I read nine books in total in April and May. I was away on holiday for a lot of those two months, that’s why I didn’t do two separate posts. I read two modern classics, The Go-Between and Brideshead Revisited. Two Shakespeare plays, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Two non-fiction, English Literature A Very Short Introduction and A New Name, a memoir about eating disorders. And three contemporary novels, one historical fiction, and two fantasies.
The Secrets of Hartwood Hall
The Secrets of Hartwood Hall is a new novel published this year, written by Katie from Books and Things. It’s historical fiction set in the Victorian era, about a governess starting a new chapter of her life in an isolated country house that’s full of shadows and mysteries.
I love the characters, especially the boy Louis and his friendship with the governess. I love the historical details – they add lots to the overall effect of the story, it reads authentic, but they don’t draw attention to themselves. The story is full of twists and turns.
The Go-Between
The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley is my first 5-star book of the year. It’s a modern classic first published in 1953. The novel is narrated by a lonely old man. One day he opened up a long-forgotten diary and it brought back memories from a summer holiday in 1900 when he was 12. Young Leo was invited to spend his summer holiday with his school friend Marcus and his family in their big country house, where real lords and ladies lived. Leo was from an inferior social class so everything and everyone in the big house was shiny and fascinating. He lived among the gods. He fell in love with his friend’s older sister in a schoolboy-ish worshipful way and became the messenger between this woman and her secret lover.
I love the atmosphere. The bright hot English summer at the very end of the Victorian era, women wearing frilly lacy dresses, young people swimming in the river, men playing cricket, and children sliding down straw stacks. All calm and lazy, at least on the surface.
I love seeing the world from an adolescent perspective and reading the thoughts and feelings of young Leo, his hopeless and confused crash on Marian, the funny wrestling and friendly abuse with his schoolmate Marcus, and his interactions with various grown ups.
It’s a sad story. It was going to be a fabulous century, 1900! The best time of Leo’s life was just about to begin. But in their small world, the summer ended with a suicide and a nervous breakdown. On a bigger scale, two world wars happened and much of the family was killed, the lords and ladies didn’t exist anymore, along with the calm and lazy world.
A Very Short Introduction: English Literature
English Literature A Very Short Introduction is an overview of the subject of English Literature in a 179-page pocket-size book written by Jonathan Bate. It’s so dense, it hurt my head to read it. I stumbled through it the first time around in 2020. I’ve read a lot more classics and got to know a lot more authors and protagonists since then. However, it still proved to be a challenge!
The Dragon and the Stone
The Dragon and the Stone is a middle-grade fantasy adventure novel written by Kathryn Butler. It’s book 1 in the Dream Keeper Saga. A troubled schoolgirl discovered a stone from her dad and was ushered into a fantasy world by a small dragon, where she went on a series of adventures.
I’m not an expert in this area, but I feel like there haven’t been many well known fantasy stories with a Christian worldview since Narnia and the Lord of the Rings. I only know of the Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson. If you’ve read or heard of any, please leave me a comment!
So when I heard this, I was very curious and excited about this novel that is published by Crossway in 2022, written by a Christian author and has Christian themes. Basically when I set out to read it, I was hoping for the next Narnia series. But no, this is not Narnia.
I guess because I had an unrealistic high expectation, I was disappointed, unsurprisingly – there’s only one C. S. Lewis and no one else is going to create another Narnia – and my review will sound a bit harsh. I apologise to Kathryn!
I think this might be the inevitable fate of a lot of the protagonists, they can be boring. I guess maybe it’s because they have to carry the plot line forward, they have to make the right choice and do the right thing, they end up a bit generic. For example, as much as I love the whole Harry Potter series, Harry himself is probably one of the least interesting characters. Please explain if you disagree. I do love him poor boy suffered so much, but if he wasn’t the chosen one, what a pedestrian character he’d have been. Same feeling with the protagonist here. She might have brilliant imagination but she’s just nice and dull.
There’s a unicorn in the story, who is the long absent prince of the realm. The place is at war with the evil one and people are being captured. Our protagonist is rescued by the prince several times. When she’s in a desperate situation, she thinks of the unicorn and he comes and solves her problem. IF the unicorn is a Christ figure, so far it’s not a very complete representative of Christ. The unicorn is nothing like Aslan, powerful, awesome, dangerous, unpredictable and untameable. The unicorn gives me the feeling of a genie, you call him and he’ll do your bidding. Maybe the unicorn is not a Christ figure.
Again I’m sorry to sound so harsh. I haven’t studied it like I would a Shakespeare play and I’m aware there are more books in the series so I could be completely wrong. Let me know how you feel if you’ve read it.
A New Name
A New Name is a memoir by Emma Scrivener published in 2012. It’s Christian non-fiction telling the story of her years struggling with anorexia, when she was a teenager and later on after she got married. I didn’t read it because I myself or any close family or friends are struggling with anorexia. I read it firstly, because I met the author and heard her personal story – she was an incredible speaker, many of us in the audience came away in tears, not because of sadness, but because the power and beauty shone through in her weakness – so I wanted to know more about her; secondly there ARE a lot of people struggling with it and I want to be able to support them.
This book is a page-turner, more so than any other books I read this month or even this year. I read the whole book in one day and there are reviews on Goodreads saying how they read the whole book in one sitting. I’m not surprised at all. I think there are at least two reasons, according to my own reading experience.
