This is the second in a series of archive posts (first here) in which I look back at my reading lists to pick a few highlights from ten years ago. I won’t cover every month, just ones where I had notable reads or bookish events. Links lead to my original posts as appropriate.
I went to 4 brilliant bookish events in April 2016. Seeing Meg Rosoff speak at the Oxford Literary Festival celebrating her first adult novel Jonathan Unleashed was excellent, as was hearing Tim Spector speak for the first time on The Diet Myth.
But even better was being invited to a Blogger’s Brunch to celebrate the shortlist announcement for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize – celebrating the best books, fiction and non-fiction on medicine, the human condition, illness and health. Some of the six nominated authors (right) were able to be there to talk to us, and we each got given a set of the shortlisted books, which was lovely. I remember being very impressed by Cathy Rentzenbrink, whose memoir The Last Act of Love which tells the story of her brother, who was injured in a hit and run accident, ending up in a vegetative state and how her family finally let him go, was so moving.
The cream of the lot though was attending the launch of First Light at the Bodleian, an Unbound anthology to which I’d pledged, celebrating Alan Garner, edited by Erica Wagner. I took Simon with me, and I am almost ashamed to say I went around hoovering up signatures of the authors who’d contributed to the book, including: Rowan Williams, Helen Dunmore, Philip Pullman, and hero of mine, historian Michael Wood to mention but a few.
But enough of the high life! Now for a few reading highlights from that month…
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
‘A witch, a scientist and the end of the world’.
What a great premise. This novel tries to do something that is not often seen in genre fiction – melding fantasy and urban SF in a dystopian setting. It’s also a romance and coming of age story with a thrilling edge to it and definitely has crossover appeal for YA and adult audiences. Patricia is six when she discovers she can talk to birds when she helps an injured sparrow and saves it from a cat. It doesn’t happen again until she’s a teenager, enraged by her sister, she escapes into the forest and talks to the Tree where the Parliament of Birds meet. She’s confused by her magical skill, which doesn’t seem useful compared to Laurence’s technical abilities. Patricia will become a witch. Meanwhile, Laurence is a geek who would spend all his hours in front of a screen or tinkering with things. Laurence recruits Patricia to talk to his supercomputer CH@NG3M3 which lives all over the networks. He thinks if it talks to different people, it may become sentient. As we follow their diverging lives, ultimately they will come together again to save the world.
The author has tried throughout to get the balance between science and magic right. Both sides have their internal rivalries and shades of goodness. There are no real villains on either side, just misunderstandings and misplaced beliefs. It is an emotionally and ethically complex science fantasy and it was impossible to take sides which is an achievement in itself. It does suffer slightly, as many debuts do, from an overload of ideas, but I loved the wonderful imagination of it.
Cause for Alarm by Eric Ambler
Finding an excuse to read an Ambler novel is always a great pleasure – and I read this one for the 1938 Club. 1938 is particularly interesting because of the political situation building up to WWII , and the novel I chose to read encapsulates those worries perfectly.
Cause for Alarm, was Ambler’s fourth spy novel and is mostly set in pre-war Milan. As happens so often in spy novels, the prologue starts with a murder – a man is knocked down, and then run over to make sure he’s dead in a Milan street. Then we move to England, and the main story narrated after the event by engineer Nicholas Marlow, who works for a company making shell casings, gets sent to Milan, then in a typical Ambler fish out of water scenario is unwittingly embroiled in dirty business, involving Fascists and secret police, a chase across Europe and a mad professor!
However, the book of the month was…
Gorsky by Vesna Goldsworthy
I simply adored the debut novel from Vesna Goldsworthy, a Serbian poet and writer who moved to England in the mid-1980s and is Professor of Creative Writing at Exeter University. I’ve followed her ever since. Gorsky is s a retelling of The Great Gatsby, relocated to London. Nick is Nikola, a Serbian, working in a dusty bookshop in Chelski, as he calls Chelsea due to the influx of rich Russians. His favourite customer is Natalia (whose daughter is called Daisy), who has a penchant for art books, and is married to the philandering Tom. Nik is drawn into their world via Roman Roman Borisovich Gorsky who turns up at the shop and commissions Nick to furnish a library for him in the palace he is creating in an old building on the Thames. Nick moves into a cottage in the corner of the grounds, where he is also next door to the Summerscales – and so it goes on.
Knowing that this novel is a doomed romance, it was a surprise to find that Gorsky was such a comic novel. Our narrator Nick’s observations are full of dry humour and this added a lightheartedness to the text that made up for the lack of subtlety that most of this group of characters exhibits. The temptation is to over-compare the Gatsby/Gorsky correlations as you read, but the best thing is to forget Gatsby and just dive in. Gorsky is a clever tale and I loved it – and would like to re-read it.
Can you remember what you were reading 10 years ago?
