The Mixed-Up Bag of Late November

Very mixed reading bag to catch up on. At least in terms of genre and style, it is. I happened to love all three of these books. In fact, in setting about compiling my list of favourite reads of the year yesterday, I realised how very few stinkers I've actually put myself through this year. I think I've been listening to the bookshop hype less. I've been avoiding big stores and definitely I've been avoiding newspaper reviews. So I think this has had a happy effect on my reading.

So... I read another Maureen Lee. This one was a 'split level' narrative about a mother and a daughter, separated by murder and twenty years in prison. It's another lovely portrait of Liverpool and Liverpool families, taking us from just before WW2 and up to the early Seventies. The book's various threads are wound and twined together very cleverly, culminating in a twist that I gasped rather than groaned at. It's a book about reconciliation and difficult choices. There's an unfortunate kinky Colditz section that doesn't quite work out for me. All the gay characters in this are portrayed as wicked perverts, which I've a bit of a problem with. This could have been balanced by having the hero's obviously-gay brother outed and allowed to stand in counterpoint to the queer nazi commandant who effectively destroys everyone's lives... But I don't suppose you can have everything. This strange strand in the novel didn't spoil my enjoyment of a novel which has all of the trademark warmth and wit of Maureen Lee.

Marta Acosta's vampire series was new to me. I came across it through the interviews I was doing with wonderful Paranormal Romance sites, such as Book Chick City. Suddenly there were all these fab comic vampire novels to delve into. I'd been off vamps for a while after ploughing through drippy old Twilight... but the first in Marta's 'Casa Dracula' series is a complete antidote. It's spicy and salacious and silly. Thank god for a bit of naughtiness and brio. Here we've got fag hags and glitz and shopping and a cross old matriarch stomping about in a mansion. Our Latina heroine Milagro has a hard time of it, choosing between sexily monstrous men and winds up, bitten and misbegotten, in a safehouse mansion with a crackpot vampire family trying to keep her under house arrest. It took me a few chapters to realise that it reminded me of some bizarre Gothic version of Dynasty or Dallas. All the elements are there - the frosty matriarch who wins our hearts with her brusque one-liners and her hidden-away broken heart. The sexy fellas who vie for the new girl's attentions. The villains trying to lure her away...

It's a real romp, anyway, and I'm looking forward to getting on with the sequels.

My third book to catch up on is Muriel Barbery's 'Elegance of the Hedgehog.' In a departure for me, I listened to the whole unabridged audio on the weekend's road trip to my wonderful sister's graduation. There's something really compelling for me about audiobooks and this one works brilliantly as it's in two very distinct voices, given here by two excellent actresses. It's about a cranky and philosophical concierge in a posh Parisian apartment block and a little girl, bright beyond her years, determined to commit suicide by burning down her apartment by the end of the book. Both are brought together and helped along in the unacknowledged quest for happiness by a japanese man who moves in upstairs. It's beautifully written, I think. And I bet it feels rather dense on the page, with its allusions to Tolstoy and Husserl and who knows what else. Read aloud it has a wonderful lightness of touch. I didn't even care about the incredibly slow pace or lack of drama. And the ending is wonderfully sad.

Those are my three at the end of November! Also Susan Cooper's 'The Dark is Rising', which I've reread YET again, for my class tomorrow. But more of that later...