TBR Thursday

TBR Thursday with She is Too Fond of Books is a meme to highlight all those hidden gems languishing in our out-of-control TBR piles.

They can be "books that I physically own, be it arc, bought, paperback or ebook.  It could have been there for months or just acquired it yesterday."

My little twist is to highlight one new release and one classic each week.

Although AusReadingMonth is officially over for another year, I still have a few more Australian books lurking on my TBR pile.

The Secret Maker of the World by Abbas El-Zein ended up on my TBR pile because Abbas is a friend of ours. I read several of these short stories immediately after the book launch, but during our move earlier in the year, it got packed away and forgotten, until I went searching for all my unread Australian books for AusReadingMonth.

Abbas was born in Beirut and many of his stories are informed by his childhood experiences. I can hear his voice in my mind telling me these stories as I read.

A boatman fishes bodies from the Yellow River searching for the one he can claim. A construction worker speeds through the Indonesian jungle to board his plane on time. Playing a terrifying game of cat and mouse, an isolated sniper in Beirut observes the city from his rooftop perch. 

With profound insight El-Zein’s stories cross continents and time zones, effortlessly melding themes of loss and longing with larger questions of power, politics, faith and love. His characters, as provocative as they are diverse, confront issues of violence, justice and redemption with varying degrees of rage, suspense, satire and wit.  

With a sharp eye for the ridiculous, El-Zein’s collection cleverly illuminates stereotypes and contemplates global truths. These are worldly stories in the best sense, and wise ones.

A couple of years ago I read my first Harrower (The Watch Tower) with great love and affection (and just a little creepiness!) I've been dead keen to try more, which is why The Catherine Wheel was added to my TBR pile.

Twenty-five-year-old Clemency James has moved from Sydney to a chilly bedsit on the other side of the world. During the day she studies for the bar by correspondence; in the evenings she gives French lessons to earn a meagre wage. When she meets Christian, a charismatic would-be actor, she can see he’s trouble—not least because he’s involved with an older woman who has children. She is drawn to him nonetheless: drawn into his world of unpayable debts and wild promises.

First published in 1960, The Catherine Wheel is Elizabeth Harrower’s third novel and the only one of her books not set in Australia. In it she turns her unflinching gaze on the grim realities of 1950s London, and the madness that can infect couples.

It has been fun highlighting all these Aussie books over the past couple of months....but perhaps I need to declare every month #AusReadingMonth to actually get through them all!!

How do you manage your out of control TBR piles?

TBR Thursday

TBR Thursday with She is Too Fond of Books is a meme to highlight all those hidden gems languishing in our out-of-control TBR piles.

They can be "books that I physically own, be it arc, bought, paperback or ebook.  It could have been there for months or just acquired it yesterday."

My little twist is to highlight one new release and one classic each week.

This month I have focused on the Australian books lurking in my TBR in honour of AusReadingMonth.

The White Earth by Andrew McGahan is a Miles Franklin Award winning book that has been on my TBR pile for several years now.

After his father’s death, young William is cast upon the charity of an unknown great-uncle, John McIvor. The old man was brought up expecting to marry the heiress to Kuran Station—a grand estate in the Australian Outback—only to be disappointed by his rejection and the selling off of the land. He has devoted his life to putting the estate back together and has moved into the once-elegant mansion. 
  
McIvor tries to imbue William with his obsession, but his hold on the land is threatened by laws entitling the Aborigines to reclaim sacred sites. William’s mother desperately wants her son to become John McIvor’s heir, but no one realizes that William is ill and his condition is worsening.

Ruth Cracknell's memoir Journey from Venice is a recent find from a second hand book shop in the Blue Mountains. I've heard wonderful, heart-warming things about this book over the years and couldn't resist it when I spotted it. First published in 2000, this grief journal becomes even more poignant when Ruth Cracknell also died in May 2002.

The Serene City beckons, promising Paradise regained for Ruth Cracknell and her husband, Eric, as they set forth on a carefully planned holiday. 

What they are seeking is time. Time to think, time to gaze, time for each other. But from the moment the holiday becomes an uncharted journey, their time is measured.

