Top Ten Tuesday: Books Awaiting Reviews

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

Previous Top Ten Tuesday Topics

• 11th July: Freebie: Books Set in Rome
• 18th July: Books With One-Word Titles
• 25th July: Ten Most Recent Books I Did Not Finish
• 1st August: Forgotten Backlist Titles
• 8th August: Books I’ve Read/Want to Read Because of Top Ten Tuesday
• 15th August: Bookshops in Rome I Am Excited For
• 28th August: Water
• 5th September: Books That Defied My Expectations

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It’s been a funny old week this week… we have just begun to be in the swing of things after a week at work, then my wife has surgery on her arm and is out of action from both work and driving – and in a lot of pain bless her. So I am driving daughter to school, walking straight into lesson one without a pause for toilet or coffee and being covered to sneak out ten minutes early to pick her up again, check horses, cook, wash up and get everyone ready for bed….

And this week’s TTT is one that I would want to devote more time and thought to than I realistically think I have available right now, so instead, as I am falling behind in my reviews, these are the books that I have read most recently and which still need to be reviewed. Perhaps this will generate some accountability for me as well!

Therefore, this week, nothing connects these novels except for the fact that something about them had piqued my interest…

Uncle Paul, Celia Fremlin

The holidays have begun. In a seaside caravan resort, Isabel and her sister Meg build sandcastles with the children, navigate deckchair politics, explore the pier’s delights, gorge ice cream in the sun. But their half-sister Mildred has returned to a nearby coastal cottage where her husband – the mysterious Uncle Paul – was arrested for his first wife’s attempted murder: and family skeletons emerge.

Now, on his release from prison, is he returning for revenge, seeking who betrayed him? Or are all three women letting their nerves get the better of them? Though who really is Meg’s new lover? And whose are those footsteps …?

I found this a perfectly readable and enjoyable but not particularly memorable read… I did enjoy some of the social satire in the common room of the hotel and the politics and squabbling over favoured chairs and the propriety of staying in unless the weather looked bad… Not as tense as it could have been for the first half but it improved. I may well pick up another of Imrie’s books at some point: nothing about this one put me off, even if nothing is making me rush to but another.

Mr Loverman, Bernardino Evaristo

Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he’s lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant, wise-cracking local character with a dapper taste in retro suits and a fondness for quoting Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father and grandfather – but he is also secretly homosexual, lovers with his great childhood friend, Morris.

His deeply religious and disappointed wife, Carmel, thinks he sleeps with other women. When their marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away?

This is a difficult book: I so wanted to love it but found I couldn’t. Evaristo was fantastic at creating voices and character in Girl, Woman, Other and that ability to inhabit and channel those distinctive voices is at play here as we alternate between Barrington’s and Carmel’s…What I wanted and had anticipated was something celebratory and joyous as a septuagenarian comes out; in fact, Barrington was rather an unappealing character to spend that much time with: his bickering and animosity with Carmel felt rather mean. The stand out moment? Carmel, the uptight wife, finally succumbing to her own affair in the office was hilarious!

Babel, R. F. Kuang

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

Oxford, 1836.

The city of dreaming spires.

It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world.

And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows.

Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Babel seemed like paradise to Robin Swift.

Until it became a prison…

But can a student stand against an empire?

This has been everywhere on social media and I was expecting it to find it massively overhyped… but no, it is wonderful! It is very much a book of two halves and the celebration of Oxford student life and of studying and of language and etymology was glorious; the violence and rebellion of the second half was poignant and thoughtful and profound in its response to the stain that is imperialism. Although the seeds of that second half were sown in the first, I found the shift between a little abrupt and sudden and jarring… which may of course have been exactly the point!

Spook Street, Mick Herron

Twenty years retired from the Intelligence Service, David Cartwright still knows where all the bones are buried. But when he forgets that secrets are supposed to stay hidden, there’s suddenly a target on his back.

The ‘Old Bastard’ raised his grandson to be a hero, not a slow horse. Now, far from joining the myths and legends of Spook Street, River Cartwright is part of Jackson Lamb’s team of pen-pushing no-hopers at Slough House. Which doesn’t mean he won’t ditch everything and go rogue when his grandfather comes under threat.

Lamb worked with Cartwright back in the day, and knows better than most that this is no innocent old man. So when a panic button raises the alarm at Intelligence Service HQ, it’s Lamb who’s called on to identify the body. And it’s Lamb who’ll do whatever’s necessary to protect an agent in peril.

A pretty dark entry into the Slow Horses series that continues the paranoid atmosphere within the Service – after all, how far can you trust people who are professionally spies and liars? Can you trust the government not to protect its secrets when one of its old spymasters grows senile and forgets that his memories are classified? We seem to have a new villain introduced here too, who feels likely to be a recurrent antagonist.

