The Bookish Life of Nina Hill

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
by Abbi Waxman
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781472266217
Publication Date: July 9, 2019
Pages: 335
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Headline Review

Meet Nina Hill: A young woman supremely confident in her own... shell.
Nina has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, an excellent trivia team and a cat named Phil. If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book.

So when the father she never knew existed dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by! She'll have to Speak. To. Strangers.
And if that wasn't enough, Tom, her trivia nemesis, has turned out to be cute, funny and interested in getting to know her...
It's time for Nina to turn her own fresh page, and find out if real life can ever live up to fiction...

Back when I read The Garden of Small Beginnings, I realised I’d read Abbi Waxman before, but I could find no record of my reading The Bookish Life of Nina Hill. This drove me more than a little cray-cray at the time because I remembered reading the book; I distinctly remembered many, many plot points. But nowhere on my too-many book sites was there any record of it. I did finally find the book on my bookshelves (the Read bookshelves), and accepted the fact that I must have read it during the Great Reading Slump of 2020, and it fell through the cracks of my book-life despondency, never to be acknowledged until now.

I’ve recently ordered Adult Assembly Required, and as it involves a few of the characters from Nina Hill, I thought now would be a good time to re-read tBLoNH.

I love this book. Waxman writes incredibly likeable characters, laugh-out-loud dialog that’s witty as hell, and buried at exactly the right depth in all this sunshine-y fun is the acknowledgment of Very Real Life in the form of crippling anxiety. Nothing is downplayed or made light of, but it’s not turned into a massive melodrama either. I don’t have crippling anxiety, but Nina Hill and I share a lot of other character traits (actually, I probably fall closer to Lydia, her niece, but never mind), and I’d like to think that if I did have crippling anxiety, I’d handle it with the same optimism and humor Nina Hill does, even if she sometimes visits self-denial-land more often that she should.

My loquaciousness is still sleeping off the 3 day weekend, so that’s really all I’ve got. It was a great book, even the second time around, and a lot of fun to read. I can’t wait for Adult Assembly Required to arrive, and in the meantime, I’ll likely re-read The Garden of Small Beginnings too.

The J.M. Barrie Ladies’ Swimming Society

The J.M. Barrie Ladies' Swimming Society
by Barbara J. Zitwer
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: April 5, 2012
Pages: 271
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Short Books

When Joey Rubin stumbles upon a group of elderly women swimming in a lake one freezing January morning, she thinks they must be mad. But then they dare her to come in...

Joey, an overworked New York architect, is in the Cotswolds to oversee the restoration of Stanway House - the stately home that inspired J.M. Barrie to write Peter Pan. It hasn't been easy. The local residents aren't exactly welcoming, and then there's the problem of the brooding caretaker, a man who seems to take every opportunity
to undermine her plans. She soon begins to feel that she can't do anything right.

Until, that is, she discovers the J.M. Barrie Ladies' Swimming Society and begins to take a daily dip with them in their own private Neverland. For Joey, meeting Aggie, Gala, Lilia and co. is a life-changing experience, the beginning of a friendship that will transform her in the most remarkable of ways...

What my daddy would have called a “fair to middlin'” story. It was good, evenly paced, well-written. Interesting without being exciting. A page turner without being suspenseful. It was extraordinarily realistic in its portrayal of adult friendships – pretty much all interpersonal relationships – without being dramatic.

A very ordinary story, well done.

DNF: The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days

The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days
by Ian Frazier
Rating: ★★
isbn: 9780374133184
Publication Date: January 1, 2012
Pages: 244
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Farrar Straus and Giroux

Based on his widely read columns for The New Yorker, Ian Frazier's uproarious first novel, The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days, centers on a profoundly memorable character, sprung from an impressively fertile imagination. Structured as a daybook of sorts, the book follows the Cursing Mommy―beleaguered wife of Larry and mother of two boys, twelve and eight―as she tries (more or less) valiantly to offer tips on how to do various tasks around the home, only to end up on the ground, cursing, surrounded by broken glass. Her voice is somewhere between Phyllis Diller's and Sylvia Plath's: a hilariously desperate housewife with a taste for swearing and large glasses of red wine, who speaks to the frustrations of everyday life.

This book has been on my TBR for years; the title appealed to me in the moment – I’m not a mommy but I can curse with the best of them. A few months ago, I had it in hand to purge, but I read the flap and the author is a New Yorker columnist so I held it back. After reading Are We Having Fun Yet by Lucy Mangan, I thought it would be the right time to read this one as a comparison of sorts: how would the American version of the concept compare to the UK version? How would a male author’s portrayal of a columnist-working-from-home mother of two stack up against the same dynamic in the UK?

