2017/22 Max Porter: Grief is the Thing With Feathers (2015) ***

A bereaved husband with two boys is laid low by grief and rescued by Crow, an initially unwelcome visitor arising from his Ted Hughes obsession. A short, robust, poignant blend of poetry and prose.  How powerfully the legends of Hughes and Plath continue to be. Today's Guardian has a front page story of newly uncovered letters from SP to her therapist, Ruth Barnworth, supposedly revealing his abuse and violence but, if I remember correctly, she claimed to have bit him savagely on the cheek the first time they danced and she seems to have been a few slates short of a lean-to. Or maybe I'm just an appalling old mysogynist, soured by finding The Bell Jar a dispiriting tale of the self-obsessed.

https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571327232-grief-is-the-thing-with-feathers.html

2017/18 Ottessa Moshfegh: Eileen ****

It is always a delight to encounter a new, different and confident voice, often a woman, and you ask yourself how they managed to think their way into the being of the protagonist. Imagination is indeed a remarkable thing. Eileen is a screw up, pretty much despised by her sick and now dead mother and failing to look after her half-crazed retired, Catholic, small town alcoholic cop of a father. Eileen works at the juvenile prison for boys and the scenes with her appalling co-workers are very rich in grim detail. There is much wit and some laugh-out-loud moments.

Madness and obsession are never far away and the sordid is meat and drink to Moshfegh, who is the daughter of professional musicians from Iran and Croatia, who settled in Boston, Massachusetts. I don't spend too much time exploring the background of writers but I like to know something about them. She does seem to have been a tortured teen, probably with a rich inner life and writing seems to have been her way back. She wrote Eileen because she needed the money and decided to knock out a psychological thriller and see how far she could push things. This is a confident and absorbing novel, with some great twists and turns and an excellent sense of small town life in the 1960s.

2017/17 John Updike: Rabbit Run (1960) ****

Having never previously got round to John Updike, this was a late first. It is a novel of details and at its finest the writing seems unique, at least to me: the very early description of Harry, Rabbit Angstrom's encounter with the kids playing basketball is particularly striking. He nails what it must be like to harness the physical and mental skills required to play confidently and well. The descriptions elsewhere are exact and closely observed; uneasy passages relate Harry's discontent with his marriage and inklings that maybe being a high school basketball star is as good as it may be going to get. The blind date in the company of his former coach is pretty queasy and the shocking downfall of his alcoholic wife is tragic and theatrical. The overall sense is of an unusual mind, exploring the norms and constrictions of small town life, with a strong sense of class, the pecking order and the proximity of religion. Episcopalianism comes out of it as spineless do-goodery.

2017/21 Robert Penn: It's All About the Bike (2010) ****

An excellent little book, which was made into a TV series; he uses the selection of components and elements of his dream bike as a framework on which to hang anecdotes, cycle history, technology, and visits to the factories and workshops of specialists. Most are fanatics like Rob who has cycled round the world and used his many bikes on endless expeditions and adventures. His origins on the Isle of Man are touched on, including naming his round the world bike Mannaman after the Manx warrior god of legend. We learn the origins of the mountain bike in Marin County California as a development from the 1930s balloon-tyred cruiser bikes. This all started around 1973 and was a very laid back hippy carry on. A far cry from the Campagnolo works and the Continental tyre factory in Germany.

And what an excellent machine the bicycle is, the  most efficient frame still essentially the same as that invented by Coventry genius John Kemp Starley in 1885. I was impressed that Rob has managed to make the switch from being a lawyer to making a living out of his writing on cycling from his Black Mountain fastness above Abergavenny.

2017/20 Colleen McCullough: The Thorn Birds (1977) ***

Although this is a long family saga it is compelling and redolent of place and time. Colleen McCullough's knowledge and appreciation of the Australian outback is vivid and impressive. She is fearless in killing off her creations and the dominance of the Catholic church in Australia is a major theme but she shies away from dealing with its more sinister and abusive history. The female characters are strong, as might be expected, and the scenes in the New Zealand primary school run by Catholic nuns is vividly realised around the central character of Meggie. Her affair much later with Irish Catholic priest Ralph (Rafe) de Bricassart is central to the story, although he is perhaps a little too handsome, charming and athletic to be entirely believable. 

The descriptions of landscape and weather are somewhat overwritten but by and large the writing is very sound and workmanlike. Notwithstanding the family's ties to the Drogheda sheep station, the size of a small country, I was not sufficiently attracted to counter the dust, the flies, the snakes and the isolation. As to cane cutting in the Northern Territory, no thank you. This was another Blackstone Audio Book read well but with some difficulties over the Australian accent by Mary Woods, an American narrator.