1. Everless by Sara Holland
This is the first book in a new Young Adult Fantasy trilogy, which is not a genre I have read a lot of, but let me start by saying I cannot wait to read the rest of it! It is set in a land called Sempara, where they have discovered that time can be extracted from the blood, turning it into the most valuable resource. Naturally, this means that the rich live for centuries and the poor have to sell off their time to feed their families. It tells the story of a young woman, Jules, who puts herself in a dangerous position in an attempt to save her father.
I don't want to give much away, but I found it to be an engaging read with some fantastic twists. I had half ideas of how the story would unfold, but Holland exceeded my expectations and did the unexpected at every turn. My second favourite read of the month. Even my boyfriend, who has been reading the same book for the past three years, devoured it in less than a week.
2. The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan
It may not come as a surprise that I chose this book because of the cover. I mean look at it, it's beautiful! I am not sure why but it took me a long time to get into this book. I actually started it in 2016 and have sporadically picked it up and read a few pages before putting down again. I thought now was good time to actually get it read.
It follows the eponymous Inspector Chopra, who is freshly retired from the Mumbai police service, who has inherited an Elephant from his Uncle. However, he just cannot let go of a promise he made on his last day to a mother whose son's murder was officially ruled a suicide. He takes it upon himself to investigate and bring the murderer to justice.
There were flaws in this book, not just an unbelievable Deus ex Machina moment involving the elephant, I don't care how 'special' he is!! However, I would definitely pick up the second book in the series, now that we have been introduced to the main characters.
3. The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
I am a huge Agatha Christie fan. I remember the excitement as a child, when the Miss Marple theme music started at a beginning of an episode (it still gives me the chills 30 years later), which started my love of all things Christie. A couple of years ago I rekindled my love for the Queen of crime, and have been steadily working my way through her works.
This is not only the first Poirot novel, but it was also Christie's first published work. It is where, thanks to feedback from the first readers that she changed a courtroom denouement into the everyone-gathered-in-the-parlour whodunit reveal we have come to expect. It is a traditional locked room mystery, with a good amount of red herrings. A fantastic debut of a genius of the genre, though slightly lacking when compared to her really great works.
4. Little Deaths by Emma Flint
I was really excited about this book, which was longlisted for last year's Women's Prize for Fiction. It is based on the true story of a woman in 1960s New York, who wakes one morning to discover her children are missing. The detectives decide immediately to focus their investigations solely on the mother. She is ultimately arrested for their murder.
It is undoubtedly a bleak subject, made all the more harrowing for the fact that a real woman was subjected to the same treatment, highlighting the double standards at work when analysing the same behaviour in men and women. As far as the book goes, I thought it was okay. I found it overwritten, in the sense that had Flint told me every time one of the characters inhaled and exhaled I would not have been surprised. She is obviously a talented writer, but I just found the narrative focus a little too much. I would, however, certainly be interested in whatever she writes in the future.
5. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
This is the book credited with being the first English Gothic novel. It was originally published in 1764, but as the editor says in the introduction to the book, 'many modern readers find it by turns ludicrous and unreadable'. Perfect.
It opens with the Prince of Otranto's son being squashed by a giant helmet, which came from nowhere, and is never really explained. So there begins the ludicrousness. I wouldn't necessarily recommend reading it if you have no interest in literary history and intertextuality, but if you do then you will like what you find here. The introduction is especially informative, and it has made me keen to visit Strawberry Hill House next time I am in London.
6. The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena
I had such high hopes for this book, the synopsis was everything I want from a thriller:
It could have been great!!! The idea was excellent, some of the twists were brilliantly plotted, but unfortunately, these lacked the best execution. Lapena also did one of the things I absolutely hate, which is to let the narrator inside a character's head, but lie to us about what the character was feeling/their involvement in the happenings until halfway through to make it a twist. Add to that, I hated the ending.Your neighbour told you that she didn't want your six-month-old daughter at the dinner party. Nothing personal, she just couldn't stand her crying.Your husband said it would be fine. After all, you only live next door. You'll have the baby monitor and you'll take it in turns to go back every half hour.Your daughter was sleeping when you checked on her last. But now, as you race up the stairs in your deathly quiet house, your worst fears are realized. She's gone.You've never had to call the police before. But now they're in your home, and who knows what they'll find there.
You can safely bet that this will not end up on my Best of 2018 list. However, the synopsis for her next book looks just as fantastic as this one, so I see myself giving her a second chance, so hopefully she won't disappoint me next time.
7. Tithe by Holly Black
Another foray into the world of YA Fantasy, and another enjoyable experience. It follows Kaye, whose has so far been living an unconventional life, moving around a lot every time her mother joins a new rock band. When her mother's boyfriend gets violent, they have no choice but to move back in with Kaye's Grandmother. Kaye spent her early years here playing at the bottom of the garden with some fairies who only she can see. When she returns she discovers the fairies were not simply imaginary friends and she gets caught up in a fued between two fairy courts.
I really like it, not as much as Everless, but I have added The Cruel Prince to my February TBR, and cannot wait to read it.
8. The Very Pointless Quiz Book
I am addicted to Pointless, and the book kept me and my boyfriend very entertained. I was happy to find quite a few pointless answers along the way. I was especially excited when it was for a literature category.
9. The Collector by John Fowles
Have I mentioned how much I love this book already...?
It is the story of Frederick, a young man who doesn't fit in, the only thing that gives him joy is collecting butterflies, that is until he becomes obsessed with the beautiful Miranda, a talented art student. His obsession is so intense that when he wins £70,000 (according to an online calculator it would be the equivalent of £1.1 million today) he decides to kidnap her, believing that this is what everyone would do if only they had the money.
