nocto's reviews
1240 reviews
The Museum of Broken Promises by Elizabeth Buchan
Not an author that I'd come across before but I totally judged a book by it's title (and a bit by it's cover) and liked it.
It's mostly Laure's story, she's half French, half English and, in 1986, goes to work as an au-pair with a family in Paris who then relocate back to Prague where she starts a relationship with a Czech musician. The book is mostly split between what happened then in Prague, and modern day Paris where Laure lives now and runs the titular museum, with a few parts taking place in between in 1990s Berlin.
It uses the mechanic of telling you the ending (of one part of the story at least) in the beginning, which means it's not about what's going to happen but how and why, and I mostly liked that since those are the more interesting questions. And the tangled up timeline in the book means that you learn why some things are significant after they've happened which is also fun to read.
I enjoyed the book on the whole but found it too long on uninteresting details in some places, and yet there were odd corners of it that were delightful and I wanted to know more about. I didn't feel I ever figured out what was really important in the book but I prefer not quite figuring everything out to having things explicitly explained so that's ok with me.
It's mostly Laure's story, she's half French, half English and, in 1986, goes to work as an au-pair with a family in Paris who then relocate back to Prague where she starts a relationship with a Czech musician. The book is mostly split between what happened then in Prague, and modern day Paris where Laure lives now and runs the titular museum, with a few parts taking place in between in 1990s Berlin.
It uses the mechanic of telling you the ending (of one part of the story at least) in the beginning, which means it's not about what's going to happen but how and why, and I mostly liked that since those are the more interesting questions. And the tangled up timeline in the book means that you learn why some things are significant after they've happened which is also fun to read.
I enjoyed the book on the whole but found it too long on uninteresting details in some places, and yet there were odd corners of it that were delightful and I wanted to know more about. I didn't feel I ever figured out what was really important in the book but I prefer not quite figuring everything out to having things explicitly explained so that's ok with me.
Mother's Boy by Patrick Gale
4.0
I've been moving house and not settling down to finish any of the books I've been reading. I joined the new library and figured I needed to find a book that would get me out of the slump of not finishing anything. So I turned to the new book by an author I know I love though I'd put off buying this because a story based on Charles Causley's life didn't sound terribly interesting to me. Anyway, it all worked out. I enjoyed the read and I finished it within the week, which given that the other books I was reading had been half done for weeks and weeks and weeks felt like an achievement.
It's far from Patrick Gale's best work (I'm always going to love Notes From An Exhibition which was the first book of his I read and I still think about it often) but it's a more interesting story than I expected it to be. Maybe it should be obvious from the title but I liked how much the story was actually that of Charles' mother Laura and how the book was about the shifting relationship between them. The lengthy time period makes it a case study of 20th century history as well, and though there were a few times when I felt it was telling me stories I'd already read many times before I think that was about what my brain needed at the moment rather than anything especially new.
It's not a biography and it's not clear what's been made up and what hasn't but I don't think that really matters. I wouldn't have read a biography and I don't think this is an unsympathetic portrait. I enjoyed it and I know I'll continue to enjoy Gale's future work as well.
It's far from Patrick Gale's best work (I'm always going to love Notes From An Exhibition which was the first book of his I read and I still think about it often) but it's a more interesting story than I expected it to be. Maybe it should be obvious from the title but I liked how much the story was actually that of Charles' mother Laura and how the book was about the shifting relationship between them. The lengthy time period makes it a case study of 20th century history as well, and though there were a few times when I felt it was telling me stories I'd already read many times before I think that was about what my brain needed at the moment rather than anything especially new.
It's not a biography and it's not clear what's been made up and what hasn't but I don't think that really matters. I wouldn't have read a biography and I don't think this is an unsympathetic portrait. I enjoyed it and I know I'll continue to enjoy Gale's future work as well.
