I read six books in September and started another and for the first time in ages there were more non crime than crime, and I found that very pleasing.
The DNF, which was more a HES ( hardly even started ) was The Sewing Machine by Natalie Fergie. I got this from Borrowbox late at night and was somehow fooled into thinking it wasn't yet another bloated family saga told over decades of the C20, in which men are men and go off to war and women are downtrodden but find themselves by achieving financial independence in some fairly non-male threatening way. In the event this is exactly what this was. I think I gave it 50 pages before I sent it back.
So with that out of the way ... the first one I finished was Juliet Barker's The Brontes: A Life in Letters ,which is obviously a re-read. I was rather concerned to find that I was not as annoyed by Charlotte and Emily as I remember being in the past; however I read it partly as preparation for rereading Barker's monumental joint biography of all four Bronte children and I'm fairly sure that once I embark on that I will find Charlotte, at least, as irritating as ever. Unless I have mellowed a great deal since I last read it.
The book club chose a J D Kirk, not at my suggestion I hasten to add. It was his latest, called 'Better the Devil. It went down well which isn't surprising,. Quite a few members were already fans and it was the mixture as before; a bit of a plot, good interaction between team members and lots of humour, sometimes very dark.
After that was Robert Harris' Agrippa which had been very well reviewed and which I used an Audible credit for. This was a mistake. Obviously Harris has decided that Agrippa was a fairly stolid, 'follow orders and support the man in charge' military type which presumably works well on the page. The story is told in the first person and sadly the narrator had decided that he needed to make Agrippa someone with no expression in his voice at all, presumably because he was a fairly stolid military type etc This made for dullness. In fact it made it a very good book to fall asleep to which hadn't at all been the plan. In fairness it straightened out for me a lot of history that I had been confused about before; also taught methat Augustus really wasn't a loud cuddly Brian Blessed type, he was a murdering, power hungry horror (I Claudius reference there for any reader old enough to catch it). I came to the conclusion that overall the book would have been better as a read than a listen.
Next up was Savage her Reply by Deirdre Sullivan which retells the Irish myth of the Children of Lir, who were turned into swans by their stepmother. Sullivan tells the story from the point of view of the stepmother and makes her credible and sympathetic. I was fascinated by this book and read it over only a few days, helped by the fact that Sullivan writes beautifully. Her prose is poetic without being pretentious and it flows like a river. Highly recommended if myths and/or lyrical writing are your thing.
Finally got around to Frankly, the memoir by Nicola Sturgeon of her life in Scottish politics. I won't say it was totally disillusioning, but politics, even when pursued in a good cause, seems to be a dirty business by default.
And finally another crime novel, The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley. I got this from Borrowbox because her latest book, which is a new Miss Marple novel commissioned by the Agatha Christie estate isn't available for months from the library and I thought this might give me a taste of her writing. It's less a crime novel than a ' who are all these people, how are they connected and what is going to happen next' novel. It was soooooooooooooooo slow. I got so impatient with it. Multiple POVs, and two time periods, and at the end the number of connections between this seemingly random group of people stretched credibility to its borders and beyond. I'm not saying that I don't like loose ends to be tied up in a book because I do. What I'm saying is that not all loose ends need to end up in the same oversized knot. Very disappointing.
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