Journey From Venice is confronting yet deeply comforting – an acknowledgement of the miracle that is unconditional love.

TBR Thursday

TBR Thursday with She is Too Fond of Books is a meme to highlight all those hidden gems languishing in our out-of-control TBR piles.

They can be "books that I physically own, be it arc, bought, paperback or ebook.  It could have been there for months or just acquired it yesterday."

My little twist is to highlight one new release and one classic each week.

This month I will also focus on the Australian books lurking in my TBR in honour of AusReadingMonth.

Just a Queen by Jane Caro is the follow up to Just A Girl from 2011. I've been waiting a long time for this YA sequel about Elizabeth and hope it's a good as the first.

A gripping and page-turning young adult book about one of history’s greatest women.

'The Queen of Scots is dead and they say I killed her. They lie!'

Just a girl to those around her, Elizabeth is now the Queen of England. She has outsmarted her enemies and risen above a lifetime of hurt and betrayal – a mother executed by her father, a beloved brother who died too young and an enemy sister whose death made her queen.

Not knowing whom she can trust, Elizabeth is surrounded by men who give her compliments and advice but may be hiding daggers and poison behind their backs. Elizabeth must use her head and ignore her heart to be the queen her people need. But what if that leads to doing the one thing she swore she would never do: betray a fellow queen, her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots? 

The Railwayman's Wife was one of my favourite reads of 2014. Gum is the 2002 non-fiction classic by Ashley Hay.

No matter where you look in Australia you're more than likely to see a eucalyptus tree. Scrawny or majestic, smooth as pearl or rough as a pub brawl, they have defined a continent for thousands of years, and still shape our imagination.

Indigenous Australians have long woven myths about the abilities of the eucalyptus. Since Australia was colonised, botanists have battled for more than two hundred years in a race to count, classify and own the species. This is the story of that battle and of other eucalyptographers – explorers, poets, painters, foresters, conservationists, scientists (and engine drivers) – who have been obsessed by them, championing their powers. Gum trees have promised to cure malaria, solve the drainage problems that had defeated the Roman emperors, forest the Sahara and divine gold.

Gum is about a magical, mythical, medicinal tree. More than that, it's the story of new worlds, strange people and big ideas.

TBR Thursday

TBR Thursday with She is Too Fond of Books is a meme to highlight all those hidden gems languishing in our out-of-control TBR piles.

They can be "books that I physically own, be it arc, bought, paperback or ebook.  It could have been there for months or just acquired it yesterday."

My little twist is to highlight one new release and one classic each week.

Over the next few weeks I will also focus on the Australian books lurking in my TBR in honour of AusReadingMonth.

The Midnight Dress by Karen Foxlee made it onto my TBR list after I read her children's story Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy. I was captivated, wrote a gushing review and tracked down her backlist.

All her life, Rose Lovell has moved from town to town with her alcoholic father. When they wash up in an Australian coastal sugarcane town, Rose wonders if maybe, finally, things will be different this time. On her first day at school, Rose meets Pearl Kelly, a popular, pretty and lively girl intent on tracking down her long-lost Russian father. She convinces Rose to join in with the town's annual Harvest Parade, and Rose agrees, despite thinking the whole thing is embarrassingly yokel. She has to find a truly special dress - one that will make it clear she is different to the rest of the girls in this town. And who better to help her than the local eccentric, Edie Baker, who knows all the town's secrets and whose own family is a rich tapestry of stories, including whispers of witchcraft and murder. Edie agrees on the condition that Rose will create the dress with her - a dress woven from scraps and secrets and stories.

But when the girl wearing the midnight blue dress goes missing, the town will find it has secrets of its own to tell, and nothing can ever be the same again. THE MIDNIGHT DRESS weaves a mesmerising story of love, loss and longing to the very last page.

I came late to my love of Alex Miller with Coal Creek. As with Foxlee,  I am now tracking down Miller's backlist. This is his Miles Franklin Literary Award winner from 2003, Journey to the Stone Country.

