May books

Date: 31 May 2009 14:59:45

The Kalahari Typing School for Men by Alexander McCall Smith is the fourth book in the Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. Mma Precious Ramotswe is faced with new challenges in this book and the beautifully gentle stories continue. Once again the actual mysteries she solves are secondary to the details of life in Botswana. What I really enjoyed about this book though was that her assistant Mma Makosi's character was developed and we learnt more about her. In this novel she gets herself a boyfriend and starts a new business in the evening to help her make more money to send to her family. These are such wonderful books and reading each one is like meeting an old friend again.

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A Kept Woman by Louise Bagshawe is everything a chick-lit novel should be. Beautiful women, cheating husbands and lots and lots of backstabbing... but I really enjoyed it! Diana is rich and beautiful and marries a very rich man. All goes well until she finds her rather wet husband in bed with a dominatrix and they end up divorcing... although she comes out of it rather badly. Now she has to get a job, work hard and make her own way in the world. For a change it would seem that the beautiful heroine isn't as useless as most of these books make out. It was a good read, nice characters and a fun storyline. It was also entirely predictable, which maybe is why I enjoyed it so much!!!

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The Summer of Secrets by Martina Reilly is a brilliant book. Kind of in the vein of Marian Keyes but I think she is a better writer. Hope Gardner loses yet another job and decides to take an extended holiday. However, the plane flight she takes to this dream is less than expected when it crashes and the majority of passengers die. Hope survives, with some significant but not life-threatening injuries, and to cheer her up her two friend Adam and Julie decide to take her to a cottage in Ireland, near where she grew up, to recuperate. Whilst she is there she undertakes some counselling to help her manage her anxiety, and with the help of this therapist she starts to address some of her unresolved issues about her past. I think I really enjoyed this book because it takes the issue of trauma seriously, and shows some good examples of desensitization techniques and therapy. But, more than that it was just a really good read and I romped through it in about 2 days!!

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The Return by Victoria Hislop is a good read. It is one of those novels which flits back over the years - tying two stories together through the characters. In this case a woman called Sophie, her love of Spain and the discovery of her mother's life in Granada during the Spanish Civil War. It's a good read, nice characters and enough historical detail to make it interesting without making it overwhelming. I have to say though, I didn't love it quite as much as her other book The Island which I thought was a fantastic read.

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Sparkles by Louise Bagshawe is a slighlty ridiculous tale about a jewellery empire called the Massot family. Bizarrely Pierre Massot disappeared leaving a wife and a young son. Seven years on Mme Massot decides that in order to save the empire she needs to get involved. However, she hadn't banked on hostile takeover attempts from both s rival company and her son. This was really quite a silly book. The plot was verging on the ludicrous and it was almost like three stories that had been put together in a poor attempt to pad out the book. Not a terribly good novel in my humble opinion!

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The Kommandant's Girl by Pam Jenoff was a story that I listened to on CD when I was driving around recently. It is set in Krakow during the Second World War and overnight nineteen year old Emma Bau's world is turned upside down. Her husband Jacob is a member of the Resistance and he is forced to flee the city and go underground. She returns to her family home, only to find that her parents have been taken into the ghetto, and after a brief stint with them in the ghetto the Resistance move her to live with Jacob's aunt. She assumes a Catholic identity and after a chance meeting at a dinner party she is offered the position of assistant to Kommandant Richwalder at Nazi headquarters. From there she is able to work for the Resistance, whilst always hiding her true identity. This was a really good story, despite it being a little slow in places. I found the tales of the Resistance, the bravery of the people involved and the things that were experienced by the Poles very emotive. I was also surprised that I found some sympathy for the Nazis. An interesting story about a period of history that generally fascinates me.

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Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson is a book narrated by Ruby Lennox, right from her conception through to adulthood. It tells memoirs of her very disfunctional family who live in York and their strange relationships, both with themselves and with each other. I expected quite a lot of this book. I mean even on the back cover The New York Times Book Review says, "Rermarkable... full of the grimness, grit, and grandeur of Yorkshire life... One of the funniest books to come out of Britain in years." Quite frankly I certainly found it grim, but I didn't find it funny in the slightest. there were very irritating full chapter footnotes after each main chapter and I didn't really think it had a story. Most disappointing.

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Wife in the North by Judith O'Reilly is about Judith, a mother of two children, with another one on the way who moves from London to Northumberland. This isn't her dream, it is her husband's and she struggles to get used to living in the middle of nowhere. Whilst there she starts writing a blog about her experiences and these memoirs document her experiences, fears and frustrations of living far away from what she calls home. This book was fab, there were some real laugh out loud moments, but it was also poignant, sad and very, very honest. She also came up with a fab quote about friendship... "Some friends become another family. Some friends you talk to once a year, A few are there in every crisis and extremity. You hurt when they hurt. There are times when you put down a phone after they have read you the latest chapter of their life and you weep for the Some, occasionally, disappoint. Occasionally, you disappoint back. You try to listen. In sadness and disaster you day: 'I love you' and hope they can hear between their shouts of pain. You say: 'I'm here for you' and hope they can see you in their darkness. it seems the least that you can do."

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Birthday Girls by Annabel Giles is about six different women, all celebrating six important birthdays in their lives. Initially they all seem like independent, unrelated individuals but through their stories it is possible to work out that that they are all inter-linked through one way or the other. This book was ok. Kind of pointless in someways (like most chick lit) but it wasn't even a very good read. Back to the charity shop I think!!

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Night by Elie Wiesel is one of those books that has had a profound affect on me. I first read it when I was in my late teens and I found it incredibly moving and thought provoking. Elie Wiesel is a Jew who was born in Transylvania. Night is his memoir of the Holocaust and his experiences of being in Auchwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. However, the book isn't a straightforward story of the experiences of the Jews. It is his recollection of the loss of hope and the despair over his loss of faith that really got to me. For me, this is probably one of the most moving quotes in the whole book.... "Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never." I think everyone should read this book. The travesty of the loss of so many Jewish people, along with all the others who died in the concentration camps, is completely overwhelming. I wonder regularly what gifts the world has missed out on because of the early demise of these souls.

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The Editor's Wife by Clare Chambers was a book that I listened to on CD when I was driving around. The Mister also listened to some of this one too because I was driving and I wanted to know what happened!!! This book is about an aspiring novelist called Christopher Flinders who makes a pretty spectacular error of judgement and this has a major impact on the rest of his life. I really enjoyed this book and found the peripheral characters somehow more satisfying than the main characters. It certainly passed the time when I was driving anyway!

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A Breath of Fresh Air by Erica James is about a thirty-something woman who is widowed and moves back to her childhood village to live. There are the usual host of interfering villagers and family to content with. This was a dull book with a predictable storyline and the most totally predictable ending. Perfect to read when I could only read a bit at a time, but not one of her best.

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I picked up the audio book version of The Secret Diary of a Demented Housewife by Niamh Greene thinking it would be entertaining to listen to when I was driving. The blurb on the back of the case says that it is about Susie, a stay-at-home mother and this is her private diary of the highs and lows of of her life. I have to say that this was a truly rubbish book. The main character was unbelievably self-centred and truly irritating. I also decided there were only so many stories I could listen to about poo and snot. Truly grim. There was 10 CD's on the set and I switched it off after 2 1/2. I just couldn't take it anymore!!!

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