It didn’t, obviously. I wasn’t able to make it through February. But I’m not sure this is a condemnation; it’s just a very different delivery and one that ultimately didn’t suit me at all because – hilariously – of the swearing.

Do you remember the comedian Sam Kennison? For those that don’t, he was an American stand-up comedian and actor. A former Pentecostal preacher, he performed stand-up routines that were characterized by intense sudden tirades, punctuated with his distinctive scream, similar to charismatic preachers. The Screaming Mommy is the Sam Kennison of mommy diarists, and I think you have to have a certain sense of humor to appreciate it. Entire paragraphs of all-caps profanity, using f*ck as every part of speech, usually in the same sentence.

Apart from that, it’s not bad, but still didn’t work as a book; if I skipped those tirades, the narrative still failed to connect with me and frankly, I found some of it disturbingly hypocritical – like when she’s wondering why her 12-year-old son needs to be medicated to control his angry, emotional outbursts in school, as she’s smashing an entire sink full of dishes with a hammer because she tried to rinse her hands off, and the splash back from a dirty cereal bowl stained her silk blouse.

In the author’s defence, this book was based on a series of columns written for The New Yorker, and as columns, I think they’d have worked much better; outbursts like this are probably easier to chuckle over when they’re fed to the audience once a month. All together like this in book form, it’s just way too much. Lucy Mangan manages to convey the same frustration and angst in a way the reader can laugh with, rather than feeling as though they’re laughing at the crazy person who escaped the asylum, and she manages to do it with a semblance of continuing plot, or at least character, development.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs

Still Life with Bread Crumbs
by Anna Quindlen
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781400065752
Publication Date: January 1, 2014
Pages: 252
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Random House

Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.

Brilliantly written, powerfully observed, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a deeply moving and often very funny story of unexpected love, and a stunningly crafted journey into the life of a woman, her heart, her mind, her days, as she discovers that life is a story with many levels, a story that is longer and more exciting than she ever imagined.

I vaguely remember buying this book at a used book shop, mostly because the cover was gorgeous and to a lesser extent, because I’d read Anna Quindlen’s book of essays How Reading Changed My Life and rationalised that there was an outside chance I might like her fiction too – but really, I bought it for the cover.

Last night, I read the synopsis – because it’s been so long since I bought it or looked at it again that I had no idea what it was about – and thought ‘Oh hey, this sounds interesting.’ I decided to try the first page, just to see if the writing was something that would hold my attention, and promptly read the first 5 chapters. It was a little sketchy at the start, because there’s a scene involving a racoon that I’d have preferred not to have read, and having lived through exactly the same scenario, I cry bullshit on the resolution, but it was a quick scene and not gratuitous.

Midway through though, I was having second thoughts. The writing is what I’m going to describe as ‘extreme third person POV’; an omniscient narrator who sometimes jumps from one person’s comments or thoughts about a character to asides that reveal what that other character was really thinking or doing or what was motivating them. It was both interesting, because the reader gets all the facts about what’s really going on beneath the surface, and jarring. One aside, set in a parenthetical, was over a page long. At this point it felt like speculative fiction, and I thought … 3 stars.

But then things started coming together, and by that I means the two main characters come together – and kudos to the author for turning the May/September dynamic on its ear without any equivocation. I didn’t care so much about the romance aspect, but it was at that point that so many divergent stories started to come together into something resembling coherence, and it made me want to stick with the story. I’m glad I did, because it ended up being an enjoyable story with a satisfactorily happy ending. I’m a fan of the device Quendlen used, where the end of the book jumps forward in time to give a quick summary of where everyone’s lives ended up; I like the sense of pleasant finality it imparts to the reader, even if it is unrealistic.

I’m not sure I’d read more of her work – but if I do run across any more of it, I’d definitely consider it.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Are We Having Fun Yet?
by Lucy Mangan
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9781788161084
Publication Date: November 1, 2021
Pages: 303
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Souvenir Press

From the deep rage of knowing where to find every single thing your husband is looking for to the joy of a friend's longed-for pregnancy, here is the pleasurable stab of fellow feeling you get over drinks with friends. Liz records her ups and downs, including the love of a good cat (up), not being able to find a babysitter (secret up) and the question of what 'we' really means when it comes to fixing the dishwasher (definitely, definitely down).

