Dear Friend,
One of the sadnesses about getting older, along with that fricking Nora Ephron neck thing TM, is that it gets harder to get surprised.
I got a huge amount of pleasure from showing the kids things like The Sixth Sense, just so I could watch their faces when the penny drops. (I will tell you by the way The Sixth Sense is so mad watching it a second time, you simply can't believe you were ever fooled the first time. The kid literally tells you exactly what's going on, over and over again, to your face, you fricking idiot).
And I am not terribly keen on this contemporary fashion for overdescribing everything. I never read blurbs anyway, they're already a disaster without a cutesy bunch of arrows telling you everything that’s going to happen and what all the main characters are like. This is because I am 104 years old. In fact, I hate even KNOWING that something is going to be twisty. I will then spend the entire book trying to third guess everyone and if it’s just that you’re meant to think the baddie s dead but woo they aren’t, they aren’t I’m like okay, meh.
Actually AHA! someone has just very sweetly done one for one of mine, so I retract everything. Also I can’t read it but I really hope it is Polish and we do well in Poland and they invite me over, as there is someone I badly want to visit there and have heard it’s gorgeous.
Also I read on kindle (suck it, Ooh the Smell of Real Books brigade) and it's even worse there for ‘twisty’ books, because you see where other people have underlined things when they're reading. And quite often they have gone back and underlined CLUES .
Mind you I am saying that whereas of course older books tell you everything in the chapter headings. Chapter XXXVIII: in which Emilia is surprised by the unexpected return of her wounded brother Edmund, and so forth.
One thing I don't mind is trigger warnings, as I have a phobia of sneks so bad I won't even type the word, and I would love a personal trigger warning just for me so I respect those who could do with one. I have two friends who are film critics and they both very sweetly let me know when an upcoming film has sneks in it so I don't get surprised in a dark theatre, except by that ad that warns you not to leave your handbag unattended.
On the subject of kindles, by the way, it is basically my grown up teddy bear. It sleeps with me in the bed and goes everywhere with me (one of the three identical ones I possess just in case), and I am distraught if I don't have it on me at all times. Also when I got my first one, the kindle web interface, the single worst web interface known to man, was, pre- smartphones, pretty much the only way to directly connect to the internet. \
It makes me very happy that they have never ever updated or improved its internet access in any way. It is still a complete crock, a pain in the arse to connect to wifi, and you still have to write CONVERT on an email subject header if you want to be able to read a pdf. I love it so hard. Perhaps because it is a lot like me: good at one thing only, and best suited to the early zeros.
So, anyway this rec qualifies as twisty, I am deeply sorry to tell you. BUT it is just such a cracking reading experience we are going ahead anyway.
It is called The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen David Walker, and is about a woman found unconscious in a park who has abandoned her child. She has to talk to a psychiatrist to figure out what happened to her- the book is written from his point of view- and I loved every single damn word of it with a fiery passion.
More or less completely untwisty, but very much My Kind of Thing is Dream State by Eric Puchner. It is in that realm of long fat Jonathan Franzen novels about incredibly well-off Americans managing to make themselves completely miserable, which are the kind of books I really enjoy. Oprah liked it too, if that helps, although our tastes don't always collide.
I often find quite a lot of the American MFA style of writing, where everyone has been to years and years of classes and workshops and retreats, refining and editing and discussing their ‘oeuvre’ can turn writing very bland. A lot of contemporary American novelists are like reading baby-food, a completely frictionless experience- but this is really really good on place, character and money.
It starts with the preparations for a wedding and then carries on and on throughout their lives- oh how I love a long book. (I think this stems from being a library kid. When you can only take out four books a week and read at warp speed you have to ration yourself. It's why I adore comic books but didn't read a lot of them growing up- they go so fast, and they're expensive. Someone once gave one of my brothers an old box of Warlords and Victors and boy I loved them so much. Alf Tupper Tough of the Track was my favourite. It was the 1970s, so people's granddads had fought in the war and there was always a letters page where boys would write in and insist that their grandfathers had stood up to terrible Nazi torture, which is amazing as apparently the number of people who can actually stand up to torture is statistically negligible. But all their grandkids wrote in to Warlord).
Anyway, Dream State is a very enjoyable world, and read, and comparable to Culpability by Bruce Holsinger, which I am reading at the moment but which is so unbelievably horrifying that I keep having to put it in the freezer, like Joey when he reads the Shining. I mean, GREAT though, in a Bonfire of the Vanities way.
And finally, I have noticed recently a certain look that comes over people's faces when we're talking about books, and I always know what's coming. It's a certain dreaminess, as if they're remembering a long ago love affair, or the best cherries they ever tasted, and their eyes go all soft- and it is always, always Meryl Streep reading Ann Patchett's Tom Lake. There is nothing more to say about this book, because if you are getting this far in a book rec newsletter you have already listened to it yourself but on the TINIEST offchance that you haven't, well, life has a little more joy left to give you, whatever your age.
Love,
Jen xxx