If you like Richard Ayoade, you will very likely enjoy this light-hearted, often ridiculous appraisal of a little known (and certainly never seen by me) Gwyneth Paltrow film. Interspersed with details from his own life, Ayoade gives us the blow by blow glories of this film and the wonder that is GP herself. A great deal of fun, and a delightfully short and satisfying read.
I read Mary S. Lovell’s fascinating biography of the Mitford girls, and a few of Nancy’s novels, loving them, too, so finally got round to reading Jessica’s first memoir. The whole family remains utterly enthralling, and I was surprised to discover how much Decca, the communist, loved Unity, obsessed with Hitler. She talks mainly of her eccentric, and oppressive, upbringing, and how she came to form and act on her political views. Surprisingly dispassionate, it is a funny, clever, and engrossing look into the lives of this aristocratic and bizarre family before WWII, and Jessica and Esmond’s life in England and the US.
After a series of events in her personal and work life rocked her, Leigh Sales set out to investigate how people cope with the very worst of days. Sales revisited people involved in high profile incidents, such as Walter Mikac, who lost his family at Port Arthur, Stuart Diver, who lost one wife in the Thredbo landslide and another to cancer, and people from the Lindt Café siege, and many others who had experienced incredible trauma and loss. What results is a life-affirming book about resilience, strength, faith, understanding and kindness. A good companion book for Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence.
Nadia Owusu’s Ghanaian father worked for the UN, and her Armenian-American mother abandoned her when she was two. They lived in many places across the world, and then Nadia’s beloved father died. Aftershocks is a beautiful, poetic memoir about the impact of abandonment, the question of identity, womanhood, and a sense of fractured self, in a fractured world. It is the story of a colourful, varied, privileged outer life, and the inner struggles of a woman trying to make a place for herself.
I knew very little about Michelle Obama before reading this. It’s hard work for me to have any interest in Australian politics, so I have made little to no effort with that of other countries, however prominent. This is the story of a working class girl, with a stable, loving family, naturally inclined to work hard, and supported by those around her so that she achieved all she set out to do, and sought to use her gifts to make a difference in the lives of others. It is long and detailed, but I found it enthralling, at least until Barack Obama entered politics. It’s about the importance of education, representation, having people who believe in you, and hope. It really does make the years that followed even more incomprehensible. I listened to the audiobook, beautifully read by the author.
This collection of essays begins with one about libraries, a very good start indeed. I love Zadie Smith’s fiction, and very much enjoyed many of the essays, especially those about books I have read, or places I have been or long to go. There were quite a few essays about people I knew nothing of, and which did not capture my interest, and others which I felt simply not clever enough to appreciate. It is fascinating to hear the actual voice of a novelist, writing as herself, and come to know something of her life, how she thinks, and how she writes her novels.
Bri Lee was an enviable young woman. She has a loving family and partner, plus a plum job as a judge’s associate. Behind the scenes, however, she was barely holding herself together, and her year of dealing with hideous court cases in regional Queensland gave her the impetus to deal with her own past. Not an easy, or pleasant, read, it is a moving story of the impact of abuse, the imbalance in the justice system, and the pain associated with speaking out.
This is the true story of Gavin Maxwell’s time in a remote cottage on the coast of Scotland, and of the animals he loved, particularly two otters. He paints a beautiful picture of the wild landscape, and the creatures who live in it. Life with otters sounds amusing, but I don’t envy it. I suspect that It’s because I am not a person who prefers the company of animals to people. I found this fascinating, but I didn’t really warm to Maxwell, and far prefer the nature writing of Gerald Durrell.
There is just something soothing about life in this Scottish, secondhand bookshop. Shaun Bythell is a curmudgeon, granted, but the frustrations of working in retail are real, and often amusing. This is the second volume of his diary of bookshop life, and I found it so compelling. Scottish weather and landscape, endearing and eccentric characters, and a love of books and reading; what more could we ask for? This book is great to read in troubled times, as there is no plot to follow, you can read a little or a lot at one time, and it is a delightful, and hopeful, escape.
This is one of the titles in the RRL Book Club collection. The Trauma Cleaner tells the true story of Sandra Pankhurst who has lived an extraordinary life: husband and father, drag queen, sex reassignment patient, sex worker, businesswoman, trophy wife. As a little boy, she was raised in violence and excluded from the family home. Sandra now brings order and care to the living, and the dead: a woman who sleeps among garbage she has not put out for forty years, a man who bled quietly to death in this loungeroom. Biographer, Sarah Krasnostein, accompanies Sandra on her cleaning assignments, at the same time piecing together her much forgotten life history. A fascinating and utterly moving story of survival.
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