Blame EAT, PRAY, LOVE, by Catriona

I do. I blame it for all those signs you see in people's houses. There's one that says SLEEP in the bedroom, another announcing EAT in the kitchen. LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE gets the livingroom wall. I've never seen one in the loo.

Aaaaaannnyway, this week's question asks us to talk about recently-read books that have caused a notable effect. So here goes.

LAUGH. Right now, I'm reading Alexei Sayle's memoir STALIN ATE MY HOMEWORK and laughing a great deal. It's the story of growing up as the only child of the only Jewish communists in a working-class area of Liverpool in the 1950s and 60s. If that doesn't sound funny, maybe you don't know Alexei Sayle. (Thinks: how to explain his place in the culture to non-Brits . . . national treasure, basically.) The book opens with his parents deciding not to let him be sullied by the dangerous counter-revolutionary messages in Bambi, and instead taking him to see Sergei Eisenstein's brutal epic, Alexander Nevsky. He was eight.

Where I'm up to, they have just spent yet another summer seaside break at the National Union of Railwaymen's AGM. It makes a change from Czechoslovakia.

CRY I don't often cry at books. Or films. Or plays. (A sport montage can get me and many bits of real life have managed to dissolve me over the years.) One recent exception was THE STORY OF TRACY BEAKER by Jacqueline Wilson. I was aware of Jackie Wilson, of course. She's another national treasure, apart from anything else. But I never read her "Nippers" series when I was a nipper myself and by the time she started writing for 9-12 year-olds I was grown up. 

So why now? Well, I heard her on a book podcast from BBC Radio 4 - link here -  discussing how she became the most-borrowed author from UK libraries, taking the crown from Catherine Cookson. And, since I'd recently devoured Catherine Cookson's THE MALLEN STREAK (after realising that I'd never read a word of her), it seemed an obvious next move. Hey - you choose your reading how you choose your reading, right?

But back to Tracy. She lives in a group home for children after a couple of failed foster placements:  angry, funny, exuberant, heartbreakingly vulnerable and a behavioural nightmare. Such an unreliable narrator! I've never seen a children's book with a cleverer and less condescending tone. And maybe 9-12 year olds can take it in their stride when Tracy declines an invitation to a treat in case today is the day her mum turns up, but it slayed me.

THINK It's totalitarianism again in Yoko Ogawa's THE MEMORY POLICE and, while she is too subtle a writer to be pinned down to a central message, I reckon she'd agree with Alexei Sayle that the enforced removal of all personal freedoms might not necessarily bring about perfect peace in the brotherhood of man. But you don't have to read the book as a political allegory. It's just as much an exploration of the process of dying and rembembrance, of friendship and loyalty, of writers and editors and whether objects have inherent meaning. And it's as scary all get out too. Brrrrrrr.

WHIP PAGES PAST FAST ENOUGH TO GET PAPERCUTS would, I admit, take a long time to embroider on a wall-hanging. But Marion Todd's 8th entry in the Sgt Clare Mackay series is another barnstormer of a police procedural, with the perfect mix of character, light relief, thematic weight and pacy puzzle. So clever. So not clever-clever. I get an extra dollop of enjoyment from knowing the setting - why I could drive there now and be back in time for tea - but several pals who don't know Scotland at all have chimed in positively and I would recommend these books to anyone. In fact, I am recommending them, right now, to you.

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