner (scrambled, buttered, omletted, encaked...), and now things are back to more sensible levels.

Along similar lines, I’ve been finishing off all my library books before they, too, exceed their expiration dates…

The Hungry Cloud, Tom Ingram. Children’s fantasy, in a vaguely Scottish world where two children wait in a castle for their parents to return from holiday, and strange things start to happen. ( The Hungry Cloud. )

I’ve bounced off a lot of Cherryh’s stuff, and it took Cyteen (which I read for the first time about three years ago) to actually make me stick. ( Foreigner, CJ Cherryh. )

The Stormwatcher, Graham Joyce. The blurb disturbed me on this one. “In England,” it says, as if about to announce some bizarre perversion, “it is very common for groups of friends to vacation together…”. It then goes on to tell me that only one of the events in the story is unambiguously supernatural, and after finishing the book I’m still not sure which it was. Anyway. ( The Stormwatcher. )

Magic's Child. Tying up the series. ( Magic’s Child, Justine Larbelestier. )

( Edwina Sparrow: Girl of Destiny, Carol Chataway. )

( Garlic and Sapphires, Ruth Reichl. )

( The Haunting of Lamb House, Joan Aitken. )

( The Hard Way, Lee Child. )

My books-read-and-not-recorded stack is approaching ridiculous lengths. Leaving out books I want to discuss at more length, here are some catch-ups.

( Blood Price, Tanya Huff. )

( The Death of Dalziel, Reginald Hill. )

( Bad Medicine, David Wotton. )

( Snake Agent, Liz Williams. )

And some even shorter summaries...

Die Trying, Lee Child. Solid thriller, good characters, smart plot.

Killing Floor, Lee Child. See above. I worked out the gimmick to this one just when Jack Reacher did (a few pages ahead of the explanation) and liked it a lot. I do like thrillers where neither the good guys nor the bad guys are dumb.

Tripwire, Lee Child. Not quite as good as the first two, but I think he’s also setting stuff up for later books. The gimmick here was, unfortunately, much more obvious to the reader than the characters, which (for me, anyway), creates the wrong sort of suspense, where I feel that the characters are just being dim. A little unfairly in this case, as they know a lot less than the reader for much of the book.

Lady Friday, Garth Nix. Latest one in the series. I must re-read the earlier ones before the end, as it’s been a long time since Monday. Good and inventive, as always; slightly less complex than some of the earlier ones. Looking forward to the weekend…