Driving Over Lemons, A Parrot in the Pepper Tree and The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society, by Chris Stewart

Hurrah! The time has come to review the first book I ever mentioned on this blog. And it's younger siblings, whom it has had to wait for.

Last summer my friend Phoebe rang me while i was in ASDA buying flipflops, and we finalised our plans for a holiday in Spain that August. A few days later I was reading the Sunday Times' 50 top reccommendations for holiday reads, and I noticed that some chap called Chris Stewart had just published his third book about life on his farm in the Andalucian mountains, which is exactly where I was about to go. I took myself off to the library, where this Almond Blossom book wasn't available, but the first one, Driving Over Lemons, certainly was. It's always better to start at the beginning of a trilogy anyway, so that's where I began. In these books Chris Stewart, an eternally optimistic Brit, writes about the new life that he and his family carve out in a ramshackle farm in Spain. I love to read comical anecdotes penned by self-deprecating, humble writers and Stewart is up there with the best of them. I made light work of the first two books, and by the time in was up in the Alpujarras I was keen to take a drive along the scary mountain roads down to his nearest main town, Orgiva, which was not far at all from where we were staying, to get a better picture of the environment he describes. Sadly our plans were scuppered by some undercooked Granadian calamari and I've felt a bit gutted about that ever since. Oh well.

I finally managed to get the third book in February, but somehow I just couldn't settle down to read it until the sun was shining and it was warm enough to sit in the garden! The first two books are more packed with action, comedy and gastronomical descriptions, but it was also interesting to read the most up-to-date anecdotes - it suddenly felt more real than ever. ABAS also features an episode from Stewart's early life as a Spanish farmer which I found especially engaging: in Morrocco on a temporary job he gets taken in by a poor family, who have also adopted a child off the street and a baby who was abandoned in a hospital, and here he sees the incredible generosity that the poor are able to show towards others in their community and to complete strangers.

This Book Will Save Your Life, by A.M. Homes

I wanted to write a terribly intelligent, engaging and humorous review, which would have matched my feelings about the book. But that was taking too much brain and thesaurus power so the following will have to do. It is an intelliegnt, engaging and humorous book. Read now.

The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova

This is rather a strange novel, and although I wouldn't say that reading it brought me a lot of joy, I certainly found it hard to put down. Okay, so essentially the story is about Dracula but even more than that it seems to be about the the nature of being a historian and the nature of research, and it's the blending of the two which makes the whole things a bit strange. The storyline is pretty gripping and I really did want to find out what happened in the end, which is why it was hard to put down, although some sections dragged on a bit. There's hardly any present-day narrative, with almost the entire story being taking place in various people's past and being relayed to the reader second-, third- or even fourth-hand through stories and letters, and stories and letters within letters. What you miss out on, therefore, is any characteristation of the woman who is ultimately telling the story - even by the end you don't really know what she's like at all. Furthermore, I didn't feel there was enough variation between the different characters. We hear the lengthy recollections of this historian and that librarian, all from different cultures and backgrounds, but it's as if they're all speaking with the same voice and personality. Having said that, it is a really interesting book and at points it was scary enough to prevent me from reading it at night!

The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

Wow. Lillie lent me this book when I asked her to reccommend me something to read, and now that I've read it I'm tempted to buy it for myself, because the story is so powerful and intriguing that it'll cling to me and I'll want to dip back into time and time again. The story is told to us by Clare and Henry, whose relationship is constantly buffeted by the sea of intense love and loss. Henry's got this genetic condition which causes him to time travel - he somehow gets dragged forward and backward to different points in his own lifetime, where he meets Clare, himself and other people in different times and places. It's a really beautiful and poignant tale, and it seems genuinely believable - not sci-fi at all - and is entirely unsentimental, which I appreciate. The Times describes it in three words: "wonky, sexy, incredible," and I agree.

44 Scotland Street and Espresso Tales, by Alexander McCall Smith

These are the first and second collected-together-in-a-book versions of McCall Smith's newpaper serial about the lives of some people who live in a house of flats in Edinburgh. It passes the time I guess, but there are whole stories I skip because they're dull. I would rather read an entire book about the five-year-old genius Bertie and his self-obsessed mother: that's the one storyline that has something genuinely interesting to say. Something to read when you can't find anything else.



The Sunday Philosophy Club, by Alexander McCall Smith

I'll just add a quick word about this one here. I can't add it to my book count because I didn't finish it; but I really couldn't read any further. I'm not sure why McCall Smith thought it was a good idea to write a series of books through the eyes and thoughts of a tedious, self-absorbed and unlikable middle-aged woman. Ugh.

Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, by Helen Fielding

Acting on a tip-off from Kate John's blog, I picked up Olivia Joules yesterday in the library (see my other blog for library-related ponderings). It's a good job I didn't have anything important to do today, cos guess what: I've already finished it. I wonder if this book brings on a pyjama-day in every female who reads it? I've never read anything by Helen Fielding before (frankly I think I was put off by Renee Zellweger's perpetual I'm-eating-a-lemon face) but I was really pleasantly surprised by Olivia Joules. It is fluff, but it's well-written fluff, and I'm all up for that on an idle weekend.

Andrew Lang's Fairy Books

I absolutely love fairy tales, of all shapes and sizes. I’d been really hankering after them and one evening over a cup of tea I even got my mum to retell me one of her mother’s stories which she used to tell me at night time (it sounds extra good in Polish). She then told me about a series of books which she had read as a girl: some chap called Andrew Lang began, in 1889, to collect fairy tales from cultures far and wide, and he put them together in The Blue Fairy Book, which was closely followed by The Red Fairy Book, and so on until he finished eleven years later with The Lilac Fairy Book. I wasted no time. Within a week the library had dug six of these colourful collections out of storage for me and for many a happy night I read myself a story or two before turning out the light (sometimes aloud to practice the voices). They're pretty ancient books, too, so the pages are lovely and yellowing and smell just they way they ought to.