Book Around the Corner

I’m a little late with my usual Book Club list but, here we go!

Our reading year starts in September with The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard (UK, 1990)

This is the first volume of the Cazalet Chronicles, the story of an English family from 1937 to the 1950s. It’s our September read and I’ve finished it now and won’t write a full billet about it. I know it is a beloved series but I was very disappointed and terribly bored.

I expected something between Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson and ended up in a plain soap opera full of clichés.

An eccentric couple as patriarch and matriarch of the family. A woman who left her career to marry and ends up stuck with a womanizer. A closeted lesbian spinster. A would-be painter, a widower remarried to a beautiful but vapid young woman who doesn’t like her step-children. An affectionate couple who can’t seem to speak to each other. A sister married to a scoundrel and struggling with money, until a dear old aunt dies. An ugly and poor governess. An army of children with the expected dreams and angst: being an actress, fleeing from home, fighting with each other…And servants as side characters.

All this in a style I found very plain. Tedious and lifeless descriptions of the countryside, the different homes or the cook’s culinary wonders. I expected a bit of humor and found none. I couldn’t find any interest in the characters’ fate and struggled to finish The Light Years. Needless to say, I won’t be reading the next one.

I couldn’t immerse myself in Downtown Abbey either, that should have clued me in. At this time, I don’t know if the other members of our Book Club enjoyed it more than me. I’m looking forward to hear their take.

Since several bloggers I respect and share literary interests with really loved this series, I wonder what I missed. A British cultural background?

October will bring another historical novel with Flight of the Sparrow by Amy Belding Brown (USA, 2014)

Like The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd, Flight of the Sparrow is based upon the real life of a woman who feels stifled by the restricted status of women in her time and who starts questioning the vision of the world she was born in.

Set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1676, Flight of the Sparrow is based upon the real life of Mary Rowlandson who lives in a Puritan community and is captured by Indians. Sharing the Indians’ quotidian, she’ll discover another way of living, another kind of civilization.

I’m looking forward to it.

November will be totally different with Animal Souls by Jose Rodrigues Dos Santos (Portugal, 2020).

It is the eleventh volume of a crime fiction series featuring a recurring character, Tomás Noronha. I’ve never heard of this writer, specialized in scientific crime fiction and who bases his books on true scientific research.

Animal Souls explores the topic of the intelligence and the consciousness of animals as Tomás Noronha investigates a murder at the Oceanarium in Lisbon.

It sounds fascinating. December will take us to India with Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga. (2011)

Set in Mumbai, it’s the story of a man who refuses to leave his apartment and sell to a property developer. On principle.

I like him already.

I hope to learn a bit more about India through this book even if it’s already eleven years old and many things have happened since.

January will bring us back to Europe and in the 19^th century with The Waltz of the Trees and the Sky by Jean-Michel Guenassia (2016).

I don’t think it’s been translated into English and the original French title of the book is La valse des arbres et du ciel.

The beautfiful cover is spot on as this book relates the last days of Van Gogh’s life with the Gachet family in Auvers-sur-Oise. It’s based upon the latest research on Van Gogh’s life and his work.

February will see us back in the 21^st century with Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov. (Ukraine)

Lots of reviews of this book have blossomed on our literary blogosphere since the war in Ukraine started.

I’m looking forward to understanding better the background of the war in Ukraine through Kurkov’s eyes.

I still have his other book, The Chameleon, on the shelf.

In March, we’ll go to Atlanta and read An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (2018)

According to the blurb, it sounds like the little brother of If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin.

A young couple with a promising future is set apart when the husband is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit.

How will their couple survive this?

Then it’s back to France and crime fiction in April.

We’ll read Boccanera by Michèle Pedinielli, a crime fiction book set in Nice. Boccanera is a woman PI who will investigate a murder in the gay community. She sounds like a great character, a maverick in a men’s world.

On the cover it says : “If Montale and Corbucci had a daughter, she’d look like Boccanera.”

Doesn’t it sound great?

We’ll fly back to America in May, to New-York and his Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. (2021)

According to the blurb, it is a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s.

It sounds more playful than the very serious Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.

Let’s go to Harlem in the 1960s!

June will have a totally different vibe with L’Autre by Andrée Chedid (2005).

I don’t think that this one is translated into English. Andrée Chedid is a poetess and a novelist. In this novella, an old man sees someone at the window of a hotel just before an earthquake. He’ll do his best to steer the rescue teams towards this stranger and save him.

And July will be a reread, Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger. No description needed. I’m curious to read it as an adult.

That’s all for the coming year. I’m happy with our choices, it’s a good mix of historical, crime and literary fiction. Did you read any of them and did you like them?