november-december 2023 books…

Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin): This is our next Storysmith bookgroup book (478 pages long – which, as we always skip meeting in December, allows time for us all to read it!). This is a book about video gaming. I know NOTHING about video gaming… but it didn’t matter. It’s a complex book about friendship, love, creativity, betrayal, rivalry and tragedy (but, as the book’s cover makes clear: “it’s not a romance”!). The key characters, Sam and Sadie, first meet in childhood – in a hospital games room (Sam had an injured foot, which becomes a long-term disability). Years later, they bump into each other at a train station when they were both college students (Sam, mathematics at Harvard and Sadie, computer science at MIT) and, cutting a long story short, end up making an incredibly successful video game together. Their non-romantic relationship is a joining of minds and of worlds but, such creative relationships can also cause rivalry and resentment… which is what happens with them (despite them both continuing to work in the Company they’d set up together at the very beginning). I don’t want to spoil things, so will leave it at that – apart from saying that the story ends with an abstract section set in a virtual world which, ultimately, reveals a means of communication and reconciliation for its real-life players. It’s a very clever, intriguing (and very enjoyable) book.
Uncle Fred In The Springtime (PG Wodehouse): I read this more than 6 years ago (first published 1939), but had forgotten most of it(!). Uncle Fred is Lord Ickenham - as with many of Wodehouse’s books, this one’s full of titled/upper-class characters – and he is urged by a Lord Emsworth to save his prize pig (an everyday story of country folk!). The plot is predictably complex and farcical and, just to complicate things further, many of the characters take on disguised personas during the course of the tale. Who could ever forget(!) people with names such as Pongo Twistleton, Horace Pendlebury-Davenport, Galahad Threepwood, Bingo Little, Oofy Prosser and Bricky Bostock? It’s an absurd storyline but, thanks to Wodehouse’s wonderful, posh descriptions and humour, it provides a hugely enjoyable respite to all the current troubles here in the UK and the world.
Mrs McGinty’s Dead (Agatha Christie): Resorting back to yet another Christie novel (I think we have something like 35 of them on our bookshelves!). This one was first published in 1952 and a village charwoman is murdered and her lodger is found guilty of killing her… but a local police superintendent has his doubts and seeks the help of a certain retired detective, Hercule Poirot. It’s a very clever, satisfying mystery – with lots of plausible possibilities and suspects.
Pessimism Is For Lightweights (Salena Godden): This is a book of 30 poems by a writer I hadn’t previously come across. One of the reviews I came across talked about them as poems “for courage and justice”… there are poems that salute people fighting for justice, poems on sexism and racism, class discrimination, period poverty and homelessness, asylum seekers, immigration and identity. I found them hugely impressive and read them out loud to myself each morning. Excellent.
Choose Life (Rowan Williams): This was my book for this year’s Advent. It’s a series of Christmas and Easter sermons Williams gave in Canterbury Cathedral between 2002 and 2012 (I’ve just read the Advert ones for now). Williams has always struck me as a wise and intelligent man and so I felt that, in my ongoing faith struggles, he might be a good person to read about Christianity at Advent. It proved to be a useful, thought-provoking book – albeit it didn’t quite haul me out of my spiritual wilderness.