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535. The Ruin

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee

Author:   Dervla McTiernan

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Foreign

380 pages, published July 3, 2018

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

The Ruin (Book no. 1 in the Cormac Reilly series) opens with DI Cormac Reilly discovering the body of Hilaria Blake in her crumbling Georgian home, dead from a drug overdose, along with her two children, Maude and Jack.  Twenty years later, Aisling Conroy’s boyfriend Jack is found dead in a freezing river and the police conclude it was suicide. A surgical resident, Aisling suspects something is not quite right, especially after Jack’s sister Maude reappears in Ireland after a 20 year absence.  When  Cormac Reilly is assigned to re-investigate Hilaria’s accidental overdose, he also comes to suspect that things are not as they seem.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Having read and loved many books by the Irish writer Tana French, I was keen to check out Dervla McTiernan, a writer in the same vein.  I was not disappointed.  Her spot on character insights and sense of place enrich and deepen this crackling mystery.  I will continue to read her books and look forward to the second Cormac Reilly book.

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533. A Column of Fire

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ken Follett

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

916 pages, published September 12, 2017

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

A Column of Fire is the third book in Ken Follett’s series of historical fiction that focuses on the town of Kingsbridge, England during succeeding time periods.  In this book, the focus is on the continent wide conflict between Protestants and Catholics.  The story unfolds with a focus on characters from England, France and Spain as they navigate the treacherous mid 1500’s.  In England, after a young Ned Willard is stymied in his desire to marry Margery Fitzgerald by class and religious differences he enlists in service to Princess Elizabeth.  When she becomes queen, all Europe turns against England. Over a turbulent half century, the love between Ned and Margery seems doomed as extremism sparks violence from Edinburgh to Geneva.

Quotes 

“When a man is certain that he knows God’s will, and is resolved to do it regardless of the cost, he is the most dangerous person in the world.”

 

“Some men craved deference; others craved wine, or the bodies of beautiful women, or the monastic life of order and obedience. What did Ned crave? The answer came into his mind with a speed and effortlessness that took him by surprise: justice.”

 

“Trials rarely found men not guilty. The general view was that if a man were innocent he would not have got into trouble in the first place.”

 

“I may yet go through anguish in hell for my sin. But if I had to live that time again I would do the same, to end Margery’s ordeal. I preferred to suffer myself than to know that her agony continued. Her well-being was more important to me than my own. I have learned, during the course of a long life, that that is the meaning of love.”

 

“Changing your beliefs with every change of monarch was called “policy,” and people who did it were “politicians.”

 

“there are no saints in politics, but imperfect people can make the world a better place.”

 

“he thinks the aldermen’s job is to make decisions and then enforce them. When your father was mayor he said that aldermen should rule the town by serving it.” Ned said impatiently: “That sounds like two ways of looking at the same thing.” “It’s not, though,” said his mother. “It’s two different worlds.”

 

“We hanged him in front of Kingsbridge Cathedral. It is the usual place for executions. After all, if you can’t kill a man in front of God’s face you probably shouldn’t kill him at all.”

 

“My father taught us to learn as much as possible of any tongue we came across. He says it’s better than money in the bank.”

 

“The simple idea that people should be allowed to worship as they wished caused more suffering than the ten plagues of Egypt.”

 

“Elizabeth’s true attitude was probably that of someone who hears two drunks fighting in the street at night: it did not matter who won so long as neither tried to get into the house.”

 

My Take

With his engaging style that effortlessly weaves historical figures into compelling stories, I always find Ken Follett a pleasure to read and A Column of Fire is no exception.  I had previously read several authors’ take on the frought Elizabethan era, but gained some new information and insights from Follett’s book.  I also found myself involved with the characters and often kept playing the audio book to see what would happen next.  If you like this book, then check out the rest of the Kingsbridge series:  The Pillars of the Earth, World Without End and The Evening and the Morning.  All are excellent.

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527. The Evening and the Morning

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ken Follett

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

913 pages, published September 15, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Evening and the Morning is a prequel to Ken Follett’s very popular Pillars of the Earth series which center on life in the medieval town of Kingsbridge, England.  Set in 997 CE, it starts with the pillaging of a coastal English town by the ruthless Vikings.  A young Edgar, who is a skilled boatmaker, survives along with his mother and two brothers.  They start over as farmers in the town that will become Kingsbridge. Around the same time, Lady Ragna, a Norman noblewoman comes to England to marry Wielf, the man she loves.   Finally, we follow the story of Aldred, a monk who dreams of transforming his humble abbey into a center of learning.  The lives of Edgar, Ragna and Aldred intertwine to illuminate life in England during the end of the Dark Ages.

Quotes 

“In dog philosophy it was always better to go somewhere than to be left behind.”

