Gold Star

This is what I am giving myself for achieving my writing retreat goal of 12,000 words - and I did in five days instead of six! I completed a chapter and wrote two more. Very thrilling. And there was an unexpected twist at the end of Chapter Eight, which surprised even me. The tension is growing, my characters are all over the show: confused, ashamed, emotional, seeking guidance and resolution. I am going to have to head on in there and sort the lot of them out, but rest assured, the ending won’t be too neat.

As my reward, I’m off to the Bergmannstrasse yoga studio for an hour and half’s class, after which I’m meeting a friend for dinner. I think I may even allow myself a celebratory glass of wine - my first since I arrived here.

I think it is richly deserved.

Berlin Diary

Please may I interrupt my writing schedule (8,000 words and counting) to tell you a few things, about me and about Berlin.

Firstly, if I lived alone permanently I would talk to myself out loud and eat straight from the fridge without bothering to use a plate, so I am very grateful to my darling family for keeping me on the right side of civilised.

Secondly, I like to shop but very large department stores confuse me and I have to head for the coffee-shop for recuperative chunks of cake. Yesterday, however, I found the perfect department store - just one size up from bijou, it has an excellent mixture of designer wear to just look at and more affordable street-wear from a mixture of French, British and German designers. The Galleries Lafayette on Friedrichstrasse is beautifully designed around a central glass cone, so I couldn’t get lost. It was also conveniently having its summer sales, so I found one or two lovely items at seriously reduced prices. Having enjoyed that success, I then went down to the foodhall and discovered to my absolute joy, that they have a concession for the Laduree macaroons which are, frankly, the most delicious things I have ever eaten in my life, ever. I ordered four small ones - rose petal (!), salted butter caramel (!!), chocolate and pistachio - but only ate the first two and took the other two home. They are a pastel taste sensation. I love this city!

Then I went into bookshops and flirted dangerously with buying more books than I could carry. Next, I walked up Unter den Linden to Bebelplatz - scene of the Nazi’s first book-burning in 1933 - where there was an open-air book fair. I bought some more books, this time for my kids. There were white marquees up, with writers giving readings, and a children’s tent with books to read, pictures to colour in and a man doing a reading from a pirate-book. I also picked up a flyer to LesArt, a centre of literature for children and young people based in Berlin, that arranges literary events for kids and trains adults, whether parents or professionals such as librarians, how to foster a love of literature in the young. Did I mention that I love this city?

Then I went for a very long walk to the Jüdisches Museum in northern Kreuzberg. It chronicles 2000 years of Jewish history in Germany, and is stunningly detailed, with interesting multimedia effects that even the youngest visitors could enjoy. There is one section dedicated to the Holocaust, and this is reflected in the architecture - an imposing steel-clad building designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind. Inside, the building is divided into three axes - the Axis of the Holocaust, which leads to the empty and haunting Holocaust Tower; the Axis of Exile which leads to a garden of tilting concrete columns that left me feel nauseous and anxious and which is supposed to evoke the discomfort of exile, and the Axis of Continuity, which leads to a very long, steep staircase and the rest of the exhibition. It was very impressive, and tiring.

This morning I took a walk along the Landwehrcanal, zigzagged through various Kreuzberg streets, and ended up in the Hasenheide park on the border of Kreuzberg and Neukölln. Then I strolled back to my favourite Kreuzberg hangout, Bergmannstrasse, for an early lunch of salad, carrot juice (we writers have to keep our strength up) and hummus at Knofi.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some writing to do …

Things To Do Instead of Writing

You can spend time with friends, with old friends, who because you haven’t seen them for so long, seem like new friends, and with new friends, who because you feel so strangely at one with them, seem like old friends. You can drink wine with them in the afternoon, share your kids with them, wander new streets with them, and make extravagant promises to babysit their kids, once they have some.

You can spend an entire afternoon in Berlin looking for the perfect dress. You can look for something whimsical and floaty, with tea roses and cleavage, that looks like Jane Austen wore it to a party where there was croquet and Indian tea, but finally buy a twenty-first century dress, a little edgy, a little sharp, but with its curves in the right places. Also with cleavage.

