September was going to be my final month of being helped to choose randomly my next book. I had really enjoyed this little experiment over the given months, and definitely wanted to give it one more try before 2019 was over. There was to be one small problem though – as we had just moved house, all of my books were all over the place and everywhere! So my first pick for September was to be from whatever I could find from what I had unpacked to this point!
So instead of my total TBR being entered into the website, I entered in the selection that I had unpacked and it helped me choose from there. In addition, I didn’t know where my laptop was and I didn’t have Internet access yet, so this was to be a very rudimentary version of the experiment that I had already done! Nevertheless, my first book was chosen.
Lionel Shriver’s Double Fault was written in 2006, published just months prior to her explosive bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. Interestingly as a predecessor to her rise to fame, there are many resemblances between the two texts; but perhaps this bears a separate piece on its own! Double Fault, unsurprisingly, is largely about tennis, but as Shriver notes with wry humour in her author’s note, it is more about marriage, which is a much more complicated game.
Our main character is Wilhelmina “Willy” Novinsky, a middle-ranked professional tennis player who was striven for greatness in her game since her wee years. Love me, love the game, is what she declares. That is exactly what happens when she encounters fellow player Eric Oberdorf, a lowly ranked professional himself who is comprehensively beaten by Willy when they play as a meeting. Eventually, the pair marry. But, little by little, cataclysmic events begin to tear the couple apart, as we examine the nature of competition, sports psychology and the nature of passion versus love.
A sometimes ugly torch on the nature of the professional sports industry and its relationships, Shriver is deft at showing readers all sides of the marriage and relationships depicted. There is no doubt that Willy and Eric love each other, but it is when that love is tested through one’s success and the other’s relative failure in the sport that causes the novel’s tipping point.
Perhaps not my favourite of Shriver’s books (I’ve read quite a few now, in spite of her polarising nature she does know how to write a compelling tale) although nevertheless I really did enjoy this one in the end. I was fascinated to read particularly the scenes where Willy visits the sports psychologist as very few novels delve into this particular aspect of sports & their relationship with the people that play them. Overall, a very different sort of read and one that I did enjoy in the end.
With all of my books unpacked (albeit hastily and with minimal sense of order!), I could return to normal proceedings for the second book selection of the month. This book was one I bought after having watched the trailer for the film adaptation and was immediately caught in wanting to see the movie, but also wanting to read the original text.
Garth Stein originally wrote The Art of Racing in the Rain in 2009 with great ongoing success, 2019’s film adaptation will only be sure to strengthen this success. After having read the book now, I’m definitely keen to see the movie as it was a lovely story and one I’m sure will translate well to the big screen. Told from the perspective of a loyal dog, Enzo, this is the story of one man, Denny, and his dedication to the two great passions of his life: his family and car racing. Of course, there are many difficulties that Denny encounters in pursuing his dreams and in taking care of his family – and for this, he has Enzo.
In spite of his being a dog, Enzo has many great philosophies and mediations on the nature of life that he can offer both Denny and to readers alike. This is all related very cleverly back to the other great passion that both Enzo and Denny share – racing. A very clever and moving story of the gestures that Enzo can offer and what he observes, readers can take heed from this story of karma, persistence, determination and believing in yourself and your dreams come what may.
One could be cynical in the reading of this book and attribute what happens to the fact that this is all just a work of fiction – but, particularly dog lovers will know, that dogs do have the special feeling of being spiritual animals (Enzo himself observes the Mongolian tradition of what happens to dogs when they pass) and that they potentially carry great power in our lives in spite of their meek outward appearance. This was a book that I did not want to put down, and even though it’s a short book, it carries a powerful punch. A gorgeous novel that consolidates many important facets of life into a humble little tale!
The next book that was selected was a pleasant surprise, and one that I was eying off reading before the end of 2019 anyway. Having read, enjoyed and even previously blogged about J.P. Delaney’s crime fiction novels, I was pleased to see the new release of The Perfect Wife in August this year, and was keen when I got my hands on a reading copy. In comparison to previous works The Girl Before and Believe Me, The Perfect Wife is a very different kind of read, where it could even not be classified as crime fiction, but as something else altogether.
It is not a spoiler to say this as readers discover this in the opening chapters of the novel – the main character, Abbie, is a robot. Artificially created by grieving husband Tim in the wake of the human Abbie’s mysterious death, AI “cobot” Abbie is to live the life of the human Abbie in a revolutionary first for the technology megacompany of which Tim as at the head. In spite of this extremely strange, unique situation, things appear to be going well. But then Abbie begins investigating who she was before, who she was as a human, trying to understand more of the artificially implanted memories, and that’s when things begin to unravel.
A fascinating insight into the world, ethics and existence of AI, this book really does put a thoroughly human spin on their rights, as well including a genuine mystery for readers to solve. Told through both past and present tense perspectives, the past shows the human relationship between Tim and Abbie, and how they came to be, as well as providing us with more insight into how the tech corporation works, a behind-the-scenes glance into the creation of the artificial Abbie. The book also truly provides great psychological insights behind why Tim would create such a thing, what caused the strains of their human relationship, and how and why we view AI as either a threat or something so thoroughly inhuman that we cannot empathise with their experiences. A compelling read that I did not want to end, and another fabulous entry into the fiction universe from J.P. Delaney!
The final book for the month was to be Almost Love by Louise O’Neill, an Irish author who I came to know through a much-talked about book released in 2015, Asking for It. 2018’s Almost Love, in spite of being the author’s first foray into adult fiction, explores similar themes of love, class, sex and relationships. I picked up Almost Love in the hopes that it would be a timely mediation on power dynamics in sexual relationships and that it would bear resemblance to Asking For It’s powerful stance on the politics of these such themes.
Sadly, I was ultimately disappointed in my last pick for September 2019. Told in a then/now style, we see how Sarah falls in with real estate mogul Matthew, a man twenty years her senior and decidedly uninterested in any relationship with her beyond the sexual. Conversely, we also see how Sarah has progressed with her life to a committed relationship with a new man, Oisin, son of hugely influential artiste Oonagh. In both her relationships with these men we see that Sarah is hugely fragile, has only a tentative grip on what it is she actually wants from a man in her life, and is willing to cause all kinds of messes, drama and trouble for herself and those around her to try and figure it out.
An extremely frustrating character, and what could have been a wonderful narrative, but sadly for me, it just simply wasn’t written well enough to convey any of this. I couldn’t engage with the story, I couldn’t see why Sarah wasn’t brought to her senses at any stage in the story, and I certainly couldn’t empathise with her at all. The one thing I could understand is that she was simply ravaged by a prior relationship in her life, and, even though it wasn’t an idyllic relationship, she simply couldn’t move on and it caused tumult in her life. Perhaps it may have had more success for me if the power imbalance in her relationship with Matthew was explored more, as even this was glossed over.
A mixed bag of books for September, and even though it wasn’t exactly a prolific month of reading (lots of circumstances why this was the case!) it certainly was a diverse one. Another TBR pile chewed through, and another one to get through!
thankbookitsfriday 