My top films of 2023

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For the first time, in 2023, I kept a list of the films I watched. I discovered that most of what I want from movies is to be silly and fun and usually short – I watched maybe three disposable films for every one film I thought might be really good. And you know what, I’m ok with that. I also thought I’d watch maybe 20-25 films in a year – and somehow I watched 117. Most weren’t from 2023, of course.

But among the silliness were some films I thought were brilliant, so I thought I’d put together my top ten. I know a lot less about movies than I do about books, so I don’t feel on the steadiest ground – but, as with my books list, it’s more about how much I enjoyed them than how objectively good I thought they were. So all manner of awards winners and contenders didn’t make the list.

Anyway, enough caveats – here’s the list:

10. Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong (2015)

Heavily influenced by Richard Linklater’s superlative Before series, the natural chemistry between real-life couple Bryan Greenberg and Jamie Chung make this funny, moving and compelling. I wish it were longer, and I almost never say that about films (or books).

9. Round and Round (2023)

Ok, I watched this Hallmark Hanukkah timeloop movie as a joke – but it turned it out to be one of the best romcoms I’ve seen in years. Bryan Greenberg makes his second and final appearance on the list, and is paired with Leighton Meester. The writing is so tight, the leads have great chemistry, and it deserves a much wider audience than it’s likely to get.

8. Aftersun (2022)

A gently profound film about a young father taking his 11-year-old daughter on holiday. Director Charlotte Wells and stars Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio have been deservedly feted.

7. Rye Lane (2023)

Like Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong, a lot of this film is about two strangers meeting and walking and talking – but with the added bonus of being slightly wacky (fish-eye lens comes out to play) and very, very British. But I think my favourite thing about it was how the central couple’s ex-partners were both fully developed, very funny characters rather than one-note targets.

6. Befikre (2016)

I loved this energetic Hindi romcom set in Paris. We go back & forth between Shyra and Dharam getting together – and splitting up a year later, and what comes next. Ranveer Singh and Vaani Kapoor are so watchable, and the songs are a clever blend of Indian & French styles. I’ve been listening to Je T’aime and Ude Dil Befikre a lot ever since – rather than a trailer, here’s Je T’aime (also the most inventive musical section of the movie).

5. Of An Age (2022)

It’s another strangers-getting-to-know-each-other movie, this time an Australian film about a young man getting to know his friend’s brother on a car journey – and what happens afterwards. Beautifully written and directed by Goran Stolevski, and with a particularly soulful and restrained performance from Thom Green.

4. Freshman Year (2020)

Amazingly, this lovely, naturalistic film about an emotional first year at uni was made for only $15,000. Cooper Raiff wrote, directed, produced, and starred – usually an ominous sign, but he is obviously one to watch. (Released as Sh!thouse in US.)

3. Ustad Hotel (2012)

I watched a lot of films with the wonderful Dulquer Salmaan in them this year – Malayalam movie Ustad Hotel was one of his early films and often mentioned as among his best, and I can see why. Faizal leaves home after a dispute and works as a chef with his grandad (Thilakan, extraordinary in one of his final roles). The movie has a beautiful tone and message, and shows what a star Salmaan would become.

2. Grey Gardens (1975)

I’ve long meant to watch this documentary about an eccentric elderly mother and daughter living in chaotic poverty in a mansion. Completely without guile or artifice, this is an extraordinary portrait of resentment, dependency, regret, and love. I don’t know if you’d be able to find people this unguarded and genuine on camera anymore – or at least not people like Big Edie and Little Edie.

1. O Kadhal Kanmani (2015)

The first film I watched in 2023 was also my favourite – a Tamil film in which Dulquer Salmaan and Nithya Menen are a couple who decide to ‘live-in’ rather than marry (a common story in contemporary Indian cinema). As they try to be modern, they also grow to know and care for an elderly, old-fashioned couple nearby dealing with the woman’s dementia. It’s a beautiful, sweet, charming film – the sort of thoughtful, open-hearted romcom that has been disappearing from Western cinema in recent years but still very much made in India, thankfully.

