My reading is progressing at a snail's rate this year and I'm not finding many gems.
18. Everyone in this room will someday be dead. This is yet another young woman's misery fest tale.Don't read this if you suffer from panic attacks, substance abuse or are feeling down. Some reviews state that this is a funny, hunourous book. I didn't find that all and I'm a big fan of gallows humour. It's just exhausting and draining reading about Gilda and the scenes from her life that jump about manically (like her brain). She is a very damaged and vunerable person. She is on first name terms with the local A&E staff as she constantly visits in a state of anxiety about her health and the prospect of dying. She can't get the energy to wash up a dish but manages to inadvertently get a job as a receptionist at a Catholic church (when she thought she'd be attending a therapy group), makes an email friend with an elderly parishioner, goes on dates with an unattractive man (despite being a lesbian) and so on. Gilda is so damaged that the "scrapes" and situations she finds herself in aren't amusing, just indicative of the chaos that is her life.
19. Acts of Desperation - Meg Nolan yet another young woman, self sabotaging, misery fest this time in the highly banakble Sally Rooney-esque Irish oeuvre. This has been much hyped and IIRC doesn't come out until June, so hope an ARC review is okay.
I thought this had some fantastic writing in parts but was a bit bloated overall. I just kept thinking, why doesn't she post on Mumsnet's relationship board or AIBU that would sort her out.There is fairly unrelenting misery throughout, but at least some of it will resonate with the majority of young women navigating their way through relationships. The story is told by a young woman in her early 20's (we never learn her name). The narrative is a bit disjointed, like snippets from a diary or vignettes so you feel along with the narrator a sense of fragmentation but it can sometimes be problematic as the reader has no sense of the time period which has passed or what has happened between progressions. We follow the narrator through her early to mid twenties and the scenes from this life are interspersed with thoughts about herself and what happened with hindsight at the age of 29 and living in Greece rather than Dublin..
The narrator is living In Dublin having moved from a more rural area, she's an dyed in the wool self sabotager: in education (uni drop in out), in career (callling in sick or being late for her dull desk job), is unhappily promiscuous, is an alcoholic, bulimic, self harmer and is a poor friend ("steals" boyfriends). She spys Ciaran (a tall, handsome, golden haired Irish/Danish guy) at a gallery event and becomes over invested in their relationship. She thinks, like many young women of my experience do, that if she can make him love her then life will be okay, she'll be rescued and her life will have meaning. However, Ciaran is cold and controlling. He's tight with money, won't have any truck with her friends, is workshy, arrogant and only seeks his own pleasure in bed. He is also secretive and our narrator is driven to playing detective, discovering that Ciaran has a Danish ex girlfriend who he is still very much in contact with. He tells our narrator when confronted that he will always love his ex (even though she cheated).
There are many really well observed insights but the protagonist has an everything plus the kitchen sink shoppping list of addictions and self harming behaviours which I felt was a bit overkill. There is also no exploration of why she has become so self sabotaging. Her parents divorced when she was young but she seems to have a good relationship with them both and her stepfather. There's not much backstory about her childhood and like the narrator in Rebecca we never learn her name. She never seems to try to seek help or insight, all she would have to do would be to Google some of Ciaran's controlling behaviours and edicts and a plethora of helpful articles and forum posts would pop up which she could read at leisure during her underemployed job explaining how his behaviour is emotionally abusive. Her "reflective" thoughts later in Greece are amorphous and don't really add much. She claims she is "no longer a girl" and that the men in the bar in Greece where she drinks no longer hit on her, but she's only 29 hardly aged. She also claims that there were more good times than bad with Ciaran but the scenes protrayed don't convey that sense at all. So, much to admire and like, some paragraphs stopped me in their tracks but not a whole success.
20,22,23 the first 3 Outlander books bought as a "collection" for under a fiver on Kindle . My brain has turned to mush, I've not been well, so these were about the level I thought I could handle right now. Claire, a ww2 nurse on a second honeymoon with her boring husband Frank in Inverness visits a stone cirlce and is drawn through a cleft in the largest stone and ends up in 18th Century Scotland where she is attacked by her husband's ancestor (who looks very like him, what are the chances??) but rescued by a band of Highlanders including a super hot, ginger haired hunk.
I can't say I exactly enjoyed the books - they are long but curiously not much seems to happen, the writing is a bit flat yet they are also easy enough page turners. Kind of reminds me of Ken Follet's writing. Overall, they feel lacking and I think they could be so much better. I couldn't feel, smell or taste 18th century Scotland in the descriptions and they were weird. So many coincidences. Gabaldon is obsessed with breast feeding descriptions and men suckling milk as part of sex. The hulk of urgent "need" that is Jamie (the hero) basically rapes a girl (when she asks him to stop) and there is a weird chapter at the end of the first book where Claire (heroine) decides that the best way to save Jamie's life when he has a fever, is dangeroulsy underweight and is in turmoil after being tortured and raped (and she is the early stages of pregnancy) is to drug him and herself with opium and make him fight his demons which he thinks she embodies, he almost kills her. It's just bizarre and bizarre things keep on happening so much so that I find them weirdly addictive. Shoot me now.