I was relieved to finally put down this 'unputdownable' book

Claire Douglas isn't writing books for people like me, but nevertheless I do have some positive things to say about The Couple at No. 9, so I'll start with those.

First, the premise is great. A young couple called Tom and Saffy Cutler move into a cottage in a village somewhere near Chippenham, Wiltshire. It's owned by Saffy's grandmother, Rose. They want to make some changes and begin with the garden. While digging the builders discover two bodies, buried 40 years earlier, when Rose was living there with her infant daughter, Lorna. Unfortunately the elderly woman has dementia and can't remember what happened.

They fuck you up...

Lengthy family sagas don't appeal to me and I'd never normally have opened the covers of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. However, during a chat with an English-teacher friend I mentioned that I knew nothing about Shakespeare's King Lear. "Here", she said with a smirk, "this is a modern adaptation." So I took it, left it on the shelf for a couple of years where it kept staring down at me, and eventually thought I might as well read it so I could report back.

#NaPoWriMo Paint Pot Angel

So NaPoWriMo has ended. Actually, 2024 is the first time I've participated, and I only managed one new poem throughout April. The Poetry Society prompted me to choose an artwork featuring a figure, to ask the figure a question, and imagine the answer. Having visited Bristol Museum and Art Gallery recently, I went for their Banksy figure, Paint Pot Angel, which you can see in the gallery's ground floor hall.

Here it is then. Hope it makes you smile.

Banksy's Paint Pot Angel
I can't hear you! Speak up! What's that you said?
That Banksy has put a large can on my head.
I can't see a thing and I'm feeling quite faint.
There's a very strong smell. I think that it's paint.
Since two-thousand-nine I've stood in this spot.
Won't somebody please take the stinking pot off?
Hello? Hello? Are you still there?

Saturday... wait

I knew nothing of Ian McEwan's Saturday before picking it up. It was just another one of his books, another that I wanted to read before settling down to Atonement (I've still got a few to go).

A few pages in and I thought it was going to be a struggle.

All the nice people were poor

If your reading preference is for door-stop sized sagas featuring families or fantasies, Muriel Sparks's 134-page The Girls of Slender Means may not appeal. The girls in question are aged under thirty, living away from home at the May of Teck Club, and starting out on their working lives. It reminded me of all-female halls of residence at university.

Don't call me Fanny

I have no idea how Anita Brookner's 1983 book Look At Me came into my possession. It's an old paperback copy with yellowed pages and the back cover missing. I'd been told that the author's output was melancholy, which suits me fine, so when I spotted it on the shelf I thought I'd give it a go. And I'm glad I did.

The story's narrated by Frances Hinton a medical librarian and aspiring writer who yearns to be noticed. She fears that she will "grow into the most awful old battle-axe" and says she writes in order to become visible, to be heard, "to make people laugh". In other words, she says she wants people to "look at me".

Theirs not to reason what the fuck, Theirs but to shoot and duck.

I might have been half listening to one of those BBC Sounds programs whilst preparing lunch, or reading an end of year best books list in The Guardian. Whatever, someone recommended Paul Beatty's The Sellout and said it was about a black man who re-introduces slavery and segregation to the USA. What?!