142. An Excellent Choice, Emma Brockes
Non-fiction. English woman living in New York ponders whether to have a baby and gives us the details of how she went about it. I sympathised with the author's description of how her twenties went past focusing on work and friends, and then there she was in her thirties wanting a child but not exactly well-positioned to have one. Enjoyable description of the contrast between the US and UK health systems.
143. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
Fiction. Woman takes drugs for a year to sleep away her past and be reborn into a new future. I liked the disenchanted descriptions of her relationships with others - parents, the non-boyfriend, the friend who obstinately sticks around.. Not LOL, but there is bleak humour in there.
144. The Real Peter Pan, Piers Dudgeon
Non-fiction about Peter Llewellyn-Davies, the boy beloved by J M Barrie, who based much of Peter Pan on him. I think I previously read another book by this author on almost the same topic. It's very frustrating because I'm interested in the subject, but this author is all about the dark hints and odd tangents, and it's hard to know how reliable his account is. What it is about these Edwardian lost boys? Kenneth Grahame's son (said to be the model for Toad in the The Wind in the Willows) laid down on train tracks and died, and within a year and a mile, the boy who was the model for Peter Pan drowned in questionable circumstances. All those fantasies of childhood innocence, and something wrong and unhappy lying beneath.
143. Appointment with Yesterday, Celia Fremlin
I've recently become interested in this author, who wrote domestic noir between the 1950s and 1970s. This opens with a woman on the run who must find a way to survive. The risk with this genre is that the author can be very good at creating an atmosphere of mounting menace, but then the big reveal makes it all seem a bit silly. The real pleasure here are the sly asides - the passive-aggressive exchanges between husbands and wives and the author's cynical take on domesticity.
144. The Comforts of Home, Susan Hill
If you like this series, you'll want to read it for the update on the various members of the Serrailler family (some big changes are, ahem, at hand). The crime-solving aspect itself tails off rather inconclusively.
145. The Hours Before Dawn, Celia Fremlin
Woman struggles with unsleeping baby and increasing suspicion about her lodger. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Didn't like this as much as the previous book I read by her, but it certainly illustrates why the 1950s brand of domesticity was followed by 1960s feminism.
148. A Trail Through Time, Jodi Taylor
One of the early books in the St Mary's time travel series, but I'd missed it out. I'm not sure of which ones I've read, rendering a confusing narrative arc even more incomprehensible. Now I finally know what the battle of St Mary's was. I don't really care - I still like the camaraderie of St Mary's and the way they dip into historical moments, always vividly rendered.