#27. The Amateur Marriage: Anne Tyler

So I gave up reading about writers, and started reading about marriages instead. The Amateur Marriage follows a similar theme to Love and Other Infidelities, in that it looks at how a marriage goes wrong. But what I also enjoyed about this is its exploration of what must have been an incredibly common phenomenon - couples marrying in the heat of the moment amidst the chaos of World War II, only to be left with the reality of post-war America, living in the suburbs with someone who may be all wrong for them, wishing they had made different choices, but having to live with the consequences.
This book also gives a view of the whole lives of central characters Michael and Pauline by taking jumps forward in time - how they get together, raise their family, fall apart, what they do next, and how their children grow up.
There is something of the detached observer in Anne Tyler's writing, and I feel I don't know enough of the characters. This is particularly frustrating in the subplot of the vanishing of Michael and Pauline's daughter Lindy - I wanted to know more about how they coped with it, why she did it, what happened to her. So it was a little dissatisfying in this respect.
And maybe this slightly dispassionate tone comes from the fact that the characters, for the most part, lived a life devoid of passion - even any enjoyment, it seemed.
Despite this (and I do like a bit more excitement and passion in my books), it was beautifully written and a thoroughly enjoyable read.

#26. Love & Other Infidelities: Helen Townsend

This is the book I always thought should have been written - about what happens after the 'happily ever after', when you find 'the one' and everything is meant to be clear and easy from then. When I was younger, I used to wonder why people wrote about the search for someone to love, and what happened after they had proved to be the wrong one, but not about what happened in between. Well this certainly does – charting the slow crumbling of a marriage in gut-wrenching detail.
Set in Sydney, the novel works chronologically through the years from 1975 to 1994. Each chapter has multiple narrators, so you get the perspective of various characters on the complicated interweaving of relationships over two decade. This device, while unsophisticated and a little jarring in the early chapters when you're trying to figure out how these people fit together, highlights how different a single situation - especially the inner workings of an intimate relationship - can look through different eyes.
In the end, though, it just made me feel kind of sad - and maybe that's why people tend not to write these books.

#25. Girl from the South: Joanna Trollope

I love Joanna Trollope, but I haven't read one of her books for years - not since Marrying the Mistress and Other People's Children. I love her style of writing, especially because the characters she creates and the scenarios she places them in are so real, and yet still light-hearted and engaging enough to ensure that you don't feel depressed at the unrelenting reality of it.
Girl from the South straddles London and Charleston, South Carolina to examine thirty-something angst - finding love, finding the right job, working out where you fit in, and so on. There are men who can't commit, girls who can't work out whether they want to be married mothers or to go a completely different way, and all are feeling like time is ticking - that things should be getting serious. Of course, my favourite character is Tilly, the features editor (there I go with the writers again!), who can't get her boyfriend Henry to marry her and instead ends up in an unsuitable relationship with unsuitable William who has been in love with her forever.
It should be predictable and irritating - but it's not. And that's the joy of Joanna Trollope.

#24. Chocolat: Joanne Harris

Now I realise that I may be one of the last remaining people on the planet not to have either read this book or seen the movie with Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, but somehow I managed to completely miss both, up until now.
I loved this book, and its light-hearted whimsy was the perfect antidote to the increasingly depressing tales I have been reading recently. It has such a lovely array of characters, and I enjoyed stepping into the little village of Lansquenet every night with Vianne and her daughter Anouk, and imagining that lovely patissier with its beautiful chocolate delights. But it had just enough conflict and darkness to avoid sickly sweetness.
It also reminded me of the pleasures of fiction for its own sake, unclouded by too much 'worthiness'.