Spiky, charming and most of all loving, it's a hilarious skewering of the sweetness and nightmare that is modern family life.

This book is the literary equivalent of those visual illusions that psychologists try to hang meaning on depending on what you see – like the one that’s either an old woman or a candlestick. Or is it an old woman / young woman? Anyway, whatever, you know what I mean.

As someone who is voluntarily childless, this book was a hilarious – and I mean laugh-out-loud hilarious – justification that my decision to stick with the furry and feathered walks of life, rather than replicating my own DNA, was the right decision for me (and MT, who came to the same decision long before we met). Her kids are hysterical, but they’re hard work and are constantly opening up avenues of conversation that I’d hurt myself to avoid having. Mangen’s descriptions of child birth should be required reading in human development classes as psychological birth control. I was made to be an Aunt.

There was another – unintended, I’m certain – consequence this book had for me, one that is again tied, I’m equally certain, to our choice to stick with non-human family members, and that’s the lack of suppressed rage that lies as an undercurrent in Liz and Richard’s marriage, that I recognise in the marriages of my friends with children. It’s not all chocolates and roses here at chez zoo by a long shot, but without the stress and pressure of making new humans that will hopefully treat the world better than we have, MT and I have experienced more fun than festering resentment. Of course, I also recognise the near-miracle that he’s one of the 1 in 100,000 men who seem to have been raised without the ingrained gender biases and learned helplessness most are saddled with when it comes to matters of home keeping. Still, the book really gave me a few moments of “do you really appreciate how lucky you are? really, truly?“, which I think constitutes healthy self-reflection.

Putting all that aside, I have to figure out how to get my sister-in-law to read this, because, as the mother of 2, she will appreciate this book for all the opposite reasons: because Lucy Mangen wrote her truth, and she will laugh as she nods her neck stiff in righteous agreement of the trials and tribulations of an all-human family of 4.

I read so much of this out loud to MT (honestly, it’s almost been a nightly story-time around here lately) that he actually insisted I rate this 4.5 stars. As he said, it made us both laugh out loud and the writing was excellent (which gives you an indication of how much I read out loud; he was able to judge the quality of the writing). I’d been thinking more 4 stars, but since he put up with all the reading out loud, I acquiesced.

If you need a laugh, you won’t go wrong with this one.

Don’t Tell Alfred

Don't Tell Alfred
by Nancy Mitford
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1960
Pages: 248
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

Fanny Wincham—last seen as a young woman in The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate—has lived contentedly for years as housewife to an absent-minded Oxford don, Alfred. But her life changes overnight when her beloved Alfred is appointed English Ambassador to Paris.

Soon she finds herself mixing with royalty and Rothschilds while battling her hysterical predecessor, Lady Leone, who refuses to leave the premises. When Fanny’s tender-hearted secretary begins filling the embassy with rescued animals and her teenage sons run away from Eton and show up with a rock star in tow, things get entirely out of hand. Gleefully sending up the antics of mid-century high society, Don’t Tell Alfred is classic Mitford.

Oh this was a lot of fun. Ostensibly the third book of the series that includes Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, it’s been so many years since I read the first two that I barely remember the important characters, but it made not a lick of difference. Don’t Tell Alfred takes place 30 years after the events of the first two books, and anybody who is still alive is almost too different to recognise anyway.

Fanny is now the main character, rather than just the narrator, but it seems she’s also a helpless bystander in the three ring circus her life has become when Alfred becomes the Ambassador to France. One hilarious calamity after the other – most involving her extended family, if not her own children – has her scurrying to keep one step ahead of the chaos, and if not one step ahead, arranging the fall out so that Alfred comes out looking his best.

Not quite under the surface of these calamities – it bubbles up regularly throughout the story – is every parents lament over their childrens’ avowal to reject every principle they were ever taught. This being the late 50’s, the rejection is, as the age of Aquarius looms, that much more outsized and outrageous.

Throughout the narrative, Mitford takes potshots in turns at the British, the French and, of course, the Americans (I’m pretty sure it’s a national sport in the UK); about the only country to come out unscathed from her pen are the Irish, which she feels a rather lot of sympathy for. It all reads as though it’s meant in good fun and it adds to the often manic laughs.

So far, Mitford is 3 for 3; I have a couple of her other titles on my TBR and I’m curious how well the humor will hold with a whole new cast of characters.