You can drive long distances, to places you never dreamt of visiting, take trains where your children press their noses against the windows, ride bikes around the city of your dreams, bump into pedestrians and mutter sorry in two languages. You can float down a river, or down a leafy path in the Tiergarten and hear the white wolves howl at the daylight in the Zoo.

You can read A Quiet Flame and imagine the encroaching horror of Nazism in Thirties’ Berlin, and then read No one belongs here more than you and be swept away into an imagination and a sensibility that leaves you shell-shocked, war-wounded, but glad to be alive.

You can eat the best ice-cream outside of Elba in a glass palace of shops and elegance, merguez sausages and couscous in a leafy beer-garden, white asparagus with hollandaise sauce in an achingly hip urban square and the best rhubarb cake you can imagine in the courtyard of an Italian restaurant where you are introduced to the chef and the hostess by name.

You can climb with your children to the top of the Siegesauele, admire them hanging upside down and learning to swing and slide by themselves in playgrounds, watch them falling in love with your friends and weeping when they part, and see them take part in their lives with such spirit and joy that you want to shed tears of your own.

Instead of weeping, you shout, “Who loves Berlin?” and hear them yelling back, “Me Mummy! I love Berlin! I love it! I do!”

Skiing By Numbers

25 - Blue runs skiied

24 - Public usages of bad language

23 - Age of my skiing instructor

21 - Age of the other person on my ski course

18 - Age difference between her and me

17 - Times I kept the youngsters waiting

15 - Minutes Daisy waited at the bottom of the slope on the day we “skiied down the mountain together”

10 - Red runs skiied

8 - Humiliating fear-related tumbles

7 - Times my children flew over my head in a lift screaming “Look, everyone, there’s our Mummy!” as I tried to lever myself out of the snow on the edge of a cliff

5 - Hot chocolates consumed on slopes

4 - Times I nearly fell off the lift

6 - Days in which I skiied

6 - Nights in which I went to bed early

1 - Night in which I partied

4 - Glasses of red wine I drank that night

6 - Jaegermeisters I drank that night

3 - Songs I sang loudly into the microphone - with dancing - for the listening pleasure of my audience (Sweet Caroline, Mustang Sally and can’t remember the other one)

1 - Time I cried at breakfast

1 - Wonderful new friend made on skiing holiday

1 - Full-body massage enjoyed

1 - Cheese fondue relished

1 - Black run skiied

0 - Disfiguring accidents

Clearly I have this skiing lark taped.

Feeling a Bit Piste

I’m off skiing on Saturday. Not my greatest talent, skiing. However, having stunned both Austria and Italy in years previous with my abilities on the piste, I have decided to share the love with the inhabitants of Switzerland. The good burghers are already preparing the essential cheese fondues and hot chocolates that are necessary to keep a skier of my remarkable and note-worthy skills upright on the piste. In other words, reward! The only reason I ski is so that I can enjoy numerous, sumptuous, guilt-free hot chocolates afterwards. Oh, and to keep an eye on my children whose skills are far superior to mine. Not only do they gloat over their pristine German, but they gloat over their pristine parallel turns while laughing mockingly at my inelegant snow-plough and tendency to spend a lot of time sitting down.

Little buggers. They are so lucky to be learning to ski as kids, while I have to do the same as a not particularly fit nor agile adult who grew up having beach holidays. In Africa, there was not a lot of snow happening. Give me a beach and I fit in nicely: I do the book, sunglasses and towel thing spectacularly well. I even get in the sea and shriek, and have been known to toss a frisbee. But snow is foreign matter, and strapping myself to some planks in order to get down a mountain at high speed with only my muscles between me and disfiguring accidents, even more so.

As a last-ditch attempt to prepare myself, I joined a gym a week ago, and have been there every day, trying to build leg and stomach muscles. I have generated a lot of sweat, but can’t see any new muscles. It may have been too late, but I am hoping they are there, subtly lying in wait under my skin ready to transport me towards the next hot chocolate.

