Well, I failed to get to the bottom of the question of whether there would still be Monthly Deals, just listed on a different page, or whether there would just be Deals, which would change at unspecified times (it's testing enough going through pages of dross every month to find the gems, I can't imagine doing this if I don't know whether or not there's anything new in there). I spent 75 minutes (!) in chat as there is no email address to contact Amazon, and, while I was eventually told that the latter scenario is the one they are going for, I don't trust that the agent who was trying to answer my question actually understood what I was asking. I think he may well have made up the answer just to get rid of me TBH.
I thought Beyond Black was excellent although one of the darkest books I have ever read. Mantel is capable of such bleakness, such nastiness - I can't think of another writer who takes their readers to such uncomfortable places.
I'm very lucky to have had half term off work, and found some good reads to indulge in. A welcome run of good 'uns.
73. Autumn Journal, Louis MacNiece
If you can bear to read an account right now of Autumn 1938, the dying of the summer, the coming of winter, the social paranoia, fascism in the news and the increasing likelihood of war, then read this. It's both lyrical and grounded in the every day detail of 1930s life, and it feels disturbingly familiar. Good poetry for people who don't think they like poetry - it reads like fragmentary prose and you don't notice the subtle rhyme scheme until a phrase rings out beautifully from the page.
Hitler yells on the wireless,
The night is damp and still
And I hear dull blows on wood outside my window;
They are cutting down the trees on Primrose Hill.
Thank you to the 50 Book-er (I'm so sorry I can't remember who it was) who recommended this and let me know that it is free to read on archive.org. Just beware that the text contains a number of typos, including "1958" for "1938" for some reason, but IMHO it's still a decent, readable version.
74. Trust Exercise, Susan Choi
I wrote last week that I was reading something which had made me stop and think about DNFs, and this is it.
A group of teenagers in 1980s America (a city which is never named, but is clearly Houston). They are pupils in a pretentious arty school, where their pretentious, charismatic drama teacher takes them through a series of "trust exercises", from falling backwards into each other' outstretched hands to exploring each other's faces and bodies in the dark, and baring their secrets mercilessly in front of one another. I found it overwritten, overwrought, unrealistic. To be honest I would have been tempted to put the book aside except for the signs that Choi was a clever writer - a particularly excellent simile in the first chapter, some beautiful clarity in the descriptions of the interactions between the characters.
Then the book shifts, and without wanting to give too much away, from this point, I found it completely intriguing and very clever. This is a book about trust in its many forms, from the trust between a teacher and student to the trust between a reader and an author.
75. Difficult Women, Helen Lewis
A reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw, 1903
Or woman.
Helen Lewis, 2020
I love Helen Lewis and I absolutely love the premise of this book. Lewis is not afraid to tackle complicated and nuanced topics, and here she embraces the warts-and-all history of feminism's fighters and grifters, the women who said the wrong things, who were unlikeable, who shocked and broke things in their determination to bring about change. In a strong introduction, she looks at the tendency to sanitise our heroines in what she calls "feel-good inspiration porn", airbrushing out their less desirable actions; and at the flipside of that, which has seen so many feminist icons "cancelled" because one or another part of their behaviour or opinions doesn't measure up to our need for a perfect feminist heroine.
I want to restore the complexity to feminist pioneers. Their legacies might be contested, they might have made terrible strategic choices and they might not have lived up to the ideals they preached. But they mattered. Their difficulty is part of the story.
Lewis looks at 11 key areas where women have had to fight for equal rights - many of these rights being taken for granted (and aren't we lucky) by women today. She tells the stories of pioneering feminist campaigners (not all of whom would have called themselves feminists), a number of whom (being not a student of women's history, but a woman, a feminist and a wide reader) I had never heard. She approaches her subject's with a historian's respect for primary sources (reading through boxes of letters between the suffragettes, revealing a lot about the way their movement developed) and is refreshingly unafraid to depict her characters warts and all (see above).
I was just disappointed that the structure of the book is a bit woolly, and the later chapters lack the sharpness of focus that is found in the earlier ones. Towards the end it felt more like a series of (excellent, informative) magazine articles strung together rather than a book with a driving argument or narrative behind it. Mumsnet does get an extended mention - Helen, if you are here, then thank you for all your writing including this book.
76. Missing, Presumed, Susie Steiner
Police procedural, nothing hugely original but well written and readable - perfect for half term! A young woman from a well-connected middle class family goes missing, the police can find no trace of her. Our complicated detective protagonist is Manon Bradshaw: single, distanced from her family, enduring the horrors of online dating and the loneliness of weekend evenings alone, falling asleep to the sound of the police radio.
Steiner knows what she's doing and this has good Ruth Rendell-ish feel to it. She tackles some important social issues with heart, and her assured, humane treatment of class is a great antidote to the clunky snobbery of Susan Hill.
77. The Weekend, Charlotte Wood
Three women, in their 70s and friends for decades, arrive at a beach house in a low-key coastal resort in Australia. The house belongs to their mutual friend Sylvie, who has died earlier that year, and they are there to sort out her belongings so that the house can be sold. Each of the three brings her own emotional baggage, and the three very different women - buttoned-up Jude, hypercritical daughter of a hypercritical mother; vague, clever Wendy, grieving for her husband and struggling in her relationship with her children; and childlike, cheerful Adele, grimly determined to cling on to her optimism that something good is coming her way - realise that their friendship has changed shape without Sylvie, and that they might not fit together the way they did before.
This book has had mixed reviews (here, I think, and on Goodreads) and it's certainly not one that everyone will like. Very little happens. Most of the content is the women's inner monologues - their memories, their bitchy or paranoid thoughts about one another, their thoughts on ageing, on their relationships. I think the whole thing will rest on whether you find the women interesting or realistic, and personally I did; there was much here which echoed conversations I have had with my mother, who is the same age as the three women, and my relationship with my own friends - a decades-long tangle of love and resentment where the matter of who puts whose food contributions where in the fridge can unlock all sorts of half-remembered acts of kindness or selfishness from decades before. If you don't think this way, or are uninterested in people's emotional landscapes, then there's probably not much for you here, but I loved this and couldn't put it down.