dittybox

  This is a great book - which of course it would be as it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2018.  It's very much an American book with the kind of style that follows in the footsteps of twentieth century American humourists such as Garrison Keillor and James Thurber.  You probably won't find yourself laughing out loud, but there will be many times when a clever turn of phrase will bring a smile to your face. Arthur Less is a writer who is about to turn fifty, and he is being forced to consider where his life is going as his long term boyfriend has left him to marry someone else.  Less has been invited to the wedding, but he simply can't bear to go, although he doesn't want to cause offence by simply declining.  He has to find a pressing reason to be abroad at the time of the ceremony, so he mines through a discarded pile of other invitations that request his company to speak or teach or write reviews in all manner of different countries.  Before ...

  Well, I made it through one hundred and twenty two pages of this before deciding that there are better books out there and I have already taken it back to the library.  Thank goodness for library books.  Anything that doesn't hit the spot can be returned with no questions asked and you don't have to waste hours of your life on something that sparks no joy. The Left-handed Booksellers is a fantasy novel but, to borrow a phrase from my late father, 'what a load of old tosh'.  I know that the whole point of a fantasy novel is to write about purely imaginary events, but you do have to be able to buy into the alternative world, and this time I really couldn't.   The idea behind the novel is that there are left-handed booksellers in London who are really wizards, and these wizards have to fight off various magical bad guys including goblins dressed as Dickensian street urchins.  I can't tell you much more than that as I stopped reading just after that bit...

  Don't find yourself walking past this book just because you don't like fantasy novels, because this may be the one that changes your mind.  At the time of writing it's riding high in the best seller charts and is already destined to be the first of a series.  Place your bets on how long it takes before it becomes a Netflix film or box set. Set in a dark world filled with vengeful gods, the book begins with a whole family thrown into cage where they will be burnt as a sacrifice to Hseth, a god of fire.  Kissen is still a young girl but she is determined to free herself from the ropes that bind her and then free her family so they can escape this painful death.  She undoes her own ropes, but by the time she has fought with the knots holding her father, the flames are reaching higher and the building around them is collapsing.  The roof falls in, trapping Kissen's leg, and although her father is free to run he stays to free Kissen from the wreckage by severi...

I picked this up because I know all about Shearings coach tours.  I have travelled on Shearings or Wallace Arnold buses to the very places described by Ben Aitken, and I recognise almost every type of scenario he shares with us. I was in my early forties when we started booking Shearings holidays after we came across a brochure and couldn't believe how cheaply we could get all round Ireland or through Europe to Rome.  The vast majority of our fellow travelers had a good twenty or thirty years on us, but we had just become grandparents, so we felt we qualified. Ben seems like a nice young man, and he is careful not to make fun of his coach mates, but then he doesn't have to as they do that for themselves.  You really do meet some characters on a coach trip, but they are generally harmless, and a bond forms amongst the group as soon as you board the bus.  The drivers are the most tolerant people on the planet, and repeat everything they said about what t...

This is a novel with real weight to it.  Not the size of the book, but its the breadth and depth of the writing that makes everyone and everything in it feel three dimensional.  At times I could almost feel the heat coming off the characters and see the emotion in their eyes. It's about a girl who feels she has been born in the wrong body and should have entered the world as a boy, but before you start thinking that Rose Tremain has jumped on some kind of fashionable bandwagon, please note that this novel was originally published in 1992.  That was over twenty years before Caitlin Jenner transitioned, and at a time when most people were only vaguely aware of one or  two trans people in the public eye who they probably regarded as some kind of novelty. In the book, we meet Mary as a six year child who lives on a farm in Suffolk with her parents, but both of them have issues with their mental health and life becomes a daily battle.  her mother seems trapped i...

  First published in 1953, this is a reprint of a novel that had largely slipped under the radar but is rightly being given a second chance.  Reading it is a bit like flipping through someone's old family photographs where each little scene tells a much bigger story.  The narrative is broken down into small chapters, mostly no longer than two or three pages but by the end of the short book you can clearly see her world and understand what she thinks about it. Maud Martha is black (too black she says) and she wonders if she will be too black to find a good husband from all the lighter skinned people of her community.  She has her dreams of getting married and moving into a nice little house with pretty children, but she is wise enough to realise that these things have to be worked towards and will not just fall into her lap. When she does find a man to marry her, she is glad that her Paul managed to see past her dark skin and heavy features, but she constantly wo...

  This turned out to be a little gem, and one of those books that make you feel as though you have read something important.  At first I thought it was going to be one of those books that are beautifully written, but never really goes anywhere, but the further you go, the deeper it gets. As the title suggests, its an imaginary tale and it is about the poet Ovid during the time of his life when he was in exile.  David Malouf tells the reader in his notes at the end that very little is know about Ovid's life, so he had plenty of scope to make it up any way he wished but the environment feels very real.   There are no real markers in the book, so you don't know the exact date when the story takes place, and you don't know where he has found himself, and that helps because as a reader you don't start padding the narrative out with detail that you think you know.  Everything is as new to you as it is to Ovid.   He is living in a compound with an extend...