nocto's reviews
1300 reviews

The Party by Tessa Hadley

fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

So I'm really not a fan of short stories, I don't like how I just get to know the characters and the setting and find out a little of what's going on and then it's done. Where's the rest of my book?! Novellas though I thought I could handle. And Tessa Hadley's definitely become a favourite author so I really wanted to love this and enjoy its brevity. But.

It was the same old story - I just wanted there to be more. Tell me more about post war Bristol, tell me more about the sisters: Evelyn's studying French and Moira's studying fashion, how did they get there? Is their parents' relationship just going to fizzle on like this forever? What happens to the nice guy Evelyn ignores, do the bad guys have any redeeming features? I often want to know more about the background characters in a book, in a novella it feels like even the main characters are background characters. You can sketch in all sorts of things behind them to fill out the picture and maybe that's the beauty of it. You rather know what happened before this and you can take a good stab at what happens next. 

I just put the book down feeling a little short-changed. It's definitely not a bad book, it hinges on a turning point in the lives of two sisters, and if you want a quick read that's actually full of detail then I could almost recommend it. It's just that I really wanted it to be a prelude and not the whole thing.

Ordinary Time by Cathy Rentzenbrink

hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This was one of my Christmas presents. Each year we give each other books that we've picked out ourselves, except we pick out loads and only a few get bought so the presents are still a surprise! It's a fun before-Christmas ritual to go to a big bookshop, pick our own choices and then completely forget what we picked until they appear wrapped up, or in fact unwrapped.  I couldn't tell you what else was left behind in the shop but I'm glad this one got picked out as I really enjoyed it.

You already know at the beginning of this book, when you meet Ann, that the romance is going to go awry. She's a librarian, she meets Tim who's a vicar; it's hardly Mills and Boon to start with but they get married and a decade or so later they've got a son, Tim's got time for his parishioners but none for his family and Ann's wondering what on earth happened to her life and where it should go next. Romance gone awry is far more up my literary street than romance that leads straight to a happily-ever-after. 

The story of whether the vicar's wife is going to have an affair or not (and will the jumble stay in the dining room forever?) could probably sound quite tedious and perhaps predictable. But it's very much not because the main characters are so well written. One of the blurbs on the book says something comparing Rentzenbrink to Anne Tyler and I think that's pretty much on the nose. We have ordinary people doing ordinary things, but there's a captivating story in that, and it's about how no one's life is that ordinary. There's a cast of background characters who seem a little clichéd but each gets a moment to show you there's more to them than you saw at first and I like that kind of depth.

Absolutely an author I'll be reading again.

Fire by John Boyne

5.0

My last book of the year has been a long time coming as December got on top of me. After maintaining a decent rate for most of the year I had a real reading slow down in the last month. This was my present for Jólabókaflóðið and it was just what I needed to get my reading mojo back. Plus the break and the time to read didn’t hurt!

Not that it’s a nice book or an easy one to read. By this point - the third of a four book series - I’m expecting the sexual abuse theme that’s been a factor in both of the previous books. And I knew that Freya, who briefly appeared as a juror in the trial detailed in Earth was going to be the main character. But I really didn’t expect the line that this book took, and was pretty shocked by it. These are short books but there’s a lot in them. I often get annoyed with short stories and novellas for not filling in enough details or stopping short of the complicated bits but this just feels the right length and there’s no skimping on the background or the details. The story is well told and I want to think it’s unrealistic but I suspect the author knows his stuff and it’s not. I don’t want to spoil it so I won’t detail it any further. (I also thought when reading the earlier books that they could be read out of order, but there are definitely spoilers for Earth in here.)

It’s taken me until I saw, in this book’s endpapers, the name of the lead character in the last volume, Air, to realise that the title characters share their initials with the books. There’s Willow in Water as well as Evan in Earth, and knowing whose story is coming up next has me wondering where that book will take us. In Fire there’s a link back to the characters in Water but I don’t feel like the series is going to be completely circular.

There’s part of me that feels that this series of four short and linked books might really have been a single long book; but there’s something about having to wait for the next installment and come back after a little time has passed that makes you think so I can’t begrudge the author or his publisher for the moneyspinning lark of publishing them as four separate volumes really. Air is top of my reading list for 2025.

Roaring Girls: The extraordinary lives of history's unsung heroines by Holly Kyte

5.0

I feel like I just read eight books. And they were all good. And I’d happily read all eight of them again in extended editions. Holly Kyte tells the stories of eight different women here; the first woman featured was born about 1585 and the last died in 1877. It would be an anachronistic mistake to call them feminists themselves but they all pushed against the boundaries of what women were meant to do and be in their times and the way that they moved of those boundaries made life better for all of us who came along later.

