Jane Goodall - obituary

 Very sorry to learn of the death of Dame Jane Goodall. She was a truly remarkable, practical zoologist who did so much to make the human race realise we are not the only sentient beings on the planet. 

I first learned about her work with the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park in Kenya when I read her her book 'In the Shadow of Man' in the early 70's. Even my father, a doctor, animal lover and natural history enthusiast, who taught me a lot about the natural world, especially birds, didn't really see non-human animals as intelligent, thinking beings. Jane empathised with the chimps and showed the intelligence and personalities of individuals. She convinced me of the arrogance of human attitudes.

Jane Goodall still campaigning on environmental issues 

shortly before her death on 2 October 2025.

After twenty years she widened her field of concern and became involved in worldwide environmental campaigning. She was a hugely important ambassador for wildlife and the environment and the world will be a poorer place without her. 

The Taxidermist's Daughter by Kate Mosse

 

The Taxidermist's Daughter
by 

Kate Mosse

Sue's review on Goodreads

bookshelves: mystery, novels, thrillers, whodunnit

This is  a beautifully written historic mystery in a Gothic style, although the word Gothic has been so much abused and mixed with slasher/zombie/vampire tales that it almost demeans the quality of this story. 

I loved it, gripping storytelling, great characters and hugely atmospheric. The Taxidermist's Daughter kept me busy, calm and suitably distracted during a very long and tense day sitting in hospital waiting rooms. For that reason, as well as the great writing, it deserves five stars.

I've not read anything by Kate Mosse before, possibly due to an unconscious and obviously irrelevant association with the fashion industry. I stopped being interested in the fashion industry when I was about 17. I will read more books by Kare Mosse.

Auto da Fay - by Fay Weldon - review

 

Sue's Reviews > Auto Da Fay

Auto Da Fay
by 

Fay Weldon

Sue's review

May 30, 2023  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: biog-memoir, non-fiction

Fluid, fluent and very readable memoir. Fay Weldon has never been a pretentious writer. Her work is always concise, not for her the 20 line sentence or the deliberate use of obscure or obsolete words and quotes.

She gives us her relationships rather than her career as a writer, though it soon becomes obvious how writing was always her destiny. It runs in her blood and her genes.

She gives us characters in the form of her father, a distant figure and her mother too often very present. Her doomed sister, her grandmother, her lovers, ghosts, husbands and friends abound. Most of the really important people are the women. The men are culturally dominant and usually unreliable, she shows the reasons for feminism before modern feminism began.

Her novels are mentioned, but in flash-forwards. Is there a second volume of this memoir?

Fay Weldon is now, in the 2020's, no longer such a fashionable writer but god is she important. Her death at the start of this year may, very sadly, mean her importance is forgotten.

Good Friday #Tennison 3 by Lynda La Plante - book review

 

Good Friday

Good Friday (Tennison, #3)
by 

Lynda La Plante

Sue's review

May 16, 2023  ·  edit

liked it

bookshelves: thrillers, mystery, novels

Half way through this - so far so mediocre. The plot is unfolding, the main character Jane Tennison is building but it's all a bit slow. Too much mundane detail, I'm sure this is to obscure the details which are relevant to the storyline but it's becoming tedious - no actually it became tedious before I was quarter of the way through. I shall keep going because it will get faster, it has to!

Okay I finished it, the finale was exciting and gripping. No spoilers.

However I do stand by what I said when I was half way through. Apart from the explosion at a tube station which was over in a flash, with not a huge amount of description, there was a level blandness with mundane description slowing the narrative down. I didn't need to be taken through the details of how to make spaghetti Bolognese! I could see that this was part of the author character building and distracting the reader with misleading information. But the fact that I could see it happening was a but off-putting. Shouldn't a write of the stature of Lynda La Plante disguise their technique a bit better?

I do admire her scripts and I know this is not the first of her Jane Tennison prequal books. I will read the others, hoping they will have more narrative action and less about ball gowns.

