Starting the new year with a novel about Shakespeare by an indie writer kinda strikes me as good and right.
There are rumours that William Shakespeare spent some time at Hoghton Tower in Lancashire during his teenage years. Pete Hartley wrote a play, based on this assumption, that was performed at the Tower some years ago. Hartley has expanded the play into a novel, and a very enjoyable one at that.
Last year many of my books were re-reads, and I enjoyed them so much that I’ve decided to revisit Stephen King, it’s been a long time since I’ve read some of them.
Carrie isn’t so much a book as an integral part of my history. I’ve read it many times, but I confess it’s been a while. I’ve probably watched the film more than I’ve read the book over the last twenty years or so, so it was interesting to note the differences between the two, and to revisit the academic tones of King’s first ragingly successful novel.
I remember reading this book for the first time in ’76 or ’77, younger than the girls in the book, but not by much. I was a quiet girl in secondary school, I kinda identified with Carrie. Of course, I didn’t have the rabidly religious mum, but I knew what it was like to keep my head down.
This re-read I realised that Carrietta White is the same age as me, King was setting the novel in his future when he wrote it. Carrie was born in September 1963, three months before me. Knowing this added a new layer of sympathy for Carrie and for Sue, the other main character in the book.
So, from the personal to the review. This is a story told from multiple points of view and also with several different tones. We get close up points of view from both Carrie and Sue, but we also get distant third person journalistic and scientific viewpoints. It’s an interesting way to tell a story, and one that King uses again and again in later works.
Another re-read, if only to give myself permission to donate the book to the charity shop, because my oh my, my shelves are GROANING. I took another run at Vinland the Dream and Other Stories by Kim Stanley Robinson.
I like KSR, loved the Mars Trilogy and intend to re-read it one day, and have fairly recently read or re-read a couple of his other novels. And yet I struggled to enjoy this collection of short stories. They’re billed as ‘historical sf’ and deal largely with academic historical concepts, and also with alternate histories. A story about the evidence for the existence of ‘Vinland’ having been planted is very much a teaser for a longer tale, and I felt short changed at the end of it. The ‘Lucky Strike’ pair of stories looks at what might have happened if the Enola Gay hadn’t flown over Hiroshima, and then examines how the twentieth century might have been different. That was interesting and absorbing.
‘Stone Eggs’ is, for me, the standout story of the collection. It’s weird enough to stay with me.
And … back to King.
I’m going back to Salem’s Lot, a book that I’ve re-read a few times, but not recently.
It is very, very good. I know it’s a horror classic, I know the film was good, but seriously, the book far outshines it. This was terrifying, the slow build up, establishing characters, relationships … just brilliant. Especially the massive spoiler at the start of the book … who does that?
I think they call it a ‘palate cleanser’. ‘Notebook’, by Tom Cox.
Tom is one of the best writers around, and his books are an absolute treat. I wish I was back in my ‘financially comfortable’ phase so I could buy all his books, but I have to confess that I got this book for little more than the cost of postage and packaging, directly from the man himself, when he had a houseful of books claimed from his ex publishers. I hope I helped a little.
Tom talks a lot about crisps. He likes crisps. He bemoans the accompanying plastic waste, but oh my, he loves his crisps. I like crisps too, so my first thought on finishing this book mere hours after starting it was ‘That book was like a packet of crisps.’
Notebook is a collection of musings that have a certain rhythmic order imposed upon them, that take you from a perfectly formed two sentence thought to a two page mini-essay. It’s a giant bag of crisps where some of them are curled and huge and have enough flavouring on them to make your eyes water, some of them look like a standard crisp at first then you realise that there’s a jagged edge. Some of them are just lovely and perfect and you look at them several times before you eat them. Then there’s the bits at the bottom of the bag; the fragments that you secretly like the most.
I’m going to call ‘Brockenspectre’ by Caroline Moir, my last book of January.
Claustrophobic, frustrating, unputdownable.
OK, I did put it down because I have stuff to do, but I looked forward to picking it back up again, in a masochistic way. It’s one of those rare books that I really did not enjoy because everyone in it was annoying (I think they call it literary fiction), but I had to keep reading because … everyone in it was annoying.
There’s always a bit of a red light for me when a book is set in a creative writing department, or when the main characters are writers, but Moir understands the assignment, making the background part of the growing tension between the two main characters.
Hild is such a great character, by turns a chameleon, a blank screen, an abused woman struggling to find her space.
And on, to February