Miss Benson’s Beetle

Miss Benson's Beetle
by Rachel Joyce
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 0857521993
Publication Date: June 11, 2020
Pages: 389
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Doubleday

Margery Benson's life ended the day her father walked out of his study and never came back. Forty years later, abandoning a dull job, she advertises for an assistant. The successful candidate is to accompany Margery on an expedition to the other side of the world to search for a beetle that may or may not exist. Enid Pretty is not who she had in mind. But together they will find themselves drawn into an adventure that exceeds all Margery's expectations, eventually finding new life at the top of a red mountain.

This is a story that is less about what can be found than the belief it might be found; it is an intoxicating adventure story and it is also a tender exploration of a friendship between two unforgettable women that defies all boundaries.

My rating is not an accurate portrayal of the quality of the book, my rating is an accurate portrayal of my enjoyment of the book.

I say this because it’s not the book I thought it was going to be. That’s entirely on me, because I’ve read another of her books and I should have known better. But I got sucked into the summary about the expedition in search of a golden beetle, and allowed myself to be seduced by images of New Caledonia, beetle hunting, and elusive orchids (which depend on the golden beetle, of course).

This was not that book. This is a wonderfully written book about deeply flawed and lonely people who come together under the guise of searching for the golden beetle. Also motherhood, mental breakdowns and devastating nutritional deficiencies. There’s a lot of baggage in this book and very little of it is related to the beetle expedition.

They do make it to New Caledonia and they do hunt for beetles; those moments were the best parts for me, but they were all too brief. For the rest of it, I just kept thinking this was Thelma and Louise Get on a Ship.

This book is a lesson in the power of titles, covers and summaries. I have a friend who wouldn’t look twice at this book, and it is perfect for her; if I can get her to read it, she’s going to love it. Whereas I, who thought everything about the ‘wrappings’ of the book screamed “this is the book for you!”, found it to be not at all what I expected and was a little disappointed.

That does not mean it’s not a good book; it’s an excellently written book, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys a book about emotionally broken people persevering and finding their happiness. It’s just not the book I was looking for.

A Table Near the Band

A Table Near the Band
by A.A. Milne
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1950
Pages: 223
Genre: Fiction, Literature
Publisher: Methuen

It’s not often that a collection of stories comes along that doesn’t have a mix of average, above-average and maybe a couple of bombs. When I wrote my reading status update for A Table Near the Band I didn’t really have a lot of confidence that the stories would continue to be the same high-quality delight that the first two proved to be – what would be the chances? Imagine my surprise to find that, with the exception of 1 story, the entire collection never failed to surprise, entertain and charm.

I have to start first with the dedication, because it made me laugh:

To
THE READER
Whose weekly parcel from the Library has included
this or that book, either because it has been re-
commended by a friend or because the author’s
previous work has recommended itself:
Who has flipped through the pages in happy anticipa-
tion and found that it is a book of short stories :
Who has said disappointedly
“Oh! short stories, and
has put it aside and settled down to one of the
other books

I DEDICATE THIS ONE
At the same time pointing out to her that completely
revealing titles which are both attractive and as
yet unused are hard to come by, and that after all
one should expect

A TABLE NEAR THE BAND
to offer a view of other tables, at each one of which
some story may well be in the making.

How often have I done this to myself – buying a book thinking it a story only to find it’s a collection of them. Thankfully, this was not one of those books, but one I did buy on the strength of A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

A list of the stories, with individual ratings and a sentence worth of blurb follows:

A Table Near the Band: 5 stars. The titular story and a short comedy of … not errors, but a neat encapsulation of the foibles of both genders. Neither side comes out looking good, but it’s light and amusing.

The Prettiest Girl in the Room: 5 stars. This one starts out sad and depressing, but midway through turns into a sweet, generous tale that manages to warm the heart without the saccharine side-effects.

A Man Greatly Beloved: 5 stars. I was completely knocked back by this story; it starts off quietly and as though it could be predictable, although the narrator’s voice has an unintended cheekiness to it that is amusing. The story than abruptly turns into an altogether different animal that leaves the reader foundering a bit, but Milne closes the story as gracefully as can be imagined.

The Rise and Fall of Mortimer Scrivens: 5 stars. An epistolary short story that had me laughing at the ‘villain’s’ comeuppance, done in a way that really only British humour can pull off.

Christmas Party: 4.5 stars. Family holidays from an untapped perspective, but which one anyone part of a married couple has experienced, and Milne delivers on the ultimate irony of the perpetual perception of the importance of family togetherness.