Reading in the Bath - Final Draft By Shelley Burbank

 Lying in a warm bath, in my right hand my copy of Final Draft by Shelley Burbank - a brand-new novel just imported from the USA - and a glass of sauvignon-blanc in my left, should be sheer luxury. 

Certain facts could diminish these luxurious elements, in some people’s eyes. Starting at the top, the dated Artex ceiling and polystyrene coving are slowly parting company with each other and the plastered walls. The spider plant atop the bathroom cabinet has browning tips, its trailing babies are all brown and mama spider is calling, loudly, for water and light. 

There is the wash basin which doesn’t drain properly no doubt due to something grim lurking down in the U-bend.  The shower cubicle is slowly growing its own dark ecosystem, not helped by the charcoal soap somebody gave us for Christmas. Charcoal soap stains everything grey and is the ultimate gift that nobody needs, ever.  The 1970’s green wall tiles (every random 10-15th of them covered in ambiguous flowers) are detaching themselves from the walls and the corner I’ve painted to pretend it never was tiled doesn’t even convince me. Meanwhile the carpeted chipboard floor is slowly disintegrating just behind the toilet… who puts carpet in a bathroom…?

I'm well aware of all these negatives and I don’t care! I've always loved to read in the bath, whatever the state of the bathroom. Today I have this new book in the genre I’m currently into, detective fiction, written by an author I know, well we chat online.  And the book is immediately engaging, I’ve reached page 56 before I notice that the water is cooling down. I could chose to stay put, deplete the reservoir further and vastly increase the gas bill, but not tonight. 

Washing is in order. I’ve been gardening and don’t fancy sleeping with my pollenated, earthy and leaf mould dusted self.  There is an ingrained order to washing which does seem mostly logical. Around the eyes first, then the rest of the face. Next the hair, then moving down the body ending with cleaning between the toes. My grandmother would not approve of hair washing in the bath. 

In my grandparents household, time was an element to be obeyed. Getting up time, breakfast time, teeth-cleaning time, playtime, elevenses – a time by its very name. Then after lunchtime there was walk time, a march to the creek to feed the swans and ducks with rice, crusts and fly-walk. Teatime was followed by bath-time, with absolutely no reading. All ablutions were timed even more carefully than meals. Hair-washing-time was not the same as bath time. It involved a twice weekly ritual of standing on a stool bent double over the wash-basin while Granny poured enamel-mugfuls of warm water over my head and, inevitably, up my nose.  Grandfather even tried to control his bowel movements to a strict timetable, with pots of senna-pods stewing on the Aga every evening. Luckily he didn’t attempt this regimen on anyone else.

And now I'm clean. I still have 236 pages of this novel still to read. The writing is fresh, easy and engaging, the story intriguing and the protagonist identifiable. I have five more bath times to look forward to, before the pages start to sag in the moist heat. Luxury!

The Girl on the Landing by Paul Torday - book review

Sue's Reviews > 

The Girl on the Landing
by 

Paul Torday

Sue's review on Goodreads

did not like it

bookshelves: novels, tried-to-read

I did manage to finish this, it took a bit of doing. I just found it impossible to empathise with either of the main characters. We get both their first person viewpoints, in alternate chapters, but it just didn't work for me.

Sorry Paul Torday, you can write but this one's not for me. I do like the cover though!

Moab is my Washpot. By Stephen Fry. my review

. 

Stephen Fry is funny and rude, clever and incredibly knowledgeable. I know who he is, of course I do.  He’s entertained me on the telly for three decades, but did I want to read his autobiography?  Not especially, I don’t really read biographies except of the artists I’m researching.

However when I saw this salmon pink paperback on a bookseller’s shelf, I bought it for the cover.  I might well have bought it even if I was quite unfamiliar with Stephen Fry and despite the obscure title. Who is Moab, why does he/she/they matter? And what in heaven or hell is a Washpot? Yes I guessed the reference was from the Old Testament, but I had no intention of re-reading that tome to find it.