As another form of comfort, I am taking a large pile of books, including Jane Smiley’s wondrous A Thousand Acres, which I have just started and am loving. I will be leaving my laptop behind, but taking my notebook and pens in order to work on Chapter Three of my novel, which is 22,000 words long and showing no sign of stopping. I have started dreaming about one of my characters, which is convenient since the next chapter is about him. In the last dream, he was baton-twirling in a newly-threshed field of corn, which is not entirely relevant to the action, but never mind.

So wish me luck, dear blogging friends. I hope to return intact, having mastered the parallel turn and rewarded myself accordingly. Also if I could be spared jeers and mocking laughter, that would be good too.

National Unity, Pyjamas and Berlin

Today is Germany’s day of national unity - the day when East and West Germany became one. In this house it is also known as the day Mummy Stays In Her Pyjamas All Day If She So Chooses. And she does choose. (By gumminy, she does.) Having just visited Germany’s monument to national unity - the wondrous Berlin - I should probably talk about my trip last week. I’ve been a bit slow about writing about it, because I’m still holding it close to my heart. I’m not sure if I want to let the secrets out or not.

So when two youngish mothers of a total of seven children hit the techno capital of the world, do they go clubbing? Do they stay out all night, drinking ridiculous cocktails and chatting up younger men? Do they totter about in high heels, whooping and kicking over dustbins?

Umm.

No.

We didn’t.*

What they do is that they carefully and responsibly See Everything. They start by seeing the Berlin State Ballet perform Alice’s Wonderland. With the artful use of matchsticks, they manage to stay awake (having just arrived in Berlin after a six-hour drive from Frankfurt) to appreciate the exquisite choreography, staging and dancing. They leave, stunned by all this superlativeness and by the enthusiastic ovation that Berliners like to give their very own ballet, and eat fresh tomato soup at an outdoor restaurant in the Gendarmenmarkt for their supper, accompanied - for one, at least - by Germanically generous glasses of white wine.

Then they leap out of bed, refreshed, drive enthusiastically to Potsdam, and park at the Schloss San Souci (which their guidebook says is the number one sight in Berlin). They repair immediately to a restaurant and partake of one of those large and languid Sunday brunches which is the number one activity in Berlin. They watch the autumn leaves fall. Then they walk around the Schlosspark, enjoying the sunshine and taking photographs, followed by an impromptu skating session in a pair of enormous pantoffel inside the Schloss itself (they avoid the tour, preferring the whistlestop self-guided version in which you can skate really fast on the polished marble and wood floors).

Would we allow our children to do this?

Hell no!

It’s far too much fun.

Then they whizz back to Berlin Mitte for a show at the Friedrichstadtpalast. Slightly disturbed by the amount of pensioners in the audience and the young man next to them with his trousers up under his armpits, who hums loudly throughout the show, they enjoy a spectacle of dance and acrobatics. There are some scary bits - all of the singing

Ho hum. Could you get on with it please?

and a truly terrifying slippery wet suspended fishbowl affair high up above where two fish

Can we call them dancers?

people try alternatively to drown each other or throw each other out of the fishbowl to plunge down down for many metres in a horrible rictus of what the director must have imagined to be erotic but which was really just a live horror show. They watch this through their fingers, sigh with relief when it is over and stop for grilled tuna on the way home at The Hotel That Has The Worst Service In The World But Which Is On The River Spree, So Must Be Good. They have an early night, tucked up by - oh - 9pm in comfy beds with books.

This big sleep is important because Monday is a big day. Monday is the Day of the Bike Tour of Berlin. One of them is an experienced cyclist, having done four-day mountain bike tours, who likes to spend her spare time careering down mountainsides at high speed. The other is not. She can count the amount of times she has ridden her bike as an adult on her fingers.

That’s not a lot, folks.

The bike tour is fabulous. They see everything. They have their photo taken at (what remains of) the Berlin Wall. They see Checkpoint Charlie, the Reichstag, the parking lot under which Hitler’s bunker may or may not be, the Tiergarten, all the government buildings on the river, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Brandenburger Tor. They also enjoy an exciting cycle in the bus lane of Berlin and a very rewarding visit to a Biergarten for a late lunch and a large beer. Their tour guide, Ingo, is beyond cute and both cyclists, experienced and not, keep snuggled up close to him in the pelaton, kicking aside any stray New Yorkers or Oregonians who to try to muscle in.