The Long Sonata of the Dead by Andrew Taylor
Life has got kind of chaotic lately and I've read very little, and what I have read is in books that I haven't finished. So I'm updating with a book that, in other circumstances, I would probably not have marked as a book I'd read. I didn't realise when I got the book out of the library (and yay for e-libraries) that it was little more than a short story. Though, as ever with short stories, I'd have liked more of it, what there was was good with a decent twist to it. And it reminded me of how much I've enjoyed Andrew Taylor's books in the past so I got a longer one out of the library, and though that's proving to be more book than I can get through at the moment I'm enjoying it all the same.
Summer on the Little Cornish Isles: The Starfish Studio by Phillipa Ashley
hopeful
relaxing
fast-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
2.0
I've done it again. Life gets busy and I pick something up because I think it'll be an easy read. But mostly it just bores me. I liked the characters in this one but a lot of things never really came alive. I thought I wanted cosy and predictable but I don't really think I did.
And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
This was another book I found by looking at available books on Libby in random order and picking the first one with an appealing cover - I think it was second in the sort. And definitely a hit, a good read and I really like having very few expectations about what a book is going to be like when I pick a new author.
The story begins with Kit, 40ish, with a family of his own, he's recently unemployed art history lecturer, but the thing looming over his head is not knowing who his father was. He's the son of a teenage mother and she's not telling. With that beginning I was expecting something more straightforward than what I found. The story doesn't stick with Kit but is told in a sequence of long narratives from other people involved. Often it seems as if their stories are going to be peripheral but it gradually builds up a whole picture. If anything it was the flashes back to his teenage mother's (and father's) point of view that seemed rather unnecessary; they were too direct to match pace with the rest of the story.
The author introduced a character in the third narrative who had a point of view so opposed to my own that I almost put the book down, it gave me an "oh, is that *really* where this story is going?" moment but I'm glad I persevered a bit longer because that wasn't where the story was going and I ended up having sympathy with how that character had come by that point of view and what's fiction for if not to show us how people other than ourselves work.
A well written and enjoyable story, enough loose ends got tied up that it felt like the story got told, and enough threads were left dangling that it felt real. Definitely an author I'll be looking out for again as I like this kind of rambling family tale.
The story begins with Kit, 40ish, with a family of his own, he's recently unemployed art history lecturer, but the thing looming over his head is not knowing who his father was. He's the son of a teenage mother and she's not telling. With that beginning I was expecting something more straightforward than what I found. The story doesn't stick with Kit but is told in a sequence of long narratives from other people involved. Often it seems as if their stories are going to be peripheral but it gradually builds up a whole picture. If anything it was the flashes back to his teenage mother's (and father's) point of view that seemed rather unnecessary; they were too direct to match pace with the rest of the story.
The author introduced a character in the third narrative who had a point of view so opposed to my own that I almost put the book down, it gave me an "oh, is that *really* where this story is going?" moment but I'm glad I persevered a bit longer because that wasn't where the story was going and I ended up having sympathy with how that character had come by that point of view and what's fiction for if not to show us how people other than ourselves work.
A well written and enjoyable story, enough loose ends got tied up that it felt like the story got told, and enough threads were left dangling that it felt real. Definitely an author I'll be looking out for again as I like this kind of rambling family tale.
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I have a dilemma. I gave the first book in this series five stars but I like this one better. Nice dilemma to have, and I'm certainly not retroactively withdrawing stars from The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet I'm glad I didn't read these back to back though. They are same universe stories and this one carries on from the first book but goes off in a different direction with different characters. Because the ending of the first book is directly linked to the beginning of this book I don't want to give anything away about the story here.
This one has a lot of meandering about what artificial intelligence is all about and the nature of life itself, but mostly it comes down to being about identity and how we forge them for ourselves whatever our origins are. Highly recommended by itself, but if you'll enjoy this then you'll like the first one as well, so start there.
This one has a lot of meandering about what artificial intelligence is all about and the nature of life itself, but mostly it comes down to being about identity and how we forge them for ourselves whatever our origins are. Highly recommended by itself, but if you'll enjoy this then you'll like the first one as well, so start there.
