Top Ten Tuesday: Best Books I Read In 2021

Published on by Margaret17 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is Best Books I Read In 2021. I’ve read 18 books this year that I’ve rated 5* on Goodreads, so it’s difficult to choose the 10 ‘best ‘ books, but these are the ones that I enjoyed the most, in the order I read them:

The One I Was by Eliza Graham – historical fiction split between the present and the past following the lives of Benny Gault and Rosamund Hunter. Benny first came to Fairfleet in 1939, having fled Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport train. As an adult he bought the house and now he is dying of cancer. Rosamund returns to Fairfleet, her childhood home, to nurse Benny. I was totally engrossed in both their life stories as the various strands of the story eventually combined. 

English Pastoral by James Rebanks – nonfiction, inspirational as well as informative and it is beautifully written. I enjoyed his account of his childhood and his nostalgia at looking back at how his grandfather farmed the land. And I was enlightened about current farming practices and the effects they have on the land, depleting the soil of nutrients.

Ice Bound by Jerri Nielsen – nonfiction – Dr Jerri Nielsen was a forty-six year old doctor, who took a year’s sabbatical to work at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station in Antarctica, the most remote and perilous place on earth. In the dark Antarctic winter of 1999 she discovered a lump in her breast. Whilst the Pole was cut off from the rest of the world in total darkness she treated herself, taking biopsies and having chemotherapy, until she was rescued by the Air National Guard in October 1999. 

A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson – a novel focused on three main characters, Elizabeth, Liam and Clara, each perfectly distinct and finely described. The setting in a small town in North Ontario in 1972 is excellent. It looks back to events thirty years earlier when Elizabeth Orchard first met Liam who was then a small boy of 3 when he and his family lived in the house next door and the events that followed.

The Killing Kind by Jane Casey, a police procedural and a psychological thriller. It’s a mix of courtroom scenes, police interviews and terrifying action-packed scenes. I was totally engrossed in it right from its opening page all the way through to the end. 

Coming Up for Air by Sarah Leipciger – a beautiful novel, a story of three people living in different countries and in different times. How their stories connect is gradually revealed as the novel progresses. As the author explains at the end of the novel it is a mix of fact and fiction and has its basis in truth.

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris – historical fiction about the Dreyfus affair in 1890s France. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, was convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment at Devil’s Island. It’s narrated by Colonel George Picquart, who became convinced that Dreyfus was innocent. Harris goes into meticulous detail in staying accurate to the actual events, but even so this is a gripping book and I was completely absorbed by it from start to finish.

A Corruption of Blood by Ambrose Parry – a combination of historical fact and fiction, a tale of murder and medical matters, with the social scene, historical and medical facts slotting perfectly into an intricate murder mystery. It’s an exceptionally excellent murder mystery and an informative historical novel, with great period detail and convincing characters.

Fludd by Hilary Mantel – a dark fable of lost faith and awakening love amidst the moors.The story centres on Fludd, a young priest who comes to the Church of St Thomas Aquinas to help Father Angwin, a cynical priest who has lost his faith. I enjoyed it all immensely – partly about religion and superstition, but also a fantasy, a fairy tale, told with wit and humour with brilliant characterisation.

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay – the story of a party of nineteen girls accompanied by two schoolmistresses who set off from the elite Appleyard College for Young Ladies, for a day’s outing at the spectacular volcanic mass called Hanging Rock. The picnic, which begins innocently and happily, ends in explicable terror, and some of the party never returned. I loved the detailed descriptions of the Australian countryside and the picture it paints of society in 1900, with the snobbery and class divisions of the period.

Have you read any of these books? What books have you enjoyed the most this year?