The first part of the book is told from Frederick's point of view, and it is very easy to find yourself sympathising with him. He quickly realises that the reality is far removed from his fantasies, in which Miranda falls in love with him, and he understands that there is no way out of it. The second part of the book takes the form of diary entries written by Miranda whilst in captivity. Miranda is obnoxious, snobbish, selfish and not a particularly nice person. This is where it, for me at least, became morally confusing. Although what Frederick has done is inexcusably awful, I found him a lot more sympathetic, and after all he shows no interest in abusing her, besides the fact he is withholding her freedom, he actually goes out of his way to make things exactly as he thinks she'd want them to be. Frederick is unaware that his actions will cause her to be frightened of him. He reminded me of the chap a few years ago who wrote a blog post about benevolent stalking - both men driven by deeply intense feelings, and an impulse that most normal people would be able to control. There is, of course, nothing benevolent about this, unrequited love sucks, but you cannot force someone to love you. No one deserves to be kept in captivity, but if it has to happen to someone, does it makes it a bit less terrible if the person it happens to is a person like Miranda? Thought provoking and beautifully written. I cannot wait to read more Fowles.
10. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
One of the things I loved about The Collector was it's intertextuality. One of the works referenced very directly was The Tempest, obviously Miranda being a character in The Tempest, but when Frederick introduces himself to her he tells her his name is Ferdinand, Miranda's love interest in The Tempest, and she in turn calls him Caliban, after the savage slave who loses favour with Prospero before the play opens by trying to rape Miranda.
I have read a lot of Shakespeare over the years but never The Tempest, so I decided to read it for no other reason than to perhaps enhance my understanding of The Collector. It is a problematic play, filled with contradictions, which make it hard to reconcile Prospero as being either essentially good, or evil. Little is really known about this play, there are few references to it before its appearance in the First Folio. A lot of Jacobean (and Elizabethan) plays can only really be understood, when transposing them to the politics of the day, with what happening on the stage being a disguised reflection of what is happening in England. I generally find my enjoyment of any of Shakespeare's plays increases with the more reading I do around the subject, so I keen to read some more critical interpretations of the play.
11. Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
I thought I would start my exploration of The Tempest by reading Margaret Atwood's modern retelling. I think I was expecting too much. I understand why she made the choices she did. She saw the meta-theatrical elements of The Tempest, and decided to make her 'Prospero' a literal director who stages a production of The Tempest. I liked the Chapter's dedicated to the actual performance, where he takes his revenge, but the rest of it contained far to much discussion of The Tempest as a play. I was expecting a re-imagining rather than a literal retelling of the plot. Atwood is so good at creating dystopian worlds, that she could have taken this in that direction and that was the book I wanted to read, so some of my disappointment comes from my own anticipation.
12. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
This is another book I chose that was inspired by The Tempest, the title being a quote from the play, and it was also a book that inspired Margaret Atwood's work, in fact this edition includes an introduction by Atwood.
I read 1984 last year and it is easy to see how Orwell had been inspired by certain aspects of Brave New World. They are on the surface very different visions of the future, 1984 is driven by fear and is a world continuously at war with Eurasia, until they were never at ware with Eurasia and always Eastasia. The future of Brave New World has eliminated war. In fact, it could be seen to be a Utopia in many ways, just like Fritz Lang's Metropolis is a Utopia from the point of view of those above ground. For all the pleasure and chemically induced happiness, it is much like an ant colony, where everyone has their own place, and free thinking (and poetry) are dangerous.
I enjoyed it. Although, towards the end of chapter three when I was reminded that 1931 was still part of the modernist movement, I swore at Huxley and re-prepared myself to read something modernist, when it returned to being a more straightforward read. It was certainly a reflection of the 1930s, a period that is a lot more liberal in their thinking than we often think. If the second world war was removed from history, then I could certainly imagine that the first summer of love could have occurred in the 1940s. This is a book I will be thinking of for a long time.
13. Misery by Stephen King
I really got into a theme this month. I knew the story before I read it, and watched the film in my teens, so at least 20 years ago. A writer has an accident and is kidnapped by one of his fans, an ex-nurse, who happens to be crazy. Unlike Frederick in The Collector (which is both referenced and quoted from in this book) Anne Wilkes is more than willing to use violence and torture to get what she wants.
I didn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to. This was partly because I wanted it as a bit of light relief after a few very literary reads, but I didn't fully gel with King's writing. There were bits that were fantastic and made me want to turn read the page through osmosis because I wanted to know everything that happens at once. Unfortunately, there were larger stretches where it became a chore to read. For me, if it was half the length it would have been a much less miserable experience! I thought it was clever, and perhaps with a second reading, when I know what to expect, I would rate it a little higher.
14. Possession by A. S. Byatt
I just about remembered in time that I needed to read a Booker winner a month to meet one of my 2018 Goals. I picked Possession as I have been saying 'this is the year I read Possession' for at least the last three years, so this really is the year! I am really pleased I waited, because if I had read it before I finished my English Lit degree, I wouldn't have appreciated as much.
It is the story of Roland, a PhD student, who discovers a link between the poet he has been researching and the poet that Maud Bailey, a literature professor, has dedicated her life's work to. If they can establish the link, it will have a huge impact on how the two poets are studied in the future. At the same time as the present timeline, actually 1986, there is a second timeline concerning the relationship between the two poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte - coincidentally named after one of my favourite poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on which I wrote one of my final essays.
The first quarter of the book, I absolutely loved, I was totally drawn into Roland and Maud's search for secrets, and had the whole book been written in the same style I could easily see it jostling with The Collector for my affections. Unfortunately, and necessarily, the correspondence between Ash and Christabel needed to be written in a more formal epistolary fashion, which sucked some of the life out of the prose. I still rate this very highly and understand completely why it won the Booker.
