A Suitable Girl

I’ve just read in the Independent Online that Vikram Seth is busy writing the sequel to his giant novel A Suitable Boy. The new book is, of course, going to be called A Suitable Girl. Seth has been paid an advance of 1.7 million pounds, and the new novel will be published in 2013. My God, I’ll be 45 years old, but it will be worth waiting for.

Seth is my favourite kind of novelist: he is lavish with words, he paints a huge canvas and he is political. He faces the issues head-on, tackles the problems of a continent without fear. As a writer, I admire the vastness, the breadth, the daring. As a reader, I can’t wait to dive in and be lost in that world. Go Vikram! And if you feel like finishing it a little earlier, there is one reader here who won’t complain.

As for the advance, I love it when novelists get treated like superstars.

15 Books in 15 Minutes

Emily tagged me to do this on Facebook, but I can’t have two places in my life for memes, so, having seen Natalia do it on her blog today, I’m doing it here – the Facebook 15 Books in 15 Minutes Meme.

Instructions: Don’t take too long to think about it. List 15 books you’ve read that will always stick with you — the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy the instructions into your own note, and be sure to tag the person who tagged you. (Like Natalia, I listed the books first and then went back and wrote descriptions.)

1. The Narnia series by CS Lewis Books I read over and over again as a child, which served as an escape from then-unpleasant reality and simultaneously offered hope. I have since read them with delight to my children.

2. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott My first vision of the sisterhood – and what a good one it was! Also, I believed I was born to be Jo, with a smattering of Meg thrown in for good measure.

3. Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery I was sold on the romance of the little orphan girl who makes a place for herself in the world by being garrulous, funny and frank, and still am. I’ve read this to my children and watched them laugh and cry as I did.

4. The Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter The first book that brought me an awareness of how good writing can capture the natural world. Her descriptions of the forest, the moths, the lunch-pail made me want to swoon. Also, it brought me the friendship of my dear G, who now lives far too far away from me.

5. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver A triumph of imaginative and honest writing. For me, the best of Shriver’s many excellent books. It sticks with me despite the horror of its content and because of the brilliance of her writing.

6. Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh This sticks with me as I’ve just read it, but also because it is written in the most glorious, riotous and dazzling language. As one reviewer said, if the next two books in the series are as good as this one, it is going to be one of the first classics of the twenty-first century.

7. Saturday by Ian McEwan The writer in me loves how he sustains the conceit of a single day in someone’s life throughout this long novel. The reader in me loves it for its immediacy and the brilliant building of suspense.

8. The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger A perfect love story. It will stick with me for the genuine, sincere love that the time traveller and his wife had for each other, and how Niffenegger sustained her challenging conceit from beginning to end.

9. Carrie by Stephen King I met the uncanny and fell in love. This book was my first introduction to how a writer can brilliantly work a theme and make your stomach churn at the same time.

10. Master Harold and the Boys by Athol Fugard This writer, above all other South African authors, wrote my political education and opened my eyes to the inequities of the land where I lived. Master Harold is a play, not a novel, and perhaps it was the immediacy of first the words and later seeing the play itself helped wake me from dreaming into reality.

11. The Group by Mary McCarthy This was written in the Fifties, and will stick with me for its excellent writing and its vision of the sisterhood, but particularly for an incredibly graphic scene in a gynaecologist’s office. I’ve never read anything like it.

12. The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer I studied this in my final year of school and adored it for the vivid characterisations that brought another age to life. That Chaucer was quite a storyteller.

13. What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt I love this beautiful book of Hustvedt’s. It contains one of the most gut-wrenching, acute descriptions of grief that I have ever read. I don’t know if I will ever have the courage to re-read it.

14. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie I have said that this will be a classic, and I stick by my guns. It’s a superb novel, that manages to combine political exegesis and humane characterisations without losing the latter to the former. An object lesson on how to bring history and politics to vivid life.

