Things are still all over the place; it was actually only this past week I realised I’d not posted here in so long. We do at least now have a pretty firm idea of the reason for the pets’ problem and are working on it, and when I’m back to not living in fortnightly cycles of worry, my head will be a lot clearer. I want to be writing here properly again.

All books are works of fiction.

Kate Forsyth: Bitter Greens – A fictional story of the woman who wrote the popular version of Rapunzel, and how she discovered the tale (it includes a retelling of its own). It made my ‘best of’ list the year I first read it, and it would make my best of list this year if I didn’t have a rule of no repeats.

Kate Forsyth: The Wild Girl – The fictionalised tale of Dortchen Wild who fell in love with one of the Grimm brothers and helped them in their task of collecting fairy tales. Very good, hard to put down.

Kimberly Derting: The Body Finder – A girl who can sense the bodies of murdered people aids the discovery of the killer. Very good young adult fiction.

Kimberly Derting: Desires Of The Dead – Violet steps up her act by working with the FBI. It may not be as creepy as expected but it’s a worthy continuation of the series that begun with The Body Finder.

Kimberly Derting: The Last Echo – Violet and her team take on a man who kidnaps girls to be his girlfriend, and this time it’s more personal than ever before. The best book of the series so far.

Kimberly Derting: Dead Silence – Violet now has her own echo playing in her head, and her next assignment involves a young group of people. Still holding onto that strength.

Lillian Li: Number One Chinese Restaurant – Jimmy Han wants to make something of himself, away from his father’s restaurant but things start to go a bit amiss; this all kicks off after Jimmy’s conversion with family friend Uncle Pang, and as Jimmy tries to work around the issues and becomes close to employee/consultant Janine, the cracks in the lives of those who work at the restaurant start to show, and they’ll need work to overcome. A difficult book to summarise without revealing too much, this is a book that studies immigrant parent-child relationships and other familial relationships in the against the backdrop of a busy restaurant.

Liz Fenwick: The Path To The Sea – The impending death of Joan causes her daughter Diana to wonder what exactly happened to her father, who died when she was young; it causes granddaughter Lottie, whilst happy to return to the home she spent her summers at, to look at her current relationship and where she went wrong with her first love; and meanwhile we learn the story of Joan’s days as a spy in the Cold War. Three very good narratives (I personally most enjoyed Joan’s) that will appeal to many give its scope, use of time, and the different characters.

Louise Douglas: The House By The Sea – When Edie’s ex-mother-in-law dies and leaves the house in Sicily to her and her ex-husband, Anna’s son Joe, Edie is forced to go to inspect it with Joe despite the hatred she feels for the woman – Anna was babysitting young Daniel the day he died. A great book about forgiveness and redemption with a heroine as well written as any of Douglas’ previous.

My reading the past couple of months has been very satisfying, a mixture of great re-reads and good new books. I particularly enjoyed the Douglas as I had time to read it slowly, which felt fitting.

Email subscribers may need to open this web page in their browsers in order to see the media players below. The episodes can also be found on all major and most indie podcast apps; links to the biggest are on the page linked to at the bottom of this post.

Podcast episodes 34-38

Charlie and Lillian Li (Number One Chinese Restaurant) discuss racial prejudice in Chinese restaurants, looking at the narrative of immigrant parents and sacrifice, and how her editor pushed her to increase the impact of themes and ideas.

Please note that I have not censored the swear words in this episode because the over all effect would be different without them.

Charlie and Liz Fenwick (The Path To The Sea) discuss the success of spies in the Cold War who were – on the face of it – ‘just’ housewives, bringing new characters to more prominence and bringing past characters back from other books, and the age-old question of cream or jam first.

Charlie and Kate Forsyth (Bitter Greens; The Wild Girl) discuss the story and history of Rapunzel – which was part of Kate’s doctoral thesis – as well as the woman who told the Brothers Grimm many of their tales, and the progression of change those tales went through as the brothers pursued success.