After being returned to the Fat Tire Bike Tour offices at Alexanderplatz

If you go to Berlin, this is the best way to see the city.

It was fabulous.

And the guides are hot fit.

Whatever. You know what I mean.

they consider rest. After six hours of cycling round the city, would two mothers of a combination of seven children head back to their chic Berlin Mitte apartment for a small nap before finding a bijou restaurant for a relaxed dinner?

Actually.

No.

It becomes essential to go to the Haekesche Hoefe for some late-afternoon shopping in the beautiful Art Deco courtyards. Some coffee and cake become of the essence. Some more walking. It becomes night. Still the shops are open. They are shopped. It is dark, and the intrepid mothers decide it’s nonsense to go home when they can go and stand in a queue at the Reichstag for an hour, allow German security officials to accuse them of carrying a sparkly fairy ornament in one of their shopping bags

It was true.

We couldn’t deny it.

and then go up many many storeys in a lift to admire the view from the top of the building. However, they discover too late that they both have late-onset vertigo and an identical urge to crawl the walkway that hugs the glass dome, so they jog down very very fast back to terra firma.

Tuesday is designated shopping day. They head for the Kaufhaus des Westerns (KaDeWe), the Harrods of Berlin, and walk around in a daze for a few hours, testing the loos and fingering very expensive articles of clothing. Then they begin to stroll up the Kurfurstendamm, Berlin’s famous shopping street, but quickly become exhausted by all the

a. shops

b. tourists

c. beggars

so are forced to repair to a lovely little sidestreet where an Italian restaurant offers to feed them delicious pasta (salmon and pine-nut with a lobster sauce, and rocket and feta) and shelter them from the rain that has so irritatingly decided to pour down. They then retrieve the car from the Hotel That Serves the Worst Tea in the World

A huge, hairy testicle of a tea bag that has clearly been used umpty times before.

to do some driving around the city Because That is Fun. First driving stop is Schloss Charlottenburg. Next driving stop is the chic apartment in Berlin Mitte because they are tired and needing to nap. Later, after the nap

It was good.

So …

… nappy.

they walk around aimlessly, finally landing at the sushi bar under the Sony Centre on Potsdamer Platz for a €12 plate of sushi that they can’t finish it is so huge and delicious beers. They walk home, veering briefly into a lamp-post restaurant to acquire ice-creams.

Next day is Dresden day. This is very exciting because it means Driving Again. It is also very sad because it means Farewell to Berlin. However, they are grown women

really?

and manage to leave Berlin without a tear. Dresden is very beautiful. It is filled with buildings. It also has a river. Most importantly, it has a fabulously luxurious HOTEL where they check in, spend the afternoon sleeping, reading, bathing, lounging around in bathrobes, preening, toenail-clipping, dressing, going to the restaurant, enjoying fine dining and excellent wines and going to sleep again. The next morning they glance once more at the beautiful buildings of Dresden

They are so beautiful.

Aren’t they just?

and drive up the river, passing all the glamorous Communist villas where happy Communists once came to play landlords, to Schloss Pelnitz for a little stomp around the beautiful gardens, sadly muddying the boots that had been polished overnight by the little HOTEL elves. They shop idly for the last perfect present for lucky husbands and children and mothers, and then depart from formerly East Germany back to the West, which, strangely, looks very much like the East except that it has more hills.

It rained.

And the journey took eight hours.

But it was worth it.

* Any irritating tics and verbal asides that may appear in this post are attributable to the fact that I am reading Darkmans by Nicola Barker at the moment.

I am.

And it’s catching.

Really, really catching.

So, I’m sorry. But I can’t help it.

Housekeeping

Is what I will NOT be doing for the next six days because I’m off to Berlin and Dresden with my friend, K. We’ve got an apartment, a show and a bike tour booked in Berlin, and a hotel booked in Dresden, and the rest is up to chance. You can’t plan too much. My main goal is not to cook anything for six days, not to fold anyone’s clothes apart from my own, not to worry about anyone’s sleep or nappies or vegetable intake, or having to find a babysitter so that I can go out for dinner and stay up ridiculously late and be as silly as I need to be. I also plan not to touch a computer.