15. A Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver This is not the Kingsolver book that you find most people talking about, but I love it for its suppressed eroticism and lush descriptions of nature. It will always stick with me for the sex scene that never happens.

Revolutionary Road

(Spoiler alert!)

I have just finished reading Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, on which the current movie starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio is based. I haven’t seen the film, and on the basis of the book – no matter how winsome and well-coiffed Kate and Leo may be – I won’t. It’s not that I am afraid of sad movies (I saw The Reader this weekend, which is one hundred levels of sad), it’s that I am tired, tired, tired of the storyline Wife Gives Up Everything for Husband’s Career, Becomes Depressed and, By Mistake or Not, Offs Herself.

Revolutionary Road is a book of its time, 1961, where wives were mostly at home and husbands were mostly at work and anyone who crossed those rigid gender lines was considered downright odd or desperate. I give it that. Another thing I give it is that it is strongly written and the characters are crystalline and piercing. Yates has a way into their heads that is compelling, that leaves you almost breathless with its frank and disturbing insight.

My objection is which characters’ heads he enters. As readers, we know a lot about Frank Wheeler, the Husband. We know that he is very impressed with himself, that he loves his own verbiage and his ironic and cutting take on his now far too suburban life. We know that Frank considers himself an iconoclast even though he is rather ordinary, and that his rebellions are typecast (affair with secretary, daytime drinking, not taking his job seriously). Frank believes in his own PR that he is an artistic soul searching for meaning and the way to handle the vast gap between that belief and his life is to take nothing seriously, and wield irony at every turn. His tragedy is that he does choose the conventional path, and that is what sets off the horror of this story.

Another character into whose head we delve is Frank’s neighbour and friend, Shep Campbell. We know that Shep ran away from his privileged background, went to an ordinary college and prides himself on marrying Millie, daughter of a painter, whom he has helped to rise above her station and who now has decorated her home almost as well as April Wheeler has done. Despite being proud of Millie’s pulling herself by her bootstraps, Shep is frantically in love with April. We spend a goodly amount of time in his head as he sways between the two poles of Millie and April.

The third character to whom Yates devotes head time is the Wheeler’s estate agent Helen Givings, who is a bundle of neuroses. Older than Frank and April, she has adopted them as her favourite couple and earmarked them as potential friends for her schizophrenic son John, who lives in a nearby asylum, but who is allowed out for visits. Helen believes that by spending time with nice young people like the Wheelers, John will have a sniff of how normal life could be. She takes him and her ancient deaf husband Howard to visit Frank and April three times, and each visit is dominated by John’s rapid social unravelling. The book ends in Helen’s head, a blur of guilt and anaesthetizing domestic detail.

My question for the sadly now deceased Richard Yates is, where is April is in all this? We see her through Frank’s eyes, through Shep’s eyes and through Helen’s, and yet, despite the fact that she is the one character with a concrete plan, with a dream that she is actually going to follow through, we are never in her head. The only time we have April head space is in the last chapter, where she enacts her fatal self-abortion. Logically, I understand that she needs to remain opaque through the narrative in order to make this final act so overwhelmingly defeating and tragic. But as a woman, I feel enraged that she is silent until she kills herself by mistake.

Here, at the end of the novel, is what April has to say:

Then you discovered you were working at life the way the Laurel Players worked at The Petrified Forest, or the way Steve Kovick worked at his drums – earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong; you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and “We’ve got to be together in this thing” when you meant the very opposite, then you were breathing gasoline as if it were flowers and abandoning yourself to the delirium of love under the weight of a clumsy, grunting red-faced man you didn’t even like – Shep Campbell! – and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn’t know who you were.

