Book challenge #34 – A book with bad reviews

The Paying Guests – Sarah Waters

“For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?”

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Book challenge #32: A book with antonyms in the title

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story’s silent twin. There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent.

Book challenge #31: A book set during Christmas

Landline, Rainbow Rowell

Georgie McCool knows her marriage is in trouble. That it’s been in trouble for a long time. She still loves her husband, Neal, and he still loves her – but that almost seems besides the point now.

Two days before they’re supposed to visit Neal’s family in Omaha for Christmas, Georgie tells him that she can’t go. She’s a TV writer, and something’s come up on her show; she has to stay in Los Angeles. She knows that Neal will be upset with her – he is always a little upset with her – but she doesn’t expect to him to pack up the kids and go home without her.

When her husband and the kids leave for the airport, Georgie wonders if she’s finally done it. If she’s ruined everything.

That night, Georgie discovers a way to communicate with Neal in the past. It’s not time travel, not exactly, but she feels like she’s been given an opportunity to fix her marriage before it starts…

Is that what she’s supposed to do?

Or would Georgie and Neal be better off if their marriage never happened?

Book challenge #30: A classic romance

Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, Winifred Watson

“All these years she had never had the wicked thrill of powdering her nose. Others had experienced that joy. Never she. And all because she lacked courage.”

Back in April, Kat Brown wrote about how, when doing her tax return, she discovered that, in one year, she had bought seven copies of Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day as gifts, and “it’s got to the stage where I dole out my favourite like medicine”. So when, several months later, I was feeling particularly rotten, she suggested I read it. I dutifully went into Waterstones on an otherwise dull shopping trip, and picked up the spectacularly beautiful Persephone Books edition, and have been reading it on the train.

Book challenge #16: A book from your childhood

The Garden, Dyan Sheldon and Gary Blythe

I don’t have many books left from my childhood. A few, but not many. Foolish lending put paid to several of them, like one of my Harry Potters, and The Ruby In The Smoke. But my real sadness comes from the multiple teenage purges that parted me from my battered, beloved, read-and-reread copies of books like Black Beauty and White Fang – though not Just So Stories or The Jungle Book or A Little Princess, presumably because I thought that, as I was, at the grand age of 15 or whatever, so grown-up, that I couldn’t possibly want a book about a horse any more… I don’t know. I needed space for Real Books, or something. How wrong I was. I’ve replaced some of them in recent months, but there are others I can’t remember the titles of, or have forgotten about completely until reminded of them, and, besides, it’s different, having a new copy, to having the same one I hid under the covers with a torch to read. My mum made me keep two copies of the same book, Teddy’s Friend – one is the English version, the other American, and there are a few subtle differences between them – but no other picture books.

Except The Garden.

Book challenge #10: A book with non-human characters

The Bees, Laline Paull

I first saw this in a bookshop in Bath a couple of months ago, and was intrigued. But I was also a bit lost, and a bit sleepy, and a bit I-should-stop-buying-books-for-a-while-I-have-so-many, so I left empty-handed and got even more lost in Bath before finding my friends (sidenote: meeting women off twitter is brilliant, I highly recommend it).