When I get back I would like to do some housekeeping here at Charlotte’s Web. If there’s anyone out there who links to me or has me on their blogroll, and I don’t link back, please let me know. Leave a note in the comments.

With that I wish you a big Tschuess. Berlin, watch out, the Pietermaritzburg girls are coming!

Glitter, Glitter

That’s what the end of the week is doing. It’s glittering at me. In five sleeps’ time, I’m collecting my friend, K, from the airport and then we’re driving to Berlin (I can’t stay away; I’m addicted) for a week of sightseeing, shopping, eating and non-stop talking. Since we have seven children between us, and they will all be far far away with their daddies, there might also be a little bit of sleeping, reading in bed, working on novels, and stopping off for chai lattes at any moment of the day or night BECAUSE WE CAN.

K and I have known each other for 26 years. I got a little weepy when I worked that out. Twenty-six years is a long time to know someone. Two other friends are supposed to be with us, but can’t for various reasons. One of them I have known for 32 years and the other for 20. Clearly, I am someone who is hard to shake off. Once I find you and decide you’re mine, then we’re friends for life.

Remember what it was like to make a friend at the age of 12? You spent long afternoons together, and then phoned each other as soon as you got home. You discussed every detail of your life minutely. My family lived out of town, so I made it my habit to spend nights at my friends’ houses. They really couldn’t get rid of me. I partook in their family lives, sat around their dinner-tables and listened to their parents talk. I became a bit of a fixture, like a wall-hanging or a lamp. While my parents’ marriage was falling apart and my mother was slowly finding her feet again, both K’s family and that of my friend who I have known for 32 years became my replacement families. They both offered me a place where I could feel secure. So they are more than friends, really. They are sisters.

Last week, someone I know told me that I have let her down, that I have not been a good friend to her. That gave me pause for thought, because I have always considered myself a good friend. I have been known to forget the odd birthday (sorry E), but generally, I make my friendships a priority. It’s much harder now to give my friends the time I used to be able to give when I was 12, given that my life has become exponentially fuller.

My mother always said that you have friends for different reasons and different times of your life. I have old friends, new friends, German friends, expat friends, friends whose children are my children’s friends, blog friends, book friends, writing friends, friends my husband found for me, friends I have stolen from him and friends whose husbands or wives are his friends. Usually friends fall into more than one category, and the more categories the better. I think what happened with this friend who is disappointed with me is that I haven’t allowed her to rise above a certain category in which I’ve pegged her, and she would really like to defy her category and be more to me. I’ve been a bit rigid with her. I see that now.

Now, all you category-defying friends, I need to get back to work. I may manage to post before Berlin, but I may not. Forgive me if I don’t. I’ll be back soon, with stories.

Italy Unplugged

(Written sometime in August …)

I’m writing this post on paper with the plan to transcribe it when I get home in - oh - a few days’ time. I’m not missing my computer or being permanently plugged in to the information tsunami, but I do miss the regular writing.

We are staying in a lovely campsite on the Italian coast, above Rome and below Pisa. The weather is mild - warm enough for beach and pool but not hot enough to require the air conditioning in our mobile home. It’s dry and dusty here - testament to the heatwave we have missed - but the campsite is situated in a lovely forest of parasol pines with tall trunks and gracious canopies that provide shade.

One of the many joys of being in Italy is the food. Why does everything taste better here? A salad of beautiful Tuscan tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella anointed in olive oil tastes like heaven, whereas in Germany it tastes like it’s trying too hard. We’ve enjoyed fine slices of Parma ham, chilled sweet melon, olives with a bite of chilli, olive paste on grissini, baby yellow tomatoes, succulent grapes the size of plums, spicy Tuscan sausages, calamari and daily doses of creamy icecream. Make mine a pistachio.