My main reason for the purchase was because the cover was largely filled with the monstrous, wise, preposterously ugly but somehow charming visage of a bull elephant seal, with a proportionately tiny blackbird staring up his bulbous nose. An elephant seal, Lain name Mirounga angustirostris - there's s my one bit of erudition. As a child I had seen one, in Berlin Zoo, as far as I know from this book Mr Fry never visited Berlin in his childhood. So why an elephant seal? Just why?

The autobiography encompasses the first 20 years of Fry’s life and no elephant seals are involved. It’s an intense, highly personal, self-deprecating book.  He writes an eruditely meandering – or maybe I mean meanderingly erudite – and excruciatingly honest story.

He presents us with his family, who he basically loves but, especially as a teenager, refuses to get on with and who love him but find him often hard to comprehend.  We see him in middle-class boarding schools, and how he coped with school life, not always well or honestly, but mostly he coped, by managing to withdraw from the system and outwit authority. And we see his love life as his sexuality begins to emerge. 

I did enjoy Stephen's book, it’s poignant, funny and engrossing, although I skimmed here and there, mostly through the meanderingly erudite sections, I don’t have the advantage of his classical education, I wonder if it is an advantage? The Washpot he mentions  in the afterword, as a metaphorical container for his dirty linen, and I believe Moab was a sinner. But the vast elephant seal, I still have no idea because it looks nothing like him!

Will I read the book again? I might, but probably only after I’ve read what comes in the next volume.  

 

Has Being a Writer Made me into a Book Snob?

 English was my best subject at school and I loved reading. From about nine years old I always asked for books for my birthday and Christmas.  I even wrote my first novel at fourteen, but I never used to call myself a writer I just made stories up. Often they were in my head, not written down and when I actually wrote, I did nothing with the story. Gradually I began to send off occasional articles to magazines etc. Going to university as a mature student gave me the ability to judge my writing and the knowledge to improve it, so I gained the confidence to call myself a writer.

As a writer I like to think I understand how to be creative using the English language, and I believe creativity is admirable. However sometimes I can be less tolerant of people who don’t seem to know what they are doing. Carelessness with sentence structure, spelling mistakes, inaccurate punctuation and uncorrected typos are not creativity and these things annoy me, although they never used to. Unfortunately there are writers who can get all of this technical and grammatical stuff correct, can get published and still can’t put a worthwhile paragraph together, let alone an interesting novel.  

I recognise that my tastes have changed over the years, I’m no longer interested in reading the authors I enjoyed in my teens. However my tastes had changed before I ‘became a writer’. I was already enjoying the intensity of Ian McEwan, the narrative drive of Ian Banks and the dreamlike beauty of Helen Dunmore long before I could define those qualities. I still enjoy their work but am now able to put a finger on why certain of their books are wonderful and others just don’t work for me.

Usually, poor writing quality puts me off reading a novel after a few pages, even if I have incentives for wanting to read it.  At the opposite end of the scale, sometimes a novel is terribly 'cleverly' written and that can also put me off, particularly if the style is un-engaging. I tend to prefer empathetic characters telling an engrossing story rather than clever-clever writing. I’m not saying experimentation with style and structure is wrong, I do it myself, but certain well-known authors can get away with an experiment gone too far. Alienating your reader is probably a poor idea even if you're writing about alienation.

I write book reviews on my blog and on Goodreads, but I don't usually review the badly written books. For a start I seldom finish them and anyway what's the point of being rude, it doesn't help the author? If they're already published, somebody likes their stuff. I do sometimes review the clever-clever books, such authors do probably deserve to be told off!

Saturday by Ian McEwan - book review

This is why Ian McEwan is one of my favourite authors, when he is good he is very very good, the writing here is completely gripping. I don't mean in the thrills a minute takes you on a roller coaster kind of gripping. I mean the kind of gripping which takes you right into the nuances of character, situation and emotion so you can't shake them off. This is why it took me a month to finish the book. I reached the climactic scene and didn't want the journey to begin to unwind, I didn't want the cast to have to react to a terrifying situation, I was afraid they would act out of character, or worse that I had misinterpreted their characters.