Charlie and Kimberly Derting (The Body Finder) discuss publishing a dark YA series in the wake of Twilight, avoiding romance and family tropes, and the further lives of her characters beyond the final page.

She’s back! Nicola Cornick (The Forgotten Sister; The Last Daughter) returns to discuss Amy Robsart and the mystery of her death, the relationship between Robert Dudley and Elizabeth I, and who killed the Princes in the Tower.

To see all the details including links to other apps, the episode pages can be found here.

I have a lot of catching up to do on this blog. One of my rabbits has required two emergancy vet visits in as many months, having also had an issue at Christmas which we just managed to catch before it became urgent. It’s a common intestinal issue, GI Statis, where if you don’t treat or catch it early enough the rabbit dies. It’s been constant stress and rushing around and now we’re waiting for blood test results to see if we can find out what’s going wrong. Suffice to say February and March have been overwhelming and my read list is a bit… sparse.

But I did get some reading done, three books that I very much enjoyed, and I hope to review the two that were new reads.

The Books

Non-Fiction

Catherine Cho: Inferno – A short while after giving birth to her first child, Cho was sent to an involuntary psych ward in the US (she was visiting from the UK) having experienced Post Partum Psychosis; she details the experience, interwoven with the events to the run up. Stunning book; Cho’s story needs reading widely and her handling of the literature side of things is phenomenal.

Fiction

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen: Secret Passages In A Hillside Town – Mundane, boring, Ollie, who lives in his own world and doesn’t even seem to know or care what his son’s name is, has a blast from the past when a past lover adds him as a friend on Facebook and Ollie starts to be imbroiled in a present-day version of his fantastical childhood. Fantastic, strange, out and out weird – I still haven’t worked it all out but there’s no question; it’s amazing.

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen: The Rabbit Back Literature Society – Ella becomes the long-awaited 10th member of a society that involves the country’s greatest writers – but are they the greatest writers, really? A very good look at ideas and writing in general.

I had a ball with my February reading. Three excellent books. The categories are incomparable and I couldn’t pretend to choose a favourite.

So far in March I have read one book and have tentatively started another. I’m going to continue doing what I am and taking it one day at a time.

Two podcasts today as I’m behind in posting them here. Email and RSS subscribers: you may need to open this post in your browser to see the media players below.

Charlie and Susmita Bhattacharya (Table Manners; also The Normal State Of Mind) discuss her world-wide travel and moves abroad – including a visa-less stopover, the experiences of recent immigrants to Britain, and having your work featured and serialised on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4 Extra.

Charlie and Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen (The Rabbit Back Literature Society; Secret Passages In A Hillside Town) discuss dreams that become literature – vampires; books where words and plot points change in a sort of book plague; secret passages that wipe your memory, and many more – writing a book that’s difficult for a reader to work out and not knowing yourself what the answer is, creepy and traumatic fictional games, and issuing an alternative ending to your novel in a brand new publication.

To see all the details including links to other apps, the episode pages can be found here.

In 2020 I read 57 books. Twelve were by men, 45 were by women. Fourteen were by non-white authors. Four were collections, 2 non-fiction, 17 re-reads. I didn’t read any poetry – I do have one at the ready but didn’t manage it for it to count for the year. I’d like to improve those numbers, particularly I’d like to read more, but I’m going to go careful.

Something very noticeable was the number of new books I read: the most numerous year was 2020 (11), the year of the reading, somewhat understandable with the podcast but I didn’t expect it to be quite as many. The furthest-away year was 2007 (1), which is utterly rubbish; I need to do better there. Further numbers: 2019 (7); 2018 (7); 2017 (8); 2016 (9); 2015 (1); 2014 (1); 2013 (2); 2012 (2); 2011 (1); 2010 (2); 2009 (3); 2008 (1).

