[ebooktalk] Re: My Monthly Reads
- From: "CJ& AA MAY" <chrisalis.may@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <ebooktalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 11:15:37 +0100
Ah yes, I now remember why I gave up on the Jean Rhys book - I was so
disappointed as it was read by synthetic speech and it just spoilt the book
for me.
Happy birthday, Clare!
Alison
-----Original Message-----
From: ebooktalk-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ebooktalk-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Clare Gailans
Sent: 08 October 2013 09:01
To: ebooktalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ebooktalk] My Monthly Reads
Bit late with this.
Peter James: Looking Good Dead. Very exciting, I must progress a bit faster
with this series. Can't remember much about the book a month on, though.
Margaret Atwood: Cat's Eye. This was a re-read for a course we are going on
soon. I enjoyed it more this time because it seemed less hard work with an
audio reader who was in sympathy than in braille first time round. Elaine is
rather hard-faced, and on this reading I found this harder to understand,
because though the experiences with Cordelia were definitely dreadful and
the sort of thing you would expect to mark her for life, she had a very
loving though rather unobservant family who you would think would have
compensated, even without knowing what was going on. Well, I suppose I think
they would have noticed that something was and asked her.
Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea, for the same course. I loved this, mainly for
the writing about the landscape and some of the characters, though my
longtime hero Mr Rochester doesn't come out of it well.
L. T. Meade: a World of Girls. This is a Victorian school story and rather
melodramatic, with some of the most nauseating baby talk I have ever seen
written out, and an awful lot of it. Three-year-old Nan kept saying "me like
'oo" among many other things. I enjoyed most of the writing though, and will
return to her, if only because I am now thoroughly gripped by the school
story genre (again!) Perhaps I have entered my second childhood.
E. M. Delafield: Turn Back the Leaves. This was a very dark book about an
old Catholic family who lived in grim isolation under the rule of their
dreadful father, though it did have snatches of humour to remind me that she
could also write about the Provincial Lady. My favourite was one of the
daughters being chastised for putting on a little make-up, which she was
told to remove before Papa saw it. "You may be sure that our Blessed Lady
never used a powder-puff!"
Charlotte M. Yonge: the Clever Woman of the Family. Another piece of
Victoriana, recommended by my school story devoteees but actually about
several families and Rachel's struggle to branch out of the drawing-room
into the world. Things go horribly wrong and she ends up marrying the man
she loves and settling for family life and helping in the parish. Not a
feminist writer, not that this bothers me as I have more or less settled for
family life myself, all these years on. She has some very good disabled
characters in this book, including a blindy, which isn't always the case in
books of this period!
Dorothy Whipple: Greenbanks. This is another family story written in the
1930s. Persephone have republished quite a few of her books. This was very
good but my favourite is still High Wages, about Jane who makes her way up
from a shop girl to running her own shop, with all sorts of lovely period
detail about the job.
Clare
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