Although April believes she doesn’t know who she is, she has an active plan for her family to escape their stultifying life.  Her plan is to move to Paris, get a diplomatic job so that Frank can wander around the city and find himself. However, Frank has received a job offer at work for a much better position and he is absolutely torn between the Paris dream and the reality of an improved career. When April falls pregnant for the third time, this stifles her plan and allows Frank to consider his work offer. By aborting the baby, she is trying to stick to her plan, to save herself and her family, and on an emotional level, it absolutely enraged me that she had to die. By killing her off, no gender lines get imploded, Frank can advance his career, hand his children over to his older brother to look after and be free to continue to indulge himself. Problem solved.

Perhaps anything else is too much to expect from a mid-twentieth century male writer like Richard Yates, and I am being unfair. However I want to read and write novels where the patriarchy gets blown out of the water, novels where women change their lives, speak out loud in voices that aren’t always mellifluous, enact their dreams; novels where their breasts or the length of their thighs don’t get a mention; novels where they are allowed to know just exactly who they bloody well are.

Reading in 2008

I’ve dived into 2009 with a delicious orgy of reading. The kids are still on holiday, it’s minus bloody something outside and I’ve got a blankie and a pile of Christmas books to work through. Luxury! So far I’ve read both of Barack Obama’s books (Dreams from my Father and Audacity of Hope) and Elizabeth George’s latest massive tome, the 530-page Careless in Red. I have also read and cooked from my wonderful birthday present, Nigella Lawson’s latest recipe book Nigella Express. (I can recommend the fudge.) Now I am reading Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which I bought in New York last year, and which promises to be delightful. More time under the blankie is predicted. Pity the fudge is finished though.

But before I get carried away with this year’s reading, and before 2008 dissolves completely, I thought I’d better review last year’s books. My total for the year was 53 books, which my old self finds disappointing since she fondly imagined she always read at least 100 books a year. Turns out I don’t: in 2007, I read 81 and this year 18 books fewer. My new self knows why – I spent more time writing than reading in 2008, and I hope that 2009 will be the same. I don’t subscribe to reading goals, though I admire those who do, but found that I consciously avoided literary fiction and books set in South Africa because I wanted to avoid any crossover with what I am writing. I read a lot of memoirs, some chick lit, some thrillers and a couple of books from the start of last century. Turns out, though, that my favourite reads of the year were litfic, so that probably is my natural reading home.

Here are the stats:

Fiction: 34 (64%)

Non-fiction: 19 (35%)

Short story collections: 1 (1.8%)

Memoirs: 11 (20%)

True crime: 1 (1.8%)

Books on AIDS: 3 (5.6%)

Thrillers: 5 (9.4%)

Books by women: 36 (67%)

Books by non-Anglo American writers: 10 (18%)

Dry stats aside, here are my awards:

Book of the Year:

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimimanda Ngozi Adechie – superb prose, wonderfully drawn characters and a history lesson all in one package. A wonderful book, destined to become a classic.

Runner-up: Richard Ford’s trilogy, of which I have only read The Sportswriter and The Lay of the Land. Ford deserves all the paeans and praise he receives for he is a wonderful writer. The surprise for me in both books was his characterization of the Tri-State area: in Ford’s skillful hands, it becomes a protagonist itself.

Find of the Year:

Geraldine Brooks! I read all three of her novels this year and was most impressed. She has a facility with bringing a specific historical period to life, be it Civil War USA, plague-ridden England or post-war Serbia.

Blogging Recommendation of the Year:

Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, recommended by Litlove. I loved this novel for its powerful, tragic story and rushed off to present it to my book club only to discover that all US members had read it either in high school or at university. Not so new to them though, but a wonderful find for me.

Thriller of the Year:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson – a gripping plot and ace characterization. I look forward to reading his two other novels.

Most Disappointing Thriller of the Year:

PD James’s The Private Patient. Oh dear, the master of the art was off-form with this one: plot didn’t gel, characters weren’t clearly or thoroughly realized and the motive for murder was vague, at best.

Most Hard-Hitting Non-Fiction:

A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous. This had strong contenders in The Gifts of the Body and Sizwe’s Test, but its frank telling of Berlin in the dying days of World War II was brutal.

