Trying to find time to read your updates! We've had a houseful and little time for reading either books or MN.
I'm hoping to squeeze one more book into 2018 but this probably my penultimate post.
102. The Immortalists, Chloe Benjamin
Reviewed a number of times here. A family of siblings in 1970s New York visit a fortune teller who tells them the date they will each die. The book then follows each of the four and explores their lives, and the impact that the prediction has on them. I found this patchy - the opening section, with its depiction of a hot summer in run-down 1970s NYC, was great, as was the next chapter (sorry won't post spoilers) but after that I felt it all went a bit OTT and I lost interest. I would read another by this author, though, as the opening section shows that she can definitely write.
103. The Box of Delights, John Masefield
Much reviewed here this month, mostly along the lines "WTF?".
Like many here, I suspect, I had nostalgic feelings about this book based on the BBC adaptation that was on TV over Christmas in (I think) 1984, but I couldn't remember much about the story, or about the book.
Suffice to say, it is very odd. A group of children live with next to no adult supervision, and take on a band of murderous thieves who are kidnapping local clergymen - at one point the entire contents of the cathedral, choir boys and all. In this they are aided by a very strange assortment of allies, including Herne the Hunter, roman soldiers, a mouse, and a medieval philosopher. There are interludes were our hero shrinks to tiny size to explore the passages behind the skirting, or is taken by pirates to a desert island, and to be honest with you, even when you reach the end it still doesn't really make very much sense.
I did think that the opening scene, where the schoolboy Kay is drawn into a game of cards by two unsetlling men on a train and later robbed, was very cleverly done - the feeling of unease that it inspires is just the right thing to draw you into the plot and the atmosphere of the book. And the way that the landscape seems to slip in and out of history - the little alleyway with the plague crosses painted on the doors, or the roman camp where the wooden fence is freshly built - there is a clever sense here of the uncanny, and you are never quite sure whether things are real, imaginary or dreamed.
104. Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively
This was a great rattling read (winner of the Booker) and I devoured it in a couple of nights. Claudia Hampton, an old lady, lies dying in hospital. Her visitors - daughter, sister-in-law - don't seem to like her much, and the nurse asks the doctor whether she "used to be someone" (to which the answer is yes). Claudia, in her head, is re-living her life, and her story is beautiful, and funny, and awful, and sad. She's a great character - clever, beautiful and incredibly arrogant. She flirts her way to the front line as a war correspondent in Africa. She struggles with motherhood. And as a historian she relates her story in both an immediate, vivid way and also as a thread in a great tapestry of history. Utterly readable and beautifully written.
105. Christmas Pudding, Nancy Mitford
I didn't love this, I didn't hate it. It was better than the Julian Fellowes. I knew two things about Nancy Mitford before reading this - that she's funny and that she's an awful snob - and both were borne out by reading Christmas Pudding. I'm very glad not to have to spend any time with the awful drawling Eton boy or any of the other characters.