Best wishes to Fortuna, Harlen and anyone else needing them right now. I do sincerely hope that 2021 is going to be an easier year.
Thank you MegBusset for the RC Sherriff review - not something I would have picked up but your review was intriguing and sounds like a really good read.
Here are my updates:
85. The Bass Rock, Evie Wylde
There are no shortage of books around in which a modern young woman, in some kind of crisis in her own life, becomes tangled in the life of another woman from the past - maybe she is turning out her grandmother's possessions, or she finds her great-aunt's diary. And often the modern chapters are interspersed with the narrative of the woman from the past, so we get the two side by side, gradually intertwining and illuminating one another.
Evie Wylde's book is one of these, at least on the surface. The first narrative strand is Viv, a troubled (recent bereavement, time spent in psychiatric hospital) young woman who travels up to Scotland from London to take care of the Big House overlooking the Bass Rock, which has been the home of her great-aunt and her (sort of) grandmother (it's complicated). The sort-of-grandmother, Ruth, is the subject of the second strand - her story takes place just after the second world war, when she is newly married to a widower with two young sons. They have recently moved into the Big House and Ruth is trying, and failing, to settle into a space that seemed filled with ghosts.
These are not the only two stories, however. Interspersed between the Ruth and Viv chapters are shorter, less defined sections of an older story, about a father and son who rescue a girl from villagers who are determined to burn her as a witch. Having enraged their neighbours, they are forced to flee with the girl into the surrounding forest. The connections between Sarah's story and the other two more modern ones aren't always clear, but fragments of dialogue and songs bleed through to be spoken or heard by the characters in the past, and Sarah herself is seen as a ghost in the Big House by numerous people.
Finally, fragments of other stories, often stripped of the context of time or place. Each a victim of male violence - these fragments are disturbing in themselves and they also focus your eye on the details in the other three stories, bringing violence, violation and powerlessness to the fore.
I know this book has had mixed reviews here but I thought it was a powerful read.
86. How to Survive Christmas, Jilly Cooper
I don't know if it's an age thing or a class thing, but Jilly Cooper's books passed me by - neither I nor anyone I knew was passing round wellt-humbed copies or dreaming about having sex with men in jodhpurs. But there was a Backlisted episode about her a while back which made me think I might give her a go - it all sounded very jolly and a bit Girl-Power-ish. I do have Imogen here on the shelf, and haven't yet got round to reading it, but in the meantime, I picked up this one in a charity pile for 50p and thought it might be a cheerful introduction to the season.
Unfortunately, if it was ever funny, it's dated badly. Lots of jokes about groping at office parties and secretaries with awful phonetically-transcribed common accents. Wayward dogs, freezing cold posh houses, outdated gender roles and a frightfully jolly assumption that everyone worth talking about is of a similar class to the author.... this was what put me off trying JC until I listened to Backlisted. I would have forgiven her if it was funny, but sadly it wasn't.
87. London Made Us: A Memoir of a Shape Shifting City, Robert Elms
A very different book to Jilly Cooper, but sharing some of the same faults. Robert Elms is a BBC London DJ and a massive London-phile, as am I. One of my favourite things about my home city is how layered it is, how you can turn a corner from 21st century glass and steel offices and be in an 18th century courtyard or a medieval alleyway. Elms certainly shares this, and the book is stuffed with stories from London's history, tracing neighbourhoods back through the 20th century and beyond, with myriad stories about street life and the music industry.
Don't even attempt to read this book unless you are a Londoner or have a deep affinity for London. Elms is convinced that London is the best and most fascinating city in the world, and, like all Londoners, he thinks that his particular manor is the best and most fascinating bit of London. If you want to read LOTS about Shepherds Bush then you are in luck - south and east London barely exist.
Constant gor blimey slang with a show-offy tone; Elms seems to have the constant need to prove how much of a Londoner he is, how salt of the earth his family are, how comfortably his children move around the city - it's like the fact that he's a grammar-school-educated, radio-4-presenter, million-pound-house-in-Stoke-Newington-owning boy who was actually born in a Zone 4 suburb at the arse end of the Northern Line bothers him a bit too much. He's self-aware, to a point - he knows his contradictions but writes about them in a way which is annoying rather than interesting. Drop the rhyming slang, stop name dropping, tell us less about yourself and more about why you love the city, and I'd be totally on board.