I feel like it's ages since I posted - work, family life - I am lucky that the reading part of my brain hasn't switched off. I have two pages of reviews to catch up with, but thought I would post my own first.
51. A Spy Amongst Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, Ben McIntyre
Pacey, readable account of the life of Kim Philby, one of the "Cambridge spies" who passed intelligence to Russia from the heart of the British establishment. McIntyre is a good storyteller, and after a bit of a slow start where he introduces member after member of the British ruling class (public school, Oxbridge, ushered into top jobs in Government, intelligence or the diplomatic service with no questions asked), this was an engrossing read. McIntyre doesn't shy away from the consequences of the information that was shared with the Russians, nor the sense of betrayal felt by Philby's friends and colleagues when his spying was discovered, but he allows space for his subject to come into focus as a human being with his own motivations and morality. Recommended if, like me, you'd like to fill in a Philby-shaped gap in your knowledge of 20th century British history.
52. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
This is a book that can be looked at from a number of perspectives: as a story, as a book of ideas and politics, and as an important historic event. I approached it first of all from the first angle, and was initially disappointed: the story has a great start and a great last section but in the middle not much happens. Janey is a young black woman in 1930s Florida; the book tells the story of her three marriages and her search for identity and freedom. There are long episodes of folksy conversation and semi-comic local goings-on (a long-running joke about a neighbour and his mule, and the jokes made at his expense) which add little to the narrative.
However, the book comes into its own when viewed from the other perspectives, and with this rounder view I can absolutely see why this is held up as a classic and a hugely important book. Hurston was an anthropologist as well as a writer, and one of her great interests was recording the rural lives and oral traditions of black Americans in the South. So while the book concerns itself with Janey's story, the diversions, the chatter and the local colour are just as important as the main narrative. Equally, Janey's story, while it may seem a little formless as a plot, asks really fundamental questions about what it was (still is?) to be a black woman, and the way that society treats women of colour. This is a book which appears to be quite simple but contains huge richness and depth.
I read the Virago Modern Classics edition which includes two excellent critical essays, by Sherley Anne Williams and Zadie Smith.
53. The Last House on Needless Street, Catriona Ward
Quite a few of you have managed to review this without giving spoilers and I will try to do the same. It's a disturbing, spooky story concerning a man (Ted) living in isolation with his daughter, and a young girl who went missing from a nearby lake some years before. Ted is clearly not a reliable narrator - he drinks heavily and has periods of mental absence, his house shifts and changes unreliably around him, he sees and hears people from the past. Is this a ghost story? A murder mystery? Certainly it can be compared to some of the writings of great horror writers such as Shirley Jackson and Henry James. Original and unsettling.
54. Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Jessica Bruder
I loved this and it took me completely by surprise, not having seen the film which it inspired. That, I think, is a dramatisation whereas this is non-fiction. Bruder explores the lives of Americans who have given up on the struggle to pay for housing and are living in RVs, vans and cars, moving from one campsite to another and participating in the widespread "workamp" schemes which have been set up to serve the fluctuating need for seasonal workers in different parts of the country. These are people who have lost everything through financial crashes, divorce or medical bills, or who never had it in the first place; people who have worked all of their lives in low-paid jobs, who have little or no pension and no savings to fall back on. People from their 50s into their 80s doing hard physical jobs (harvesting sugar beets, maintaining isolated campgrounds, walking 15 miles a day picking items in Amazon's huge warehouses) and living in cramped, unheated vehicles.
It's a fascinating slice of Americana - the huge spaces and open roads, the emphasis on individuality, freedom and small government, the economic precariousness, the tough pionerr spirit (Laura Ingalls and her family would have recognised these people, there's no doubt). Bruder embeds herself with a group of van-dwellers over the course of three years, camping with them, working alongside them, and mostly talking to them and recording their conversations. It contains beauty, companionship and love but also pain, poverty and loneliness. A book that is both timely and timeless - fascinating, moving. I've been recommending it to everyone I talk to.