I have ummed and ahhed over setting goals. I have ended up with three, and two are different to all other years. I pretty much failed last year’s goals but I think that’s true for a lot of us! Last year’s goals were as follows:

1. Read more by month, looking at shorter periods of time rather than the longer period of a year: I didn’t do the former, but did do the latter. Going by two weeks at a time all the time really emphasised the passage of time – for quite a while, the slowness of it.
2. Read more classics of all kinds: failed completely.
3. Thackeray: it’s still on the list.
4. Read Dragonfly In Amber: I didn’t actually get a copy until very late in the year; I’ve been purchasing very little and present-giving events were small. Thanks to my Second Mum, as I call her, I now have a copy and hope to get to it soon.

So, this year, I’d like to read at least one classic. I’ll be seeing the word ‘classic’ in terms of ‘older classic’, because at the moment I don’t think Gabaldon should count, and neither do I think George R R Martin, who I hope to get to, should count.

In addition to this, I’d like to get to more books received as presents; I’m thinking from recent years. These are Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Starling Days, Sharlene Teo’s Ponti, Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Mermaid And Mrs Hancock, and Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.

And, lastly, more bookish-related than about specifics books, I want to try and work past an issue I have where the feeling of being daunted by starting a new book (all those pages ahead of me…) means that it takes me time to get into the book. I need to get better not only at just starting and getting past the first pages – after which the issue disappears and I’m away – but also a (potentially) related issue, which I’ve spoken of before, where I never really take in the first page or so. Yes, this, despite my interest and focus on first lines.

Did you make any goals for this year?

This Monday’s podcast episode is with Elizabeth Baines. Email and RSS subscribers: you may need to open this post in your browser to see the media player below.

Charlie and Elizabeth Baines (Used To Be; Astral Travel; also The Birth Machine; Balancing On The Edge Of The World; Too Many Magpies) discuss writing for radio, short stories – the relative importance of their first lines and differences to novels – writing a book about trying to tell a story, and the difficulties in labelling someone complicit or a victim in the context of past societal values.

To see all the details including links to other apps, I’ve made a blog page here.

January wasn’t bad; aside from the books below I’ve two on the go and turned my way through a further small chunk of pages of A Shepherd’s Life.

All books are works of fiction.

The Books

Elizabeth Baines: Used To Be – A short story collection with the theme of different roads in life. Very, very good.

Katy Yocom: Three Ways To Disappear – Quinn and Sarah lost their sibling, Sarah’s twin, in childhood; now adults, Quinn tries to get back into her art whilst being a mother to her own set of twins, one with a chronic illness, and Sarah leaves her job as a reporter in dangerous locations to work in tiger conservation in India. Much better than my brief summary can do, this is a super book that explores trauma, conservation, and in the conservation all of the social affects conservation has on humans.

Susmita Bhattacharya: Table Manners – A collection of stories about human relationships and connections, linked by the theme of food, whether the food is an item, an idea, or a construct. Awesome.

It may not have produced the numbers, but the reading was wonderful. Everything I read was fab, and the books I have started recently – Catherine Cho’s Inferno and Lillian Li’s Number One Chinese Restaurant, the latter one of those books I took off my list when I didn’t make headway last year (I’m now further along) are great. Cho’s in particular is just incredible; Inferno is her memoir about her time with Post-Partum Psychosis; it’s a brave book, written – and structured – spectacularly well and I can’t but believe it only narrowly missed out on winning the Young Writer of the Year Award in December (won by Jay Bernard for their poetry collection, Surge).

That’s what I’m looking forward to in February, the Cho and the Li. Absolutely, completely.

In which the hope is that a tyger tyger does indeed burn bright.

Publisher: Ashland Creek Press
Pages: 316
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-618-22083-7
First Published: 16th July 2019
Date Reviewed: 1st February 2021
Rating: 4.5/5

Sisters Quinn and Sarah are still haunted by the death of Sarah’s twin, Marcus, in childhood, and the family’s subsequent move back to the US from India; mother and daughters left, leaving dad, the reason they were in India, behind. Now, many years later, Quinn has a young family and finds herself always worrying about her son’s asthma (he’s also half of a set of twins), and Sarah’s so far spent her career reporting on dangerous situations. When Sarah leaves her career to go back to India and join a tiger conservation, it brings things back to the fore for both sisters as well as their mother. And amidst this is the plight of the tigers and the villages that live next to the reserves, two species vying for the same resources that too often results in disaster.

