Mrs Blackwell’s October Reading Log
Greetings from Bend, Oregon 👋 Mr Blackwell and I are back here for a little while.
I’ll start this month’s Reading Log with two key points:
I enjoyed every book I read this month. I don’t use a star rating system but if I did they’d all be a solid four or five out of five stars. Quite a rare achievement!
All the books I’m pictured with below have different jackets here in the US than they do at in NZ. That’s not so rare overall, but six out of six is a surprise and I thought I’d start off with a little explanation about why this happens.
Books are sold - by agents, to publishers - with rights to certain countries or territories (groups of countries).
By far the most common scenario for a British or American author is that the rights are sold for North America (USA and Canada), and a seperate set of rights are sold for the UK and all other english speaking countries. New Zealand therefore sits with the UK rights holders and for this reason, we almost always have the same cover as the UK.
With the rights comes some discretion on the cover design. what the designers in each territory believe about their readers’ tastes is largely a mystery to me, but my on-the-ground observation is that US covers, in general, tend to be brighter and more abstract, to appeal to a large and diverse market. The UK (and NZ) editions tend to be more literal and often attempt to summarise the book with photo realism. Here’s a recent example of a book you probably know or have heard of, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. US cover on the left, UK cover on the right:
I picked this one because it highlights one of my pet peeves, which is attempting to personify a main characters on fiction covers. I love to use my imagination, as many readers do, and I’d just much rather imagine the character for myself.
But gripes aside, what cover designers are usually trying to do is give readers a quick sense for what the book is about and who it might appeal to. That’s the reason that a lot of science fiction and fantasy uses metallics, complex serif fonts and dark images. And why most romance titles have feminine pastel colours, with scripty hand-drawn fonts and illustrations of the main character. The designers hope it will be a way of grabbing readers attention who have enjoyed other, similar books.
Anyway, enough of a look at the weeds of bookselling, lets have a look at what I read this October:
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
If you like literary fiction that messes with your feelings about characters and your ability to judge the good and bad, the right from the wrong, then you must put this on your to-be-read!
Many of the intriguing details of this book are also spoilers for the plot, and that is part of what makes this books so interesting. But without ruining anything, our main character is Isabel who lives a very uptight life in the eastern part of The Netherlands. She lives in a house that her Uncle purchased for her family at the end of WWII. Isabel has kind of inherited the house from her late mother for the time being, but the family know that the house has been promised to her oldest brother Louis once he decides to start a family. Louis is a ladies man, so Isabel doesn’t live with the sense that he will be wanting the house any time soon.
One day, Louis calls up and asks to have his new girlfriend Eva stay while Louis is away for work. Eva and Isabel could not be more different and the tension boils up (and over) from here…
This is a Booker shortlisted title and while I have a history of getting the Booker spectacularly wrong, my pick for the winner is this book or Percival Everett’s James.
On the subject of the Booker Prize:
Held by Anne Michaels
This is the sixth and final book on the Booker 2024 Shortlist and for me this was definitely the most challenging to read.
Anne is primarily a poet and that comes through really clearly in the way this novel is written - in the lyricality of the writing - and the way it is structured. It’s laid out as stanza, like poetry.
The novel moves back and forward in time, between action in the present, memories, hallucinations and letters.
I really wasn’t sure I would be up to the challenge of this novel when I started reading it, but I was surprised at how my imagination managed to pull this all together and keep a track of most of what was happening. I would say this would be a great book to buy for readers who love poetry and aren’t hung up on a plot driven story.
Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks
Many of you will know Geraldine as the author of the hugely popular Horse which was a novel based on the true story of the Kentucky thoroughbred, Lexington.
What you probably didn’t know is that much of the work finishing that book was done after her seemingly healthy, 60-year-old husband literally dropped dead on a streeetside in 2019.
The book moves back and forward between the period of death and burial in 2019, and three years later when she’s taken herself to an isolated spot in Tasmania to try and grieve the loss of her husband.
A big theme of the book is the examination of grief in western culture, and that unlike grieving in many other cultures, we don’t really have a system or a set of protocols around grief. In fact, more often that not, if the deceased is very close to us, in the times we should be grieving, we’re actually dealing with an avalanche of paperwork and administration surrounding our love one who has died.
For a very small book I spent a lot of time in tears reading this!
It seems to me that there are a lot of grief books in the market these days, some months when I look at new release lists it feels like a bit of a glut of books on the subject, but I think this book will provide a comfort to women who lose a spouse or partner.
I had an advance copy, this book comes out in New Zealand in January. We will definitely have copies!
Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
Let’s start with an observation lesson. Mediation for Mortals is a very different book from Mediations for Mortals the former being what I saw - reading too fast! - when I first saw this on the publishers new release list.
Anyway, I should have known better of Oliver Burkeman, his previous book, Four Thousand Weeks being my favourite of 2021.
Meditations for Mortals is a series of 28 short essays, designed to be read as one essay per day. It revisits a lot of the content from Four Thousand Weeks as well as some new material. Fans of Four Thousand Weeks will enjoy the refresher, and the fact that this takes some of the concepts and makes them a bit more actionable. If you missed Four Thousand Weeks you can most definitely just start here.
The Way of the Hermit by Ken Smith
This book was another one that had me in tears several times this month!
It’s the story of a gentleman named Ken Smith who grew up in a tough working-class English household in the 50s and 60s. In the early 1970s he was badly injured in an unprovoked attack and spent a lot of time in hospital recovering. During his recovery period he decided to move to the Yukon - the remote spot where Canada meets Alaska - and learn survival skills.
He returns to the UK permanently in the 1980s and eventually builds himself a cabin in the Scottish Highlands on a large estate in exchange for working the estate-holders land.
The romantic in me struggled with the fact there was never a place for a Mrs Hermit. But what the book does well is dispel some of the common myth about people who live a solitary lifestyle. He doesn’t dislike people as a rule (in fact he often enjoys the company of others), and he doesn’t hold any kind of extremist religious or political views, he’s just a guy who prefers his own company and to rely on himself skills.
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
And finally, in October I finished Lonesome Dove. I read this in parts throughout the course of 2024 as part of the Bookshelf Thomasville Conquer a Classic program. Each year they choose the classic work of fiction and as a group, read a set selection of chapters, month by month across the course of most of year.
This year Annie and Hunter chose the 1986 Pulitzer Prize winning Western, Lonesome Dove.
Former Texas Rangers Gus and Call lead a cattle drive from Texas to Montana with the hopes of getting there in time to claim a piece of Montana land as their own. The book spans 850 pages and a huge cast of interconnected character. While the Western genre is not something I’ve read a lot of, I grew very fond of this book, it’s writer and the cast of characters over the course of the year. It will definitely go down as one of my 2024 favourites.
See you again in November!