The Three Dreams of Mr. Findlater: 4 stars. Disturbing. Well-written but with an ending that leaves the reader both crying deus ex machina! and floundering with judgement of the character.

The River: 4 stars. This one was well-written but an odd duck. The premise – the power of a powerful coincidence – works well enough, but given the reader knows the ultimate end of the story from almost the beginning, it fails to have the power it might have had under different circumstances.

Murder at Eleven: 3 stars. The weakest, by far, of all the stories and a murder mystery, but a transparent one. Luckily, it’s short.

A Rattling Good Yarn: 5 stars. A humorous tale about how revenge can be subtle and still be sweet.

Portrait of Lydia: 4 stars. Another mystery, but better written; the reader knows there’s something hinky but doesn’t get all the details until the end, when the protagonist finds out years later.

The Wibberly Touch: 4.5 stars. I want to call this another ironic story, but I’m not sure it is; it’s obvious that Milne writes with a satiric pen about a character that’s not nearly as suave or as good as he thinks he is, but the reader is left thinking he’s an ass, but is a really a dishonest one?

Before the Flood: 4.5 stars. Not a morality tale, but a different perspective on the events proceeding the great biblical flood. Told with humor, but not with disrespect.

The Balcony: 5 stars. This one is the most theological and not necessarily one that a lot of people would consider good, but it resonated with me a great deal because Milne plays with the average person’s overly simplified idea of judgement and heaven. It’s a short piece but it balances angst and hope reasonably well, leaving an ending that is up to the reader to decide.

From a strictly mathematical point of view, the collection is not quite 4.5 stars, but I rounded up in acknowledgement of a collection that I never shied away from picking back up. Milne wasn’t just a gifted children’s author, but a gifted author, capable of charming both young and old.

Reading Status: A Table Near the Band

A Table Near the Band
by A.A. Milne
Publication Date: January 1, 1950
Pages: 223
Genre: Fiction, Literature
Publisher: Methuen

I grabbed this book as a counter-balance to Einstein’s War, and while I’m only 30 pages and 2 stories in, it’s charming so far! A.A. Milne has given me a wry and humorous story and a sweet one that manages to be sweet without being saccharine or overly sentimental. If the rest of the stories are this good this collection will be a treasure.

The Enchanted April

The Enchanted April
by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1922
Pages: 204
Genre: Fiction, Literature
Publisher: Folio Society

Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Arbuthnot, cowed and neglected by their husbands, make a daring plan: they will have a holiday. Leaving a drab and rainy London one April and arriving on the shores of the Mediterranean, they discover a flower-filled paradise of beauty, warmth and leisure. Joined by the beautiful Lady Caroline and domineering Mrs Fisher, also in flight from the burdens of their daily lives, the four women proceed to transform themselves and their prospects.

I liked this book way more than I should have. Arnim’s ability to write a single moment right into the ground is admirable in a contrary sort of way – I mean, entire pages dedicated to describing one brief span of time, and it’s very stream-of-consciousness at times as well. And Lotty, who starts off realistic if a bit pathetic, opens her eyes her first morning in Italy and turns into a character Disney himself would envy. The only thing missing was somebody singing Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. And the ending is the shallowest, basest, most unrealistic Happily Ever After I’ve ever read. How is Frederick going to explain that unopened letter when he and Rose go home?

But in spite of all of this, the book was as enchanting as its title. Were I but rich and idle, instead of just temporarily idle, I’d have jumped a plane for Italy before I got so much as 100 pages in. Arnim wrote such a backdrop for these women that it was hard not to smell the wisteria as it dropped its accumulated rain drops on your head. Even the castle, which Arnim spent little time describing overall, felt lived in. And in spite of all the faffing stream-of-consciousness and Lotty’s Disney-esque departure from reality-land, I found myself liking, or at least sympathising with, all four women. The men … not so much. Even though they were supposed to have been ‘saved by love’ (ugh!), I still found Wilkins a condescending, pompous ass, Frederick pathetic, and Briggs a massive disappointment. Somebody should have slapped that boy upside his head.

Arnim was a gifted writer, creating characters with a lot of character, so to speak, but she really shines – is absolutely brilliant – when it comes to writing about gardens, so I suspect that when I remember The Enchanted April it will be the gardens of San Salvatore that come through best and most vividly.

NB: I read the Folio Society Edition from 2002, and it included the most charming colour illustrations; they perfectly complemented the text.