 

“Ma and Pa had taught their sons to keep themselves fresh by bathing at least once a year.”

 

“And so, Aldred thought, great ones sin with impunity while lesser men are brutally chastised.”

 

“And that would be sufficient, if we lived in a world that was ruled by laws.” Aldred sat on a stool, leaned forward, and spoke quietly. “But the man matters more than the law, as you know.”

 

“in the end there’s no way to get rich crops out of poor earth.”

 

 “Coming to Glastonbury was like visiting the grave of his youth.”

 

 “When the Roman Empire declined, Britain went backward. As the Roman villas crumbled, the people built one-room wooden dwellings without chimneys. The technology of Roman pottery—important for storing food—was mostly lost. Literacy declined. This period is sometimes called the Dark Ages, and progress was painfully slow for five hundred years. Then, at last, things started to change”

 

“In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Aldred felt he could spend his life trying to comprehend that mystery.”

 

My Take

Having thoroughly enjoyed The Pillars of the Earth trilogy, I looked forward to reading Ken Follett’s prequel to the series.  The Evening and the Morning did not disappoint.  Well developed and intriguing characters interwoven with historical events make for a captivating tale in the hands of the master storyteller Follett.  Well worth reading!

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524. Trespass

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Rose Tremain

Genre:   Fiction, Foreign

273 pages, published October 18, 2010

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Trespass tells the story of the competing interests over an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel, in southern France.  The owner, Aramon has let his life devolve into squalor as punishment for his past sins.  His sister Audrun, who was vicitimized by Aramon and their father, is trapped in the torment of her past.  She loves the house and the land and can’t imagine anyone else taking possession of it.  Enter Anthony Verey, a disillusioned antiques dealer from London who views Mas Lunel as his chance to start over.  The clashing interests of these three individuals sets in motion a series of tragic events.

Quotes 

“They both knew that it was borrowed, because if you left your own country, if you left it late, and made your home in someone else’s country, there was always a feeling that you were breaking an invisible law, always the irrational fear that, one day, some ‘rightful owner’ would arrive to take it all away, and you would be driven out . . .”

 

My Take

Trespass was the first book that I have read by Rose Tremain and I was impressed.  She is a gift writer and hooked me into this dramatic story  of family love and betrayal.  There is also a real undercurrent of sadness that gives the story a poignancy and endurance.  I look forward to reading more of Tremain’s work.

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519. The God of Small Things

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Arundhati Roy

Genre:  Fiction, Foreign

340 pages, published 1997

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The God of Small Things takes place in Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, in 1969.  It tells the story of an Indian family, young mother Ammu, her twins Rahel and Esthappen, the blind grandmother, Mammachi, Oxford educated uncle Chacko, and Baby Kochamma (grandaunt and ex-nun.  When the twins’ English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive for a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day.

Quotes 

“D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

 

 “…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.  That is their mystery and their magic.”

 “And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”

 

“If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?”

 

“This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”

 

“Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.”

 

 “The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.”

 

 “Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”

 

“He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.”

 

 “If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win.”

 

“Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.”

 

 “Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative – they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”

 

 “Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.”

 “Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.”

 

“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”

 

My Take

While Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is an acclaimed book, winning the 1997 Booker Prize, I had a hard time fully immersing myself in the story.  There were parts I liked and some beautiful language, but it left me a bit cold.

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477. Notes from a Small Island

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Bill Bryson

Genre:   Non Fiction, Travel, Foreign, Humor, Memoir, Essays

324 pages, published May 28, 1997

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Notes from a Small Island is author Bill Bryson’s take on the two decades that he spent living in the United Kingdom.

Quotes 

“I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, ‘Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!’ Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I’ll tell you that.”

 

“Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad – Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but’, people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays – every bit of it.  What a wondrous place this was – crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? (‘Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.’) What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners’ Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course.  How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state – in short, did nearly everything right – and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things – to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view.  All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.”

 

“The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.”

 

“Is it raining out?’ the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. ‘No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.”

 

“To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one’s mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright”

 

“…it occurred to me, not for the first time, what a remarkably small world Britain is. That is its glory, you see–that it manages at once to be intimate and small scale, and at the same time packed to bursting with incident and interest. I am constantly filled with admiration at this–at the way you can wander through a town like Oxford and in the space of a few hundred yards pass the home of Christopher Wren, the buildings where Halley found his comet and Boyle his first law, the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, the meadow where Lewis Carroll strolled; or how you can stand on Snow’s Hill at Windsor and see, in a single sweep, Windsor Castle, the playing fields of Eton, the churchyard where Gray wrote his “Elegy,” the site where The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed. Can there anywhere on earth be, in such a modest span, a landscape more packed with centuries of busy, productive attainment?”

 

“When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.”

