Betty, I'm sorry to hear about your colleague.
Updates from me:
25. Night Boat to Tangier, Kevin Barry
The main action of Barry's lyrical, gritty book takes place over a single night in the ferry terminal in Algeciras, a port city in southern Spain where the lights of Morocco can be seen across the water. This is both a prosaic setting (the information desk, the hiss of the espresso machine in the no-frills cafe) and an edgy one, peopled by beggars, vagrants and smugglers of drugs and people passing between Europe and Africa.
In the terminal are two washed-up Irish gangsters, Maurice and Charlie, lifelong partners and rivals, there not on business but with a battered hold-all full of missing person flyers.
“The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. But they retain – just about – a rakish air.”
Someone has told them that Maurice's estranged daughter, Dilly, might be passing through the terminal that night, and they wait, and talk, and watch the people coming and going. There's a definite "Waiting for Godot" feel about this, not least in the barely disguised hints of menace and violence - an early encounter between the two men and a passing young man makes it clear that we are not in the territory of cuddly ex-cons and comedic crime capers.
Other chapters range back and forth through the mens' lives, their rough childhood, the things they have done and the terrible effects that drugs and crime have had on their relationships and mental health. I can't say that I loved this book - it is bleak, sad and sometimes frightening, and the rich language can be a bit heavy at times - but blimey, Barry is a great writer.
26. Sex Drive: On the Road to a Pleasure Revolution , Stephanie Theobald
I hadn't heard of Theobald before but she is a middle-aged journalist, novelist and apparently "one of London’s most celebrated literary lesbians". The premise of this book is that, bored and frustrated in a loving relationship that has become cosy rather than exciting (her (male) partner talks about homemade soup recipes and listens to Radio 4), and carrying around both physical and emotional pain which she only reveals gradually throughout the book, she sets off on a journey - to interview experts on female masturbation and, in the process, to find out more about her own body and its capacity for pleasure.
Well, this is apparently what happens when you get a book out because it's one of the few ebooks available in the library - you get led down an unusual path!
What follows is a very honest (and - warning - frequently explicit) account of a journey through US counterculture, feminist history and a weird sex world - in her trip from New York to San Francisco Theobald meets ground-breaking 1960s gurus who run group masturbation sessions, new age sexologists, women who organise BDSM orgies for a living and a cult who think that human beings were created by sex-loving aliens. Some of it is educational, some of it is inspiring (who can argue that female sexuality has been supressed and demonised in recent centuries, and that women are the poorer for it?), and a lot of it sounds like it should be in Private Eye (either in Pseuds' Corner, or in the Funny Old World section where you read about women who want to have sex with trees). Stephanie is funny and curious if way too open-minded for this cynic (not about sex, per se, but about everything - angels, astrology and other woo ideas), and while I don't agree with her about some of the topics she lights on (I am not as sure as she is that sex work, porn and fetish/kink are feminist and empowering), it's good to have your point of view challenged. This is certainly an eye opener for the curious - I will leave you with her first impressions on visiting a San Francisco sex club:
"In the glare of supermarket lighting, I see a sea of big chicks with bad complexions and beefy thighs, skinny women with limp hair and careworn expressions, and the sort o men you see lingering by bus stops late at night. Then an overwhelming smell of warm sausages hits me. There is not a BBQ area at Lash; this is the smell of a sex club. It is a hideous dropping of the veil, the moment you realise that in real life you can't do cut and paste like you can in a fantasy."
27. Queenie, Candace Carty-Williams
Much reviewed here and elsewhere. Before I add my own comments, I should say that I listened to this via BBC Sounds; really well read by Tamara Lawrence but an abridged version.
I'd say for me this had both the strengths and the flaws of a typical first book by a talented author. It was genuinely funny and engaging, broke new ground, spoke of the author's experiences and had a real passionate emotion at its heart. On the other hand, it was a bit all over the place - the dark stuff was strangely out of proportion to the light, for me the ride was too unbalanced.
Being white I can't really comment on the depiction of the lives of young black women or of the British-Jamaican community - I've read some really positive reviews by black writers such as Diane Evans, and some really negative ones by young black women on Goodreads. I think it's a shame that there are so few books with black female heroines, that each one bears the weight of having to represent black women in a way that just doesn't apply to books about white men (or, most of the time, white women). I'm really glad that Carty-Williams is out there writing, and look forward to her next book.