I want to write down all their names so I can remember who they all were later. I only knew two of the names before I began reading; and I was only really properly familiar with one of the stories. This is a super quick summary of what I can remember of them from memory:

Mary Frith, also known as Moll Cutpurse, is the Roaring Girl from whom the book takes its title. She was a London pickpocket who appeared on stage in an age when only men were allowed to do so, and dressed as a man to do so. Margaret Cavendish, who published her autobiography among many other works, Mary Astell, champion of women’s education. Charlotte Charke, actress and playwright who often went by Charles Brown; Hannah Snell who joined the navy as James Grey. Mary Prince’s was the one story I had come across before. She was born a slave in Bermuda and became the first black female slave to have her biography published in Britain. Anne Lister was the other character I’d heard of, but I’d never read the details of her life as ‘the first modern lesbian’ before this. The book concludes with Caroline Norton whose long drawn out battle with her abusive husband resulted eventually in changes in the law allowing women to divorce and have custody of their children.

Reading these stories, no matter how informed you think you are, it’s a shock to realise how little rights women had in the past. How women were the property of their husbands and couldn’t own any of their own possessions for example. There are a few delightful parts of the book where the various women play the law off against itself. Mary Frith had a delightful trick where she would run a fraud as a single woman but then revert to a married woman with no legal existence when the law caught up with her. But on the other hand it was interesting to find out that Hannah Snell would likely have faced nothing more than discharge if she had been discovered as a woman in the military; revealing herself as female would have been an easy way to avoid punishment. What’s interesting is that she, and other military women, did not give themselves up in these circumstances, the conclusion being that the punishment was less horrible than getting sent straight back to live as a woman.

The modern reader wants these women to be progressive but not all of them are. Anne Lister’s treatment of the people she considered her wives involves exploiting them in the same way as a man would have done. Caroline Norton actively opposed the burgeoning ‘equalist’ movement rather than joining them. Some of the details are uncomfortable. It’s all interesting and informative, and a lot of it makes me rage. And it’s well worth reading.

The Twilight Hour by Nicci Gerrard

3.0

I picked this up in a second-hand bookshop years ago. I’ve previously read1 The Winter House by Nicci Gerrard but I’ve also read numerous mysteries by Nicci French which are co-written by the same author. I wanted to like this.

The story concerns Eleanor Lee, now blind and in her nineties, and Peter, a young man who she employs to help her sort out the various books and papers in the family home before she moves to a care home. She’s clearly looking for something that she can no longer see to find and slowly she reveals a story from her youth to Peter.

My partner picked it up and said that the plot synopsis sounded like Catherine Cookson; I’ve never read Catherine Cookson (and nor has he). At the time he said that to me I said, maybe, but I think it’s going somewhere Catherine Cookson wouldn’t go. Having finished it, I suspect we’re doing Cookson the injustice. The story ended up being pretty standard. Well told on the whole, with interesting characters but I wanted it to have been a more interesting plot. The complexity was resolved pretty easily and I expected more of the author really.

The Mapmaker's Wife: A Spellbinding Story of Love, Secrets and Devastating Choices by Hannah Evans

medium-paced

• 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 was doing that thing where I’m browsing in the library and there’s just too much choice. Shelf after shelf passes by and I’m not picking anything up. Eventually I just pick a shelf and tell myself to get something from here and be done with it. This was the book I picked. It was a good choice! But initially it annoyed me.

Mostly it was the title. “The Someone’s Wife” is a really common book title. “The Someone’s Husband” is, as far as I can tell, pretty much never used as a book title. And that’s a reflection of society and the way things have been (and perhaps still are). The reasons that the title annoys me are also the reasons why it’s a good book title.

The book starts out in 1954 when Beatrice Bell, the daughter of a well off family in Grenada, meets Patrick Anderson, a visiting mapmaker working for the British Government. And as you’d expect there’s a romance and Bea becomes the title character. But this isn’t a romance, at least not the sort that’s concluded with a marriage, and the story really takes off when the couple leave Grenada.

It’s very much a story of British colonialism as the young mixed-race couple struggle with the realities of life in the UK and on postings to Africa. It was the most unputdownable book I’ve read for a while and I raced through wanting to know what happened next but also the characters were so well written I wanted to spend time with them. There’s another thread to the story which takes place in 2015 in Grenada in which it’s clear from early on that the characters must connect to the other story but working out how isn’t obvious and the reader wants to find out how everything is going to match up. It’s a pretty standard narrative structure with flash forwards that don’t quite seem right but it’s gripping. I wasn’t surprised to find out at the end that the author is playing ‘what if’ with her own family history, and I won’t spoil the book for you by telling you what the ‘what if’ was. I thought the characters were superbly drawn, there are no bad guys, no one to blame, just real seeming people who love each other but often struggle to express that.

So, a good read, and I recommend it. But if anyone is wanting to write a book with a flip the tables narrative I suggest “The Someone’s Husband” as an option. I think the chances of anyone doing that with a non-superstar job title in it are slim; “The President’s Husband” would obviously make a good book title, sadly we’ve entered the timeline where that stays fictional for a while yet.

Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

3.0

I picked this up in a bookshop and started reading and it captivated me. There’s lots of well written, interesting characters and the text feels very chatty, I found most of the book a delight to read. The narrative sticks close to twenty year old Cora who gets picked as a kind of translator by an alien who has come to Earth in 2007. Coincidentally (obviously not) Cora’s estranged dad runs some kind of Wikileaks-but-with-aliens thing. I found the detailed descriptions of everything made it all seem alarmingly believable. Plus it was a comforting flashback to a time when perhaps the worst thing you could believe a US president would do was deny knowing anything about extraterrestrial species on earth.