Top Books of 2023

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I’m delighted to unveil my top reads of the year – as ever, considering how much I enjoyed them and how good I think they are, wrapped up into one. Apparently I usually do 12, but this year it wasn’t hard to draw the line after 10 – these are definitely my top books, and there was a bit of a gap before the books I’d consider for numbers 11 or 12. I don’t include re-reads or more than one book by an author – and, of course, they are in strict order. It’s a surprisingly modern list for me, with only one book from before 1950.

Click on the title to get my full thoughts. Here we go!

10. A Flat Place (2023) by Noreen Masud

It’s always good to read a book by a friend, and even better when the book is brilliant. Noreen Masud expertly weaves together her experiences of cPTSD with explorations of flat landscapes in Pakistan and the UK. It’s an involving, moving, excellent book.

9. A Bird in the House (1970) by Margaret Laurence

Laurence took the top spot on my 2022 list, and though I was disappointed by The Fire-Dwellers, I loved these linked short stories that piece together a coming-of-age for young Vanessa. The stories sometimes cover seismic moments but more often look at everyday relationships – particularly those that are cut short or peter out. It’s also the first of three books in my top 10 that have ‘house’ in the title.

8. Temples of Delight (1990) by Barbara Trapido

Trapido’s chunky novel is particularly strong in the opening chapters and the friendship between two schoolgirls: shy, nervous Alice and whirlwind Jem. The strength of Jem’s exuberant, confusing personality is sustained throughout the novel, which is comfortably the best of the three Trapido books I’ve read.

7. The Bird in the Tree (1940) by Elizabeth Goudge

Not to be confused with A Bird in the House! This is the first in the Eliot trilogy, given to me in 2008 and finally read now – a beautiful, comforting read about several generations of a family in a delightful big house. What set it apart from me is Goudge’s unashamed championing of self-sacrifice.

6. The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer (1993) by Joan Givner

A total gamble that really paid off. Givner is a biographer of Katherine Anne Porter – and this book is about that, but also about her youth and her family and everything in between, all told in index-card-style vignettes. Such an unusual, inventive, strangely compelling book that I’m so happy I stumbled across in a Hay-on-Wye bookshop and took a chance on.

5. Day (2023) by Michael Cunningham

No link yet because my review will be appearing at Shiny New Books when it’s published in the UK – but Cunningham’s first novel in an age is already out in the US. It follows the same day in 2019, 2020, and 2021 – morning, afternoon, and evening respectively – and is very much a pandemic novel. But it’s also a novel with Cunningham’s trademark groups of family and friends-as-family, and his incisive brilliance at deeply showing every conceivable relationship within these groups. Worth the long wait we’ve had for it.

4. Road Ends (2013) by Mary Lawson

For me, 2023 will always be remembered as the year that I got to speak to Mary Lawson on my podcast – and, in preparation, I read the only novel of hers that I had waiting. Road Ends is as brilliant as always, about a man in Ontario dealing with a friend’s suicide, his father trying to come to terms with his past, and his sister’s bid for freedom in London. I don’t know how Mary Lawson does it, but she always does.

3. In The Dream House (2019) by Carmen Maria Machado

Following a similar pattern to Givner’s book, Machado tells this memoir of queer domestic violence through vignettes – each one linked to a particular literary device or framework. Visceral, clever, and beautifully written – it thoroughly deserves all the accolades it got in 2019.

2. The House by the Sea (1977) by May Sarton

I’d read some fiction by Sarton but her journals are on another level – and my favourite, so far, is the first one I read. She has moved to a house by the sea, and I appreciated descriptions of the area – but it’s really about her identity as a writer, her fears and anxieties, and her constant re-determining who she is.

