Breathing Just a Little

As part of my self-imposed Read the Booker Winners for the First Decade of My Life project, I have just now finished the audiobook of the short but sweet novel that won in 1979 - Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore. Summary: I liked it very much, and rate it 8.5/10 .  Given that The Sea, The Sea also scored an 8.5 from me recently, and the two I had previously read (Midnight's Children and Schindler's Ark) are both easy 9s, so far, the decade of my birth is coming up trumps! I'm starting the Coetzee audiobook next, and reading the Gordimer as a library e-book because I couldn't find an audio version anywhere, so we shall see if this positive run holds. This is, simply put, a lovely little book. Quirky (but not in a bad, shallow way), frequently wryly funny, and very moving, it is the entwined stories of a collection of houseboat-dwellers living at Battersea Wharf in 1961, people with, literally (to misquote Shakespeare), one foot in water, one on shore. The characters ar...

Having just finished, and so enjoyed, the audiobook of The Sea, The Sea, I seem to have stumbled into a half-baked plan to try to cover all the Booker prizewinners from the first decade of my life (1973-1983) as audiobooks if I can find audio versions. I don't know why, my lists make little sense even to me sometimes :-) The list is: J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist (1974* tie) Stanley Middleton, Holiday (1974* tie) Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (1975) David Storey, Saville (1976) Paul Scott, Staying On (1977) ✅Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (1978) Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore (1979) William Golding, Rites of Passage (1980) ✅Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1981) ✅Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark (1982) J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (1983) I have already read Midnight's Children and Schindler's Ark, and of course have just read The Sea, The Sea, so they are ticked off. All three of these wer...

Every year in my January Month of Poetry exercise, the group is set a challenge one day of the week to write to a prompt. One of this year's challenges was to take lines from a favourite poem and build a new poem from them. I used the closing lines of Mary Oliver's On Travelling to Beautiful Places to create this one. On Being Alive as the Apocalypse Begins  and in truth the only ship there is is the ship we are all on burning the world as we go this ship that we can't get off, now maybe once we could have we could have dived off the deck, slick with salt and hard dreams cutting through the white horses of the glimmering sea to take our chances with the seals and the sharks turning our faces to the distant shore maybe once we could have turned this ship around or, if not that, we could have put the matches back in the box chosen sunsets and fruit and song and touch over the savage pleasures of power over watching the world on fire and delighting in our spite or even just ou...

  This book, which won the 1978 Booker Prize, is widely considered a modern classic, and has been on my long TBR list for many years. I lucked upon the audiobook version in my local library's collection, and it was read by the incomparable Richard E. Grant, so I have finally filled the gap over the course of the last fortnight, while driving, cooking, exercising, cleaning, walking, etc. And ... I Have Thoughts! Let's start with some scenario-setting. The Sea, The Sea is the story of  the protagonist / narrator, Charles Arrowby, retired playwright / director, who has left behind his London life and removed to a remote coastal location and a run-down old house (Shruff End) he has bought with the intention of writing his memoirs and living as more or less a hermit. This is where the book opens, and for a short stretch, it's all lush literary descriptions of scenery and (quite enjoyably to me, a confirmed Hobbit) delicious food, which Arrowby is both dedicated to and hilariousl...

Among more serious books, I have been churning through mystery reads in my summer break, because they are generally fun for me (although the less-great ones are not as much so!) Here are three that I did enjoy, all very different in type, but all, I think, good exemplars of their kind. This is a reverse thriller, which is an interesting way to construct the story. Beginning at the end (or close to the end), it goes backwards in time to the events in the past that led up to final moment. In a nutshell, it is the life story of literature academic, Thom, and his poet and arts administrator wife, Wendy. It takes the reader from the end of their life together all the way back to when they first met, aged 14, through all the things that happened along the way (exactly none of which I am going to name, as every single one is a spoiler!) There's no doubt about its cleverness, and Swanson always writes very well, but something about the reverse structure took a lot of the sting out of the r...

I had every good intention of doing this post in the void week between Christmas and New Year, or, at a pinch, in that void-adjacent first week of January, but I was engaged in an apparently aggressively intractable campaign of doing absolutely nothing except reading, eating, swimming and napping (all amazing things, I think we can agree) and it didn't happen. Still, I do like having these posts to reflect on, so I thought I'd catch up now, especially as I will be back to work next week and am doing set-up tasks for that now (which has me at the computer more than I have been in the lovely langorous early summer weeks). Quarter 4 (let's call it 1 November til today, as this year really only functionally begins on 27 Jan when work and school are back) was a busy and momentous time, with very high highs, and unfortunately one very low low. We were all basically well, barring a mild summer cold just before Christmas, but my perimenopause symptoms are gaining prominence, which ...