Later in the book things started to feel more outlandish (like alien landings didn’t 🤷‍♀️) and as the story developed I started to worry that the author wasn’t going to have a good ending for it, and I think my worries were justified. I knew there was a sequel1 and I think I’ll probably read it as I enjoyed the overall story and there’s a whole heap of background stuff that was realised but not explored here. Whilst I didn’t find the ending of this particular act of the story especially satisfying I did enjoy the world created, the way the aliens were characterised and the way it was written.

Good Data: An Optimist's Guide to Our Digital Future by Sam Gilbert

medium-paced

4.0

This book is a pushback against what seems to me to be the prevailing current viewpoint that our data is being stolen from us and misappropriated by companies for sale and profit at every opportunity. We generate vast quantities of data all the time and occasional misuse of it - eg the Cambridge Analytica scandal - or experiments with it that don’t quite pan out - eg Google Flu Trends - end up with us not wanting to share our data any more. The author’s arguing, partly, that a lot of what we’re protecting is not worth protecting but also that it should be used ethically and transparently.

These days I use a search engine that keeps my search terms private because I don’t fancy anyone else looking through the random stream of consciousness that I type into it each day and I think it’d be pretty easy to identity me if you had that stream even though I don’t think it’s at all likely any one would ever even try. I do think there’s a use for the consolidated data of all our search terms though and I agree with the author that it’s a pity that the tools for doing good stuff with that have been lost as a result of misuse and misunderstandings. The fact is I don’t trust a company who collect that data to do the good stuff and not the creepy stuff and I’m not alone in that. And online advertising too: I quite like the way the advertisers know to advertise stuff that people-like-me like to me so that I find cool stuff I might enjoy popping up rather than endless tediously generic adverts such as I get if I watch broadcast tv. But I don’t want that power used to enure me to extremist politics for example. It’s easy to press ‘please don’t track me’ these days but hard to know when you wouldn’t actually mind it and when you’re being tracked anyhow no matter what you say.

As I was reading I kept remembering the big data project of Ben Goldacre’s that I was reading about a few years ago. His idea - as I remember it - was to share all our NHS health data with researchers in safe and traceable ways and I thought the idea to get all this data to researchers to improve our health with vast quantities of evidence was a great idea. However I remember at that time that there being a backlash of people not wanting their health data shared because they felt it was an invasion of privacy and I felt that there was a general failure of communication over how useful large quantities of data can be. (OpenSafely is, I think, the project I was reading about before.)

It’s a well written and very readable book; and that I remember more about my own trains of thought I went off on while reading it than the actual content of the book is a product of the fact that it made me think.

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

I love the way Anne Tyler tells stories. I’ve just been back through what I’ve written about the previous eleven books of hers I’ve read over the last eighteen years and I don’t think there has been one I didn’t adore.

This book starts with a section featuring Willa as an eleven year old in the 1960s, then we next get to see her as a twenty-one year old in the 1970s. Fast forward twenty years for another glance at her life, and finally it’s 2017 and we see her still looking for purpose in her life at sixty-one. (I think the dates are right but I don’t have the book to hand to check any more.) I really like the time jumps. You can see Willa is the same person in each different time but life has pushed her around and she hasn’t necessarily got what she wanted. Things she was unsure about at one time are settled in later times. It makes you see how life forks on you. You take one of the paths in front of you but could easily have picked another. As a reader I really wanted Willa to pick different paths in one of the times, but she didn’t, and it’s entirely realistic that she didn’t, but many years later you see the echoes of what could have been still ringing in her life.

And it’s only while writing this that I realised that this is exactly what the Clock Dance is. Time speeding on and taking you where it likes, but can you make it take you where you want to be?

The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't by Julia Galef

3.5

It felt like the internet, or at least the corners of it that I frequent, was all over this book a couple of years back. And it sounded right up my street, but I didn’t find a copy of it until I spotted it in the library a couple of months back. But even after I borrowed the book it took me a long time to actually read it. And this is all relevant and somewhat ironic.

The book is all about figuring out what’s actually true in the world. The scout mindset is one that values being right, a mindset where you change your mind when you are wrong, where you don’t over commit to an opinion that you aren’t certain on. A mindset where you judge after the facts not before them. And this is in opposition to what the author calls a soldier mindset, which is one where we defend our position simply because it’s our position. The central difference between the two mindsets is how we deal with new information that doesn’t fit with our current view. A scout asks if they can believe something, a soldier asks if they must believe it.

The irony of me taking a while to get to reading this book is because I thought I knew it all already, and even though I knew that people whose opinions I value had a high opinion of it. I definitely think I have a scout mindset where I think about things for myself and don’t like to go along with the crowd when I’m not sure and am happy to change my mind when I figure out more about what is the truth. But I did read the book in the end because I was too curious about whether I could learn to do more and better. And I think I did. We all have a bit of the soldier in us as well as the scout and this taught me a bit about how that works which I think will make me a better scout. But one of the main things I got from the book was a bit of understanding about how those people who really aren’t scouts at all tick.