Back to the Classics Challenge – Final Wrap-Up

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

This is the first year I’ve joined the Back to the Classics Challenge, hosted by Karen’s @ Books and Chocolate. The books have to be 50 years old  and fit in to twelve categories. I’ve completed just six of them. These are the books I read:

  • A 19th century classic: any book first published from 1800 to 1899 – Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens 1857, not my favourite Dickens but still enjoyable.
  • A 20th century classic: any book first published from 1900 to 1971 – Checkmate to Murder by E C R Lorac – 1944. What is fascinating in this book is the insight it gives into what life was like in wartime London, complete with the London fog and details of the blackout.
  • A classic by a woman author – Orlando by Virginia Woolf – 1928. The plot is extraordinary, beginning towards the end of Elizabeth I’s reign when Orlando is a young nobleman, and continuing for the next five hundred years to the start of the twentieth century. 
  • A classic by BIPOC author; that is, a non-white author. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I enjoyed this far more than I expected. It’s a great story, action-packed, and full of high drama and emotion.
  • A new-to-you classic by a favourite author — a new book by an author whose works you have already read. Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope. It’s the fourth book in Anthony Trollope’s series, the Chronicles of Barsetshire
  • A children’s classic – The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit. This is feel good’ book about a family living in a world long gone – in 1905. I enjoyed it, but would have loved it if I’d read it when I was a child.

I very much enjoyed this challenge. My favourite is The Mount of Monte Cristo. My thanks go to Karen for hosting this challenge!

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

I read the Wordsworth Classic edition of Little Dorrit with Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) and an Introduction and Notes by Peter Preston, University of Nottingham. As always, I read the Introduction after I’d read the novel. I finished reading it in June and started writing this review. But it is only today that I realised I hadn’t finished it, so, this post is not as detailed as I would like it to be.

Summary from the back cover:

Little Dorrit is a classic tale of imprisonment, both literal and metaphorical, while Dickens’ working title for the novel, Nobody’s Fault, highlights its concern with personal responsibility in private and public life. Dickens’ childhood experiences inform the vivid scenes in Marshalsea debtor’s prison, while his adult perceptions of governmental failures shape his satirical picture of the Circumlocution Office. The novel’s range of characters – the honest, the crooked, the selfish and the self-denying – offers a portrait of society about whose values Dickens had profound doubts.

Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens’ eleventh book, was published serially from 1855 to 1857 and in book form in 1857. The novel attacks the injustices of the contemporary English legal system, particularly the institution of debtors’ prison. I found it hard going in parts, ponderous, sombre and serious. But as it’s a long book other parts are more lively, comic and far more enjoyable. That said it is also long-winded, far too wordy, melodramatic with a multitude of characters and a long-drawn out and convoluted plot. It is a great sprawling epic of a novel.

It is satire and Dickens spares no one, but it is those sections that hold up the flow of the novel. I found the first rant at the corruption and workings of the government Circumlocution Office, explaining that its purpose is ‘How Not to Get Things Done’, entertaining at first, but eventually repetitive and increasingly incredible. The account of the Barnacle family going round and round in circles, producing nothing but red tape, became excruciatingly boring.

I can’t say that I particularly liked any of the characters, and some of them are merely caricatures. rather than characters. Little Dorrit is so meek and self-effacing and far too good for her own good. Her father, known as the Father of the Marshalsea, is a most annoying character. He is the prison’s longest inhabitant, the longest debtor, the one to whom the other prisoners pay homage which makes him pompous and full of his self-importance. So much so that he fails to realise he is exploiting Little Dorrit.

But it is Dickens’ description of life in the Marshalsea, a debtors’ prison, that fascinated me, based on Dickens own father’s imprisonment there. The families could live with the debtors and were free to come and go, until the prison gates were locked at night. It was a separate society that worked on a system of hierarchy, run by the prisoners who had access to a pub, The Snuggery, and a shop, for those who had money. But it carried a terrible stigma of shame and corrupted them all – even Little Dorrit lied to herself about her father’s true situation. Once you were imprisoned there was practically no way you could be freed, unless your debts were paid and that was impossible when you couldn’t earn any money.

There are so many characters and so many sub-plots that I’m not going to attempt to write about them, other than to say at times I was amused and bemused, caught up in the stories, and dismayed at its length and complexity. Although I’ve been critical of some of the novel in this post and I think it could be my least favourite of all of Dickens’ books that I’ve read, overall I did enjoy it enough to give it 3.5 stars on Goodreads.

