nocto.com booklog

The Lie of the Land

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:00:00 GMT

I picked up this book mostly because there was a puff from Alison Lurie on the back cover. I've enjoyed Lurie's books and thought a contemporary author with the same kind of atmosphere and feeling for the time in which the book was written would be a good read. This book was published in 2017, which despite feeling like yesterday to me is just long enough ago that it can feel slightly dated but not long enough ago to be nostalgic about. In 2026, despite the intermediate pandemic, we're very much still in the same arc of global history as we were then.

In the beginning I was really pretty disappointed. The setup seemed weak and poorly constructed. Quentin has been unfaithful to Lottie, they are both recently redundant, and find themselves unable to sell their London home and make a clean break of the divorce. Lottie finds a too-cheap-to-be-true farmhouse to rent in Devon and they rent the London house out and the family moves out to the country, with Quentin tagging along. I just had so many 'yeah but' moments with this arrangement that I could easily have thrown the book across the room in the first few chapters. But it seemed well written and I thought the characters might be better than their introduction so I kept reading.

It's definitely the kind of writing that tries to encapsulate the shifting layers of society within its story. And despite occasional clunkiness mostly I liked that. The comparison to Lurie is sometimes justified. But the story also tried to get into suspense or mystery novel territory with several different threads and I felt those parts were a lot weaker than the rest of the book and weren't really what I was reading on for. I sometimes wondered if some of the subplots were supposed to be black comedy and it just wasn't landing with me, I'm still not quite sure whether they were.

I wasn't entirely surprised to discover at the end that various characters - including Lottie and Quentin - had been reused from Craig's earlier books. That perhaps explains why the beginning of the book felt a bit bizarre to me. Although I certainly found it a very inconsistent book to read I still think I'm reasonably interested in reading those earlier works. I suspect this'll seem like a better book in thirty years time than it does today; it definitely felt like it was written for the record.

Dangerous Ages

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT

I picked this up because it was part of the British Library Women Writers series and the other books I've read in that imprint have been great. So I was expecting an interesting read and I got one. Incidentally, this was the third book I read on my holiday in Cornwall. I had picked up the other two for having Cornish settings, but this one ended up in Cornwall as well with characters even cycling between Marazion and Land's End at one point. It was a nice bit of serendipity.

It's not a book with a great deal of plot. It ambles around between various women in the same family. Neville is turning 43 at the start of the book. We see her almost grown up daughter Gerda as well. And her mother, almost always referred to as Mrs Hilary, you need to read closely to realise her name is actually Emily. And her mother is Grandmamma and I really didn't catch a name for her. Then there is Neville's 33 year old sister Nan who is the one referred to as being at "a dangerous age". However the point of the book is, I think, that women of all these ages, from teens to eighties, could be considered to be dangerous.

The book is set (and was written in) 1920 but there were many ways in which it seemed quite contemporary and it's certainly a feminist book. I really sympathised with Neville. In her youth she had given up her place at medical school to get married and now her children are just about grown up she wants to get back to her studies and become a doctor. She finds this tough but I felt the major obstacle was everyone else telling her she wouldn't be able to manage it at such an advanced age (that was 43) and I think what depressed me the most about that thread of the book was that whilst vast quantities of things have changed in a century I felt the social expectations of others could fall on Neville in pretty much the same way today.

I found the chunk of the book that involved excursions into Freudian analysis hadn't aged as well as the rest but I found a lot of it was rather dryly funny. There are lots of discussions of marriage as Nan and Gerda both consider it during the book, so you get everyone else's opinions as well and these are definitely enlightening to read today. I'm not going to spoil the whole book for you, it's a really interesting read. There's not a great deal of plot but plenty of character exploration and development. Also "Neville" grew on me as girl's name over the course of the book, apparently using traditionally male names for female characters is a characteristic of Macauley's work. I need to read more!

Light Over Liskeard

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 16:00:00 GMT

This is the second of two books I picked up for holiday reading based on their being set in Cornwall where I was going. I have read de Bernières best known book Captain Corelli's Mandolin but it was sometime in the mid 1990s and I've long since forgotten everything about it, and obviously didn't enjoy it enough to pick up any of his other work. My reading tastes have definitely changed over three decades and I thought it was worth having another try.