The Fault in Our Stars, John Green

I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.

Despite the tumour-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis.

But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.

I was obliged at work to read this book. It doesn’t help that my dad is in the late stages of fatal cancer and has been told that there is no more benefit to chemo. But, putting the troubling subject matter to one side, objectively this book is awful. The language is pretentious and utterly inauthentic – and did not have a rhythm that leant itself to reading aloud which we were expected to do. The characters are limp and affected – our hero Gus has cigarettes that he doesn’t light because it is a metaphor… that is not a metaphor. The plot meanders aimlessly. To be honest, two stars is generous.

The Lies of Locke Lamora

They say that the Thorn of Camorr can beat anyone in a fight. They say he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. They say he’s part man, part myth, and mostly street-corner rumor. And they are wrong on every count.

Only averagely tall, slender, and god-awful with a sword, Locke Lamora is the fabled Thorn, and the greatest weapons at his disposal are his wit and cunning. He steals from the rich – they’re the only ones worth stealing from – but the poor can go steal for themselves. What Locke cons, wheedles and tricks into his possession is strictly for him and his band of fellow con-artists and thieves: the Gentleman Bastards.

Together their domain is the city of Camorr. Built of Elderglass by a race no-one remembers, it’s a city of shifting revels, filthy canals, baroque palaces and crowded cemeteries. Home to Dons, merchants, soldiers, beggars, cripples, and feral children. And to Capa Barsavi, the criminal mastermind who runs the city.

But there are whispers of a challenge to the Capa’s power. A challenge from a man no one has ever seen, a man no blade can touch. The Grey King is coming.

I have heard so much praise for and glowing reviews of this book! People looked at me aghast when I’ve said I hadn’t read it yet even though I had a copy on my tbr. “But you must!” they’d say. “You simply must!” I did. They were right! The world building of Camorr – a brutal, otherworldly Venice – and its society and culture was wonderful; the structure of the novel was sublime where the interludes prepared for or developed the events of the present with exquisite precision; the characters were a little tropey – the honourable bastards are just that, thieves with their own sense of honour and righteousness who come good in the end – but done so damned well!

Dragons of Winter Night, Magaret Wies and Tracy Hickman

With the return of the dragon minions of Takhisis, the Queen of Dragons, the land of Krynn has become more dangerous than ever. But as the nations of Krynn prepare to fight for their homes, their lives, and their freedom, longstanding hatreds and prejudices interfere. When fighting breaks out among the races, it seems the battle is lost before it even begins.
 
Meanwhile, the heroic Companions have been torn apart by war. A full season will pass before they meet again—if they meet again. Raistlin has made an ominous prediction, one that implies not all of the Companions will survive the fight. His warning, along with sinister dreams, haunt the friends as they search for the weapons that will stop the Dark Queen in her tracks: the mysterious Dragon Orbs and legendary Dragonlance.

There are so many things to mock so easily with the Dragonlance books – the structure is all over the place and thrilling adventures are discounted in a paragraph and tedious journeying takes chapter after chapter, the characters are cookie-cutter tropes from the Dungeons and Dragons kit and very two-dimensional and whiney… but I loved them as a kid and Sturm, Tasslehoff, Flint, Raistlin and Tanis Half-Elven were part of a formative time for me and I still love ’em for all their failings!

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Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Themes

September 19: Books on My Fall 2023 To-Read List
September 26: Secondary/Minor Characters Who Deserve Their Own Book
October 3: Reading Goals I Still Want to Accomplish Before the End of the Year (We’ve just begun the last quarter of the year! What bookish goals would you still like to accomplish? If you participated in TTT’s Bookish Goals for 2023 topic this past January, update us on which goals you’ve achieved, which you’ve given up on, and which ones you’re still working on!)
October 10: Bookish Jobs I Would Do For Free (Real or Imaginary) (Submitted by Susan @ Bloggin’ bout Books)
October 17: Books with Weather Events in the Title/on the Cover (I’m picturing a list of titles with weather-related words in them like storm, rain, blizzard, flood, lightning, hail, snow, wind, etc. OR covers with lightning/storms in the picture.)
October 24: Atmospheric Books (The Novelry explains this concept as: “A novel feels atmospheric when the setting and the narrative are deeply involved with one another; when characters and plot are physically embedded in their surroundings, and a near-tangible mood lifts from the pages and wraps itself around the reader.” Study.com explains that, “The atmosphere is how a writer constructs their piece to convey feelings, emotions, and mood to the reader. The atmosphere in literature might be tense, fast-paced, mysterious, spooky, whimsical, or joyful and can be found in poetry, stories, novels, and series.”)
October 31: Halloween Freebie