I stopped reading the book, I would look at it by my bed and keep thinking, I'm not ready to go back there, not yet. The story takes place during one day, it took me a month to finish reading.

I hadn't misinterpreted anything, the denouement for the main character was entirely appropriate while not being flagged up. The ending worked perfectly, the final scene mirroring the opening pages, but with the added frisson of what has gone between. 

So remind me again why McEwan won the Booker prize for 'Amsterdam', with its unremittingly dislikeable characters and silly ending, and not for 'Saturday'? 

No spoilers, I won't describe the plot. Read it for yourself and enjoy.

Gerald Durrell; the Authorised Biography by Douglas Botting - book review

Gerald Durrell has been one of my favourite authors since I read The Bafut Beagles when I was nine and I've always admired his determination to conserve endangered species, the little, un-noticed creatures more than the spectacular, headline-grabbing ones. Douglas Botting's biography was approved by his family and presents a detailed and unflinching portrait of this charismatic, driven and creative man. GD wasn't a saint or any kind of paragon, he was a high functioning alcoholic and could have lived so much longer. His remarkable achievements have altered the way endangered species are appreciated and conserved. His Jersey Zoo is a model for conservationist worldwide and his books are many and varied. All this Douglas Botting catches with zest and a plainly enormous quantity of research. The details of GD's final illness are not for the faint hearted but are honest. My only qualms are with the way the treatment of Jacquie, GD's first wife, seem to be glossed over. Otherwise this is a fascinating read for any GD fan, and for anybody interested in how attitudes to conservation have progressed since the 1950's.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan - review

This story begins at a woman's funeral and I soon wished it had begun 20 or so years earlier when that entertaining sounding lady was very much alive and bounding around between all her lovers. She was probably engaging which is more than you can say for the lovers, and the husband, who congregate at the funeral.

Coincidentally another novel, also by an Ian, although with an extra i (Iain) also begins at a funeral. Here is the first sentence of both novels:-
"It was the day my grandmother exploded."
and
"Two former lovers of Molly Lane stood waiting outside the crematorium chapel ..."

The first is the opening of Iain Banks' delightful mystery "the Crow Road," Banks remains one of my favourite Authors. The second is, obviously, from Amsterdam by Ian McEwan and the entire book is not up to the author's best standards. The writing is probably clever, his writing usually is, but the characters are so unlikeable that one doesn't give a damn, I had to make myself go on reading.

The portrayal of composer Clive Linley shows a convincingly vain and self-centered man convincing himself of his own genius (even while acknowledging that

the term is over-used) and blithely disregarding his responsibilities to his friends and to a stranger who he witnesses being attacked. He is only obsessed with completing his masterpiece, his millennium symphony which will premiere in a few day's time. There are some good descriptive passages on his surroundings in his chaotic home and when he goes hiking up towards Scafell Pike. Meanwhile Vernon Halliday, insecure editor of upmarket newspaper 'The Judge', is less rounded as a character. His surroundings are hard to visualise, although an office is an office is an office - maybe that's the author's point - and his motivation is muddled. One thing he is clear about is his desire to bring down Julian Garonwy, the Foreign Secretary. Garonwy is equally unlikeable though even less detailed. The end is surprising unless you're paying attention early on, which I admit I wasn't really, but it's not a shocking finale unless you cared. I didn't. Oh yes, Amsterdam is the location of the story's denouement, otherwise it's totally unimportant. Ian McEwan's position as one of my favourite authors is in danger of slipping. This is actually my second attempt at getting through this story of arrogant men, being arrogant. There's meant to be some humour here, but it's hard to spot, there is room for so much more.  * That's my review published on GoodReads - for some reason I can't get this blog to link directly to the review, so I've copied.

Friend Reviews

the ter

Never Again! - Starting my new Goodreads shelf

From Potter's Field (Kay Scarpetta, #6) By Patricia Cornwell  

My rating: one out of five stars

This is the first of the Kay Scarpetta novels that I've read myself, I've heard another serialised (and heavily abridged) on the radio. Apparently this was the third about a sadistic killer named Temple Brooks Gault, but it didn't really matter that I hadn't read the others.

