Thanks to whoever (?Splother) posted the heads-up on the Common People anthology, have had my eye on that so very pleased to snap it up for 99p.
Sorry been AWOL for a bit, work is manic at this time of year and I am feeling rather frazzled.
I have read loads and have load of reviews to write. Here are the first few.. more may follow tomorrow if I can get some time!
48. The Crowded Street, Winifred Holtby
Lovely book, first published in 1924 and recently reprinted by Persephone. It's the story of the young women in a small Yorkshire town, who are brought up to be pretty, and agreeable, and to make good marriages. Muriel and her sister, Connie, seem to lack the qualities that will attract acceptable husbands - to the dismay of their mother (who is quietly determined that the girls' marriages will lift the family into a higher social class). Muriel - who can be a rather stolid and helpless heroine - starts to glimpse the possibility of there being more to life than capturing a husband, while Connie's attempts to please her mother take quite a different turn.
This seemed rather unassuming but actually was quite devastating in its depiction of the limited choices given to young women, and the dangers that wait for them. It reminded me (along with An Invitation to the Waltz, and Old Baggage, two quite different books but with similar setting and themes) of Pride and Prejudice, but a version of Pride and Prejudice without Elizabeth and Darcy, without Jane and Bingley - where the girls despair of making a match, where the men are unappealing but represent the only real escape from poverty and suffocating social restrictions, where an ambitious matchmaking mother can be both monstrous and your most clear-sighted ally.
49. Lullaby, Leila Slimani
Much read and talked about. I wasn't sure about picking this up because of the horrific event at the centre of it. However, I'm very glad that I did. Slimani packs so much into this slim and rather sparse novel - she asks questions about class, race and gender which shine a light on attitudes that so many of us shy away from examining.
50. Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, John Higgs
The second book I've read by Higgs this year. He's (I think this is the right term) a cultural historian with a talent for writing about the ideas, concepts, values and other intangible things that make up a society. In this book, through a series of chapters with single word titles ("Space". "Chaos". "Growth"), he explores some of the major ideas of the twentieth century (Amazon's listing mentions relativity, cubism, quantum mechanics, the id, existentialism, Stalin, psychedelics, chaos mathematics, climate change and postmodernism) an the unexpected ways in which they may be related.
Higgs has a great talent for explaining complex things through simple and relatable analogies - he uses Super Mario Bros as a very useful example of postmoderism, for example, and a story about Einstein eating a sausage on a train which allowed me to grasp the most basic principles of the Theory of Relativity).
I'm afraid I did get fed up by the relentless emphasis on the cultural contributions of white men from Europe and the US. Feminism gets a short mention inside a chapter on the sexual revolution. On one page of the index (L-N) I counted 61 men or groups of men and three women each of whom gets a single one page mention. The civil rights movement, the fight for racial equality, the independence of countries who had lived for centuries under colonial rule, never mind the ideas and discoveries of people living outside Europe and the US - all get a similarly cursory treatment.
I also found that, while he was great at helping me to understand in basic terms lots of stuff that I know nothing about, when he got on to talk about subjects that I do know a bit about, I spotted weaknesses in his argument and the occasional error. Reviews suggest that others have spotted similar problems in other areas of the book.
Higgs is certainly a talented writer and an interesting mind but this book turned out to be a disappointment. Even if it did let me boast that I understand a tiny bit about Einsteinian science.