Bibliography, August 2021

BOTM: J. Didion, The year of magical thinking (2005)

W. Golding, The inheritors (1955)
W. Holland, Paupers and pig killers. Diaries 1799-1818 (1818)
J. Kaufman, Kings of Shanghai (2020)
M. Kurlansky, Milk: a 10,000 year odyssey (2019)

J. Lindsay, Picnic at hanging rock (1967)
E. Newby, Something wholesale (1961)
K. St Clair, The golden thread. How fabric changed history (2018)
R. Silverberg, A time of changes (1971)
A. Hussein, The weary generations (1963)
T. Nasrin, Lajja (1993)

Didion's book is a masterpiece. Everyone knows that and they are right. It's beautifully written, and engrossing. I read it in a morning when I could not put it down. I think it's the skill she has in articulating her thoughts in a moment of unimaginable awfulness (with her husband dead and daughter in acute care in hospital) in a way that immediately makes them resonate both in their depth but also in their reality. It's also very easy going and somehow uplifting. There's a lovely bit about marriage in there, which is written in the context of it going, but should be something we think about all the time. 

I found some of the others harder going than I had imagined. Golding, Holland, Newby, and Kaufman were books I expected to race through, but they were slower and less impressive than I had hoped. All of them had better second halves than first. I did really like the duo of subcontinental novels that I read and The weary generations in particular was outstanding.