Most Spectacularly Annoying Protagonist:

Undine Spragg of The Custom of the Country – what a grasping, power-hungry and superficial woman. A fascinating portrayal of avarice by the stylist extraordinaire, Edith Wharton. (I did I envy Undine’s wardrobe, though.)

Memoir Writer With Whom I Would Most Like To Have Dinner:

Anthony Bouraine, without a doubt. Especially if he’s cooking.

Protagonist I Most Wanted to be Friends With:

The Girls of Riyadh! What a fabulous bunch. Of all the chick-lit books I read, this one stands out the most in my memory (they often melt into a messy, love-stricken whole).

Book that Brought on Landscape Envy:

The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg. Despite the irritating title, it made me long for Africa.

Right now, with temperatures sinking and snow outside, I’m still longing for Africa. So my plan is to burrow further under my blankie and read some more. My reading resolution for 2009 is write more than I read, and post more frequent reviews. To kick-off, I will review one of my 2009 books – vote in the comments for which one you would like me to review.

Wishing you a wonderful reading year!

The Gifts of the Body

People who are dying are not statistics. People who are dying are loved ones; parents and children, family and friends. People who are dying have bodies, dying human bodies with needs identical to the needs of those of us with healthy bodies. We understand so much about AIDS now – how it transmits, how the virus cruelly mutates, how it takes over the immune system, how drugs can help, how if they come too late, they can’t. What very few of us understand, unless we are medical personnel or close to someone who is dying, is how people die. We understand that the body slowly gives up and that the basic functions fail, but we don’t understand how that feels. We don’t understand how hard it is to have our needs met when we are dying.

The Gifts of the Body is a small, spare book written from the perspective of a home-care worker who visits people with AIDS in their homes, and who helps them in their day-to-day care as they are dying. The unnamed narrator describes the basic care she gives – washing someone, making someone a meal, creaming someone’s sore-covered body with salve. She does not give you the individual stories, you do not know how or why people became infected, but she takes you into their bedrooms and shows you how people sustain life in the face of death. In doing so, she gives you their humanity.

In the chapter The Gift of Hunger, the narrator visits Connie who has received some Vermont maple syrup as a gift from her daughter. It is a symbolic gift of happier times, but Connie is desperate to eat it, so the narrator makes her pancakes to have with the syrup. Connie is so hungry that she asks her to make her an egg on the side too. After four painstaking bites, she can’t eat any more, but she is still hungry so she asks for some oatmeal. Connie manages one agonising mouthful of oatmeal before her body revolts and she must expel the food. The simple tragedy is that Connie is dying to eat. She is desperate for the taste, the flavours, the nourishing memories that food brings, but her body cannot tolerate it.

Another chapter I found moving was The Gift of Skin, in which the narrator describes bathing someone. It is so simple, and so beautiful:

I squeezed the cloth under the water then pulled it up his forearm to his elbow.

He took a deep breath, “Oh, that feels so nice.”

I cupped water in my hands and poured it down his arm. I washed his elbows and arms and toweled them dry. I washed the hollows of his armpits and his ribs. I washed his back and stomach and shoulders. When the water began to cool I filled the pan again with fresh warm waters and fresh clean oil. I did his neck and face. I washed his forehead and eyelids and around his beard and mouth. The air began to smell like oil, like mint or eucalyptus.

I sat on the floor and washed his feet. I poured the water over them.

He looked down at me. He touched my head. His face was full of kindness. “Thank you,” he said.

Other chapters include The Gift of Tears, when tear ducts fail and someone cannot cry no matter how much they want to; The Gift of Speech, when words fail and a person is too weak to talk; and The Gift of Sweat when a simple walk down the street to the bakery precipitates a visit to hospital. They are written without sentimentality, and yet they tore at my heart, because eating, crying, talking and walking are basic functions which I take for granted but which are, in fact, gifts not to be taken lightly.

