A Few Good Books I Read Last Month . . .

Another good reading month, was April.  It seems that no amount of busy-ness (Italian classes, fitness workouts, family life, knitting and sketching and bread-making, FaceTime connections with friends, kayaking and cycling and tramping through forests with my guy) can diminish  the book entries in my reading journal. The accumulation of titles continues to demonstrate reading’s central importance in my life. Hard to imagine what I would do without it.

Painful to imagine, in fact.

Instead, let’s proceed immediately to April’s list of books read. (Numbering denotes each title’s place in my hand-written Reading Journal.)

27. The Actress, Anne Enright. Literary fiction; Mother-daughter novel; Women’s lives; Theatre; Dublin; Mental health

28. The Adventures of Isabel, Candas Jane Dorsey. Mystery/Thriller; Pop Culture; LGBTQ;

29. The Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangaremba. Literary fiction; Women’s Lives; Africa; Post/Colonialism

30. The Dead Season Christobel Kent. Mystery; Set in Florence; Aging protagonist; Longstanding Marriage

31. The Museum of Modern Love, Heather Rose. Literary fiction; NYC Art world; Marina Abramovič; Marriage

32. House of Names, Colm Toibin Literary fiction; Greek myth retold

33. The Benefit of Hindsight, Susan Hill. Mystery; Simon Serrailler series; set in England

And here’s what I scribbled about each title in my little notebook.  Because I’ve been experiencing some wrist-shoulder-elbow pain recently, I’m going to keep to a minimum the commentary I usually add to these photographs of handwritten pages. If you’ve tried enlarging the photos but still need some help deciphering my writing, please let me know in the Comments below.

Beginning at the bottom of this page, just below March’s last entry . . .

#27, Anne Enright’s elegaic mother-daughter novel, The Actress. My entry continues on the next page. I should have made a clearer reference to the sexual exploitation, harassment, and assault that is part of both mother’s and daughter’s lives. . . and to the sexual agency they work their way towards.

More insight into that here, in an interview with  Anne Enright by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian.

And I posted here a passage I found particularly moving about a daughter giving her mother end-of-life care.

And this sentence deserves to be shared: “Even then, in middle age, he carried his handsome like an unwanted gift — one he offered to the world, but could never quite give away.”

Or this paragraph, which engages the reader in the metaphors such that we’re almost colluding:

“I have a sharp memory of him standing in the living room with his head tipped back against the wall. The rooms on the first floor were papered in a very pale damask pattern, in that washed-out blue you see near the horizon when the sun is setting. He looked, as he stood there, as though he had been painted some centuries ago; in his face, the kind of indifference you get from powerful men, when they are tired.”

#28: Below my notes for The Actress is the beginning of my response to Candas Jane Dorsey’s The Adventures of Isabel. So hilariously literate, and Dorsey has ridiculous fun with postmodern/metafictional style. Cis-gendered bi female protagonist who does some undercover work as a drag queen — what’s not to love?!

And attention to apostrophes, advocacy for the Oxford comma! Hello, sign me up! The Adventures of Isabel is the first in the Epitome Apartments mystery series, and I’m ready for Volume Two. Pop over to YouTube to see and hear the author reading passages (pandemic-style, i.e. from an empty room).

My Instagram post.

After this romp, though, time for something much different.

Tsitsi Dangerembga’s The Mournable Body is difficult to read, but it’s an important book for those who want to know more about Africa, particularly about women’s lives there.  Powerful, painful, beautifully written, the novel is the third in a trilogy that began with Nervous Conditions which I posted about last month.

Over on Instagram, I posted photos of a few pages that I found particularly moving, pages in which Tambu sees the beauty of her country from the perspective of the (white, European or North American) tourists she guides.  Only in proximity to their moneyed privilege does she glimpse a Zimbabwe to which she has never had access.

I seem often to sandwich these more demanding, more troubling books between two mystery novels, and that’s exactly what I did in April, turning to Christobel Kent’s The Dead Season after finishing The Mournable Body. Pop over to Instagram if you’re curious about who else is interested in reading this very good mystery.

 

And then Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love — a wonderfully engaging novel about Art and Love, set in New York City and cleverly framed around Marina Abramovič’s performance piece The Artist Is Present. Highly recommended — my husband enjoyed it as well, and then we both watched the documentary about the amazing Art of sitting still for 700+ hours, silently, looking at the face of a succession of strangers.  Seven hours at a time, six days a week, over six months. . .  It’s a beautiful documentary (we watched it via the streaming service Kanopy, which Vancouver Public Library makes available to card-holders). . .   Instagram post here.

I’m not sure where I found the recommendation for The Museum of Modern Love, but I owe the next title,

Colm Toibin’s House of Names, to the New Fiction shelf at the local branch of the Vancouver Public Library. Really, I should never browse this shelf — nor the adjoining Fast Reads section (named Not because the books are necessarily quick or easy to read, but because it’s necessary to read them quickly as they must be returned within a week). Too many times my casual perusal of these shelves has played havoc with my TBR list. But who can resist serendipity, really?!

Instagram post here

And one more mystery to end my April reading. This one, Susan Hill’s The Benefit of Hindsight, I was alerted to by my friend Sue in her latest reading round-up. Not sure how I missed knowing there was a new Simon Serrailler mystery, but I put this On Hold at the library as soon as I found out — and within a week I picked up a copy. Again, damage was done to the order of my To Be Read list, but I’m all caught up with the Serrailler clan. Do you know this series? As you’ll see in my notes (if you can decipher my scribbles) I’d say that this volume in the series will be more satisfying to those who have read all the earlier titles. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it would work as a stand-alone mystery nor as an introduction to this very good mystery series (which I’ve just seen described as an Aga-Saga, surely because of the role Police Detective Serrailler’s sister, a GP, plays throughout, fleshed out by a growing family and a rambling country home, pets, meals, all the domestic goods).

And that’s it for my April reading — I’m sorry it’s taken me longer to post than I like, but I’ve been caught up these last few weeks with refurbishing my main blog. As well, I can’t deny that the spate of good weather we’ve had has pulled me away from the keyboard. . .

But I’m here now, and I’ll be keen to learn what you’ve been reading lately — and perhaps if you’ve read any of the books I mention here we could compare responses.

Happy Reading!