73. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
I needed something to plug into on a long overnight flight which would be absorbing enough to distract me from the usual plane noise, but boring enough to allow me to fall asleep. Enter Dickens, the perfect companion. I got a reasonable night's sleep (thank you also to Dramamine) but woke up with bits of this story in my head - enough to inspire me to read the book when I got home.
I read a review which wittily describes this as "the best of Dickens, the worst of Dickens". Thank God there are fewer "comic" characters but on the bad side, it's VERY wordy, and the heroine is an utter sap who seems to have no characteristics other than lovely hair and the ability to run a thrifty household. Ignoring those flaws though, this is an absolutely cracking story, genuinely suspenseful and quite terrifying at times. Makes you think twice to realise that the terror of revolutionary Paris was still within living memory when this book was written, and must have left emotional scars similar to those experienced by those of us watching say, the terror attacks on 9/11, or the awful events of the war in Yugoslavia from a distance.
74. Milkman, Anna Burns
From one paranoid, claustrophobic and violent city to another. I know that Milkman has divided opinion here. I liked it. It wasn't always a straightforward read: not so much the style but the constant meandering off onto unrelated topics (why, a few pages from the end, for example, were we discussing whether the narrator's mother was embarrassed about her big bum?). The narrative style, for me, was like having a friend talking at you 19 to the dozen - I know a lot of people have said it works really well as an audiobook. I found the subject of the book, and the way that Burns chose to write about it, absolutely electrifying, and again very scary. I don't think I am ignorant of NI's recent history but there were some things here which shocked me - I hadn't thought, for example, about people not being able to go to hospital if they were taken ill, because of its association with the state. Apparently readers of this book from outside the UK are in some cases mistaking it for dystopian fiction along the lines of The Handmaid's Tale - what it reminded me of was some of those rather surreal comedies written by Russian and Eastern European writers under communism. Both associations which really make you think about what has happened in our own country in recent decades - not to mention where we're going right now.
75. Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain's Poorest Towns, Kerry Hudson
I wasn't sure quite what this was going to be, and I'm not quite sure either. It's not really, as I feared it might be, a misery memoir - the details from Hudson's childhood are fairly sparse, as she doesn't remember a huge amount of detail and is not inclined to make things up to fill in the gaps. She tells us snippets about the awful things that happened - the poverty, the drinking, the neglect and emotional abuse, the violence - and fills in some of the things that she can't remember from reading through her (incomplete) care records. The story of her childhood, and the towns where they lived, is interspersed with chapters in which she returns to those places as an adult. She looks at them through adult eyes and tries to understand what life was like then, when she lived there, and what it's like now.
This is partly a truthful memoir of what it was like to grow up at the bottom of the pile; partly a story of how Hudson escaped; partly a long therapy session in which she describes facing some of her demons. I came away feeling humble and with a lot of empathy, though not quite sure what Hudson's reasons were for writing the book. I guess perhaps it's too much to expect a neat ending in a book that is so much about mess, pain and loose ends.
76. Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere, Jeanette Winterson
A quick read, and a nice one - I think this was actually the text of a lecture that Winterson gave, and it's only about 50 pages long. The suffragettes seem to have come in for a bit of a bashing recently and it was nice to read someone talking with unequivocal positivity about their courage, the importance of their ideas and their legacy. Winterson is a really lively writer (although occasionally slightly annoying) and this was a lively read - she has some important things to say about the challenges still ahead for women's rights. Nothing enormously original here but a stirring read.
77. Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, Barbara Comyns
A Virago classic set in the late 20s, this tells the story of a very young, hideously naïve couple who marry in haste and repent at leisure. Sophia, our narrator, falls for Charles when she sees him carrying his artist's portfolio. They marry despite the disapproval of his family, and soon fall into bohemian poverty. Sophia is beautiful and gets occasional work as an artist's model, but it doesn't seem to occur to either of them that Charles might work - he paints, and complains about things. There is occasional money from rich relatives but things get gradually more desperate, especially when the inevitable happens (Sophia believing that birth control is a sort of mental concentration that you employ to stop yourself from getting pregnant).
Comyns herself married an artist as a young woman, and the book has the ring of autobiography, though she says in the forward to this book "“The only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters 10, 11 and 12 and the poverty.” . Parts of the book are funny and quite charming, but don't be fooled - this book contains trauma, heartbreak and one of the most realistic and distressing descriptions of childbirth I have ever read. This is unique especially for the time that it was written, eye-opening and well worth a read.
78. Transcription, Kate Atkinson
Another one which has divided opinion on these threads. I liked it, although it got boring in places. It's a book that plays with form and narrative just as much as Life After Life and A God in Ruins but without displaying its hand. The story seems straightforward but isn't - truth is slippery, most people are lying at least some of the time, and the theme of the book appears to be artifice in its various forms. I have to be honest, I didn't pick up on hardly any of this while I was reading it, but the more I thought about it afterwards the more I seemed to get what Atkinson was trying to do. She's always fun to read, though I would say honestly less so in this book than in any of the others that I've read of hers.
79. Your Pace or Mine?: What Running Taught Me About Life, Laughter and Coming Last , Lisa Jackson
This was OK. I'm in the final stages of marathon training and wanted to read something running-related to inspire me to keep going. Lisa is a multiple marathon runner, and a coach, and she's written about running at the back and the life lessons that you can learn from pushing yourself through endurance sporting events. I haven't run 90 marathons but I would say that I'm a Lisa-type runner anyway - never going to be very fast, enjoy company on my runs, compete against my self and the voice in my head telling me to stop rather than worrying too much about PBs. So there wasn't a huge amount here that felt new to me, though I agreed with much of what she said about the things you can learn from running. I did like the accounts of running big races which I am unlikely ever to run (Boston, Comrades) and I did finish feeling quite proud to be part of the marathon-finishers gang so I guess it did what I was hoping for.