1. No Leading Lady (1968) by R.C. Sherriff

All my top three are non-fiction, and my top place goes to the extraordinarily enjoyable memoir by R.C. Sherriff. The first half goes in granular detail through the conception, production, popularity, and afterlife of Journey’s End – a play I haven’t even read or seen, but I absolutely loved the detail he went into. Some books are ignored altogether, and this certainly isn’t a warts-and-all autobiography, but it’s a sheer delight. Sherriff is one of the great storytellers, and his own life and career are treated as exceptional material.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy Betwixtmas! And welcome to the final weekend miscellany of 2023. Tomorrow, I’ll be posting my favourite reads of the year – I always enjoy the little ritual of sitting down with my year’s reads and reflecting on the highlights. And, of course, putting them in strict order! I try not to think about it too much in advance, so at the time of writing I have no idea what will appear where.

And here, to tide you over the liminal land of new year, is a book, a blog post, and a link…

Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence: Amazon.co.uk: Horner, Avril: 9781526173744: Books

1.) The link – Miranda asked me to come and talk with her about the British Library Women Writers series, and I had a lovely time chatting with her. You can hear our conversation on her blog.

2.) The book – Barbara Comyns is beloved by the blogosphere, and it seems criminal that there hasn’t been a biography of her to date – but thankfully that is going to change! Avril Horner’s Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence will be coming out in March 2024. I have a review proof copy that I’m really looking forward to diving into.

3.) The blog post – I always enjoy bloggers’ end-of-year lists. Of course, I want everyone to put books in a particular order, but I am a open-minded man and can also enjoy the ones which are in no particular order. Jacqui divides her best books into new releases and backlisted titles – and, of course, it’s the backlisted titles I’m most interested in.

Bonus blog post: Ali’s year of reading Margaret Drabble!

See you tomorrow with my top ten! Or my top 12, if I can’t whittle is down sufficiently…

The Persimmon Tree by Marjorie Barnard

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I hope you’ve had a wonderful Christmas, if you celebrate – indeed, I hope you are still having it, since we are still in the 12 days. I love Christmas and I intend to make the most of every moment of it! I’m now back home after a lovely week with my brother and parents, and glad to be reunited with Hargreaves.

Unusually for me, I was very much in the mood for short stories in the days leading up to my Christmas holiday – including the Margaret Laurence collection I reviewed recently, and The Persimmon Tree and other stories (1943) by Marjorie Barnard. I read the Virago Modern Classics edition, which includes a handful of stories from other Barnard collections too. I couldn’t remember when or where I bought it, but that is the joy of keeping a blog for many years – I did some searching, and it turns out I bought it in Bristol in 2012.

Marjorie Barnard is apparently a big name in Australian literary history, sometimes collaborating with Flora Eldershaw under the name M. Barnard Eldershaw – perhaps, in 2023, she is best-known for writing a novel called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow long before Gabrielle Zevin did. But she should be far better known in this hemisphere too: I thought the stories in The Persimmon Tree were excellent.

They reminded me of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, in the sense that they are snapshots in the minutiae of women’s lives. The most successful ones don’t try to do more than that: they look at the everyday, and see the searing emotions that are always there under the surface, sometimes conscious and sometimes not but seldom revealed to anybody else. One of my favourite stories was ‘Beauty is Strength’, about a woman going to a beauty salon and hoping it will equip her for dealing with an unfaithful partner.

The girl adjusted the drier like a high Egyptian helmet, laid the copy of ‘Vogue’ in her lap, and departed briskly. Her hair stirred in the hot blast, the noise droned in her ears. The headache which she had beaten back with aspirin began again. There was a patch of wimpering nerves in her right temple the size of a penny and slowly spreading. But the worst thing was looking in the mirror. Her face suspended between the helmet and the mackintosh cape was just face, without aids or garnishings. It was from moments like these, when you saw your face isolated, that you learned the truth about it. Her mouth looked hard and disappointed, and round each corner there was clearly discernable, in this impartial light, a little bracket of wrinkle. You can’t, she had read somewhere, do anything about wrinkles once they are visible to the naked eye. Her cheek bones looked high and stiff and on her throat, where age first shows itself, the working of the muscles showed too clearly, and the skin just under the chin was ever so slightly puckered.