This part of Italy - Livorno - is supposed to be one of the centres of the Slow Food movement. I don’t have Google so I can’t check that for you, but it certainly feels that way. Aptly enough, while enjoying very slow food, I am also reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a wonderful book detailing her family’s attempt to spend a year eating both seasonally and locally. She defines local as within a 70 mile radius, but in the end the family grow and harvest most of their own food - even chickens and turkeys.

In the West, we have grown so distant from the source of our food, that just to witness Kingsolver’s attempt feels like watching a miracle. Not that I imagine for a second that I could “harvest” my own chicken or remember to water the vegetables that would feed my family for a year, but the work they do in conscious eating is inspiring.

Kingsolver is knowledgeable about the state of the protein production line and it does not make for easy reading, but it does make me want to never buy any factory farmed meat again. She is voiciferous on how farming corporations have undermined American farmers, forcing them to grow single crops in order to stay solvent. She decries non-seasonal eating, saying that food flown from China or other far-off lands merely to satisfy appetites costs not only the environment in terms of fossil fuels but also our bodies, because by the time it reaches our plates it is no longer nutrient-dense. She talks openly about how obesity is a function of capitalism:

No cashier ever held a gun to our heads and made us supersize it, true enough. But humans have an inbuilt weakness for fats and sugar. We evolved in lean environments where it was a big plus for survival to gorge on calorie-dense foods whenever we found them. Whether or not they understand the biology, food marketers know the weakness and have exploited it without mercy. Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgment of the genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who neither needed nor wished to consume them.

She makes an interesting point about the gap left in kitchens when women went out to work, and how corporations happily filled that gap with non-nutritious, calorific ready-meals. These full-time jobs that women now gladly have are:

… organized around the presumption that some wifely person is at home picking up the slack - filling the gap between school and workday’s end, doing errands only possible during business hours, meeting the expectation that we are hungry when we get home - but in fact June Cleaver has left the premises. Her income was needed to cover the mortgage and health insurance … Eating preprocessed or fast food can look like salvation in the short run, until we start losing what real mealtimes give to a family: civility, economy, and health.

Kingsolver says cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. But the pressure to find the time to select (or as she does, grow) ingredients, plan a meal, cook it with joy and not under stress, and then eat it in a civilised and peaceable way with your family is great. I feel that pressure on a daily basis, and I do malign myself when I slap down another meal of fish fingers and peas in front of my sweetly uncomplaining children. However, what her book is doing for me is making me feel more committed to making better food choices for my family when I get home and continuing the journey of more conscious eating. I would recommend it for anyone who is interested in doing either or both, or who would like to witness one family’s bold attempt to go against the grain. There are also some great recipes, which I am going to try out. I may not actually make my own cheese, though.

Now where’s the buffalo mozzarella? I’m feeling peckish.

Recent Reading

Soon, we’ll be driving to Tuscany for a couple of weeks on the beach and the best thing, apart from sun, sand and Italian food, is that I can pack the boot of the car with as many books as I want to. I don’t have to worry about weight or select a few - I can take the whole damn lot. While I’m there I also intend to complete my novel outline for the first meeting of my writing group in September, flesh out some of my characters and maybe compose some offline posts about Tuscan beach culture (Are hoop earrings de rigeur?/ Is there such a thing as too little bikini?/Sandcastles I have known).

I realise I’ve been remiss about reviewing my recent reading. When I have big work projects on and house-guests, as I do now, I don’t stop reading but I don’t really have time to write in-depth reviews. While I await comment from my editor, and while my charming house-guests entertain my children, here’s an overview of the reading that’s been going on chez Charlotte recently.