Betrayed by her husband, Annabelle Beck retreats from Melbourne to her old family home in tropical North Queensland where she meets Bo Rennie, one of the Jangga tribe. Intrigued by Bo's claim that he holds the key to her future, Annabelle sets out with him on a path of recovery that leads back to her childhood and into the Jangga's ancient heartland, where their grandparents's lives begin to yield secrets that will challenge the possibility of their happiness together. 

With the consummate artistry of a novelist working at the height of his powers, Miller convinces us that the stone country is not only a remote and exotic location in North Queensland, but is also an unvisited place within each of us. Journey to the Stone Country confirms Miller's reputation as one of Australia's most intelligent and uncompromising writers.

"The most impressive and satisfying novel of recent years. It gave me all the kinds of pleasure a reader can hope for" - Tim Winton

TBR Thursday

TBR Thursday with She is Too Fond of Books is a meme to highlight all those hidden gems languishing in our out-of-control TBR piles.

They can be "books that I physically own, be it arc, bought, paperback or ebook.  It could have been there for months or just acquired it yesterday."

My little twist is to highlight one new release and one classic each week.

Over the next few weeks I will also focus on the Australian books lurking in my TBR in honour of AusReadingMonth.

I've been a Lily Brett fan ever since I first stumbled across Too Many Men. Although many of her subsequent novels feel like a repeat of TMM, I always enjoyed falling back in to the way she wrote about family relationships.
Her non-fiction pieces also explore this theme in a way that I find very satisfying.

Only in New York by Lily Brett is her latest offering.

New York is a walker's city. You can walk for hours. The streets slip by. There is so much to look at, so much to take in. I walk a lot. Especially when I am not writing…

Lily Brett's love affair with New York began as an outsider in her late teens when she was posted on assignment there as a young Australian rock journalist. In her early forties she returned, together with her soul mate and three children, to start a new life. She has since called New York home for three decades.

This witty, candid and moving collection of short pieces celebrates the city that's now part of her heartbeat. A compulsive walker, Brett takes us to her favourite places and introduces us to the characters of the city that has nurtured, perplexed and inspired her. She brings to life the delights of Chinatown, the majesty of Grand Central Station, the lure of spandex and sequins, and the peculiarity of canine couture. And she muses on the miracle of love in the Lodz ghetto, the possibility of loneliness amidst skyscrapers, and the joy and redemption in a child's curiosity.

Full of wisdom, humour and grace, Only in New York is a human portrait of a city in part lost in its own mythology – and of a woman in step with herself.

Swords and Crowns and Rings by Ruth Park is one of the new Text Classics reprints. Harp in the South is a wonderful story, but it is this one that won Park a Miles Franklin Award. I'm curious, very curious.

Ruth Park’s Miles Franklin-winning novel brilliantly evokes Australia in the midst of the Great Depression. Written with warmth and affection, Swords and Crowns and Rings is a powerful story about human nature and the strength of an unlikely love.

Growing up in an Australian country town before World War I, Jackie Hanna and Cushie Moy are carefree and innocent in their love for each other. But Jackie is a dwarf, and his devotion to the beautiful Cushie is condemned by her parents.

This is the story of their lifelong odyssey, and of the triumph of a special kind of courage.

In Swords and Crowns and Rings, Ruth Park brilliantly captures the mood of Australia in the first part of the twentieth century.

TBR Thursday

TBR Thursday with She is Too Fond of Books is a meme to highlight all those hidden gems languishing in our out-of-control TBR piles.

They can be "books that I physically own, be it arc, bought, paperback or ebook.  It could have been there for months or just acquired it yesterday."

My little twist is to highlight one new release and one classic each week.

Over the next few weeks I will also focus on the Australian books lurking in my TBR in preparation for AusReadingMonth in November.

Magda Szubanski's Reckoning: A Memoir is a very new book on my TBR pile, but it has had such rave reviews that I'm chomping at the bit to get into it. In fact one recent review from Peter Craven suggested this book was "riveting and overwhelmingly poignant" and written by a "woman of genius". He finished with "every library should have it, every school should teach it."