 

“The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course, the British are all aware, in an abstract sort of way, that there is a substantial landmass called Europe nearby and that from time to time it is necessary to go over there to give old Jerry a drubbing or have a holiday in the sun, but it’s not nearby in any meaningful sense in the way that, say, Disney World is.”

 

“It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource.”

 

“I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York—and even New York can’t touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more courteous inhabitants than any other large city in the world.”

 

“One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to ‘bugger off’ to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.”

 

My Take

Like Bryson, I am a committed Anglophile and agree with him that London is the best city on earth.  I enjoyed his insights and witticisms as he recounted the twenty years he spent living in the UK.  Reading this book made me want to plan another trip that special place.

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467. The Henna Artist

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Lisa Stock

Author:  Alka Joshi

Genre:   Fiction, Cultural, Foreign

384 pages, published March 3, 2020

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

On the run from an abusive marriage during the 1950’s, 17 year old Lakshmi settles in the vibrant pink city of Jaipur, India.   Self taught, she becomes the city’s most highly requested henna artist and confidante to the wealthy women of the upper class.  When her ex-husband and younger sister show up, Lakshmi’s world is upended as she tries to keep her painstakingly cultivated independent life from falling apart.

Quotes 

“Success was ephemeral—and fluid—as I’d found out the hard way. It came. It went. It changed you from the outside, but not from the inside. Inside, I was still the same girl who dreamed of a destiny greater than she was allowed. Did I really need the house to prove I had skill, talent, ambition, intelligence?”

 

“Just then, my mother’s words echoed in my head: stretch your legs only as far as your bed. I was getting too far ahead of myself.”

 

“Hadn’t Gandhi-ji said, An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind?”

 

“there were three kinds of karma: the accumulated karma from all our past lives; the karma we created in this life; and the karma we stored to ripen in our future lives.”

 

“In India, individual shame did not exist. Humiliation spread, as easily as oil on wax paper, to the entire family, even to distant cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews. The rumormongers made sure of that. Blame lay heavily in my chest. Had I not deserted my marriage, Radha would not have suffered so much, and Maa and Pitaji would not have been so powerless against an entire village.”

 

My Take

In The Henna Artist, author Alka Joshi follows a familiar plot line:  Girl escaping a bad situation makes her way to the big city.  After working hard and keeping focused, she finds success.  All is threatened when her past catches up with her, but she prevails at the end.  Despite its familiarity, I really enjoyed the familiar story with its Indian twist.

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463. The Red Notebook

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Meris Delli-Bovi

Author:  Antoine Laurain

Genre:   Fiction, Romance, Foreign

159 pages, published April 7, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

When Parisian bookseller Laurent Letellier comes across an abandoned handbag on the street there is nothing in it to indicate who it belongs to.  However, there are all sorts of other things in it which bit by bit disclose the identity of the owner, especially a red notebook which contains the owner’s thoughts and musings.  Laurent spends the next week tracking down the mysterious and enigmatic owner of the bag.

Quotes 

“How many things do we feel obliged to do for the sake of it, or for appearances, or because we are trained to do them, but which weigh us down and don’t in fact achieve anything?”

 

”If there was one thing that defined adolescence it was hysterical laughter. You never laughed like that again. In adolescence the brutal realisation that the world and life were completely absurd made you laugh until you couldn’t catch your breath, whereas in later life it would only result in a weary sigh.”

 

That was exactly what Tabucchi was suggesting with his title (“La Nostalgie du Possible”) –that we can pass right by something very important: love, a job, moving to another city or another country. Or another life. ‘Pass by’ and at the same time be ‘so close’ that sometimes, while in that state of melancholy that is akin to hypnosis, we can, in spite of everything, manage to grab little fragments of what might have been. Like catching snatches of a far-off radio frequency. The message is obscure, yet by listening carefully you can still catch snippets of the soundtrack of the life that never was. You hear sentences that were never actually said, you hear footsteps echoing in places you’ve never been to, you can make out the surf on a beach whose sand you have never touched. You hear the laughter and loving words of a woman though nothing ever happened between you. The idea of an affiar with her had crossed your mind. Perhaps she would have liked that –probably, in fact– but nothing every happened. For some unknown reason, we never gave in to the exquisite vertigo that you feel when you move those few centimeters towards the face of the other for the first kiss.”

 

“Can you experience nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened? We talk of ‘regrets’ about the course of our lives, when we are almost certain we have taken the wrong decision; but one can also be enveloped in a sweet and mysterious euphoria, a sort of nostalgia for what might have been.”

 

“There, it was over. How was it so easy to disappear from someone else’s life? Perhaps it was with the same ease that you enter it. A chance meeting, a few words exchanged, and a relationship begins. A chance falling out, a few words exchanged and that same relationship is over.”

