Month: January 2023

On reading challenges

Every year there are very many interesting reading challenges that bloggers and others set themselves. I have done one every year since I started this blog more than six years ago and I have participated in others, some successfully, some not. For a while there my challenge was to pick a genre or theme for each month and select a title. The aim was to expand my reading horizons and delve into things that would not normally attract my attention, such as science fiction or autobiography. It worked and I read some amazing things. Some stand-out discoveries for me were Emily Bain Murphy’s The Disappearances, the very first choice in my very first reading challenge in 2018, classic crime fiction (I never imagined I’d become a fan of Agatha Christie) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which I confess I had been a bit snooty about when it was published.

Just a few of the brilliant books I might not have read without a reading challenge

Last year, I decided I wanted to read more non-fiction. I only managed about four books! And, another confession, Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions, which I think I started last summer, remains in my bedside pile, only half-read! Don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying it, but it’s a chunky volume and is a series of essays, some only a few pages long, so it’s the kind of book you dip in and out of. Definitely not one to speed read. It was a tricky year between one thing and another and I neither read nor blogged as much as I have done in previous years.

So, as the end of January draws near (noticeably longer days, hurray!) I find myself reading about other people’s reading challenges and wondering should I be doing one? And the conclusion I have come to, is perhaps not. Having failed (and I’m using that word with a degree or irony) last year to achieve quite a number of the goals I had set myself, due to a mixture of over-estimating my time and abilities, and under-estimating the other demands that would be placed upon me by life, I have concluded that perhaps the overall goal of expanding my reading horizons has been met, and I don’t need to do that any more. That particular habit has been well and truly established and neither do I need encouragement to read.

What I am going to do, however, is aim to pull an unread book off one of my shelves each month to read. If you are reading this you will no doubt be familiar with the particular compulsion that we book lovers have to just keeping on buying new ones, despite the many dozens of unread ones we already own! This is both a waste of money and a source of unnecessary guilt. I’m going to aim for one a month but be kind to myself if I don’t manage it.

First title to be dusted off the ‘unread’ shelf!

There’s less than a week left of the current month, so I’ve been looking for something shortish, and I’ve landed on Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, published in 1989. I have no idea how long I have had my copy, but I vividly remember reading her 1992 novel A Place of Greater Safety. It was one of the first books I read after completing my English degree (at which point my head was too saturated to read anything substantial for a long time) and it reignited my passion for literature, so I’m guessing I bought this book around that time. Hmm. I make that about thirty years. It’s time to give it the attention it deserves, don’t you think?

Re-reading the classics – “The Great Gatsby” by F Scott Fitzgerald

My book club is great. We like to dabble in a few different genres and periods and we all make suggestions about the next title. Our last read of 2022 was Graham Norton’s Forever Home and our first choice for 2023 was The Great Gatsby – couldn’t be more different! We also mainly read via audiobook, about which there seems to be a perennial debate (and for the avoidance of doubt I am totally pro audiobooks), which throws up some interesting debates about individual titles in itself. 

The Great Gatsby is one of the very few novels that I have read multiple times. I am not a big re-reader (although I have become a bit more of one since getting into audiobooks). I do love it and it never ceases to amaze or surprise me. For a relatively compact book it is thematically dense and exposes a side to the American way of life, the American dream that few wrote about in the early 1900s. The book is almost 100 years old and yet still the concept of the United States of America exercises a powerful draw, although arguably in the last few years, the scales have fallen from more of our collective eyes. But Fitzgerald was writing about this dark underbelly long before most. 

The contrast between the lavish first half of the book, with its portrayal of seemingly endless wealth, lives full of Dionysian pleasure, and purpose directed only at extravagance, is thrown into sharper relief by the darkness of the second half of the book. Once the book moves out of the bubble of the Long Island social scene, when the narrator Nick Carraway accompanies a drunk and brooding Tom Buchanan to New York City, along with Tom’s lover Myrtle Wilson, wife of a local garage owner, events take a decidedly more sinister turn. In place of music and dancing there is violence and the dark side of alcohol. In place of the luxury West Egg mansions there is the sordid city apartment where Tom takes Myrtle. And in place of easy and superficial socialising there is violence, secrecy and betrayal. Fitzgerald is systematically picking apart the edifices of wealth, class and the American dream that he has set up for us in the opening chapters of the book, with only a hint of what is to come in the dark moods of Tom Buchanan. Jay Gatsby is, for me, less of a defined and rounded character, and more of a device for Fitzgerald to undertake this dismantling process, more of a representation of fakery and of the damage caused by the aspiration towards something so ultimately meaningless. The book is truly a masterpiece. 