‘The Dressmaker’ is an extremely good story that contrasts the way we see ourselves with how we are perceived. Miss Simkins has had one great romantic tragedy in her life – she tells it to her client almost like she is the narrator of a short story herself. It has pathos, beauty, a narrative arc. But we know from the way Barnard introduces her that Miss Simkins will not be received in the way that she imagines. It’s a story about class, but mostly about self-delusion.

Miss Simkins did not see very much of life but what she saw she inspected very closely and she kept an exact debit and credit account between herself and life. She always observed her employers’ conduct and utterences minutely with a view to keeping this statement up-to-date. She was, she felt, one of life’s principal creditors.

These thoughts were habitual, automatic, and, of course, unvoiced. She merely took off her hat, which collapsed into immediate shapelessness, gave two pokes to her hair and sat down to the work-table. From her suitcase she produced a sheaf of battered fashion journals.

(Incidentally, various of the words with red squiggly underlines as I type – utterences, wimperings, discernable – are Barnard’s own uses, retained by Virago. Other typos are probably my own.)

I’m using lots of big chunks of text, as I kept being captivated by entire paragraphs. Barnard writes quite simply, so you’d be unlikely to find single sentences that mesmerise with beauty – but she has a way of building up a picture that is precise and beautiful, and somehow much more insightful than they might appear at first. Here’s a paragraph where she does use various metaphors and similes, but what moved me was the slow pan out at the end, and the words ‘each flat a little box too small for the life it house’:

She moved on. She hadn’t noticed the door behind the curtain. It came to softly behind her, leaving her in sudden quiet and enlargement. It was as easy to escape as that. The balcony, hanging like a bird cage on the clifflike facade of the flats, was as far from the party as Cape York. It was early dusk with its false evanescent clarity beginning to melt at the edges, a light that blent the noonday incompatibles into a scena. In the foreground, blocks of flats set at all angles, each flat a little box too small for the life it housed, so that it bulged out of the windows, hung over the balconies, burgeoned up through the roofs. Strings of coloured washing were as natural as vines. In William Street, narrow and living as an artery, coloured taxis moved like corpuscles. Over to the left, Woolloomooloo, pouring down the hill, houses, terraces, narrow streets fused into a solid mass, a grape bloom on its slates, a veil of light on the mediocrity of its stones and bricks. Beneath the swept stretch of the waterfront, the wharves running neatly out into the bay. Beyond the lovely, unreal drop scene of the harbour, blue water, timbered headlands, even the bridge etherealised, a grey bow drawn across the blue.

I can see why she titled the collection after ‘The Persimmon Tree’, as it is one of the strongest. The final paragraph reads simply ‘I turned away. The shadow of the burgeoning bough was on the white wall. I thought my heart would break.’ Even without context, it’s moving and its simplicity works very well. Like many of the stories, it’s very short. Some in the collection are so short as to only really be impressions, and those didn’t succeed quite as much as others, in my view – but overall, I found it a beautiful and moving collection.

 

 

A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence

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Regular visitors to StuckinaBook will know how much I adore Margaret Laurence, and particularly here Manawaka sequence of novels. They have a little overlap, though can be read independently – and it includes some of the best novels I’ve read in recent years, particularly A Jest of God. The only one of the five I hadn’t read was the penultimate in the sequence, A Bird in the House (1970), and is the only one that’s not really a novel: it’s a series of linked stories about a young girl called Vanessa.

