March reads

Brace yourselves, because I've read a lot this month, and I've got plenty to say about it too!

The publication of the final book in the Tales Of The City series prompted me to return to the previous two books that make up the recent trilogy (the wholes series runs to nine books, forming three trilogies).  I've loved these books since I was a confused queer girl growing up in Bradford, when reading them was like an insight into another, better, world.  As tempting as it is to launch into a long and detailed treatise about why the Tales are some of the best books you'll ever read, instead I'll just point you in the direction of this excellent article from Guardian Review about being a Tales fan, this profile of author Armistead Maupin from The Observer, and the wonderful interview that Maupin did with Graham Norton on the latter's Radio 2 show, which together should tell you all you need to know.

1. Michael Tolliver Lives is perhaps my favourite of the entire series.  Perhaps because it was such a wonderful surprise, being published almost twenty years after the previous volume, Sure Of You.  But also because there is such lightness and hope and humour to it; you can clearly tell how much of the title character comes from Maupin himself, who had recently met and married his husband when he wrote the self same happy ending for Michael.

2. Mary Ann In Autumn was the eighth in the series and, like earlier volumes, tends towards the melodramatic and far-fetched (there's a reason Maupin has been compared to Dickens).  But, as always, you forgive any and all flaws because the characters are so brilliantly drawn and the writing so witty and sharp.

3. And so it was with some excitement that I finished the first two books and launched into the last in the trilogy, the ninth in the series: The Days Of Anna Madrigal.  Like anything that has been anticipated for a long time, it was perhaps a slight disappointment.  I felt it suffered for shifting much of the action from San Francisco - which has always been as much an extra character in the novels as a setting - to Nevada (where the large cast of characters decamp for the Burning Man festival).  Ultimately, though, it won me over with an ending that was perfectly unsentimental yet heartwarming.

4. Boston Noir is not a book I'd have picked for myself but was a gift from my (Boston-dwelling) aunt.  A collection of short stories, all with a noirish, thriller element, I actually really enjoyed it and am now putting two volumes set in my two favourite American cities - New Orleans Noir and Portland Noir - on my wishlist.

5. Curtis Sittenfield's debut novel, Prep, is one of my favourite books, and I also loved the follow-up The Man Of My Dreams, and her novel based on the life of Laura Bush, American Wife.  So imagine my disappointment when I read Sisterland and hated it.  The story of identical twins Kate and Violet and how having 'senses' (their word for their apparent psychic abilities) impacts on their lives was severely hampered by narrator Kate being unsympathetic and even downright unlikeable.  She shares the most banal details of everyday life with the reader - I really didn't need nor want to know each specific dish in a Chinese takeout order - and I found myself skim-reading over parts of the book because of this.  Kate is also full of the worst impulses and thoughts - sometimes racist or homophobic, more often just unkind - that I really didn't feel the reader benefited from being given an insight into.   Of course, you don't always need to like book characters but, because she's the narrator and because she often actively asks for sympathy, I think in this instance you do need to like Kate.  And I just didn't.  The earthquake (the apparent premonition of which forms the basis of the narrative) was a clever twist, but not as clever as Sittenfield seems to think it is, and the events of the final, rather rushed, chapters stretch credulity further than even the most melodramatic soap opera.

6. I picked up The Snow Child as a Book-Crossing book in a cafe, and I'm so glad I did because I loved it. A touching portrait of a marriage strained by difficult circumstances, of a couple made vulnerable and desperate by grief, I loved the Alaskan setting and, in contrast to Sisterland, the vivid and hugely sympathetic characters.

7. After loving Fangirl last month, I excitedly downloaded Attachments and was not disappointed. An adult rather than YA novel, the action takes place at the turn of the century as a smalltown newspaper prepares itself for the millenium. It takes a partly epistolary form as two friends who work for the paper, Beth and Jennifer, communicate via email. Meanwhile IT worker Lincoln has been employed to check the email filter, resulting in him having to read what they write. While Lincoln does come across as a little pathetic at times (nine years and multiple college degrees to recover from being dumped by a high school girlfriend, really?), I found myself wholeheartedly rooting for him and for Beth and Jennifer. A delightful love story.

8. Meat Market is an extremely readable book by journalist Laurie Penny, a collection of four essays on the female body and its commodification under patriarchal capitalist models.  In the words of the blurb, it is "designed to counter the voice that tells women and girls everywhere to shrink ourselves, silence ourselves, be small, be sexy, be nice...".  I, of course, loved it. 

9. I'd only been vaguely aware of blogger Allie Brosh's book - part-memoir, part graphic novel Hyperbole & A Half - until I read a short review on Siobhan's blog that convinced me to use my Waterstones voucher on it.  Best decision ever.  It had me in fits of laughter from the first page; her drawings look simple on first glance but she's able to convey so much meaning (and humour) with a single line, and the accompanying text is equally wonderful.