 

“A quote from Sacha Guitry came to mind: ‘Watching someone sleep is like reading a letter that is not addressed to you.”

 

“What I really need is a friend just like me; I’m sure I’d be my own best friend.”

 

“Do great things, Laure, be happy, or at least do your best to be. Life is fragile.”

 

“There’s nothing worse than being bored with a boring man.”

 

My Take

The Red Notebook, which is a romance where the protagonists only meet at the end of the story, is a delightful read.  While reading it, I felt as if I was right there with them in the streets, book shops and cafes of Paris.  That alone makes it worth reading.

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454. The Sympathizer

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Valerie Flores

Author:   Viet Thanh Nguyen

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

371 pages, published April 7, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Set as the flashback in a coerced confession of a political prisoner, The Sympathizer tells the story of his escape from South Vietnam in the mid-70’s to his life in Los Angeles.  Unnamed, the narrator is the illegitimate child of a French father and a poor Vietnamese mother who, as an adult in exile becomes an undercover communist agent, reporting back to the Viet Cong.  The book tells the story of a life lived between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War.

Quotes 

“Nothing is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.”

 

“We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do.”

 

“While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored.”

 

“Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.”

 

“It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.”

 

“Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.”

 

“Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.”

 

“I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.”

 

“She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.”

 

“Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt.”

 

“Americans are a confused people because they can’t admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent.”

 

“Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, and to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies.”

 

“Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing theres’s someone who feels much worse.”

 

“The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.”

 

My Take

Winner of the Pulitizer Prize and many other awards, The Sympathizer is a heavily acclaimed book.  While I often find there is an inverse correlation between the amount of honors and reading enjoyment, I did enjoy this book, which is equal parts amusing, horrific, informative and entertaining.  It also provides a unique perspective on the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, both in that country and ours.

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453. Middle England

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Jonathan Coe

Genre:   Fiction, Foreign

448 pages, published August 20, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Middle England follows the lives of several interrelated Brits in the ten years leading up to Brexit:  newlyweds Ian and Sophie, whose different world views may imperil their marriage; Doug, a journalist who writes about politics while parenting a radical SJW teenage daughter; Benjamin Trotter, who finds moderate career success in middle age with the publication of a book, and his father Colin, whose last wish is to vote LEAVE in the Brexit referendum.

Quotes 

“Some people don’t realize that a straight ‘No’ can be the kindest answer in the world.”

 

“Making armaments, they were, munitions, aeroplane parts. Can you imagine! Can you imagine what it was like, hundreds of people, working together like that, for the war effort? What a spirit, eh? What a country we were back then! ‘Whatever happened to all that? It was bad enough when I was working here. Every man for himself, survival of the fittest, I’m all right, Jack. That’s what was starting to take over. But now it’s even worse, it’s just . . . fancy clothes and Prosecco bars and bloody . . . packets of salad. We’ve gone soft, that’s the problem. No wonder the rest of the world’s laughing at us.’”

 

“the unspeakable truth: that Sophie (and everyone like her) and Helena (and everyone like her) might be living cheek-by-jowl in the same country, but they also lived in different universes, and these universes were separated by a wall, infinitely high, impermeable, a wall built out of fear and suspicion and even –  perhaps – a little bit of those most English of all qualities, shame and embarrassment. Impossible to deal with any of this. The only practical thing was to ignore it (but for how long was that practical, in fact?) and to double down, for now, on the desperate, unconsoling fiction that all of this was just a minor difference of opinion, like not quite seeing eye-to-eye over a neighbour’s choice of colour scheme or the merits of a particular TV show.”

 

“Benjamin had always assumed that he would grow old and die at home; that he was bound to end his life by returning to the country of his childhood. But he was starting to understand, at last, that this place had only ever existed in his imagination.”

“I like the rain before it falls. of course there is no such thing, she said. That’s why it’s my favorite. Something can still make you happy, can’t it, even if it isn’t real.”

 

“Yes – I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I’m sure I could repeat them perfectly.”

 

“We say, ‘Shall we meet for a drink?’, as though drinking were the main end of the appointment, and the matter of company only incidental, we are so shy about admitting our need for one another. We say, ‘Would you like to come for some coffee?’, as though it were less frightening to acknowledge that we are heavily dependent on mildly stimulating drinks, than to acknowledge that we are at all dependent on the companionship of other people.”

 

“[…] words are tricky little bastards, and very rarely say what you want them to say […]”

 

“Politics can make people do terrible things.”

 

My Take

I picked up Middle England at random from Overdrive when I needed a new audiobook to listen to and was very pleasantly surprised.  Author Jonathan Coe is a gifted writer who not only paints a portrait of fascinating individuals, but also of a whole nation.  Middle England gave me a great feel for the sensibilities of modern Britain.

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