Through her eyes, steadily growing up over the course of the stories, we see a family tied together and falling apart. She is loyally close to her father and sporadically close to her mother; a little brother is born in one story; she fears some grandparents and adores others. The patterns and habits of her family are all she knows, and she details them with the interest of an anthropologist and the familiarity of a constant observer.

The world is a kaleidoscope of people and philosophies, and Vanessa is gradually working out who she is and what she stands for. But it is a curious blend of perspectives – because it is not really through the eyes of eight-year-old Vanessa, but 40-year-old Vanessa looking back. The naivety and newness of everything is layered with the reflections of a middle-aged woman remembering them.

This blend comes most to the fore in the way Aunt Edna is depicted. She is unmarried, looking after Vanessa’s cantankerous grandfather but also dependent on him. As a child, Vanessa loves and admires Edna, accepting her role as an inevitable part of the fabric of her life. But the older Vanessa clearly feels a whole range of emotions to Edna – pities her position, hopes for her, admires her spirit, recognises the limits on it. As a narrator, she is rather older than this spinster aunt – who, to young Vanessa, of course seems old. Through the stories, Laurence masterly weaves these complexities. The last line of this paragraph is brilliant, and quintessentially Laurence:

If someone coming to the Brick House for the first time chance to light a cigarette when Grandfather was home, he gave them one chance and that was all. His warning was straightforward. He would walk to the front door, fling it open, and begin coughing. He would then say, “Smoky in here, ain’t it?” If this had no effect, he told the visitor to get out, and no two ways about it. Aunt Edna once asked me to guess how many boyfriends she had lost that way, and when I said “I give up – how many?” she said “Five, and that’s the gospel truth.” At the time I imagined, because she was laughing, that she thought it was funny.”

Another instance of her lovely turns of phrase comes in a story about Piquette Tonnerres – a character and family overlapping intriguingly with one of the major families in the next book in the Manawaka sequence, The Diviners: “I could not reach Piquette at all, and I soon lost interest in trying. But all that summer she remained as both a reproach and a mystery to me.”

Each story was published separately and can be read separately – so we see Vanessa grow up, but we are also reintroduced to the family each time. Impressively, it doesn’t feel repetitive or annoying to read so many introductions in sequence – it feels, rather, like a fresh development on each character whenever we meet them again.

I think the stories I liked most were the ones about particular people who come briefly onto the scene. The one about Piquette, ‘The Loons’, is a good example. Another is ‘The Half-Husky’, about a local boy who torments her pet dog (which is quite hard to read). Laurence is too sophisticated to give her stories a neat message, but we are pulled towards moral conclusions that never quite coalesce. Vanessa is clearly learning, though doesn’t come to any finalities. Rather, these stories show us experiences and wonderings and leave behind an impression of beauty and brutality intertwined. Nothing is sentimental in these stories, but somehow they are touching. Adult Vanessa clearly has a mix of nostalgia and sadness about her childhood – not least because of a tragedy that happens almost incidentally in one chapter, then spreads out like dye in water throughout the others.

Laurence is at her best, I think, when she can really lean into the development of a character and examine every aspect of their emotional life. It’s why A Jest of God remains her masterpiece, in my eyes. But A Bird in the House is excellent too – beautiful writing, extraordinary knowledge of human character, and moments that will certainly remain in my mind. Now I’ve finished the Manawaka sequence, the only real question is when I’ll go back and read them all again.

Unnecessary Rankings! Shirley Jackson

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I try to stick to writers I’ve read most or all of, for these unnecesary rankings – so how has it taken me this long to include Shirley Jackson? Join me as I rank all her books, as I am a Jackson completist – and, as ever, let me know why I’m wrong (or right!) You can see the rest of the rankings I’ve done on the rankings tag.

9. Collected short stories

Is ‘The Lottery’ how Jackson is still best-known? It’s certainly a classic story for a reason, and I think several generations of American schoolchildren probably have read it. Jackson is an example of a writer who never published a bad book – so I’ve put her short stories even though I like them. I just think she’s better when she has more space for a sustained sense of atmosphere – whether foreboding or funny.

