Read 2012

December
Joanne Harris The Lollipop Shoes Chris Bohjalian The Law of Similars Alexander McCall Smith The Lost Art of Gratitude Alexander McCall Smith The Careful Use of Compliments John Irving In One Person Tim Winton That Eye, The Sky Joanne Harris Peaches for Monsieur le Curé Alice Sebold The Almost Moon (left off) Mark Haddon The Red House Annie Proulx The Shipping News (second attempt)

November
Erin Morgenstern The Night Circus (left off) Barbara Kingsolver Flight Behaviour Alice Sebold The Lovely Bones Jane Urquhart A Map of Glass (left off) Edith Pargeter She Goes to War (again, again)

October

Orson Scott Card Seventh Son Virginia Woolf The Years Sebastian Faulks A Possible Life Pat Barker Toby's Room AS Byatt Little Black Book of Stories Gavin Maxwell The Otters' Tale Rohan O'Grady Let's Kill Uncle Jeanette Winterson Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

September

Ann Patchett State of Wonder John Wyndham The Chrysalids

 

August

Peter Carey The Chemistry of Tears Marilynne Robinson Home (again, in conjunction with Gilead for cross-refencing)

July
Marilynne Robinson Home (again, in conjunction with Gilead for cross-refencing) Marilynne Robinson Gilead Annie Proulx Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place (resumed) ML Stedman The Light Between Oceans Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games Martin Davies The Conjuror's Bird

June

Annie Proulx Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place (interrupted) Barbara Kingsolver The Lacuna (again) Tim Winton Land's Edge: A Coastal Memoir

 

May

Andrea Barrett The Air We Breathe (again) John Irving Last Night in Twisted River Ian McEwan The Cement Garden

April

Torey Hayden Overheard in a Dream Sebastian Faulks Birdsong (again, after several years) Mary Morrissy Mother of Pearl Marlene Wagman-Geller Once Again to Zelda. Fifty Great Dedications and Their Stories Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending

March

Elizabeth von Arnim The Enchanted April (again after a long time) Margaret Drabble The Peppered Moth RA MacAvoy The Grey Horse (yet again) Margaret Drabble The Millstone Nicholas Evans The Brave Dawn Clifton Tripp Moon Tide

February

Carlos Ruiz Zafón The Midnight Palace (transl by Lucia Graves) (Feb-March) Alice Walker Collected Poems Barbara Trapido Sex & Stravinsky (left off) Phillipa Pearce A Finder's Magic (illus by Helen Craig) Jonathan Safran Foer Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Rumer Godden A House with Four Rooms Bernhard Schlink Homecoming (left off)

January

Martin Davies The Year After Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking Louis de Bernières The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts Muriel Barbery The Gourmet (transl by Alison Anderson) Jane Campion and Kate Pullinger The Piano Zoë Heller Notes on a Scandal JRR Tolkien The Hobbit (Dec 2011-Jan) (again, after a long time)

What some days hold

Today the air has swirled and spun.

I’ve been thinking of the Cape, where a windy day can be claustrophobic, when to open a window just a crack is enough to allow such a flush of air through it’s like a crazed creature racing around the room picking things up and flinging them above its head. Book covers flapped and snapped like birds’ wings, tissues danced, dust motes rode the rollercoaster currents. Outside, our hair was yanked from the roots and it was difficult to breathe.

Here in Joburg such tumult is far more unusual. Inside there has been quiet and coolness; two cycles of soft breathing. One body floated in light and twitchy sleep; the other mind watched and wandered. Outside, wind swept long fingers through branches and leaves, tangling and untangling. Plump bougainvillea bobbed. The windows are open just a crack, for the moment, to prevent another crazed creature from getting out, from leaping off high places and ensnaring himself in the shadowy webs of creepers. He’s only four months old, after all.

Still, some air entered. Along with the sight of greenery bending and swaying, it was the scents of wood smoke, dust, old furniture polish and, inexplicably or perhaps just wishfully, salt that triggered memories of that other day.

Two stories, one river

Another litoverlap:

When I first encountered the Willamette I had no idea it was a river in the United States; the name was simply interesting and unusual. On the one hand, it brought to mind a kind of cloth that hard-working homemakers might have found revolutionary in the 1960s, while on the other it reminded me of my friend Will, and how long it has been since we’ve met.

In Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise (2010, Old Street), Chuck holds Winnifred in his open palm at his apartment window, and says, ‘Doesn’t the Willamette look inviting?’ (p 122). Winnifred is the diminutive tortoise of the book’s title. Chuck’s girlfriend has agreed to look after her while her owner and the book’s protagonist, Audrey Flowers, goes home to St John’s, Newfoundland to be with her comatose father. As an out of work actor Chuck has a lot of spare time, and he doesn’t really know what to do with a tortoise. Winnifred is nervous about his preoccupation with the river; she wonders ‘how long before he decides the tortoise is better off in her “natural” habitat’ (p 157). But in the end Chuck grows quite fond of her and the Willamette pretty much fades from the story.

1. Washington 2. Columbia River 3. Idaho 4. Nevada 5. California 6. Pacific Ocean 7. Oregon 8. Willamette Basin, through which runs the Willamette River

The name felt like an old acquaintance when it appeared again in The Jump-Off Creek (1989, Boston: Houghton Mifflin), Molly Gloss’s tale about a pioneering ‘westering woman’, Lydia Bennett Sanderson, who sets up home by herself on a smallish piece of Oregon land. In the late 19th century, the Willamette’s valleys are ‘gentler’ than the nearby Blue Mountains (p 69), but the strapped Sanderson must make her bleak new home in the latter area because Willamette country is by that time already ‘thickly settled’ and the price of the land is ‘very dear’ (p 106).

Now, in Winnifred and Audrey’s time, the Willamette seems to have a tendency to flood, and it’s the last remaining place on Earth where American Indians of the Pacific Northwest can find one of their food staples: the jawless, eel-like lamprey.