Quick Lit February 2019

Linking up with Modern Mrs Darcy for another year of monthly reading round ups. January reading got off with a bang, thanks to some shorter classics and frothy page turners - and sickness in the family (lots of hanging around time). Reviewing it, I noticed that my favourites this past month were by women authors who struck out on their own in some way.

Daphne Du Maurier - Frenchman's Creek
Sickened by the shallowness of life as a courtier under Charles II - the meaningless love affairs, the contrived intrigues - Dona, Lady St. Columb, flees London for her husband's Cornish estate, only to find real love and deadly conspiracy in the person of a French philosopher pirate. But this awakening to an authentic life ultimately demands a serious moral reckoning. Only in the hands of a master such as Du Maurier can a novel be both reflective and roistering. A perfect start to the reading year. This is the fifth Du Maurier I have read, and I would rank it fourth.*

Du Maurier has been described as Britain's highest paid woman writer in the 1950s

Shion Miura - The Great Passage
Araki is being forced to retire from his publishing job just as his small team begins his greatest project -  a new Japanese dictionary. He must find and mentor the perfect replacement, a person who is a born lexicographer. This is not just about writing a dictionary, but about how the lives of those who work on it are changed through their interaction with words. It is a book about love: of food, of people, of dictionaries, of course, and ultimately of the words that help us give expression to all these loves. It was sweet, but not riveting for me.

Laura Esquivel - Like Water for Chocolate: A novel in monthly installments with recipes, romances, and home remedies
I began a tradition of giving my children a book for epiphany, and this year decided to give my girls the same one, and read it myself, in the hopes we can share opinions. I saw the movies years ago, not knowing it was a book (it's a rule with me not to see the movie if I haven't read the book first). A magical realism novel set around the time of the Mexican revolution. Tita is forced to give up her hopes, dreams, and love to be the daughter who stays at home to care for her mother, but her suppressed emotions begin to seep through her food and into the hearts of those who eat it. A quick, delightful read.

Herman Hesse - Siddartha: An Indian Tale [audiobook]
To be painfully honest, I never paid much attention to Herman Hesse because the hearing the name so much made me think he must be one of Hitler's henchmen (yes, that was ignorance, I apologise to any German readers); in fact, his work was banned by the Nazis. When I learned he is notable for helping introduce Eastern religion to the west through his writings, I decided I should read something of his. Siddartha is more of a religious fable than a novel, telling the story of the eponymous hero's journey through asceticism and sensuality to enlightenment. Interesting from the point of comparative religion, but I found it dry.

Muesli the cat stars in the Oxford Tearoom mysteries

H.Y. Hanna - All-Butter Short Dead / A Scone to Die For
A Kindle deal got me again -  a three-book 'set' for 99 cents - plus I needed something indulgent to encourage me to persevere with Siddartha at the same time. I admit I am more interested in the author than her cosy mysteries. After earlier rejections stalled her writing career, Hanna took the plunge in mid life to successfully self publish (and the sales from this Kindle deal put her on the USA Today bestseller list). These are the prequel and first novel in the Oxford Tearoom Mysteries (I'm saving the third for the next time I need a light read). The amateur detective is Gemma, who has given up her executive job in Australia to return to her home in Oxfordshire and pursue a dream of running a tea shop, but of course, she finds a body almost before the first batch of scones has cooled down. Light as a fairy cake, but well-written (and professionally edited, if you are wondering).

Markham was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.

Beryl Markham - West With the Night
This pops up a lot on MMD's Daily Deals page, touted as a book every woman should read. I am glad I finally did. It is about everything I am decidedly not interested in - flying, hunting, horse racing, Africa - but the writing is so accomplished, I was hooked anyway. Both the style and the narrative structure are beautiful, imitating the ebb and flow of memory and mood. Markham herself is a remarkable woman, claiming agency for her own life from childhood onwards in an era when feminism was in its infancy (and her life was much, much racier than she lets on in this memoir!). A book I would recommend to my daughters.



*If you are burning with curiosity:
1. Rebecca (of course)
2. My Cousin Rachel
3. The Scapegoat
4. Frenchman's Creek
5. Jamaica Inn (too melodramatic)

Hope you got to cosy up under a blanket with some good books in January, with or without the sniffles!