8. The Road Through the Wall (1948)

Jackson’s debut novel – and you’ll begin to sense a theme, in terms of my order closely reflecting publication order. The Road Through The Wall is about Pepper Street and its younger inhabitants – as well as the ‘threat’ of the lower classes nearby. From the outset, Jackson was great at weird, but she walks a tightrope between weird and vague. I like this novel, but it doesn’t have the clarity she later mastered.

7. Hangsaman (1951)

More of the above, really! Natalie is heading off to college, and her unhappiness and oppression from her father dominate her life – to the point where she sometimes seems to be in almost a fugue state. A sexual assault early in the novel leaves her more confused than ever, and the novel has a dark dream quality to it as she becomes dependent on a student called Tony. A very good, rather baffling, novel.

6. The Bird’s Nest (1954)

Very ahead of its time in a depiction of dissociative identity disorder – you can hopefully forgive some of its inaccuracies because it was written long before the condition was even medically recognised. The ‘characters’ Elizabeth/Lizzy/Betsy/Beth are well-handled, and it’s a fascinating work.

5. The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Onto one of Jackson’s best-known books, and probably the closest she got to all-out horror – I still love it, even as a wimp and someone who never reads horror. A group come to Hill House to determine whether or not it is haunted. I love Jackson’s playfulness with the architecture of the house (nothing is quite a right angle, so you’re never quite where you think in relation to other places) and those who’ve read it won’t forget the hand in the bed.

4. Raising Demons (1957)
3. Life Among the Savages (1953)

Number 3 and 4 could go either way around – Jackson’s preoccupation with the enclosure of domestic spaces can also come out in humour! These autobiographical books about life as a wife and mother are hysterically funny – very Provincial Lady-esque. Some see the darkness of Jackson’s agoraphobia below the surface. Perhaps it’s there, but you can also enjoy these as comic domestic memoirs par excellence.

2. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

My first experience with Jackson, and I was captivated from the first paragraph – where Merricat walks to the local high street and feels herself observed and judged by the townsfolk. Almost all her family have died in a recent poisoning, and the remaining few (including Merricat’s sister) live there in strange isolation. Sidenote: one of the best titles ever.

1. The Sundial (1958)

My favourite Jackson is up there with my favourite books – and breaks my ‘every non-memoir novel in chronological order’ ranking! The residents and visitors of Halloran house are the only ones who will be spared in the forthcoming apocalypse. Jackson’s masterstroke is to make the (enjoyable awful) characters not really care about this. They continue their petty squabbling, even while the world is ending. It’s the perfect combination of Jackson’s humour and gothic strands – and that’s why it’s my favourite.

What about you? How would you rank Jackson’s books?

Blight by Tom Carlisle

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One of the interesting and fun things about friends writing books is that they take you in all sorts of places you wouldn’t necessarily expect. Would I have picked up a novel described as folk horror if my friend Tom hadn’t written it? Probably not – but I thoroughly enjoyed Blight (2023) and was relieved that it lent more into gothic than horror. My tolerance for horror is very low and I wasn’t traumatised, so hurrah!

Set in 1883, James Harringley has been summoned back to the Yorkshire mansion he grew up in by his brother, Edward. They parted on bad terms and do not feel very brotherly to each other – but James is persuaded to return because of two things. One is his ailing father – the other, more importantly, is the groundkeeper’s missing baby. The family, and the village, are sure it’s connected to the horrifying tale of the Tall Man – a being that possesses a great void beneath the house, and demands human sacrifices.

You can imagine that I was a bit of a fish out of water with that premise, but what I liked most about the novel was the insight into family. The dynamic between the brothers is particularly well-observed, and work independently of the supernatural element. While they may talk about extraordinary things, there are the ordinary resentments of two brothers who no longer share a common belief system or set of priorities, and both feel judged by the other. (Interestingly, James has his own unconventional relationship back home – I would have liked more attention paid to that, to learn more about its progression and what day-to-day life was like.)

