Vendela Vida : We Run the Tides

San Francisco is the setting for this story of four girls coming into adulthood in the 1980’s. Eulabee and her school friends Maria Fabiola, Faith, and Julia live in Sea Cliff, a foggy beach side suburb. San Francisco then is not as it is now. Vendela Vida has described it thus,

Growing up in San Francisco in the eighties you felt like you were arriving at a party that had just ended. Wherever you went in the city, you were reminded of more romantic days. North beach had the beats; the Haight had the summer of love. You had nothing but the yellow Tower bag you filled with records hoping to capture another time and place. That’s the San Francisco I knew growing up-it was cold and foggy and gray, and kids had to make their own drama.

Youth

Margaret Drabble : The Dark Flood Rises

Margaret Drabble has been described as a writer who has ‘achieved a panoramic vision of contemporary life’. She has written women’s lives from student days in The Summer Birdcage through motherhood in The Millstone and falling out with children in The Witch of Exmoor. She has also written biography and memoir and now in The Dark Flood Rises she turns her vision to old age and the approach of death. Her title is taken from a poem by D H Lawrence The Ship of Death,

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul

has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

All For Nothing

Hearing Strauss’ Voices Of Spring waltz the other day I couldn’t help thinking of the magnificent passage in Walter Kempowski’s All For Nothing, in which the last residents of an arisocratic house dance in a freezing ballroom with all their possessions piled in crates around the walls as the invading Russian army moves closer. Here’s a repeat of our 2016 review of this truly great book:

You have destroyed/this lovely world

Stella Gibbons : Enbury Heath

Cold Comfort Farm, the book for which Stella Gibbons is best known, was published in 1932 when she was thirty. It is an extraordinary book for a thirty-year old; sophisticated, witty, a wonderful satire of Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb even D H Lawrence. It has been made into films, plays and audio books, and remains a favourite novel of many readers. Not many readers know that she published about twenty-eight books in her lifetime, as well as poetry and journalism. I am gradually dipping into her books, in no particular order, as they cross my path.

Here is the news

In the good old days:

Change of Season Haiku

above

the dead leaves

huge golden moon

GD

a black umbrella

flapping on the road

spine shattered

GD

spring rain

a little glint of rainbow

on the smallest cloud

GD

Elizabeth Jenkins: The Tortoise And The Hare

Anthony Horowitz : The Twist of a Knife

As my days are currently being consumed by a deep de-cluttering, I am only capable of reading books that require little thought. I dropped into the library for some crime reading and, even though I said I wouldn’t do it again, came away with the latest Anthony Horowitz.

Keigo Higashino: Malice