Recently the weekend is the time when I’ve just finished a book and am deciding what to read next. This weekend is no exception. Yesterday I finished Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, a book I first read as a young teenager. This is a dramatic romantic tragedy, first written in 1917. It tells the story of Hazel Woodus and her marriage to Edward Marston, the gentle, local church minister. Hazel is an innocent, a child of nature, wild and shy and a protector of all wounded and persecuted things. She becomes the prey of John Reddin, the squire of Undern who is obsessed by her. I’ll write more about it in a later post.
Because I enjoyed Gone to Earth so much it’s hard to find a suitable book to read next. I have started All Bones and Lies by Anne Fine, which is the choice for my local book club. But so far I’m not sure if I want to finish it. It’s about Colin and his mother, who could complain for Britain. He has a twin sister who is estranged from her mother, making up a unhappy family who don’t get on. It’s about old age and the problems of carers and up to now I’m not finding it at all uplifting. It paints a sad picture of the frustrations of old age and the problems of everyday life. I’ll give it a few more pages before deciding whether to finish it or not.
Other than that book, I have several library books I could read next.
- The Beacon by Susan Hill – a short book (154 pages), examining truth, mental health and memory. Maybe that’s not right for me today as it sounds like another family with problems.
- Missing Link by Joyce Holms – a new author for me, this book is a murder mystery a case for the detective duo Fizz and Buchanan. This one looks promising.
- The Missing by Andrew O’Hagan – about people who disappear from society, a merging of social history and memoir. Described on the back cover as ‘elegantly written, affecting and intelligent.’
I’ll also look at some of my own books, to reduce the growing pile of to-be-read books. I started A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book a while ago. I think I’ll start that one again, or maybe look at Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, or a shorter book such as The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch.
Although writing posts like this does help a bit to clarify my thoughts, sometimes I just can’t decide what to read next and today is one of those days.
BooksPlease 
I started Freedom by Franzen and I feel the way you do about the Fine book. I am not in the mood for the drama of life. I’m setting it aside for Bill Bryson’s At Home. Gotta be a less gloomy read.
Here’s my Sunday Salon: http://readerbuzz.blogspot.com/2010/11/sunday-salon-war-and-poetry-and.html
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Margaret – You do have an interesting selection. I would vote for the Holms, but then, that’s my bent. I’ll be very interested to see what you think of it.
And debnance, I love Bill Bryson!
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Debnance, I love Bill Bryson too, although I haven’t read that one.
Margot, I’m leaning towards reading the Holms book, but as I’ve started to look back over Ian Rankin’s Rebus books to write a page about each one I think I’ll be re-reading Knots and Crosses.
And I listened to Book Club this afternoon on BBC Radio 4 with Claire Tomalin talking about her biography of Thomas Hardy, which I began a few years ago and never finished, so now I want to read that as well.
By tomorrow I should have decided what to read – at the moment I’m torn.
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Did you really like Gone to Earth the second time round? I love Precious Bane, having discovered it via an absolutely wonderful mini-series adaptation of it years and years ago, I finally read it and adored it. Hence I assumed I would also like Gone to Earth, but I must have read it in a Stella Gibbons mood because I found it just too melodramatic.
When I blogged on it, I quoted this bit, which still makes me smile…
“Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky-shepherdless futile imponderable-and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.”
Good luck with deciding what to read next…mood is everything!
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Jane, Gone to Earth is melodramatic and it’s certainly doom-laden. I did like it this time round – I suppose I was in the mood for a romantic tragedy as opposed to modern fiction. I’m still writing my post on it – it’s taking me a while to crystalise my thoughts.
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