Edward spoke more quietly now, but his lip still twitched, as though at any second it might twist into a sneer. “That’s always been your problem,” he said bitterly. “You want to throw away our history. Everything that made this family who we are today.”

“Not throw it away. Just – examine it. Update our traditions, if need be.”

“Those aren’t the words of a man who believes in this family.”

“My God,” said James, unable to hide his exasperation, “would you listen to yourself? A family’s not a matter of faith – it’s here, no matter whether we believe in it.”

But of course the supernatural is there. We get hints very early, and I think the reader is asked to fairly quickly suspend any disbelief. This isn’t really a novel about trying to work out whether there are natural or fantastic explanations – rather, we are given the apparatus of the genre and left to get on with it from there. Since Tom Carlisle’s home-from-home is literary writing rather than the more schlocky edges of genre-writing, it is given with neat and precise turns of phrase. The writing isn’t trying to be opaque, but there were lovely little spins on sentences and dialogue – like the end of this section:

“You said they went away,” James said. “Went away where?”

“He took them to the pit,” said the man, swallowing hard. “Gave them to the void.”

“Who?” said James desperately, his curiosity a knot in his guts.

The man sucked on his teeth, thought for a moment. “He doesn’t have a name,” he said eventually. “Or else he has too many.”

I tend to be very scared by novels I think contain feasible threat. I won’t read about serial killers or home invasion or anything like that – but I naturally don’t believe any of the Thin Man mythology, and so was able to read the progressing horror without feeling too uneasy. A few paragraphs were a bit gory for my squeamishness, but I managed to skim through them.

The tension builds, and there are a series of climaxes that are paced very well – I don’t think I’ve a convert to the genre, necessarily, but I certainly enjoyed reading Blight. Anything with a strong investigation of family dynamics is likely to win me over, in whatever form it’s presented.

Tea or Books? #123: Critical or Charitable Reading? and Sheep’s Clothing vs Harriet Said…

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Beryl Bainbridge, Celia Dale, critical and charitable reading – welcome to episode 123!

In the first half of the episode we use a suggestion from Susannah – do we read charitably or critically? In the second half we compare too rather dark novels – Sheep’s Clothing by Celia Dale and Harriet Said… by Beryl Bainbridge.

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. And you can support the podcast at Patreon. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Mary Lawson
Stories for Winter and Nights by the Fire by various
Elizabeth Taylor
Angela Carter
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Temptation by János Székely
Family Album by Antonia Ridge
Miss Read
Grandma Went To Russia by Antonia Ridge
The Persimmon Tree by Marjorie Barnard
Katherine Mansfield
Ivy Litvinov
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Richmal Crompton
Stella Gibbons
Day by Michael Cunningham
Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
A.A. Milne
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Dan Brown
Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge
Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh
Another Part of the Woods by Beryl Bainbridge
Anita Brookner
Barbara Comyns

Stories for Winter: new British Library Women Writers collection!

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A quick post to say there is a new collection of stories out from the British Library Women Writers series, and it’s perfect for Secret Santa, stockings, or any festive gift: Stories for Winter and Nights by the Fire.

A lot of people enjoyed the Christmas collection last year – I think this is even better. The standard is really high, with well-known authors like Katherine Mansfield, Shirley Jackson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Angela Carter represented – along with new discoveries.

Not many of the stories were suggested by me, so I can’t take credit for what a good selection it is. But it means I can unabashedly advocate that you buy this and enjoy a night by the fire with it!