The Gifts of the Body is the best book about AIDS I have ever read. The author, Rebecca Brown, is a former home-care worker and her compassion for the dying and unstinting generosity in meeting people’s needs is astonishing. It is not entirely clear to me if this is a work of fiction or non-fiction, but in the reading it begins not to matter. It just a book about one person helping others. The narrator sees people for who they are and she recognises what they need. It is a book about empathy.

On 1 December, World AIDS Day, and every day, empathy is what we need to have. After all, we are all human.

Further reading for World AIDS Day:

Natalian’s moving tribute to her manager J, who died of “TB” in Durban a few years ago.

Sharon from The Not So Secret Life of Us, writes about volunteering with AIDS babies at Nazareth House in Cape Town.

Julie Belle’s message of love.

Christopher’s review of the movie Longtime Companion.

John Self’s review of Adam Mars-Jones’ Monopolies of Loss, a book of short stories about AIDS.

Atherton Bartelby’s tribute to a beloved friend.

* If you have a World AIDS Day post, please let me know and I will link to it here.

Which Book Shall I Take to New York?

In four sleeps’ time, I depart for my long-awaited holiday in New York with my dear friend, V. Not the world’s lightest packer, I am beset with decisions: what clothes to take, which shoes, do I need a cocktail dress, what to leave behind, laptop or no laptop? When I get there will my first drink be a Manhattan or a G&T? What’s in a Manhattan anyway? First Avenue or Century 21? Big Broadway show or little smoky dive? Pastrami or lox? You can see, dear reader, that I am troubled. In a good way. But the one question that is literally keeping me awake at night is: which book to take on the plane? And you can save me by voting in the poll below.

Do I take the latest Candace Bushnell novel, to get me into major retail-therapy, Carrie Bradshawesque Manhattan mode? Do I take my teenage favourite Catcher in the Rye for a taste of Fifties New York noir? Or should I take a classic in order to picture the city in a more innocent and genteel time?

In order to ensure that I arrive in the city fresh, without disfiguring bags under my eyes from lack of sleep, please help me decide which novel should accompany me on the plane. PollDaddy will allow you to make another suggestion, if you disparage my choices. Enjoy testing out WordPress’s new poll functionality, to which I potentially could become addicted. (I imagine future polls: “Reader, should I get up or stay in bed?”, “Wine or chocolate?”, “Love-god: Barack Obama or Colin Firth?”)

So without further ado, I give you the big question:

Thank you for voting! I’ll be so glad you did.

Pouting and Reading

To quote the Sunday Times, I’ve been “doing a lot of pouting and staying in bed late”, not because I’m Madonna, but because I’ve had a three-day migraine. Germany’s top husband has, as the article says, been playing chef, diplomat and domestic fluffer, which has included his coming into the bedroom frequently and putting down the blinds to rest my eyes. About 30 seconds after he leaves I leap up, and roll them up again so that I can read. It probably prolonged the headache, but I can’t lie in bed during the day and not read. Also, the books were so good that I had to.

First up was Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book, which definitely rates as my third book of the year (first was Half of a Yellow Sun and second was The Lay of the Land). People of the Book is hard to define – it’s part thriller, part love-story, part historical novel and part something all its own. I got that shivery feeling on the first page that I was going to love it, and I did (no, it wasn’t the migraine). It tells the story of Hanna, an Australian book restorer who is called to Sarajevo in 1996 on behalf of the UN to restore an ancient Jewish manuscript – the Haggadah – which was rescued from destruction during the Bosnian war by its Muslim librarian. Hanna restores the text, but also finds objects between its pages – a grain of salt, a fragment of a butterfly wing, a wine stain – that give her clues to the book’s previous owners. Large sections of the novel are given to uncovering who these people, the people of the book, were and tracing the Haggadah’s journey from Spain to Italy and finally to Sarajevo over a 500-year period.