The Light of the Western Stars by Zane Grey
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
At some random point in the night several months ago I found myself browsing ebooks at the library via Libby's random ordering and, I have no idea why, this jumped out at me as the thing to read to put myself to sleep. I liked the title. I'd never read a Western. I'd heard of the author but had no idea if he had a bad or a good reputation. I guess I think anything still going over a century after it was published is at least worth a look. I fancied something different.
I was ready to find, at the very least, sexism and racism. The central character here is Madeline Hammond, who goes out west to visit her brother and ends up staying, and I think because of this I didn't find the sexism in the book too overwhelming. I liked having a strong female character and though many of the other women in the book were shown to be 'weak' in one way or other most of them had a moment to shine. If anything it was the male characters who seemed to be a bit of an amorphous mass of cowboys that I struggled to remember which was which. And I was expecting "cowboys and indians" but this was "cowboys and mexicans" and a whole slew of racist stereotypes and that bit of the plot didn't really grab me other than to make me roll my eyes a lot.
I wasn't expecting temperance to be such a central theme of the book, which just shows how little I know about the prohibition movement in the US, now I've looked into that background a bit more it absolutely makes sense that a book aimed at male readers in 1914 has a large part of its plot about a drunkard redeeming himself. Oh, and the other defining feature of the book for me is terrible accents. I don't think it's any worse than any other genre of the era for that though! It always amuses me that the working class in mysteries are portrayed with these literal interpretations of the sounds of their speech but the upper classes don't get the idiosyncrasies of their speech similarly treated - I mean it would make books unreadable if they did, and I'm glad we don't see much of this device any more. But in this book I have no idea what accent is being evoked by making a character say "shore" rather than "sure" - homonyms in my English accent - I spent a while wondering if this was just an archaic spelling (which you find in even fairly recent books, for example, I noticed Anthony Powell uses "connexion" where we've since standardised on "connection") but it's spelt normally when said by every other character.
Though it's taken me several months to read the book I did enjoy most of it. There's some great descriptions of the landscape and riding through it. The plot is as obvious as any romance novel, it starts with girl comes to town and drunkard tries to marry her before she's even got away from the train station, and I don't need to spoil anything because that's page 1 and you already know where that storyline is headed. I had a lot of issues towards the end of the book with how that story line resolved itself though. There was needless cruelty and disregard for consent. The ending rather spoilt the book in fact, but it's of its time I suppose.
I probably won't read a western again any time soon, if at all, but I'm glad I persevered with this one and found out what they were all about.
I was ready to find, at the very least, sexism and racism. The central character here is Madeline Hammond, who goes out west to visit her brother and ends up staying, and I think because of this I didn't find the sexism in the book too overwhelming. I liked having a strong female character and though many of the other women in the book were shown to be 'weak' in one way or other most of them had a moment to shine. If anything it was the male characters who seemed to be a bit of an amorphous mass of cowboys that I struggled to remember which was which. And I was expecting "cowboys and indians" but this was "cowboys and mexicans" and a whole slew of racist stereotypes and that bit of the plot didn't really grab me other than to make me roll my eyes a lot.
I wasn't expecting temperance to be such a central theme of the book, which just shows how little I know about the prohibition movement in the US, now I've looked into that background a bit more it absolutely makes sense that a book aimed at male readers in 1914 has a large part of its plot about a drunkard redeeming himself. Oh, and the other defining feature of the book for me is terrible accents. I don't think it's any worse than any other genre of the era for that though! It always amuses me that the working class in mysteries are portrayed with these literal interpretations of the sounds of their speech but the upper classes don't get the idiosyncrasies of their speech similarly treated - I mean it would make books unreadable if they did, and I'm glad we don't see much of this device any more. But in this book I have no idea what accent is being evoked by making a character say "shore" rather than "sure" - homonyms in my English accent - I spent a while wondering if this was just an archaic spelling (which you find in even fairly recent books, for example, I noticed Anthony Powell uses "connexion" where we've since standardised on "connection") but it's spelt normally when said by every other character.