A whole bunch of audiobooks I’ve listened to recently

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As per, I’ve been listening to an awful lot of audiobooks recently – some very good, some enjoyable trash, some in between. Here’s a quick overview of some of them (…minus the trash, which nobody needs to know more about):

The First Stone (1995) by Helen Garner
After loving This House of Grief, I downloaded an earlier non-fiction by Garner – a response to two college students going to the police after being allegedly groped by the college dean. Garner poses some interesting questions about gradations of assault, and writes excellently as ever, but it is very galling to read a book by a noted feminist where Garner seems nonplussed about why a woman would complain about being groped. She recognises it’s annoying – but not in the same league as rape, and that her generation always just put up with it. I suppose it’s a good sign that, 30 years since this was published, things have moved on sufficiently that no feminist would wonder-out-loud why a woman doesn’t just cope with being assaulted.

Toxic (2023) by Sarah Ditum
Great segue into this excellent collection of essays about what Ditum calls ‘the upskirt decade’ – the 2000s, where the paparazzi were even worse than normal, and famous young women were treated as sexual consumption for everyone. There are chapters on Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Janet Jackson, Kim Kardashian and more. Sometimes the links she tries to make with contemporary political issues are a bit flimsy, but in general it’s an exceptionally good look at a recent period where media ethics (and common consensus) were so misogynistic. The afterword, sadly, shows how misogyny has largely just found a new guise…

Ride the Pink Horse (1946) by Dorothy B. Hughes
People adore Hughes’s The Expendable Man, but now – having read that and Ride the Pink Horse – I think her brand of hard-boiled Americana isn’t quite for me. In this novel, Sailor comes to town during fiesta trying to exhort money from a man whose wife he was ordered to kill. Along the way, he gets to know various desperate locals. It reminded me of a less miserable Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock – but I still didn’t find much momentum beyond the atmosphere.

You Are Not Alone (2023) by Cariad Lloyd
I love Cariad Lloyd’s podcast Griefcast, interviewing people (usually comedians) about the people they love who’ve died, and how they cope with the grief. This book is closely related – drawing on Lloyd’s grief about her father dying from cancer when she was a teenager. Unsurprisingly, she writes excellently and wisely about grief, and I think this book would be helpful to a griever – perhaps particularly someone who doesn’t know why they haven’t ‘got over it’. Audiobook includes snippets from a fair few podcast episodes.

What’s That Lady Doing? (2023) by Lou Sanders
Lou Sanders is one of those comedians who makes every single sentence funny, and I really enjoyed her memoir. She clearly went through quite a lot as a teenager, and tells stories that balance humour and pathos. I’d have liked even more about her career, but perhaps there is a second book coming.

Broken Horses (2021) by Brandi Carlile
Brandi Carlile is a singer I deeply love, and her audiobook was a real journey. She doesn’t always come across as the easiest person to know, but she’s certainly transparent. The way she delves into songwriting is fascinating and the audiobook includes new versions of many songs at the end of chapters – a perfect reason to choose the audiobook.

Tales from the Café (2017) by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
I’d heard a lot about this book about a café where you can be transported back in time. What I didn’t realise until I was quite a long way through this audiobook was that (a) it’s an episodic selection of four separate stories, and (b) this is a sequel, not the original. Oops! I enjoyed it, though there is so much world-building and so many rules that the actual emotional moments get a bit lost.

Middle England (2018) by Jonathan Coe
Read for my book club – I really enjoyed my first Coe, often called his Brexit novel (though Brexit takes a long time to appear). There is a broad cast of characters doing ordinary and not-so-ordinary things – ranging from the amusing (an arrogant author on a cruise) to the moving (a man losing his faculties doesn’t understand where his factory workplace has gone). I found a woman dealing with accusations of workplace bigotry particularly interesting and even-handed, and at its best I was really engaged. But it’s also (oops again) the third of a trilogy, and I haven’t read the others – so some of the characters meant very little to me, as they get bit parts that seem to rely on previous time spent with them. Coe is also not subtle in his anti-Brexit stance. (I share his political views, but would like a novelist to be a bit less polemical.)