Geraldine Brooks was a war correspondent in Bosnia, Somalia and the Middle East and People of the Book is testament to her experience in parts of the world where many cultures meet and her journalistic ability to uncover and represent facts. The novel traces the history of the Jews in Europe, and thus the history of religious intolerance and prejudice, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Venetian Geto to the cultural richness that was Sarajevo before the World War II via characters who become curators and care-takers of the book. I found this part of the novel fascinating, and the way she winds it into the modern strand reminded me a little of Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth or Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.

However, Brooks is also now a prize-winning novelist, and it is her ability to imagine characters that is her ultimate success. Hanna is a completely appealing narrator: she has a snappy, self-deprecating Aussie wit, an appalling relationship with her mother which provides a satisfying sub-plot and a penchant for heroes disguised as librarians. Her passion for restoration and detail, which in other hands could have been dull, illuminates the novel so that, as a reader, I felt as if I was on her journey with her, uncovering the people and the history of the book.

People of the Book is about layers and mysteries, about history and fiction, and about ordinary people who in moments of historical crisis, become heroes. Apart from being a superb read, it also strongly underlines the fact that religious intolerance and the struggle for Muslim, Jew and Christian to co-exist peacefully is an ancient one. However, since the curators of the Haggadah were, over the centuries, Muslim and Christian as well as Jewish, Brooks’ message is a positive one: that people who love the written word will try to overcome their differences in order to save books. For, as Hanna reminds us:

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

That happy note leads me to the second book I read this weekend. It was a toss-up between the new Le Carre and, after a shuffle through my to-be-read pile, another Brooks’ novel The Year of Wonders. I decided on a feast of Geraldine, and I was rewarded. TYOW rests on Brooks’ twin pillars of historical veracity (the evocation of an English village in 1666, the Plague year) and compelling, believable characters. Having read March earlier this year, I am in awe of her ability to imagine herself into a distant world and make it real through a combination of exacting research and beautiful writing. Thanks to her, I forgot my migraine and stopped pouting, just for a while.

Garrulous Girls and Other Orphans

I am revisiting my childhood obsession with Anne of Green Gables by reading it aloud to my two enraptured daughters. I’m loving how the book is working its magic on my girls, just as it did on me. My grandmother worked as a school librarian and I was allowed to sit in the library while she worked, or wonder quietly amongst the shelves trailing my hands along the lovely cool spines of the books. Since it was a high school, many of the books were too advanced for me, but then I found Anne and fell in love. I was delighted by her zest, and learnt many useful phrases (”kindred spirit”, “scope for imagination”, “bosom friend”) which I immediately incorporated into my daily life.

It has been interesting reading Anne of Green Gables, which was published in 1908, directly after Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) and Pollyanna (1913), since they all have the same synopsis: garrulous orphan girl goes to live with spinster and bachelor/spinster aunts and eventually wins their chilly unyielding hearts with her unique optimistic world-view and amusing talkativeness. In all three books, the orphaned child must enter a rather adult world and learn to live in it, but not without bringing her own charm to warm the childless household. The orphan gets a family; the spinster a child, and all is well with the world. It was clearly a formula that worked, as all three books were popular in their time and are classics now.

Much of children’s literature centres on the symbol of the orphan. In order for a book to grasp a child’s imagination, the small protagonist must battle alone in an unfriendly or fantastic world, without the help of adults. This gives the reader a chance to imagine herself into that situation and live with the thrilling possibility of a world with no grown-ups, where she has to make decisions and take the consequences. There are three main categories: orphans in the real world like the three books above, orphans in a fantastic world like Peter Pan or Harry Potter, or where children function in the real world but are left to their devices by their parents (most of Enid Blyton’s books, Swallows and Amazons, the Just William series). It is necessary for adults to be dead or absent or threatening in order to make the reading experience a thrilling one.

