Thanks, as always, to Eleanor and Skai for posting about their recent library reads.

My local library hosted a talk with Claire Fuller early in the month. I volunteered as a steward. It was a very hot evening, but I was still disappointed that there wasn’t a larger turnout for an author of her stature (though two from my book club came), but I hope she got a good impression of Newbury and its readers. Her new novel, Hunger and Thirst, arose from a short story she wrote about Ursula’s first time at a restaurant. It’s about loneliness and belonging; necessity and desire – hunger being literal here but also figurative for everything missing in the protagonist’s life. Ursula lost her mother young and grew up in care. Fuller said she had to interview lots of people who were involved in the care system to get this right. (She disagrees with the view that you can’t write about things outside your own experience; you just have to be careful to represent them properly. For instance, she talked with her own daughter, who has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, before giving a character that condition.)

At 16, Ursula is working in the post room of an art college and living in a squat that has some properties of a haunted house. Her friend Sue is obsessed with horror films and they have a go at filming their own – until real life takes a horrific turn. A true crime documentary is used as a framing device in the novel, with snippets of interviews interspersed. Fuller said she had to take care not to reveal too much via these in terms of who was still alive. (No spoilers here or in the talk!) I was interested to hear that the author makes a cameo appearance in the novel, as a 19-year-old student rolling a cigarette, and that her spin-off story imagining Sue’s twin siblings several decades in the future, “A Land Beneath,” is in the anthology Unquiet Guests, which has just won a Shirley Jackson Award. Hunger and Thirst has also been a Radio 4 Book at Bedtime – an odd choice for that given the spookiness! – and she was impressed that they abridged the story by 80% but it still managed to hang together.

This was my least favourite of Fuller’s novels, unfortunately – for once I don’t think her flirtation with genre fiction really works – so I was more interested in her general thoughts about the writing and publishing process. She doesn’t plan at all, instead finding the plot as she goes along. If she’s not actively publicizing a book, she’ll be at her desk 9 to 6. (Though she does sometimes have to scramble to write a few words before her husband gets home from his library job.) She’s never had multi-book deals because she doesn’t want deadlines or publisher demands. Instead, her books are sold ad hoc. She said her agent is a useful go-between if there’s ever an issue, e.g. she didn’t like the original proposed cover for Bitter Orange; her agent conveyed that message and it got changed quietly without anyone falling out. There is film news about several of her books: filming is to begin in June for Our Endless Numbered Days, and both Bitter Orange and Unsettled Ground have also been optioned.

My library use over the last month:

(links are to any book reviews not already featured on the blog)

READ

• Dominion by Addie E. Citchens
• Receipts from the Bookshop: A Bookseller’s Year by Katie Clapham
• Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller
• A Long Game: How to Write Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken
• The Typing Lady and Other Fictions by Ruth Ozeki
• The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
• Saltwater: A Midsummer Ghost Story by Elaine Thomson

And the picture book Simon Gets Sneezed by Adam Kay, which is a little gross (as per usual for Kay’s sense of humour) but also actually taught me some things about the purpose of mucus.

I love snapping up appealing picture books during my library shelving sessions and reading them at home between other things. I encountered this apt quote in the Clapham:

“do you know what happens when you read a picture book as an adult? Your mood almost instantly, vastly improves because there’s a brief window of time in which you are being cared for so completely – stimulated by beautiful images, engaged by a thoughtful text; perhaps you’re being momentarily transported to a younger version of yourself who remembers reading books like this”

A cute idea, that: reading to feel comforted by words and pictures alike.

CURRENTLY READING

• The Years by Annie Ernaux
• Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami
• The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha
• Night, Neon and Other Stories of Suspense by Joyce Carol Oates
• Heartstopper: Volume 6 by Alice Oseman
• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (a reread)
• The Land and Its People by David Sedaris
• The Original by Nell Stevens
• The Queen’s Gambit by Walter S. Tevis

SKIMMED

• The Walking Cure by Annabel Streets

CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ

• Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns (for Classics book club)
• Hum by Helen Phillips
• Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath

ON HOLD, TO BE COLLECTED

• Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai
• The Shock of the Light by Lori Inglis Hall
• Country People by Daniel Mason

IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE

• Second Self by Chloë Ashby
• Life of M by Rachel Cusk
• Honour & Other People’s Children by Helen Garner
• The Given World by Melissa Harrison
• Why I Am Not a Bus Driver by Ashley Hickson-Lovence
• Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason
• Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens

RETURNED UNFINISHED

• Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy – I read the first few chapters and liked the portrait of her mother but wasn’t interested enough in their lives to read more than the equivalent of a long magazine essay.
• Land by Maggie O’Farrell – Even less interesting than Hamnet (one of my most controversial literary opinions is that that’s her weakest novel), drowning in descriptive language and lacking momentum. Why does she persist with historical fiction? The Marriage Portrait was good; these others, not so much. I guess no one dares edit her anymore; look at these sample lines: “The wind vanishes, as does the relentless rain. He is enclosed and enfolded, as if he has stepped inside the secret green house of a giant.” Overwritten! Too many, and stretched, metaphors; unnecessary doubling of similar verbs. I read about 30 pages, skimmed another 100 or so, and then gave it back so the other 38 people in the queue can hopefully enjoy it more than I do.

RETURNED UNREAD

• Come What May: Life-Changing Lessons for Coping with Crisis by Lucy Easthope – Requested off me before I could have a look.
• The Giant, O’Brien by Hilary Mantel – I borrowed this as an example of something our Classics book club could consider reading in the future. I’ll get it back out when we schedule it in.

What have you been reading or reviewing from the library recently?

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