Heartbreaking, joyous, traumatic, intimate and revelatory, Reckoning is the book where Magda Szubanski, one of Australia’s most beloved performers, tells her story.

In this extraordinary memoir, Magda describes her journey of self-discovery from a suburban childhood, haunted by the demons of her father’s espionage activities in wartime Poland and by her secret awareness of her sexuality, to the complex dramas of adulthood and her need to find out the truth about herself and her family. With courage and compassion she addresses her own frailties and fears, and asks the big questions about life, about the shadows we inherit and the gifts we pass on.
Honest, poignant, utterly captivating, Reckoning announces the arrival of a fearless writer and natural storyteller. It will touch the lives of its readers.

The Essence of the Thing by Madeleine St John has been on my TBR pile ever since I read and loved The Women in Black a few years ago.

Nicola only went to buy cigarettes and upon returning finds a stranger in her apartment. He looks like her live-in boyfriend, Jonathan, but he can't actually be the dependable known quantity whom Nicola loves that goes by the name of Jonathan. Can he? Before Nicola stands a man who is strong and adorable just like the old Jonathan, only this one is no longer hers! 

This sad tale of love gone south still has its funny side. You have either to laugh or cry when you see, as acutely and elegantly as St John captures it here, the things women will do to hold on to love, and the things men will do to escape it.

Reviews for this book fall into the love it or hate it category.
I wonder how I will go?

TBR Thursday

TBR Thursday with She is Too Fond of Books is a meme to highlight all those hidden gems languishing in our out-of-control TBR piles.

They can be "books that I physically own, be it arc, bought, paperback or ebook.  It could have been there for months or just acquired it yesterday."

My little twist is to highlight one new release and one classic each week.

Over the next few weeks I will also focus on the Australian books lurking in my TBR in honour of AusReadingMonth.

Paving the New Road by Sulari Gentill is no. 4 in the Rowland Sinclair series. These books have become my go-to comfort read. Gentle crime at its gentlest - Sydney in the 1930's, Bohemian artists, political nasties - what's not to love!

It’s 1933, and the political landscape of Europe is darkening.

Eric Campbell, the man who would be Australia’s Führer, is on a fascist tour of the Continent, meeting dictators over cocktails and seeking allegiances in a common cause. Yet the Australian way of life is not undefended. Old enemies have united to undermine Campbell’s ambitions. The clandestine armies of the Establishment have once again mobilised to thwart any friendship with the Third Reich.

But when their man in Munich is killed, desperate measures are necessary.

Now Rowland Sinclair must travel to Germany to defend Australian democracy from the relentless march of Fascism. Amidst the goosestepping euphoria of a rising Nazi movement, Rowland encounters those who will change the course of history. In a world of spies, murderers and despotic madmen, he can trust no-one but an artist, a poet and a brazen sculptress.

Plots thicken, loyalties are tested and bedfellows become strange indeed.

The Rose Grower by Michelle de Kretser is from 1999 although it's only been in my collection for a couple of months.
De Kretser won the Miles Franklin award in 2013 for Questions of Travel, so when I spotted her name on this luscious looking book at a market stall in the beautiful hamlet of Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, my curiosity was piqued.

Reading the back cover though had me swooning with delight - roses, the French Revolution and love!
Now I just have to make time to read it.

On a cloudless summer afternoon in 1789, labourers working in the fields around Montsignac, a village in Gascony, saw a man fall out of the sky. 

The balloon had drifted over a wooded ridge and into their valley. The farm-workers, straightening up one by one, shaded their eyes against the dazzle of sun on crimson and blue silk. The thing hung in the sky - sumptuous, menacing - like a sign from God or the devil.
Then there was thunder and fire, and a man plummeting earthwards. 

It was the 14th of July. The world was about to change.

Are you familiar with either of these books or authors? 

TBR Thursday

TBR Thursday with She is Too Fond of Books is a meme to highlight all those hidden gems languishing in our out-of-control TBR piles.

They can be "books that I physically own, be it arc, bought, paperback or ebook.  It could have been there for months or just acquired it yesterday."

