What are you reading?

Friends who talk about what they’re reading are particularly welcome in our house! And if they want to know what we’ve been reading – that’s a bonus! A  long-time word-loving friend whom I haven’t seen for years visited this week, ‘I’m not leaving till you tell me what you’re reading,’ she said. Luckily, I keep a list of books I’ve been reading (if I don’t, sometimes I forget what I have read!) As you tell someone else about it, you realise what really matters so much to you that you spend hours with your nose in a book about it. The conversation this week offered me no surprises really: novels, biography, history, theology, writing... same old, same old!

Of course, it’s not always the subject matter but the approach. The older I get the more I want to read books by wordsmiths: people who can mine everyday human experience and come up with words to describe authentic experiences. Words to evoke experiences which I may have had but may not be unable to articulate or which I haven’t had but they offer an insight into a new world. In that category I recommended a book I read a few years ago - Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘Hamnet’  an imaginary first-person description of the experience of Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes (alternative to Anne Hathaway) in the death of her son. As an evocation of the complex experience of motherhood, I don’t think I’ve read anything better. (This year I was disappointed by O’Farrell’s latest The Marriage Portrait)

Earlier this year another historical novel wasn’t a pleasant read but gave me an insight into really difficult topics about which I have little or no personal knowledge. The novel, Days without End by Sebastian Barry is written from the standpoint of an Irishman who lost his family and went alone to North America to get away from the potato famine of the mid 19th century and eventually enlisted as a soldier in the Indian Wars and the American Civil War. The evocation from the inside of a consciousness that manages to maintain simple humanity and love in the face of the extreme inhumanity of impersonality and isolation, famine and war, racism and violence and prejudice was profound.

A different and authentic consciousness came through this spring in actor Richard E. Grant’s account of his 40-year relationship to his wife Joan Washington, the accent and dialect coach to the stars, and her death from cancer. The book is called ‘A Pocketful of Happiness’. At first I thought I would have to put it aside as too heart-wrenching but I was glad I persevered. The warts and all account of what sounds like a long and authentic marriage is an emotional roller-coaster but I ended up with a ‘pocketful of happiness’ that such a relationship can maintained to the end in the heart of the artificial world of show-biz.

I’ve never read a Stephen King novel but I did read his fascinating semi-autobiographical book ‘On Writing’ written while he was recovering from a near-fatal road accident. My friend had read his novels and recommended some! I’ve also returned to Elizabeth Strout to read I am Lucy Barton and O William. Hilary Mantel(another favourite, of course!) said it all when she referred to Elizabeth Strout’s ‘attention to reality as so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue’.

There are more but our word limit approaches! What have you, our readers, been reading? All recommendations gratefully received!

The picture shows an excerpt from Days Without End