Which brings me on to the subject of the medium through which one accesses such works. There have been a few film adaptations of The Great Gatsby; the most recent one, starring Leonardo di Caprio was critically panned. A version starring Robert Redford was made in 1974, which I think I have seen, but a long while ago (note to self: must watch again). My book club friends and I all ‘read’ Gatsby this time via the audiobook, which was a freebie on Audible. What appealed to us in particular was that the reader was Jake Gyllenhaal. I’m afraid to say that we were all deeply disappointed. There was something very mechanical about his reading, almost no distinction in voice or tone between the characters, which is surprising given his talents as an actor. Truly, it was as if this was his first reading of the novel. Which perhaps it was. I know many people will point to this as one of the underlying problems of audiobooks, that the reader can affect your view of the book. In this case, if it was my first encounter with Gatsby, I might have come away wondering what all the fuss was about, although I also hope I might have decided I actually needed to go to the source and read the book myself too. A film is clearly more of an interpretation than a straight unabridged reading, but you would not judge a book by the film or the mini-series. The excellent readings have far outweighed the poor ones I have come across in my audiobook experience; besides Gatsby, the other terrible one was a reading of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which was so bad I actually stopped listening! That was a freebie too. Which is perhaps the moral of the story here; you get what you pay for. It requires a certain skills set, commitment and a good understanding of the book to pull off a reading well. 

A recent debate regarding audiobooks was around the use of AI, surely an alarming development for jobbing actors. I think this will be a retrograde step by production companies and readers will turn away. During the various lockdowns I dabbled quite a bit in Youtube recorded meditations. There were some I came across which just felt to me that I was not listening to a human, and they were terrible. We know the difference and we won’t be fobbed off.


So, The Great Gatsby, do read it if you haven’t done so already, it really is one of the landmarks of literature in English, but the audiobook? Best avoided.

Audiobook review – “Forever Home” by Graham Norton

Happy New Year! I am rather late to this I realise. We have had a somewhat sickly household over the last few weeks, with Covid plus some other assorted ailments, and still not out of the woods yet, but hopefully it’s the beginning of the end and we can start getting back to normal soon. I did just about manage to get a decent Christmas dinner on the table, and we also managed a short trip to Dublin for new year to visit family, but apart from that it has all been very low-key. 

I haven’t done much in the way of reading in the last few weeks – partly too busy and partly because my head hurt too much! I managed half a book of Christmas short stories (pictured left), which was nice. In this selection I particularly liked Trollope’s Christmas at Thompson Hall and Alice Munro’s The Turkey Season, both of which managed to pull off that particular skill of being both amusing and poignant. It’s a while since I’ve sat down and read a series of short stories; it’s curiously liberating, like a brief fling, enjoyable and without commitment! That’s not my usual approach to life, I hasten to add, but it was nice, especially in the context of so many other distractions when it was hard to maintain long periods of concentration.

An audiobook I listened to over the Christmas period also gave me great pleasure – Graham Norton’s Forever Home, his fourth novel and another set mainly in his home county of Cork, Ireland. I am a huge fan of Graham Norton’s and have previously reviewed his earlier novels Holding and Home Stretch on here. In Forever Home he explores similar themes of complex family dynamics, love relationships, modern culture and life in Ireland and, in this novel, as in his first, Holding, a slightly macabre twist! There are secrets, there is a sense of shame and a desire to appear normal, even when things clearly aren’t, and in this way the author makes a nod, though not a heavy one, to elements of Ireland’s past that it is still coming to terms with.

The central character is Carol Crottie, a teacher living in a small town in County Cork. She is divorced and has one adult son who lives in London and while they are not exactly estranged, it is clear that his distant and separate life is a source of pain to her. Carol found love again later in life when she developed a relationship with Declan, owner of the local pharmacy. Their love blossomed after she began giving home tutoring to his daughter Sally, who was struggling at school. Sally is a fragile girl, deeply affected by her mother having left the family home, mysteriously, when she was young. Sally’s older brother Killian carries anger and resentment towards both his father and Carol.

Despite this Carol and Declan live happily (though unmarried, because he has never actually divorced his first wife) in the family home for a number of years until Declan begins to develop dementia. In a cruel twist, Killian and Sally secure power of attorney over their father’s affairs, admit him to a nursing home and put the house up for sale and Carol has no rights to object. She is forced to move back home with her parents, into her childhood bedroom. 

Carol’s parents are a hoot! Moira and Dave have become wealthy from the chain of coffee shops they set up, capitalising on the modernization in Irish society that happened so suddenly in the early 2000s. Despite this they are old-fashioned and set in their ways and provide hilarious comic relief to the tragic events occurring in their daughter’s life. When they propose to her that they secretly buy Declan’s home, with a view to renovating it and selling it on for a profit, no-one realises what dark secrets will be uncovered and how this will turn everyone’s lives upside down.

This is a fun novel though it is not without its dark moments. All the characters experience a transformation as a result of the events, and it is not all neat happiness. I listened to this on audiobook and, as always, the author’s narration is brilliant, a perfect showcase of his comic and artistic abilities. 

Highly recommended.

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