My little twist is to highlight one new release and one classic each week.

Over the next few weeks I will also focus on the Australian books lurking in my TBR in preparation for AusReadingMonth in November.

Reading by Moonlight by Brenda Walker is one of those books about books that I love to dip into at times. It came highly recommended by a friend. I hope to do it justice one day soon.

A memoir of reading and healing.

The first time Brenda Walker packed her bag to go into hospital, she wondered which book to take with her. As a novelist and professor of literature, her life had been built around reading and writing. Now she was also a patient, being treated for breast cancer, fighting for her life and afraid for herself and her family. But turning to medicine didn't mean she turned away from fiction. Books had always been her solace and sustenance, and now choosing the right one was the most important thing she could do for herself.

In Reading by Moonlight, Brenda describes the five stages of her treatment and how different books and authors helped her through the tumultuous process of recovery. As well as offering wonderful introductions and insights into the work of writers like Dante, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Beckett and Dickens, Brenda shows how the very process of reading – surrendering and then regathering yourself – echoes the process of healing. 

Reading by Moonlight guides, reassures, throws light on dark places, and finds beauty in the stories that come to us in times of jeopardy. It affirms that reading can be essential to life itself.

This week is a non-fiction TBR week.

Resilience by Anne Deveson has been on my shelves for over ten years. I bought it during a particularly difficult year. The death of an ill aunt, the very sudden death of a dear colleague, followed by the tragic death of a friend's 21 yr old son had left me reeling. I was looking for answers and guidance.

Resilience was recommended to me and promised to be useful.
I dipped in and out of sections of it at the time, but in hindsight, I realise that I wasn't really capable of taking much in back then that wasn't grounded purely in the here and now. Thinking philosophically about what had happened that year was still some time away.

Perhaps, some of it did sink in though, given how well I have coped with subsequent grief and loss and major change events in my life.

This work explores resilience, one of the most important and intriguing characteristics affecting human wellbeing. In western societies scant attention has been paid to exploring how and why some people and some communities are better able to cope with adversity and risk than others. 

Anne Deveson addresses the nature of resilience, whether it can be learned, its many components, what inhibits resilience and why some people/communities are more resilient than others. individuals and groups of people to feel they can cope, to encourage a different ethos amongst the shapers of law and policy, and to encourage the establishment of programmes to develop resiliency models for young people.

Have you found a book or an author that has helped you through tough times? 

I usually turn to Jane Austen, but there have been two times in my life when she deserted me.

One was a very happy time and one was a very stressful time.

In both cases, my mind couldn't settle on anything except the immediate events. The problem wasn't Jane Austen though, I actually couldn't read anything at all. The solace of reading left me completely.

I hope it never happens again!

Later: I've just spotted that Sophisticated Dorkiness et al are hosting Non-Fiction November again this year. Now I have a double reason to get these two books read in the coming weeks!

TBR Thursday

TBR Thursday with She is Too Fond of Books is a meme to highlight all those hidden gems languishing in our out-of-control TBR piles.

They can be "books that I physically own, be it arc, bought, paperback or ebook.  It could have been there for months or just acquired it yesterday."

My little twist is to highlight one new release and one classic each week.

Over the next few weeks I will also focus on the Australian books lurking in my TBR in preparation for AusReadingMonth in November.

My new release is Autumn Laing by Alex Miller.
I read Coal Creek a few years ago and loved it.
I loved it so much that I've gradually been acquiring Miller's backlist. I just haven't made the time to read any of them yet!
Autumn Laing was first published in 2011.

Autumn Laing has long outlived the legendary circle of artists she cultivated in the 1930s. Now 'old and skeleton gaunt', she reflects on her tumultuous relationship with the abundantly talented Pat Donlon and the effect it had on her husband, on Pat's wife and the body of work which launched Pat's career. A brilliantly alive and insistently energetic story of love, loyalty and creativity.

