nocto

I picked this up at the library in preference to the "Kevin" book which falls into the category of books I think I might enjoy but have heard too much about from too many sources to bother with I'm talking slightly tongue in cheek but I've been disappointed by books with clouds of hype emanating from them before and so, well, I don't exactly steer clear of them or refuse to read them, but I tread carefully.

This proved to be an excellent read though. Well written on the whole. The odd sentence stopped me in my tracks with either a typo, a missing word, or some odd stressed word meaning that I couldn't make head nor tail of it.

It's the story of the relationship between two tennis players, both hoping to make it as professionals. Willy has been dreaming of playing at Wimbledon since she was five; Eric was an Ivy League mathematics major before he picked up a tennis racquet. From the title you can deduce that love's course, as ever, doesn't run smoothly.

Shriver does a great job of keeping the tension up and the plot tight. You want to keep reading because the story is so good. I was worrying about the end of the book because I was thinking back to other books which have carried me along on a wave of words and then beached me with an ending that doesn't really matter. That didn't happen here; the close of the book is as good as the rest of it, pitched at the right level.

Definitely an author to read more of.

Borrowed.

This is an autobiographical memoir of Penelope Lively's childhood which was mostly spent in Cairo - she "returned" to Britain, a country she barely knew, when she was 12 at the end of the second world war. It's not the exotic setting that makes it fascinating as much as the implications of its subtitle "A Childhood Perceived". Lively has almost as much to say about the nature of our memories of our childhoods as she does about the life her family lived in Egypt. Really enjoyable!

Purchased on 2nd June 2008.