Hello all and thanks Southeast for the new thread. I fell off the old thread a few weeks ago, came back a few days ago to find it filled with train and dino porn and tiptoed away quietly until it had all passed. V amusing to read from a distance, though.
I've got a lot of catching up since my last update, so I'll just post some reviews and will spare you the list!
30. The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, by Janice Hallett
I think this was reviewed in the previous thread. I'd read The Appeal last year and, although the case itself didn't fully grab me, I really enjoyed the storytelling format, based on disparate documents from a murder prosecution. This is more of the same but this time the documents are notes, emails and newspaper clippings gathered by Amanda, a true crime writer who is being pushed by her editor to find a new angle on a 20-year old case. The case itself is a bit overblown and ridiculous - it takes in cults, coercive control, religious mania, and a mysteriously disappeared baby who is possibly the antichrist reincarnate - but I enjoyed going along for the ride anyway. Hallett really has fun playing with the different text formats and narrative voices and parts of it were genuinely funny, especially the rivalry between Amanda and her professional nemesis Oliver, and also the increasingly concerned parentheses from Ellie, who is transcribing Amanda's interview recordings.
31. The Marrying Game, by Kate Saunders
I loved this book when I was in my 20s and re-read it with some trepidation after Kate Saunders' death in April, worried that it would have lost its magic for me. [Spoiler: it had, to some extent, but parts of it stood up surprisingly well.] The four posh-but-impoverished Hasty sisters hatch a plan to save their home after their charming-but-feckless father (known to all as The Man) dies, leaving nothing but a pile of debts and an impeccably Norman bloodline. The two oldest sisters (the capable but slightly neurotic Rufa, and the cheerfully vulgar Nancy) set out to Marry Money, in the hope of saving their home. [Spoiler 2: they end up marrying for love but it all works out ok in the end.]
Some of the attitudes and sexual politics had not worn well in the last 20 years, but nothing terrible. The first half is a typical romantic comedy but it turns into something rather darker in the second half, which I'd forgotten.
32. Madly, Deeply: the Diaries of Alan Rickman, by Alan Rickman
I reserved this from the library in January, and had gone off the idea by the time it became available in May. I'd read some excerpts and reviews that made it sound bitchy and luvvie, which I was very much not up for. In fact, I really enjoyed these diaries, and found them rather illuminating about playwriting, acting, directing and about Rickman himself. This is partly because the diaries were not written with an eye to publication (the introduction acknowledges that Rickman’s intentions were completely unknown), so there is none of the usual amazing foresight or post hoc justification that you often get with celebrity diaries (Matt Hancock). The format also helped: Rickman used day-to-a-page diaries and the limited space discouraged luvvie navel-gazing. He also writes with a wonderful economy of style, and you get the impression that he was a man who said little and thought much. I came away with the impression that any harsh comments sprang from his high artistic standards and frustration with shoddiness, rather than from bitchiness.
33. The Darkest Evening, by Ann Cleeves
This is book 9 in the Vera series, so anyone who has made it this far knows what they’re going to get (and Cleeves does it as competently as ever, although this particular book felt a bit tired to me).
Fortunately, Cleeves has eased up a bit on the constant descriptions of how fat Vera is, although Sal is still described as dismissively as ever. (I often wonder what it would be like to get Sal’s story on the MN Relationships boards, and suspect that her resentment at having her husband’s boss forever disrupting their plans - not to mention her devotion to the children and her pride in domesticity - would get a more sympathetic hearing there.)
34. Voyage in the Dark, by Jean Rhys
This groundbreaking novel was written in 1934 and set in 1914 but feels incredibly modern because it reflects a world that isn't often shown in fiction of that period. Anna Morgan has come to England from her beloved West Indies following the death of her father, and is scraping a living as a chorus girl. She drifts almost unwittingly into a more seedy life, dependent on predatory men for her financial survival and becoming isolated and withdrawn. The book is startlingly modern in many ways - especially in its treatment of sex and contraception/abortion - and very much of its time in others (e.g. casually dropping the "n" word on the very first page!!). I admired it rather than liked it, partly because Anna's narrative is so (deliberately) emotionally dissociated that I couldn't really connect with her or understand her properly.
35. Agatha Christie: a very elusive woman, by Lucy Worsley
I haven't read any of Worsley's other books but know that many find her irritating (and, in the case if her book on Queen Victoria, tedious). This book was neither of those things: it was a fairly gossipy biography that covered very well trodden ground, including another look at Christie's infamous disappearance in 1926 (which Worsley thinks was a genuine mental health crisis rather than a publicity stunt). As a golden age crime fiction fan, there wasn't anything new here for me, but I enjoyed Worsley's breezy, flippant style, including some astute speculation about the unrecorded feelings that Agatha's friends and family may have had in response to various situations. She also has some interesting discussion about Christie's contributions to both literature and archaeology, and in the impact that she had on both these fields (although I'm not fully persuaded by Worsley's assessment of the former). Oh, and there are several plot spoilers for Christie's books, which you may want to avoid if you haven't already read them!