CHERTSEY

BOATS, BRIDGES, BOILERS ... IF IT'S GOT RIVETS, I'M RIVETTED
... feminist, atheist, autistic academic and historic narrowboater ...
Likes snooker, beer, tea, rivets and solitude, and is strangely fascinated by the cinema organ.
And there might be something about railways.
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Thursday 1 June 2017

Books I read in May

A thin month, this, what with the excitement of the house and all. But I read: 

Julia Crouch Her Husband's Lover (local library)
Yet another female psychopath story, albeit well written and with a nice - if not wholly unexpected - twist.

Beryl Bainbridge The Bottle Factory Outing (Amazon)
Seventies period piece, mildly diverting.

Tana French The Trespasser (Smiths, St Pancras)
I really rate Tana French and I think this is her best yet. On the face of it, a Dublin police murder mystery. But also an exquisite study of trust, mistrust and paranoia; of relationships lost, found, made, destroyed and thrown away. One of the most real protagonists I have ever read relates a first person, present tense narrative that is so dense and intense that I found myself having to put it down to take a breath. The speech patterns and dialogue are so natural; the prose perfectly balanced, the single viewpoint so intense, the feelings so raw and real - and all done so effortlessly that as a reader you are never aware of the author's presence. A fabulous example of ars est celare artem. An extraordinary book.

Catherine O'Flynn What Was Lost (from my shelves; originally from a charity shop)
Reread after recomemnding it to someone else to see if it was as brilliant as I remembered. Maybe not quite, but I'd forgotten how neatly it all ties up.  And that it's a sort of ghost story, but if you really don't want to suspend disbelief, you can get round that.

Louise Doughty Black Water (Smiths, St Pancras)
Gripping, Graham Greene-esque tale of a man involved in all sorts of nastiness in Indonesia. Slightly disappointingly ambiguous ending but I guess that's how it was meant to feel.

Clare Mackintosh I See You (Tescos)
Another psychopath lurking in plain sight, a bit too clever and not entirely unpredictable.

Maggie O'Farrell This Must Be The Place (Tescos)
Well written as always, but the way this odd-family saga skipped about made it hard for me to really engage with most of the characters - and the cipher at the middle of it never quite rang true.

Ann Cleeves The Moth Catcher (local library)
Traditional detective mystery with the ending somewhat pulled out of a hat.

Mark Edwards The Magpies (local library)
Nothing sparkling, competently written but grubbily gripping tale of a young couple persecuted by their neighbours.


Books I really tried to read in May

Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces

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