Three Ways To Disappear is a very well written and carefully handled novel about trauma such as that stated above, and conservation when there is little literal space between animals and humans.

There is a special individuality to Yocom’s book. You have the two narratives that, whilst connected, are very different and enable the story as a whole to have a very diverse atmosphere to it – and I’m not talking about the different cultures and locations here. The sisters are very different, their working backgrounds and choices in regards to family are different, and whilst at heart their thoughts and, often, problems, are informed by the same events, the resulting actions are dissimilar enough that it can be easy to forget that they are indeed forged by the same thing.

The choice of family, or life in general, is where this is most apparent, particularly when it comes to Quinn. Quinn’s story is pretty mundane and quiet compared to Sarah’s life covering war zones and further violence; it can come as a surprise that Quinn’s story can have more of an affect on your reading experience and what you take away than Sarah’s does.

Let’s look at the two stories. Sarah’s is where the tiger conservation comes in and, as the cover might suggest, this is a major part of the book. Yocom’s research shines through each section, from the expected conservation, to life in the locations in India where the needs of human survival come into conflict with animal survival. Yocom details the circumstances that create this conflict – lack of land, the need to conserve whilst also acknowledging the fact that more tigers equals less space and resources for humans. She looks at communities that are obviously based in reality in both an emphatic and studious way – this book is certainly fiction, but the truths that run throughout it, and the very real issues, are laid out very well. Where Sarah herself is concerned – Sarah serves as both a fully-fledged character driving the narrative herself and a vehicle to allow the reality to show – we have the appreciation that this is a white western person looking from the outside in; however much Sarah spent her formative years in India and remembers the language local to her, she is still an outsider and makes poor choices, the choices themselves another aspect of the book that Yocom has handled with care. So, too, the use of religion and mythology, which I’ll leave there.

Away from the conservation, Sarah’s story starts with relief – along with the background we get to begin with, our picture of her is of her past career and the choice to change it for something that – if still overseas from home – is completely different. Her passion drives her – she sees something to work for and she goes for it, and this pervades throughout the book whether it’s the tigers, or the women who need an income, or a possible romance.

Quinn’s passion is different, quieter, like her life. The affects of Marcus’ death have led to her being an anxious mother, particularly as she grew up to have twins herself. Quinn’s strength as a character are in her thoughts on family, on how the present relates to today, where her family – nuclear and extended – come into it. Her twins have some growing to do, but so does she, in the way she deals with others, the advantage she gives them over her. Quinn’s narrative, whilst, as said, not the exciting one, and pretty restricted in locale, is perhaps the stronger one, which is an interesting point in itself. I’d go so far as to say that it serves as a reminder of how important every person is, regardless of how ‘average’ their life.

The book walks an interesting line between the predictable and not so – if you strip the book down to its bare basics, you will see where some of it is headed (some, not all) but with the entirety of its contents together, a lot of aspects are far more foggy to work out. It’s well done. Will you expect a romance? You might, you might not. There may or may not be one. Will you expect the ending? The same applies.

The ending is incredibly poignant, and asks you to consider the whole, starting from the beginning of what you’ve read to the final pages; it also asks you questions about specifics.

This, the winning nature of the ending, is due to the characters’ thought processes and the use of the concept of the three ways to disappear. You may count many sets of three ways, and each will bring you new understanding, opening the novel a bit further every time in a way that I can only call interactive. It’s based in the way each character copes, it’s based in the past, present, and future, and the various ways of living that are presented in the book.

Three Ways To Disappear is great. It does so much in a relatively short time, takes you to locations beyond the geographical, and it presents constant beginnings and ways forward, regardless of endings.