I have something of an urgent call for help for all of you book lovers out there, so do please read on and recommend away as you know how much it means especially in a state of a small but worrying bookish emergency.
As you may know I have moved to a temporary residence oop north whilst I see what’s going on with my health and find a flat in the centre of town that’s ‘just right’, which could of course be looking for the impossible but never mind that for now, I digressed and there are much more important things need addressing on the blog today. So while I am in temporary residence some of my stuff is in the house and my acre sized bedroom and some of it is in the garage. Like most of you every now and again you sort out a TBR for the bedside table of books which have been floating in your subconscious ‘must be read soon’ and I was sorting that very thing out and realised some of the books were in the garage, and so off I went.
What greeted me left me with a slight chill and dampened brow as it seems that the lovely boxes which I thought looked ever so nice to hide the hundreds of books in Mount TBR aren’t fairing so well in the garage. This of course is understandable as I have had them nigh on three years and they aren’t plastic or wood (some kind of thick cardboard with a nice pattern as you can see from the picture to your left) and they have also done a rather vigorous move a fair few hundred miles, in fact one went missing but we don’t like to talk about that. Sadly in the garage they aren’t doing a very good job of protecting and my lovely beautiful books are getting slightly damp with some covers curling and some pages getting that rather wavey look.
So in order to stop the palpitations and vexation that I am currently going through, and that horrid feeling where you get busy forget about it and then suddenly remember again, I wondered if you could help.
What I would like to know first is if these books will need drying out or if because they aren’t soggy they will dry ok? Second I wondered what you all use to store your books safe and sound if they cant be on shelves or by the bedside? Third where did you get your storage from, where can you recommend? Thanks in advance.
‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ is a novel of three parts and as it opens in part one we find ourselves in Jamaica in the 1830’s. Antoinette Cosway, now Mason, tells us the story of her youth from growing up with her mother and disabled brother several years after her father seemingly drank himself to death after the emancipation of the slaves – so he then leaves his family in the same state. Things change however when Antoinette’s mother meets Mr Mason, and Englishman of wealth who asks for her hand and restores the land, only the local community have other ideas and in a rebellious act burn their house down. From here things seem to deteriorate further with the death of her brother causing a madness in her mother soon Antoinette is sent to a convent. If you’re thinking I have given everything away then you would be wrong as this all happens in just part one which is a mere 40 pages.
I was relieved when I finished ‘Caribou Island’ because it was a brilliant read, though I can’t quite say I enjoyed it as with its subject matter to say you enjoyed such a novel might make you sound a bit mad. We meet spouses Irene and Gary both in their mid-fifties and who seem separately rather unhappy and having slight mid-life crises. Irene’s way of coping seems to be the onset of a mysterious disease, doctors say there is nothing wrong and yet she is sure there is and often finds herself unable to get out of bed for the pain. Gary’s answer to his situation is action, though you sometimes wonder if it’s his way of trying to push his wife away, and to build a dream log cabin on the remote island near their home in Alaska. This is no easy task and with the atmospheric and tempestuous backdrop and Vann’s power with a sense of menace behind every page you know you are on a journey that might make for rather uncomfortable reading (not in a gory sense), though you have to read a long anyway.
To say that I was disappointed or underwhelmed by ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ by Edgar Allan Poe would be some what of an understatement, but stay with me as I can see why it should be read. I have always wanted to get my mitts on a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of Dupin, who is pretty much the first detective in fiction (though I am sure there are others), because I had heard that it is these tales that gave inspiration to the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie who are seen as the great masters of detective fiction in modern times, and who also happen to be two of my favourite authors. I therefore thought that I was going to love this collection.
‘Truth or Fiction’ is really a novel that looks into just what the difference is between people’s own truths and their own fictions. Caroline Wallace is a journalist in her forties who thinks she is fairly happy in her living with her partner Herbert, an author, living in Notting Hill. That is until Herbert proposes, a scene which actually made me laugh out loud, and it brings all the things that have been bubbling under the surface of Catherine’s mind to the fore. Around the same time her editor decides to send her to Dublin to meet and interview the rather reclusive ageing author Desmond Fitzmaurice whose works seem to have been forgotten and are deserving of resurgence.
Not having previously read any Elizabeth Taylor novels before I didn’t really know what to expect from ‘Blaming’ if I am honest, maybe something a little twee. The story opens in Istanbul where Amy and Nick are taking a holiday after his recovering of an illness, what it is we are never quite sure. Here they meet the American Martha, a novelist which they don’t know initially, who is travelling alone. Slowly but surely the three start to become acquainted and before they know it, or have even really consented to it, Amy and Nick find they are sharing a holiday with someone who was until recently a stranger.
It interested me that out of the rest of the book group the people who knew nothing of it, bought it off the internet and started reading it pronto simply because it was the book group choice got a lot more out of it than those who had read the blurb, got quite excited about the premise and then read on. In fact people who had got really excited about it prior the meeting seemed to think they had been let down in some way. This could of course simply be sod’s law, or the fact that the book just wasn’t quite for them, but it brought up the question yet again of book hype and how it can affect a read for you. 
Sara Gruen can certainly describe something vividly if ‘Water For Elephants’ is anything to go by. I don’t think I have read a book that has captured me quite so much in the world it creates for quite some time. In this case, through the eyes of protagonist and narrator Jacob Jankowski after the death of his parents, loss of his inheritance due to the financial climate and with nowhere else to turn, we are thrown into the world of the 1930’s circus and ‘Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth’. Here he joins a world of underdogs, freaks, misfits and the beautiful ‘star of the show’ Marlena who is married to the tyrannical and rather unhinged animal trainer August. Gruen slowly sets up a love triangle which you have an inkling from the prologue could end in disaster.
That said ‘Water For Elephants’ is a truly cracking read. I was occasionally frustrated I couldn’t simply sit and read it all in one go because the world Gruen created I really wanted to be a part of and stay in. It was a book I would simply take to read a few paragraphs of whilst boiling the kettle or walking down the stairs (dangerous) and was constantly in my hands whenever I had the chance.
Savidge Reads 