Autumn Laing seduces Pat Donlon with her pearly thighs and her lust for life and art. In doing so she not only compromises the trusting love she has with her husband, Arthur, she also steals the future from Pat's young and beautiful wife, Edith, and their unborn child.
Fifty-three years later, cantankerous, engaging, unrestrainable 85-year-old Autumn is shocked to find within herself a powerful need for redemption. As she begins to tell her story, she writes, 'They are all dead and I am old and skeleton-gaunt. This is where it began...'
Written with compassion and intelligence, this energetic, funny and wise novel peels back the layers of storytelling and asks what truth has to do with it. Autumn Laing is an unflinchingly intimate portrait of a woman and her time - she is unforgettable.

My Aussie classic from 1995 is the memoir Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave. It has had a resurgence of interest of late thanks to a movie starring Guy Pearce, Geoffrey Rush, Sarah Snook, Anthony LaPaglia and Ryan Corr (which I hope to see soon).

The mid-seventies: at an all-boys Catholic school in Melbourne, Timothy Conigrave falls wildly and sweetly in love with the captain of the football team. So begins a relationship that weathers disapproval, separation and, ultimately death. With honesty and insight Holding the Man explores the highs and lows of any partnership, and the strength of heart both men have to find when they test positive to HIV. This is a book as refreshing and uplifting as it is moving; a funny and sad and celebratory account of growing up gay.

Have you read either of these books or authors?

TBR Thursday

TBR Thursday with She is Too Fond of Books is a meme to help us highlight some of the hidden or forgotten gems languishing in our out of control TBR piles.

Arcadia by Iain Pears hasn't been on my TBR for very long. But it's a chunkster (608 pgs) with an accompanying app (which I've downloaded in preparation).

The novel contains ten separate story strands. Pears explains (in his Guardian interview) that "each narrative is complete but is enhanced when mingled with all the others; to offer readers the chance to structure the book as best suits them."

I'm not quite ready to tackle such a big multi-modal reading experience so soon after A Little Life, even though the story line brings to mind both David Mitchell and Kazuo Ishiguro (two favourites of mine).

Henry Lytten - a spy turned academic and writer - sits at his desk in Oxford in 1962, dreaming of other worlds.

He embarks on the story of Jay, an eleven-year-old boy who has grown up within the embrace of his family in a rural, peaceful world - a kind of Arcadia. But when a supernatural vision causes Jay to question the rules of his world, he is launched on a life-changing journey.

Lytten also imagines a different society, highly regulated and dominated by technology, which is trying to master the science of time travel.

Meanwhile - in the real world - one of Lytten's former intelligence colleagues tracks him down for one last assignment.

As he and his characters struggle with questions of free will, love, duty and the power of the imagination, Lytten discovers he is not sure how he wants his stories to end, nor even who is imaginary...

Part of the appeal for this week's classic is the Introduction by Hilary Mantel; another part is the beautiful Virago Modern Classics designer cover.

Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins

A love story with a difference, this exquisite novel subtly demonstrates that in affairs of the heart, the race is not necessarily to the swift—or the fair. It comes with a beautiful cover by Florence Broadhurst.

The magnetic Evelyn Gresham, 52, is a barrister of considerable distinction. He has everything life could offer—a gracious riverside house in Berkshire, a beautiful young wife, Imogen, who is devoted to him, and their 11-year-old son, a replica of his father.

Their nearest neighbor is Blanche Silcox, a plain, tweed-wearing woman of 50 who rides, shoots, fishes, and drives a Rolls Royce—in every way the opposite of the domestic, loving Imogen.

Their world is conventional country life at its most idyllic: how can its gentle surfaces be disturbed?

Have you read either of these books?
Have you ever used an app to enhance your reading experience?

TBR Thursday

TBR Thursday with She is Too Fond of Books is a meme to help us highlight some of the hidden or forgotten gems languishing in our out of control TBR piles.

My first book hasn't actually been languishing for very long at all. But I'm so excited to be finally reading it, that I had to mention it this week.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest, most ultra-Dickensian places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement—and a great gift for its publisher.

     In its simplest terms, this is a novel about the long-term friendship of four classmates from a Massachusetts liberal arts college who come to New York to make their way; unlike most such college friendships the four never lose touch over the years and decades.