I feel disappointed and almost guilty about hating a really gritty novel by a woman author, but from Potter's Field is unremittingly tense and bleak, full of not very rounded and mostly depressed characters. There are no peaks and troughs, the tension is constant so the 'shocks', when they come, are almost anti-climactic. I made myself finish the book and was relieved once it was over.

I shall go back to reading Ian Rankin's Rebus novels, which are just as gruesome in places but as well as plenty of splashes of blood they are relieved by splashes of dark humour, which this novel totally lacks.

Rankin also rounds his characters out better. Here the only character whose speech was even distinguishable from the others was the rather caricatured detective Marino. This novel left me feeling stressed, tense and slightly miserable, I shan't read any more.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6980565-from-potter-s-field">From Potter's Field</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1025097.Patricia_Cornwell">Patricia Cornwell</a><br/>

Unsuitable Authors - where to start?

First I have to say that I don't regard any authors as 'unsuitable'. The word was applied, by certain adults, to some authors and types of reading matter when I was a teenager. I was addicted to reading and could get through four or five novels a week, on top of my school reading. I took delight in reading anything, especially books not aimed at teenage girls. I also took delight in reading books that I knew would horrify a certain family member. I read everything, but especially science fiction - I began with father's copy of John Wyndham's 'Day of the Triffids' and was hooked. The local library in Cheriton ran out of sci-fi, I read their resources dry! I had to get a bus to Folkestone library for my weekly fix of robots, dystopias and space opera. 

My parents were not the problem, they both read liberally, newspapers, magazines and books of all kinds were left around the house, neither of them ever told me I shouldn't read a particular book. When I was nine I picked up a book called 'Naked Under Capricorn' (by Olaf Ruhen) which was left lying around. Obviously, I was pruriently attracted by the word 'naked,' and by the nude on the cover, but the book seemed to be just about about a man wandering in the Australian desert and I soon got bored.


Instead I began reading Gerald Durrell's books, beginning with 'The Bafut Beagles,' about his explorations and 'encounters with animals', which included some mildly blue humour and innuendo, much  drunkenness and teaching monkeys to smoke. Apart from the hilarity of the drunken scene where the Fon of Bafut and his many wives danced the conga with Durrell, most of the 'unsuitable' content went right over my head. I just loved the animals, Durrell's wonderful sense of humour and his stories of finding and caring for his creatures. However these were not quite the first 'unsuitable', non-children's books I read.

The very first was probably my father's medical dictionary - author/editor lost in the mists of time - which I first dipped into when I was about seven and understood little of, but I was fascinated by the illustrations. In the centre of the book were outline figures of a man and a woman overlaid with transparent pages which you could slowly turn to reveal bones, blood vessels, muscles, internal organs and on the outside their very pink and hairless (apart from on their heads) skin. Despite this adult nudity the book wasn't hidden away from us under-ten's.

But when my mother's mother came to stay, things were different. Books were tidied away, papers and magazines containing anything which she disliked were put into the dustbin as soon as she could get away with it, under the guise of 'tidying up.' Reading was a battle when she was around. I shouldn't read in the evenings, it would ruin my eyes. I shouldn't read at the table, it was rude. I shouldn't read in the daytime, I should be outside getting fresh air. I shouldn't read in bed, I should go to sleep.

My grandmother was from earlier times when young people were told how not to speak, what not to wear, what not to read and probably who not to marry. Everything was proscribed. She would probably have forbidden me from reading any of the books and authors I've mentioned, if she was in charge. I didn't understand her because I remember she helped me to learn to read when I was a lot younger. But when I was fifteen she invaded my bedroom while I was at school, went through my wardrobe and binned all my NME's, rock and fan  magazines and posters. I had bought them all with my own money and I was more than angry, I felt violated.

I have detested censorship ever since, there are no unsuitable authors! This blog listing is to illustrate how much tastes, social mores and literary sensibilities have changed, and are still changing, since my grandmother grew up in the Edwardian era.