BLEAKER HOUSE - NELL STEVENS

Nell Stevens went to Bleaker Island in the Falklands seeking isolation so she could really concentrate on her novel. She got the isolation but the novel she was intending to write escaped and so we have Bleaker House, the story of her stay on Bleaker. Cold, barren, harsh, all these words apply to this godforsaken piece of dirt but the story of her stay is an excellent one. We get glimpses of the story she was trying to write but I doubt it would be better than this story. Highly recommended. Yes, it's in the library and is a treasure.

THE ESSEX SERPENT - SARAH PERRY

I'm not into historical novels but following some good reviews I picked this up, the last book due as part of my prize for winning the Chapter Bookshop Short Story competition run by Romance Writers of New Zealand for 2016.

Part social commentary, part fantasy, with the mythical Essex Serpent playing it's part, it's about friendship, lust, magic and death. Attraction between men and women (or vice versa) is a mystical process and that's true here. People who would never consider moving outside a relationship suddenly find, to their surprise, that there's a person with some kind of magnetism who is affecting their rational thinking. I sometimes feel like that when I see pictures of certain people and if you never, ever consider an adventure with someone of the other gender, real, imagined or mythical, you should.

Anyway, it's a good read. It's probably in the library.   

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR - RUTH RENDELL

 

Ruth Rendell was eighty-four when she wrote this in 2014 just before she died in 2015. It reads like it was written by an eighty-four year old who really wished she was living in earlier times when things were better and life was grand apart from random murders. Her constant references to earlier times (this one is set initially during the early years of WWII) are a distraction and ultimately just filler. I came away with the feeling that I'd wasted three hours of my life I wasn't going to get back. She needed an editor to take a firm hand on this one. A social novel more than a murder novel.     

 TRUE CAPTIONS THE ARTIST DIDN'T WANT YOU TO SEE.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN - JILL LEPORE

 

More the history of Wonder Woman's creator and the history of the women's movement in the US. William Moulton Marston was a psychologist who is credited with designing and testing the first lie detector with some limited success. An academic, and an early achiever in the medicine of the mind, he was, like H.G.Wells, a proponent of the rights of women and their right to share his bed.

The women's movement is covered because of Marstons relationships with the women involved early in the search for equality with men and particularly the right to use birth control. One of them coincidentally had an affair with Wells for some years.

As to Wonder Woman, Marston conceived the idea of a female Superhero and  used the strip as a vehicle to show how women were being held back, chained up and punished because they were women in a time when being a wife was the ultimate prize. Throwing off the chains in each strip was a demonstration of woman achieving freedom.

Marston himself had a rocky road in academia and continued to be fired from university positions because of his radical views on women's lib and his personal life, which offended those who knew about it. Wonder Woman and her fight to remove the shackles of domesticity also reflected badly on him. He was fascinated by the idea of women locked in chains or otherwise immobilsed to the point where it must have been a fetish.

The book ends just as Lynda Carter gets name-checked and doesn't cover that TV series at all. A great read.      

A MAN OF PARTS - DAVID LODGE

A fascinating tale of the life and loves of H.G.Wells. Not much about his books and an awful lot about his love life. It seems Wells had a great deal of trouble 'keeping it in his pants' as it were. He had affairs, short and long-term, and casual assignations. His wife knew about these affairs and agreed Wells could put it about as long as she knew who with and where. He was obsessed with a utopian view of sex and marital relationships where faithfulness wasn't an issue as long as the pleasure outweighed the responsibilty. Making demands on him guaranteed a girl would be cut off in a short time.

That sounds like it could be boring but the writing is superb, an engaging narrative.   

NICK HORNBY - SONGBOOK

 

Picked this one up recently. Hornby gives us the benefit of his opinion on songs, lyrics and music as an art form. I read it with YouTube open at my elbow. References High Fidelity now and then. Well worth a read by anyone even slightly interested in popular music. All right then, rock music. BUT published in 2002. I'm ready for the 2017 version.