Past, Present, Future

For a big chunk of the year what I choose to read tends to be influenced by the various book prizes. At the moment there is a gap and I am getting round to reading books I have planned to read for a while.

The last book I read was ‘The Tenderness of Wolves’ by Stef Penney. This was our village book group choice for our meeting last night and we had a good discussion about it. It’s quite an old book, winning the Costa Book of the Year in 2006. I seem to have had it on my shelves for a while but this was the first time I had read it. It’s a good story and we all enjoyed it, we just thought there were too many strands to the narrative. But the depiction of the Canadian wild Northern Territory in 1867 is quite breathtaking.

I am currently reading ‘David Copperfield’ and am really enjoying it. It’s a long book, I had not realised. It’s a book that you think you’ve read but actually you just know the story, have seen the TV serialisation or the film. I think I read it a long time ago, but I’m not sure. It’s a long while since I read any Dickens and had forgotten what a great storyteller he is, what fantastic characters he creates. I’m finding it useful to read it in the three chapter chunks that it would have originally been serialised in and sometimes to listen to the audio book. The main reason for reading it is because Barbara Kingsolver has used the story as a basis for her new novel ‘Demon Copperhead’ so I thought I would remind myself of it.

And my next book will be ‘Storyland’ by Amy Jeffs. I know very little about this except that it is ‘A New Mythology of Britain’ and seems to be a retelling of all the legends and tales that have been handed down over centuries of storytelling. Sounds good.