One book that springs to mind where an adult is present and part of the action is Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World, but even there Danny’s father is a renegade fighting the status quo (a poacher), and the positive outcome of the story depends on Danny alone. There is a scene where Danny must drive his father’s car alone, which resulted in many childhood nightmares for me – clearly a little too much autonomy for me to cope with.

In all good children’s books, the child protagonist must effect a change – defeat an evil wizard, beat the pirates, escape the wicked aunts, win the chocolate factory, find the missing parents – and this allows the powerless child reader to enjoy the vicarious pleasure of being in control, making adult decisions and being given free reign. In last night’s chapter from Anne of Green Gables, Anne’s temper got the better of her and she lashed out at the dreaded Mrs Rachel Lynde:

‘I hate you,’ she cried in a choked voice, stamping her foot on the floor. ‘I hate you – I hate you – I hate you -’ a louder stamp on each assertion of hatred. ‘How dare you call me skinny and ugly? How dare you say I am freckled and red-headed? You are a rude, impolite, unfeeling woman!’

I can’t tell you how much my children enjoyed that.

Reading Matters

Instead of writing, I have been reading, getting through swathes of books and loving them. Here are some:

Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Described as Burroughs’ “debut memoir” since he has recently published another that is a prequel to this, Running With Scissors is graphic, shocking, unputdownable and, according to some of the people who were there, not entirely true. It tells the story of what apparently happens when Burroughs’ mother, an unsuccessful and suicidal poet, hands her teenage son over to her psychiatrist to live in his spectacularly unconventional household that includes a paedophile who immediately starts a relationship with the boy. Die-hard Burroughs fans don’t seem to care whether RWS is memoir, creative nonfiction or pure fantasy, and I would have to say I agree. It reads like a novel, the characters are grotesquely fascinating, and Burroughs’ voice is an enticing admixture of knowing and innocent. If you enjoyed A Million Little Pieces and weren’t particularly bothered whether that was reality or part-fiction, you would find RWS fascinating. Like reality TV, it’s gruesome, but it’s hard to get up and switch it off.

The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford

Words fail me. Nothing I try to write does justice to the broad sweeping vision and forensic scrutiny that Ford applies to American suburbia in this novel. There isn’t a bad note; every paragraph contains jewels that seem to slip simply into the text without any indication of the sweat and work that must have gone into writing this book. To combine such a superb evocation of suburbia with such an empathetic writing of what it is to be a middle-aged man in America in the year 2000 makes Ford a master storyteller. On top of that it is funny, which I always like. I will now go backwards and read the first two parts of the Frank Bascombe trilogy. I just hope I won’t be disappointed. The Lay of the Land is up there with Half of a Yellow Sun as one of my books of 2008. It’s simply superb.

Giving Up The Ghost by Hilary Mantel

Mantel’s memoir is evocative, yet slippery. The ghosts of the title are many: the children she is never able to have after her hysterectomy at 27; the long-dead parents and grandparents she left behind in northern England to move to London, the ghosts of herself in homes in England, Botswana and Jeddah. Houses are important in the memoir, as are the memories interred in them. For a couple of years, Mantel was actually a neighbour of mine in a converted lunatic asylum outside London, where she says visitors ask her if she is afraid of ghosts. No, she says, but she was a ghostlike and mysterious presence there, especially to an aspiring writer who would have liked to have trapped her in the car-park to talk books. Giving Up the Ghost is a moving read that focuses mostly on her northern Catholic childhood and her longterm suffering with endometriosis and depression. I was pleased to fill out the ghostly image of the neighbour I always fantasised about meeting, but still came away knowing little about her.

The Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower

If stonking great historical novels are your thing, then this is the book for you. Set in England in the time of William the Conqueror, it focuses on a passionate love affair between William’s half brother Odo, a Bishop, and Gytha, one of the women working on the Bayeux tapestry. It’s fascinating, fun and lively. The dust jacket says The Needle in the Blood “is a powerful tale of sex, lies and embroidery”, which, following Victoria’s enthusiastic review on Eve’s Alexandria, was more than enough to sell it to me. Happily, it lived up to both its own and Victoria’s promise.