Dog vs cat people

You know the old dog vs. cat people argument - that you're either one or the other?
Personally I'm a rabbit person (but with definite underlying leanings toward dogs).
Anyway, my mum recounted a conversation she witnessed (and participated in) last week at, of all places, a medical clinic. A woman was raving to another woman about how fantastic Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love was, how life-changing, etc [insert Oprah here]. Until another woman piped up to say she didn't like it. And then my mum told everyone she hated it. Couldn't finish it. Didn't even get out of Italy.
So this got us thinking, is Eat Pray Love the new dichotomy dividing women of a certain age? Is the world now split into women who loved it, and women who wanted to give Elizabeth a good smack and tell her to stop whingeing about having a crap marriage/not wanting kids/lusting after younger men/NOT BEING ABLE TO MEDITATE for heaven's sake and just get on with it?
Could it become a kind of shorthand to find out whether you're going to get along with another woman, or whether your world views will be inconvertibly divergent?
Come on, you can tell me - which side of the Eat Pray Love fence do you sit on?

#23. Blinding Light: Paul Theroux

I'm conscious that I'm becoming a bit of a whinger on this blog. But really, I've had a bad run with books lately. Unfortunately, this one is no different. (Fortunately, this run of bad choices has definitely ended, as I am reading Chocolat by Joanne Harris at the moment and enjoying it immensely - a chocolatier/witch in a French village is just what I need.) First of all, I'm placing a temporary ban on any books with writers as their central characters. I get the whole 'write what you know' thing, but really, after about six books so far this year, it gets a little tiresome, and given that I find myself mired in the writing process on a daily basis, doesn't really provide the escapism I'm looking for in my fiction.
I hated this book. I hated the misogynistic, self-indulgent character of Slade Steadman, a one-hit-wonder writer who was fabulously successful and made a fortune from travel goods, who goes on a 'drug tour' of Ecuador and finds a hallucinogen that makes him able to pen a brilliant second book, through rendering him temporary blind. I hated that this long-awaited masterpiece was just about him reliving his various sexual experiences (like it was so fascinating to others). I hated that he managed to get his supposedly intelligent doctor girlfriend Ava to act like a glorified dictaphone and then in her time off, become his sexual puppet. I hated the weird introduction of Bill Clinton's infidelity into the storyline. And I particularly hated the continuing fiction he acted out in his life about being really blind, when he was just doping himself up every day.
In fact the only part I liked about the book was when he eventually got his comeuppance. But my short-lived enjoyment was ruined when two-dimensional Ava turned into a conniving, malicious lesbian. At first I wanted to applaud that she finally shook off whatever was keeping her in his thrall, but she was so nasty it just didn't make sense. Where was that backbone when he was being such a pain? The 'twist' in the story was reminiscent of some well-worn morality tale, and held about all the interest.
Just don't go there.
For the time being, I'm also swearing off gritty realism. You can have far too much of a good thing.

#22. Breakdown, Breakthrough – The Professional Woman's Guide to Claiming a Life of Passion, Power and Purpose: Kathy Caprino

I didn't really read this book out of choice – it is research for a ghostwriting project I am working on. It's a bit too 'I am woman, hear me roar' for me, and I was embarrassed reading it on the bus. Plus, given that I'm not currently having a breakdown or seeking a breakthrough, it didn't really resonate with me (well, until I got to the middle, when I started to think maybe I could do with a breakthrough too...). Putting all that aside for the time being, if I was a professional woman struggling with questions like, "Is this all there is?", "Why can't I manage better?", or "What do I want to do with the rest of my life?", then I can see it might help. Basically Caprino discusses 12 disempowerment crises, which relate to women's relationship with self, with others, with the world and with higher self. Caprino says she has experienced all 12 crises personally, which to me, suggests she must have been something of a train wreck at various stages. But never fear, she broke through and explains how everyone else can too. Each chapter describes the experience of other women who have been through the particular crisis it is focusing on, therapy-speak on how to identify and get over it, and then a series of action steps and a Breakthrough affirmation (it is a self-help book after all).
Despite the slightly annoying tone, it largely presents common sense, and I think the format would really work for someone feeling overwhelmed and a bit stuck, as it provides a simple way to work through the issues they are facing, perhaps start getting some perspective and move forward towards something better.