Two Lives by Vikram Seth

I love Seth’s novels. He writes them big and fat and packed with characters, which is my favourite kind of book. Two Lives is a memoir and biography, and it is just as large and satisfying as one of his novels. It details the lives of Seth’s great-uncle Shanti and his wife Henny. Shanti moved to Berlin from India in the 1930s to study dentistry, and found rooms with Henny’s family. Henny managed to escape to England from Germany in 1939, but her mother and sister were unable to leave and eventually were murdered in a concentration camp. Seth researches the memoir after Henny’s death, so he pieces her story together through Shanti Uncle’s memories and Henny’s vivid correspondence. What was fascinating for me was the vibrant picture of Thirties Berlin, and Shanti and Henny’s glamorous and various group of friends. After the war, the group is of course shattered, with some members dead, others shamed by their Nazi connections and others trying to survive the depredations of postwar Germany. Henny’s Berlin friends were always deeply grateful for her care packages of chocolate, stockings and cigarettes. At one point, Seth travels to Israel to research state records of the Holocaust in order to find out how and where Henny’s family were killed, and is overcome with horror at the understated cruel efficiency of official German as it describes the removal of people from society. He writes, “I grew to hate the verbs”. That resonated so strongly with me. The German that I use every day is the same German that wiped out millions of people with its cruel deathly verbs. While parts of this book are difficult to read, Two Lives is written with sensitivity, affection and humour. I loved it.

The Memory-Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards. This is apparently a bestseller, but that hadn’t crossed my radar when I picked it up. I suspect I may have read about it on someone’s blog - my usual method of collecting recommendations. The storyline was intriguing: a couple have twins but when the husband, who is a doctor, sees that his daughter is a Downs baby, he hands her to a nurse with directions to remove her to a home. He then tells his wife that her daughter has died. The nurse takes the baby to the home, but when there, changes her mind and decides to raise the child herself in another city. The novel tells the parallel stories of these twins growing up in different circumstances. It was well-told and the characters were well-drawn and believable. I felt compassion for the wife who mourns her dead daughter, compassion for the husband living with his terrible secret, and admiration for the nurse who loves the little girl as her own. It’s a competent story and well-told. I think it would make a good beach book.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walsh. This is also a memoir and a gripping one. Walsh is one of four children raised by a pair of completely feckless parents. The father is a dreamer and and an alcoholic, and the mother is an artist who doesn’t see the point of cooking a meal, because it only lasts 15 minutes, while a painting lasts forever. Walsh’s first memory is of standing at the stove at the age of three cooking hotdogs because she is hungry. The boiling water spills on her, and she has to spend six weeks in hospital, from where her father “saves her” because he doesn’t want to pay the bills. This is only the beginning of a litany of stories about her parents which I read with my mouth hanging open. Despite neglect on a spectacular scale, three of the four children manage to survive relatively intact - Walsh herself becomes a successful journalist in New York. She writes of her childhood without bitterness and of her parents with affection. As a reader, I followed her trajectory of warmish feelings towards this astonishingly unconventional couple - until the scene where the children are picking through the bins at school for something to eat and when they get home, the mother dives under the comforter on her bed (where she spends most of the day) to take large bites of a chocolate bar she’s secreted there. I lost patience with the father even earlier. I think Walsh wants to present a non-judgmental picture of her parents, but merely by telling her story she does invite her readers to judge. I judged, and I found them guilty of extreme neglect.

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson. This is the second mystery story by the writer of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and the second featuring grizzled detective Jackson Brodie (the first was the acclaimed Case Histories). Atkinson is at the top of her game. One Good Turn is an excellent read, with a host of superbly-drawn characters, a great mystery and a wonderful twist at the end. If anyone’s looking for the perfect summer book, I’d say this is it. I seldom re-read, but I’m tempted to take this on holiday with me because I’d like to pay more attention to her style. She is so damn talented.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I’m not going to write too much about this book, as there are many acres of text on the Web already, but I loved it. It was beautiful. It’s terrifying portrait of a country, a poignant study of family and a testament to loyalty.

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody. I saw Ang Lee’s superb film a few years ago, so it was his images that were in my head when I read the book. Perhaps my slight disappointment stems from the disjunction between the film and the book, but I found the book’s preoccupation with male masturbation and overly knowing teenage girls a bit tiresome. It’s not intended to be comfortable reading, and it isn’t. Let’s just say that Moody draws a particularly unappealing portrait of the American male and his preoccupations, circa 1973.

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Right now, I’ve got two books going on. For fun, I’m reading Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder, a great thriller set in early twentieth-century New York. For intellectual challenge, I’m reading Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s a bold and fascinating book and it’s sure to spawn a blog post or two.