And now I’m about to settle down with Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. How lucky am I?

Green and Fabulous

If you want to be green but can’t face wearing hemp, if you get frozen in the supermarket deciding whether to buy the organic Italian apples wrapped in plastic or the non-organic apples that are loose and local, and if you feel guilty every time you let the tap run but still have to bath now and again, then Christie Matheson’s book Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style is the book for you.

As Matheson says in the introduction, ” … we need to embrace the fabulousness of green living. And it is fabulous. Being green can help you look gorgeous, have a killer wardrobe, feel amazing, travel in style, create a home that’s an oasis, host fun parties, eat incredible food, and drink phenomenal wine, all while feeling more connected to your friends, family and nature.” She says that while buying an eco-friendly cashmere jersey will not stop global warming, it is the change in mindset, in starting to become conscious consumers, that will help us to reduce our individual contributions and encourage systemic change.

This week I bought some clothes for my kid, who needed shorts and T-shirts for summer. I have heard that you should wash new clothes before wearing them because of the chemicals shops spray on them to make them hang nicely, but I had never believed it until now. He put on one of his new T-shirts and within an hour had a rash across his neck. Cue parental guilt and vows only to purchase organic cotton tees from now on. Green is clearly not only good for the planet, but good for our health too.

Matheson’s book is clearly divided into useful chapters, from being green at home, to eating and drinking green, beauty, fashion, transportation and travel. There’s even a chapter on how to throw a green party. When I read blogs on the environment, like the No Impact Man or wonderful books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, my main reaction – apart from being grateful that there are people out there who are actually doing something about the environment – is to be intimidated and then feel guilty. Although in many ways we are a fairly green household, there is still room for improvement: we run two cars, still sometimes buy food in plastic wrapping, drink bottled water, forget to switch our computers off, even (aargh, pains me to admit) use paper napkins sometimes. Once I feel guilty, I get overwhelmed and can’t imagine how I could even start to change these things that prey on my conscience.

What Matheson does so well is to praise the baby steps. She’s not saying we all need to get solar panels tomorrow, but she is saying that we should be aware and start to make small changes in our lives. Very kindly, like a lovely big sister, she points out the small changes we can make. Here are some that resonated with me:

* Time how long your standard shower takes and then challenge yourself to cut it down

* Keep a full fridge (if you don’t have a large family like mine, fill it with organic wine instead of food) and only run a full dishwasher

* Avoid PVC in any form – it is evil

* Choose local and non-organic over organic food that has travelled a long distance (but long-distance organic is better than long-distance non-organic)

* Eat more whole food – it puts less strain on the environment than processed food (bye-bye chilli rice cakes … sniff)

* Cut back on meat – it is also a strain on the environment

* Use chemical-free lipsticks – the chemical ones contain a long list of hideous ingredients which we eat since they are on our lips. Yuck!

* Edit your closet so that you only shop for clothes you need

* Buy organic rather than conventional cotton, which is the most pesticide-intensive farming in the world

* Drive smoothly (no abrupt braking) and stick to the speed limit

* Switch the car’s air conditioning off and open a window

* Use the car wash instead of washing it yourself (or you could leave it dirty, like mine)

I have cherry-picked (ahem, nature pun alert) the tips that I can actually imagine myself doing, but there are many more which might resonate with you in this excellent book. For US readers, Matheson includes a long list at the end of her favourite eco-friendly retailers, many of whom have websites.

To celebrate all that is green, I would like to offer Green Chic to one of my fabulous readers. Just put your name in the comments if you’re interested, and in the course of this week I will draw a winner.

Now I’m off to town (on foot) to return some books to the library (borrowing, not consuming)!