There is Willem, an actor from the West who becomes a Ryan Gosling-type indie film star and heartthrob; Malcolm, an Upper East Side buppie who becomes a noted architect; JB, a painter of Haitian/Brooklyn middle class descent whose Basquiat-type portraits of his friends earn him art world fame and fortune; and Jude St. Francis, a damaged orphan with a mysterious past whose brilliance in the law cannot shield him from the effects of that past and whose fragility and need for protection bind the group together as much as any one thing. 

     The book begins as a four-hander as we watch the friends progress in their lives and careers and observe the intricacies and shifting alliances of such a group friendship. But gradually Jude takes over the book and we learn his horrifying and beyond-Gothic backstory. The drama of the book is whether Jude can ever escape the grip of his Dickensian past--can he be saved? All of this unfolds over the decades in a mesmerizing fashion, with the tragic and the transcendent being on closer and more intimate terms than any work of fiction you have ever read.

My classic TBR this week has been languishing for a couple of years now. Thanks to its gorgeous cover, though, it has pride of place with my other Virago Modern Classic designer books on the bookcase in our bedroom. These books catch my eyes every morning when I open the blinds. They always give me a little bookish glow of pleasure. A lovely way to start each day.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s.

Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.

“I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).” –Groucho Marx

"[The Dud Avocado] is one of the best novels about growing up fast..." -The Guardian

Have you read either of these books?

Enough blogging - time to jump back into A Little Life!

Happy Reading!

 

TBR Thursday

As part of my reassessment about how I spend my time online, I'm looking at the memes I participate in.

I love how memes lead me to new bloggers, new books & new ideas. I enjoy the social aspect of memes.

But can I be frank?
I also spend a lot of time looking at blogs and books that I have no interest in whatsoever.

I'm happy that in this big wide world of blogging, there are blogs, books and ideas to suit every type of blogger. The hard part can be finding ones that appeal to your own taste.

I love to read classics, which led to me The Classics Club several years ago. A match made in heaven.

But I don't read classics all the time.

I like to read the new stuff, the award winning stuff and the occasional gentle crime comfort read. I love reading Australian authors. I appreciate diversity. I enjoy quirky and experimental. I love history - fiction, biographies, memoirs and non-fiction.

Like most of you, I also have an out of control TBR pile.
My recent move helped me to recreate a semblance of order. It also helped me rediscover lots of forgotten gems.

So, I've decided to join She is Too Fond of Books with her TBR Thursday meme to highlight one classic and one new release from my TBR pile each week.


Flesh Wounds by Richard Glover

A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family.

Richard Glover's favourite dinner party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?'. It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob, who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed-toy collector. There was his father, a distant alcoholic, who ran through a gamut of wives, yachts and failed dreams. And there was Richard himself, a confused teenager, vulnerable to strange men, trying to find a family he could belong to. As he eventually accepted, the only way to make sense of the present was to go back to the past - but beware of what you might find there. Truth can leave wounds - even if they are only flesh wounds.


Part poignant family memoir, part rollicking venture into a 1970s Australia, this is a book for anyone who's wondered if their family is the oddest one on the planet. The answer: 'No'. There is always something stranger out there.

'Sad, funny, revealing, optimistic and hopeful.' Jeanette Winterson

Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell

I think I must be an improper woman without knowing it, I do so manage to shock people.'

Elizabeth Gaskell's second novel challenged contemporary social attitudes by taking as its heroine a fallen woman. Ruth Hilton is an orphan and an overworked seamstress, an innocent preyed upon by a weak, wealthy seducer. When he heartlessly abandons her she finds shelter and kindness in the home of a dissenting minister and his sister, who do not reject her when she gives birth to an illegitimate child. But Ruth's self-sacrificing love and devotion are tested to the limit by a twist of fate
that brings her past back to haunt her.

Gaskell's depiction of Ruth lays bare Victorian hypocrisy and sexual double-standards, and her novel is a remarkable story of love, of the sanctuary and tyranny of the family, and of the consequences of lies and deception.

Have you read either of these books yet?
What did you think?