Reading catch up

Some of my recent reads have been fairly lightweight, with E F Benson's Queen Lucia and Katie Fforde's Recipe for Love being the lightest of the bunch. I've come across so many comments about how wonderful the Mapp and Lucia books are that when I saw the Complete Mapp and Lucia stories in a two volume Wordsworth edition on the Bibliophile website/catalogue at a very low price that I immediately sent for them. I am reading them one at a time, not rushing through the whole sequence, so I can enjoy them at leisure. After all, they were originally published as independent novels, for entertainment. I also saw the television series broadcast at he end of last year on the BBC. I usually prefer to read the books first, then watch, so when I saw it I thought I'd better read the stories as well.

I have read many, but not all, of Katie Fforde's novels ever since she gave a talk about her writing many years ago at Southampton City Libraries, and enjoyed them all as lightweight and entertaining escapist stories, as was this title.
 Tove Jansson's The Summer Book is a fairly short, easy to read story of one summer on a island in the Gulf of Finland, but has such beautiful writing, such tenderness in the description of the relationship between the grandmother and her granddaughter in their adventuring on the island that it will be one I remember for a long time.
Although Stella Rimington's At Risk and Susanna Gregory's An Unholy Alliance are thrillers, they are very different, At Risk being set in the present day, while An Unholy Alliance is set in 1348 at the time of the plague. At Risk is also the first in a series of thrillers with a heroine, Liz Carlyle at the centre of the action. I have n't yet read any of the more recent titles, but will look out for them.
I was unaware of just how prolific Susanna Gregory is, and will probably read others in her series of medieval mysteries, as they are well written and the events described so far in the past they are less disturbing than more up-to-date crime stories. 

 I picked up Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust  in a local bookshop (October Books, a co-operative) as the sub-title, A History of Walking was intriguing.(It was also reduced in price).  How do you write a history of something that for centuries, millennia even, was the main method of getting about the world for all humankind.

This book covers a huge amount of not just history, but literature, art, human anatomy, gender politics,  mountaineering as well as where we walk in country or city and how the motor car is affecting our pedestrianism. Rebecca Solnit has included an amazing amount of research in this nicely produced volume.

Nearly there

Christmas preparations gradually coming together - a cake has been made, mince pies made and put in the freezer, a few eaten by a visitor this week, cards written and posted, ,presents bought but yet to be wrapped, tree up and decorated (yesterday), washing machine engineer visited and machine to be replaced on Monday.. why do things like the washing machine having problems, ear infections, colds and other such tedious events happen just around the Christmas period, when one could do without the extra hassle?
Last week I paid a visit to my local library and picked up two Barbara Pym novels, Jane and Prudence and Some Tame Gazelle, along with Katie Fforde's A French Affair. Just the right sort of read for this time of year, I feel. I haven't read any of Barbara Pym's novels until this year, so catching up on an author whose popularity has waxed again in recent years is very satisfying and enjoyable.

A little light reading

As an antidote to reading books narrated by young boys, I picked up Katie Fforde's Summer of Love on a recent visit to my local library. I like Katie's books, they are light, cheerful and have a happy ending. I know that people in the book world are saying that chick-lit is dying but Katie fforde has been writing fro quite a long time and shows no sense of slowing down - long may she continue. Chick-lit was only a name dreamed by someone who possibly had never read it - and I'm not sure the "lit" bit applies to much of it, entertaining as it is. Summer of Love is vintage Katie Fforde, with a single mother, Sian Bishop, as heroine, running her own small business and moving to the countryside to provide a better school for her son. She eventually meets Gus Beresford, her neighbour's explorer son, recently returned from his latest adventure. But Sian and Gus have met before, so the twists and turns of the plot begin. Great fun.
Michael Wright's C'est La Folie was recommended by a friend, after she had read his articles in the Telegraph newspaper. As he lives in France in the Limousin region, next to the Auvergne region, I thought it a very sympatique read. Much of the life he describes is rural, somewhat isolated and very different from English city life. We are heading off to the Auvergne ina few days, so it had many resonances.

Random reading again

While away in France, I kept dipping into Mourjou: life and food in a village in the Auvergne, by Peter Graham, an Englishman who has spent most of his life in France. I found this through the Prospect Books website, a wonderful resource for anyone interested in food and its history. The village we have a house in is in the Auvergne, though further north than Mourjou, but much of the food is the same. The dish aligot is a regular at the evening fairs held in August, when all the villagers gather together to buy their supper and eat and chat at long tables set up outside the Mairie. The descriptions of past village life are fascinating and obviously the same for the villages in the region. However life has changed somewhat, as the author reports, and is more like life in the rest of France, as communications have improved a lot in the last century or so.

I picked out an old Katie Fforde book on a recent trip to the library, Living Dangerously. Published in 1995, it seemed to have passed me by, yet I'm a keen fan of Katie Fforde's writing. Her books are an easy read, and fall into the romantic category, but for me are ideal comfort reading in between something a bit more demanding. I usually borrow them rather than buy them however.

The more demanding read I read before this was Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief. It might seem strange to call a book written for young adults more demanding, but the setting of Germany in the Second World War, and the dreadful things that happen to the central character Liesel and to the family who foster her after her mother disappears and her younger brother dies on a train journey is an emotionally demanding read. The Book Club who chose and discussed this felt it was "I'm glad I've read this book" title, and it led onto various memories for one or two of the older members who'd lived through the same war in England, some as children and some as adults. Reading this made me feel much more compassionate towards those ordinary German people who didn't agree with Hitler, but had no means of expressing their disagreement outwardly - it was only expressed by hidden acts of resistance, like fostering the daughter of a communist, and hiding a Jew in their basement. Although I describe this as a more demanding read, the writing is beautifully simple and clear, it is the emotions aroused that are more complex and demanding.