Though it's taken me several months to read the book I did enjoy most of it. There's some great descriptions of the landscape and riding through it. The plot is as obvious as any romance novel, it starts with girl comes to town and drunkard tries to marry her before she's even got away from the train station, and I don't need to spoil anything because that's page 1 and you already know where that storyline is headed. I had a lot of issues towards the end of the book with how that story line resolved itself though. There was needless cruelty and disregard for consent. The ending rather spoilt the book in fact, but it's of its time I suppose.
I probably won't read a western again any time soon, if at all, but I'm glad I persevered with this one and found out what they were all about.
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
4.0
This is set in, I guess, the near future, possibly an alternate present, it's tempting to claim it's very different to the world we live in but in fact it's a world very like the current one in way too many ways. Xenophobia has taken over America and the Chinese are the enemy, which of course covers all "persons of Asian origin" no matter that they've been in America for generations or that the vast majority of Americans are immigrants from other continents. I guess the book would fit under "near future dystopia" and as always that feels very much like the present day.
The story begins with a very YA feel to it as 12 year old Bird Gardner ponders the way his mother left him three years before and the changed circumstances of his family since. His mother turns out to be a Chinese-American poet who attracted the attention of the authorities. It's a great story and it's well told. I suspect the people who need to read and understand it won't do, but the rest of us can revel in the power of librarians and fairy tales and resistance.
The story begins with a very YA feel to it as 12 year old Bird Gardner ponders the way his mother left him three years before and the changed circumstances of his family since. His mother turns out to be a Chinese-American poet who attracted the attention of the authorities. It's a great story and it's well told. I suspect the people who need to read and understand it won't do, but the rest of us can revel in the power of librarians and fairy tales and resistance.
The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller
3.5
This starts in what now seems a pretty reasonable manner - Neffy's volunteering for a vaccine trial with a pandemic raging around her. I was about to get all "but this totally isn't how vaccine trials are run" when I realised we are in some other reality, some other pandemic! Everything rapidly goes awry and I don't want to give the plot away but it's quickly clear that the details of how vaccine trials work are the least of our scientific worries here. There's all sorts of odd things going on, and the science is not the point it's just used to show up how humans behave in all kinds of odd situations. It's hard to describe, but I enjoyed the book and the differences between the character's viewpoints on what was happening to them. The conclusion of the book left me with more questions than answers, not always a bad thing but here it felt like the author just chose to wrap up rather than making sense of the threads and I felt a bit short changed.
Tall Oaks by Chris Whitaker
4.25
It took me a while to get into this. I really enjoyed the characters in [[we-begin-at-the-end]] and although that was definitely a standalone book and this is a previous work by the same author I found the strong memories I had of that book were making it hard for me to get to know the characters in this book.
Eventually though I got to know the characters in this book and I'm glad I did because they are just as individual and well drawn as the ones I met before. They're quirky, but in the way that real people are, some of them larger than life, others are trying so hard to blend into the background that it makes them seem a bit weird too. I really liked a lot of the storylines, a couple of them seemed very strange to start with but made sense when they resolved themselves. The book revolves around the kidnapping of toddler in a small town and his mother's attempts to cope with this as well as the way the disappearance affects numerous other characters in the town.
There's a lot going on under the surface, and the plot struggles to stay focused at times, but it's basically just not a one strand mystery story and trying to judge it by the standards of one doesn't make sense. I enjoyed it a lot and will definitely pick up more of Chris Whitaker's books in the future.
Eventually though I got to know the characters in this book and I'm glad I did because they are just as individual and well drawn as the ones I met before. They're quirky, but in the way that real people are, some of them larger than life, others are trying so hard to blend into the background that it makes them seem a bit weird too. I really liked a lot of the storylines, a couple of them seemed very strange to start with but made sense when they resolved themselves. The book revolves around the kidnapping of toddler in a small town and his mother's attempts to cope with this as well as the way the disappearance affects numerous other characters in the town.
There's a lot going on under the surface, and the plot struggles to stay focused at times, but it's basically just not a one strand mystery story and trying to judge it by the standards of one doesn't make sense. I enjoyed it a lot and will definitely pick up more of Chris Whitaker's books in the future.