Just clearing some books from my pile to be reviewed – and while the blog post is called ‘some more recent reads’, let’s be SUPER lax with what we mean by ‘recent’. A few of these have been waiting for a while… I also find it hard to write about audiobooks because I can’t go back and add quotes, so shall pop a couple into this round-up.
A Countryman’s Winter Notebook by Adrian Bell
This was a review copy from the lovely Slightly Foxed, which I couldn’t find after it first arrived and I later discovered under a pile of things in the kitchen. Note to self: don’t unpack parcels in the kitchen. It’s a collection of Bell’s articles from the Eastern Daily Press, where he wrote a countryside common between 1950 and 1980. I think this collection, published last year, is the first time they’ve been brought together.
I’m not sure how they’ve been organised, but it’s a fun meander through all manner of countryside topics from across the decades. I enjoyed guessing which era I thought it would be from when I started, discovering how accurate I’d been when I turned the page. He writes gently about gardens, farming, the home – it all blurs into a contented, cosy whole. I particularly liked this line:
I think every village has a double population: those who live in it, and those who remember it fondly for having been reared in it, or having stayed in it, or even passed through it adn said, “Here is a place […] where I should like to live if ever I had the chance.”
Mr Fox (2011) by Helen Oyeyemi
I got my book group to read Oyeyemi’s fourth novel, which I’ve had on my shelves ever since it came out – well, a little before, as it was a review copy. Oops, sorry! Anyway, it’s set in the 1930s and it’s about a writer (St John Fox) and the character he has created (Mary Foxe) and their tussle. The boundaries of reality and fiction aren’t so much porous as totally non-existent – the pair start telling each other stories, and Mr Fox really resembles a short story collection more than a novel. Along the way, St John’s real wife begins to get jealous of this illusory woman with whom he becomes obsessed. The stories the two tell each other often seem barely to connect to the main narrative, and the whole thing is an ambitious and slightly confusing tour de force.
I don’t want to suggest limits on anybody’s imagination, but I have to say I prefer Oyeyemi when she has one foot on the ground. Though that doesn’t happen very often. Considering I’ve read all her books, I only *really* love one of them – Boy, Snow, Bird – but always get something out of them. Even if that’s just admiration.
The Spectator Bird (1976) by Wallace Stegner
A few Stegner novels are among the free audiobooks available with Audible Plus, so I downloaded The Spectator Bird, having previously only read his most famous (?) novel Crossing To Safety. It is about a retired literary agent, Joe Allston, who is coming to terms with increasing inactivity and ill health. Not that he is extremely ill – just all the aches and restrictions of getting a bit older, and you can tell 60-something Stegner was aware of the loss of his youngest days.
The short novel is half set in the present day, where Joe and his wife are in amiable, squabbly, grumpy normal life – and half in the past, mostly told through a diary kept 20 years earlier. The diary is about their time in Denmark, and the friendship they had with a Danish countess. It is a sensitively told story, even despite moments of high drama and shocking plot. As mentioned recently, I’m not sure fine writing is a good fit for an audio experience, for me. Whenever I stopped listening to The Spectator Bird, I seemed to forget everything that had passed – but, having said that, I still thought the book good.
The Memory Illusion (2016) by Dr Julia Shaw
But this book worked much better as an audiobook – a non-fiction book about memory, and largely about how bad memory is. Shaw writes about how faulty memory can be, how easy it is to plant false memories in people, the dangers of relying on memories solely in legal cases, and so on. It is a fascinating read/listen, covering all sorts of academic material about memory in a very accessible way. I felt a bit smug, because at least I *know* my memory is terrible.
Yes, it’s also a bit alarming to learn about false memories – and sections on false sexual abuse memories are quite confronting. But if that is content you can cope with, then I really recommend getting hold of this. Get ready to have a lot of things you thought you knew about yourself and the world blown out of the water.
The Last Interview (2016) by Oliver Sacks
My friend Malie got me this back in 2018, and it is a series of interviews with the late, great Oliver Sacks – ‘The Last Interview’ seems to be a series of books, and the small text ‘and other conversations’ on the front gives away that this covers a wide period. Sacks doesn’t seem to have given interviews all that often, and these are all transcripts – often of interviews given on radio. And it’s interesting largely for seeing the range of people Sacks spoke to. All the information in the interviews will be welcome but familiar territory to those of us who’ve read Sacks’ books, so it’s fun to sit back and interpret how Sacks felt about the interviewers. There is one who interrupts him constantly and blithely misinterprets everything…
Well, there we go, a handful of recent reads – all of them good in their own way.
I had a little blogging absence because I had a nasty cold – which I presumed might be Covid, given how everyone seems to have it at the moment, but a zillion tests turned out negative. Just a normal cold! Back to normal winter life!
When I was two essays into this collection, published in 2013 but collecting pieces from across several decades before, I was certain it would be one of my best books of 2021. The first two essays are among the best non-fiction I’ve ever read.