Country Dance by Margiad Evans: a short review

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Country Dance by Margiad Evans, a novella, is set in the the border country between Wales and England in the late 19th century. It’s the story of Ann Goodman, the daughter of an English shepherd and a Welsh mother. It’s told in diary form, telling how she left her cousin’s farm, Twelve Poplars in Wales, for her parents’ home in England to look after her mother. She had promised Gabriel, an English shepherd working on her cousin’s farm that she would keep a diary of her visit to England.

Whilst in England her father’s employer, a Welsh landowner, Evan ap Evans, takes a fancy to her. When Gabriel visits her he is infuriated by Evan’s attentions to her, especially as they talk together in Welsh. And it is this relationship that sets in motion the conflict between the two men.

I was confused when I began reading, trying to work out these relationships and I wondered why Ann was living in Wales away from her parents – I don’t think that was ever explained. But anyway as she rejects both men this turns the book into a tragedy, with the English and the Welsh at each others’ throats, divided by language and profound misunderstandings. Ann, herself is equally torn between her dual heritage.

Whilst I didn’t love this book, I did enjoy reading it and would like to read more of Margiad Evans’ work.

Artist and writer Margiad Evans (Peggy Whistler) was born in Uxbridge in 1909. Her work includes Country Dance (1932); The Wooden Doctor (1933); Turf or Stone (1934), and Creed (1936), as well as non-fiction, short stories, autobiography and two collections of poetry, Poems from Obscurity (1947) and A Candle Ahead (1956). 

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Parthian Books (1 Dec. 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 110 pages
  • My Rating: 3*

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

Vintage Digital| Oct 2010| 210 pages| my own copy| 4*

I heard of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American years ago. So when it was on offer for 99p at Amazon three years ago I bought the e-book version, with an Introduction by Zadie Smith. It’s one of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. The nudge to read it now came from FictionFan’s Wanderlust Bingo as it fits nicely into the Southeast Asia Square as it is set in Vietnam * (see below). I don’t think I’ve read anything set in Vietnam before so I enjoyed it for its setting in Saigon and a glimpse of the situation in Vietnam under French colonialism in the early 1950s.

There are many natural storytellers in English literature, but what was rare about Greene was the control he wielded over his abundant material. Certainly one can imagine nobody who could better weave the complicated threads of war-torn Indochina into a novel as linear, as thematically compact and as enjoyable as The Quiet American. (Extract from Zadie Smith’s Introduction)

The Quiet American was first published in 1955 and is about America’s early involvement in Vietnam. It’s only the second book of Greene’s that I’ve read. The main characters are a cynical British journalist, Thomas Fowler, Phuong, a beautiful, young Vietnamese woman who lives with him, and Alden Pyle, a young and idealistic American – the ‘Quiet American,’ of the title. Phuong’s sister is keen for her and Fowler to marry, but he has a wife in England, who won’t agree to a divorce. Matters between all three characters come to a head when Pyle falls in love with Phuong and wants to marry her.

The book begins with a death and then goes back to the events that led up to that death. Although there is plenty of action the book revolves around these three characters and their relationships. Fowler is tired and jaded, addicted to opium and the thought of losing Phuong forces him to face the possibility of a lonely and bleak future. She meets his needs and prepares his opium pipes for him. Pyle, on the other hand is bright, confident and optimistic, certain that he can offer Phuong a better future.

The Americans at this time were not actively involved in the war against the Vietminh and Pyle has been sent to promote democracy and combat communism through a mysterious ‘Third Force’. However he is naive and gets involved in violent action causing injury and death to many innocent people. At that point Fowler realises he has to intervene.

*I know very little about Vietnam and its history, before the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s and was a little confused about what was happening during the period in which this book is set and the references to the Vietminh. So, I had to look it up – In the late 19th century Vietnam was controlled by the French. In September 1945 the Nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh proclaimed its independence. From 1946 to 1954, the French opposed independence, and Ho Chi Minh led guerrilla warfare against them in the first Indochina War that ended in the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954. (see Britannica)