Emma is an extremely gifted writer. The story is beautiful. I said similar things about the Go-Between by L. P. Hartley. I usually use a straight line to highlight key information I want to keep track of and a wavy line for beautiful sentences. I had real trouble deciding which kind of lines to use when I read A New Name. The second reason is that reading the book is like listening to her, sitting across you in a room, I just couldn’t stop halfway and I just wanted to keep listening. I highly recommend it.
Titus Andronicus & Julius Caesar
Titus Andronicus is not my favourite, but it’s still interesting to think about. It took me about three months to finally finish Titus Andronicus and it took me about three weeks, reading Julius Caesar and watching two different productions. I think I prefer Julius Caesar! It’s a tragedy written in the middle of Shakespeare’s career. It’s not mainly about Caesar himself, but the events leading up to and the aftermath of his assassination.
I loved the play and the shows I watched. The characters have a lot of depth to them and a lot of room for interpretation, so each show tells the same story but with a different take. It’s really fun to think about Brutus, Cassius and Antony, what kind of people they are, and what motivates them to do what they do.
Brideshead Revisited
The novel is a memoir of Charles Rider who looks back on his relationship with Sebastian in their university days and later on his relationship with Sebastian’s sister Julia. There are a lot of similarities between Brideshead Revisited and the Go-Between at least initially.
I don’t quite understand what the author wants to say. I don’t get the religious element, which plays a big role in the story. The Flyte family life is tightly bound up with their Catholic faith. Does Evelyn Waugh want to show how religion can affect individual people’s life?
I also don’t like Charles Rider who’s a bit low in spirit and energy – that might be the author’s intention. He just drifts through life without much meaning and purpose. He marries his wife because everyone thinks she suits him. He leaves her with her lover and goes to do his art in a jungle for years without any confrontation or reconciliation. He doesn’t know she has given birth to their daughter. This character of him bugs me the most at his dealing with Sebastian, on multiple occasions. They are each other’s shadows for years but when Sebastian is in a bad place and needs him, he just says, there’s nothing I can do for him, and walks off. Is that a friend?
One thing that made a deep impression on me is Cordelia’s description of the kind of life Sebastian would live in the monastery. It’s such an excellent description I can see it in front of my eyes. It gives a sad, passive, drifting impression of a life wasted.
“Poor Sebastian!” I said. “It’s too pitiful. How will it end?”
“I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I’ve seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He’ll live on, half in, half out of the community, a familiar figure pottering round with his broom and his bunch of keys. He’ll be a great favourite with the old fathers, something of a joke to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking; he’ll disappear for two or three days every month or so, and they’ll all nod and smile and say in their various accents, ‘Old Sebastian’s on the spree again,’ and then he’ll come back dishevelled and shamefaced and be more devout for a day or two in the chapel. He’ll probably have little hiding places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and then on the sly. They’ll bring him forward to act as guide, whenever they have an English-speaking visitor; and he will be completely charming, so that before they go they’ll ask about him and perhaps be given a hint that he has high connections at home. If he lives long enough, generations of missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old character who was somehow part of the Hope of their student days, and remember him in their masses. He’ll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he’ll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he’s expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life.”
I thought of the joyful youth with the Teddy-bear under the flowering chestnuts.
Moon Over Soho
Moon Over Soho was the last book I read in May. After all the Shakespeare and classics, it was delightful to read something fast-paced, gripping and fun. I absolutely loved the first book in the Rivers of London series. It’s an urban fantasy series written by Ben Aaronovitch. To be fair, I don’t read THAT many fantasy novels. But the ones I did read, most of them are set in the countryside, some kind of wilderness or an altogether made-up world. In that sense, Rivers of London is quite unique.
Moon Over Soho is the second in the series, published in 2011. Our protagonist Peter Grant is a wizard apprentice police constable from a department of the Metropolitan Police that deals with crimes that involve magic and supernatural things. In Moon Over Soho, Peter Grant is involved in two cases, talented jazz musicians fall dead one after another, and corpses of men are found missing one certain body part.
It has a jazz theme all the way through. I’m very impressed by the author’s knowledge of jazz and jazz musicians in history. I’m also very impressed by the author’s knowledge of the police, who they are, what they do, how they behave in certain situations – I’m curious if the author has often seen police in action, otherwise, how do you reconstruct their way of thinking and behaving just by doing research in books and archives. I’m ultimately very impressed by the author’s knowledge of the cityscape of London, the geography of the streets, the changes of certain areas throughout history, and the architecture of the city. I love the humour. I love the characters and specifically, the protagonist. He feels real, and not dull at all. I haven’t worked out what the author did to make him feel real but I like him very much.
I gave up on Theogony by Hesiod in May – it’s like an extended genealogy of the gods from the beginning of time. Too many names were thrown at me on every page in every paragraph it was a bit overwhelming and confusing. I listened to the Classical Mythology from the Great Courses lectures which was excellent but the free audiobook expired on the 1st of May so I didn’t finish it. There is a lot of overlap between the lecture and Theogony, I might just listen to the rest of the lecture instead of finishing reading the book. My enthusiasm for Ancient Greek and Roman Literature is clearly not as great as my enthusiasm for Shakespeare – apologies!
I’ve also been reading Metamorphoses really slowly every night. The stories are merging into each other already. It’s REALLY a book of transformations, it happens way oftener than I expected. Each story is short, about one to three pages, and every story ends with someone turning into an animal or a tree etc. I have a bad feeling about what I’ll remember or get out of it in the end. I’m reading this for Shakespeare. It’s surreal to think Shakespeare read this exact title as well, even though in a different translation, but the same stories. But still, I’m struggling. Any tips please let me know!
A Day of Small Things 