Reading Retreat Reviews!
Feb. 7th, 2018 06:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThis weekend, I went on a marvellous reading retreat (www.readingretreat.co.uk) and read 1550 pages in 24 hours of actual reading, over the course of 72 hours on retreat. I read four whole books from start to finish, and it was glorious!
I started with The Seven Sisters by Lucinda Riley, which I had been saving for this very occasion because it is over 600 pages long. It's not the sort of book I normally read - young woman finding herself by delving into her past - but it was recommended to me a while ago and I decided to give it a try. The premise of the series is that a man travelled the world, finding orphaned baby girls and adopting them, naming them after the Pleiades and bringing them up on his island hideaway in Switzerland. It's a lot less creepy than it sounds... On his death, he leaves them each clues as to where they originally came from and each book follows a different sister on their quest to discover their roots. This is the story of the first sister, Maia, and it takes her to Brazil, where the book splits to follow the narrative of her great-grandmother in the 1920s. I liked the setup and it's well written and absorbing, easy to fall into and get lost in. It was a bit disconcerting to have 150 pages in the present with one set of characters, and then 150 pages in the past with an entirely different set of characters, before the storylines started alternating more rapidly. One of the characters in the past seemed to change personality quite dramatically at one point, but this was explained pretty well later on. And, after 500 pages of lush storytelling, the crux of the plot is 'told' very briefly right at the end, and everything gets wrapped up incredibly neatly. I'm also generally annoyed at the suggestion that a solitary life, translating great books from a beautiful house on a lake in Switzerland requires the addition of a man and a little girl to be fulfilling, but I guess I shouldn't expect anything different from a romance novel! Still, it kept me engrossed and I read it in less than 24 hours. I'm quite keen to carry on with the series, as I'm hoping the settings, tone, and plots will be as varied as the sisters themselves.
My second book of the weekend was The Bees by Laline Paull, which was part of my reading retreat prescription. It's certainly not a book I would have picked up otherwise, and it turned out to be fascinating. It tells the story of a bee hive, from the point of view of one of the workers, Flora. It's very cleverly done, with the bees not really being anthropomorphised much. You never forget they are bees, and all their activities are in line with what bees would do, and how bee anatomy works. It's also a very strong allegory for social inequality and restrictive notions of gender and class roles. It's pretty brutal in places, and very unsettling in the way it looks at the conflict between duty, devotion, loyalty, indoctrination and the desire for independence in a totalitarian regime. There is some hope for a better future at the end, but it's also clear that change is likely to be slow and gradual. A really interesting read.
Next was Pantomime by Laura Lam, which tells the story of Iphigenia Laurus, born with both male and female genitalia, but brought up as a girl in a pseudo-Victorian society. Gene, as she prefers to be known, is not interested in fulfilling her expected role, so runs away to join the circus and becomes Micah Grey, the aerialist. The story barrels along very enjoyably, and Gene/Micah makes for a good narrator. I found myself very invested in her fate, and wishing her success in her attempt to find a place in the world. There were some instances of characters telling others things they or the reader already knew, but mostly the world was very well realised, and the story kept me gripped throughout. It really changed gear towards the end for a tense and violent conclusion, with lots of scope for interesting development in the sequel, which I will definitely read sometime soon.
Finally, I reread Out of the Silent Planet by C S Lewis, the first part of The Cosmic Trilogy. I remembered very little about it, and didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. It's a very male-dominated and quite dry story, with too much detail of the minutiae of the characters' actions and their surroundings. It's clearly well thought out, but not very exciting, though it does gain in interest in the middle section when Ransom is interacting with the hrossi. I quite enjoyed the moral philosophy towards the end, though it's not very subtle in terms of the overall message of embracing people's differences. I remember liking the second book in the series best, so I may get round to rereading that at some point, though I have plenty of new books to be getting on with, so maybe not.
Anyway, it was a wonderful weekend of reading, and I'm very much looking forward to my next retreat in June!
I started with The Seven Sisters by Lucinda Riley, which I had been saving for this very occasion because it is over 600 pages long. It's not the sort of book I normally read - young woman finding herself by delving into her past - but it was recommended to me a while ago and I decided to give it a try. The premise of the series is that a man travelled the world, finding orphaned baby girls and adopting them, naming them after the Pleiades and bringing them up on his island hideaway in Switzerland. It's a lot less creepy than it sounds... On his death, he leaves them each clues as to where they originally came from and each book follows a different sister on their quest to discover their roots. This is the story of the first sister, Maia, and it takes her to Brazil, where the book splits to follow the narrative of her great-grandmother in the 1920s. I liked the setup and it's well written and absorbing, easy to fall into and get lost in. It was a bit disconcerting to have 150 pages in the present with one set of characters, and then 150 pages in the past with an entirely different set of characters, before the storylines started alternating more rapidly. One of the characters in the past seemed to change personality quite dramatically at one point, but this was explained pretty well later on. And, after 500 pages of lush storytelling, the crux of the plot is 'told' very briefly right at the end, and everything gets wrapped up incredibly neatly. I'm also generally annoyed at the suggestion that a solitary life, translating great books from a beautiful house on a lake in Switzerland requires the addition of a man and a little girl to be fulfilling, but I guess I shouldn't expect anything different from a romance novel! Still, it kept me engrossed and I read it in less than 24 hours. I'm quite keen to carry on with the series, as I'm hoping the settings, tone, and plots will be as varied as the sisters themselves.
My second book of the weekend was The Bees by Laline Paull, which was part of my reading retreat prescription. It's certainly not a book I would have picked up otherwise, and it turned out to be fascinating. It tells the story of a bee hive, from the point of view of one of the workers, Flora. It's very cleverly done, with the bees not really being anthropomorphised much. You never forget they are bees, and all their activities are in line with what bees would do, and how bee anatomy works. It's also a very strong allegory for social inequality and restrictive notions of gender and class roles. It's pretty brutal in places, and very unsettling in the way it looks at the conflict between duty, devotion, loyalty, indoctrination and the desire for independence in a totalitarian regime. There is some hope for a better future at the end, but it's also clear that change is likely to be slow and gradual. A really interesting read.
Next was Pantomime by Laura Lam, which tells the story of Iphigenia Laurus, born with both male and female genitalia, but brought up as a girl in a pseudo-Victorian society. Gene, as she prefers to be known, is not interested in fulfilling her expected role, so runs away to join the circus and becomes Micah Grey, the aerialist. The story barrels along very enjoyably, and Gene/Micah makes for a good narrator. I found myself very invested in her fate, and wishing her success in her attempt to find a place in the world. There were some instances of characters telling others things they or the reader already knew, but mostly the world was very well realised, and the story kept me gripped throughout. It really changed gear towards the end for a tense and violent conclusion, with lots of scope for interesting development in the sequel, which I will definitely read sometime soon.
Finally, I reread Out of the Silent Planet by C S Lewis, the first part of The Cosmic Trilogy. I remembered very little about it, and didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. It's a very male-dominated and quite dry story, with too much detail of the minutiae of the characters' actions and their surroundings. It's clearly well thought out, but not very exciting, though it does gain in interest in the middle section when Ransom is interacting with the hrossi. I quite enjoyed the moral philosophy towards the end, though it's not very subtle in terms of the overall message of embracing people's differences. I remember liking the second book in the series best, so I may get round to rereading that at some point, though I have plenty of new books to be getting on with, so maybe not.
Anyway, it was a wonderful weekend of reading, and I'm very much looking forward to my next retreat in June!