I really quite enjoy reading books where I haven't the foggiest idea what is going to happen. Blurbs so often give away too much of the plot so I dived into this one only knowing it was set in Cornwall. I was vaguely expecting something historical and absolutely wasn't expecting a story set in a near future dystopia of robots and artificial intelligences. And once I got my head around the setting I quite enjoyed the story. It's about how a middle aged man, Artie, expecting the end of the world, restores a derelict farm on Bodmin Moor and makes it a home for his family. He's helped by his neighbour Theo who is restoring extinct wildlife to the moor, and Theo's daughter Eva, and eventually his children arrive too. It's a pretty engaging family story.

But ever since I finished the book it's been going round in my head. I think it's supposed to be seen as a hopeful book about the future and about how we can get life, nature, back from the brink. But Artie is a quantum cryptographer who works with the government, he knows the prime minister and he's so sure the the world is about to reach full on apocalypse because he has a seat at the table where those decisions are made. And he doesn't try to build a community or help others. Ultimately he's just one well off guy building himself a compound for his own survival. Whilst I was entertained by most of the novel - there's a number of hugely fun setups in here - I wanted there to be an upbeat message but was ultimately left despairing rather than hopeful.

The Sea Gate

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT

I discovered that I could search the local library catalogue by the setting of the books and decided to pick out a couple of books set in Cornwall to read on my holiday there. I really enjoyed doing this!

The story begins with London-based Rebecca trying to sort out her mother's house after funeral and discovering a letter from an elderly cousin in Cornwall asking for help. She decides to go off and see Cousin Olivia and the rest of the story flows from there and turns into a mostly two-threaded narrative with Rebecca's modern day troubles switching turns in the limelight with the tales of Olivia's teenage years during the second world war. It was a really engaging and well written tale, just what I wanted in holiday reading. Lots of good characters, and I definitely got what I was after from the setting.

There were also many happy endings (for the nice characters and not for the not-nice ones, Rebecca's family were a hideous lot!) which also made it good holiday reading. I'd recommend it and will be looking for what else the author has written. And I'll probably be searching for books by setting again since it was a novel way to uncover some different stuff and I often struggle to pick out and settle on a book to read.

Love and Other Crimes

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 11:00:00 GMT

I have a longstanding disappointment with short stories. Just occasionally they work for me but mostly they leave me wondering where the rest of my plot, the rest of my character development, the rest of the fun is. Not all of these stories feature VI Warshawski but quite a few of them do. Whatever it says on this page I've read all twenty-two of the full length novels featuring VI, the first ones back in the 1990s before I was keeping track. So you'd think that I couldn't complain that I don't get to know the characters well enough. But I'm still going to whinge a little. After all there are other characters than the recurring ones and I don't get to know them very well. And whilst there are plenty of novels that could do with editing down the plot of a short story is never going to have the depth that a novel can.

A lot of the VI Warshawski books emerge from real world situations - real world culture and politics shape the stories. These short stories are no different but their origins felt very obvious at this scale. Paretsky also writes a quick explanation about each story after it and whilst these are sometimes illuminating, such as where she'd reused classic crime fiction characters I didn't know, more often than not I found myself going "yes, I got the allegory!".

There are definitely times where the stories are fun and add to the canon and wouldn't work in a longer format but I'd rather have had a story about VI's childhood, for example, as an extra in a longer book than a whole book of short stories. So it's not that I think it's a bad collection of stories, it's more that I'm just a bad short story reader.

The Millstone

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:00:00 GMT

It's the usual story: seven years ago I read my third book by Margaret Drabble, having read the first thirteen years ago, and I'm just now getting round to reading another. I had enjoyed the later novels with older characters more than the earlier ones but this early one is probably her most well-known novel and it's great.

Published in 1965 it's the story of PhD student Rosamund who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. Abortion is still illegal; the National Health Service has been going less than twenty years; illegitimacy is frowned upon. Margaret Drabble herself was still in her mid-twenties when the book was published (it was her third) and she was a (married) mother so I would expect the descriptions of the NHS services of the time to have a basis in reality[^1]. They make for pretty alarming reading today so there's a bit of time capsule about the book. But then there's a whole lot of things that are just as relevant now as then.

I see from her Wikipedia page that Drabble decided not to put Rosamund in a relationship in order to be able concentrate on and explore the mother/child relationship rather than the mother/father one. Which makes sense for the story, but whilst that takes away one angle it adds in another. Though attitudes to illegitimacy have certainly changed single mothers often still take the heat today. Rosamund being relatively well-off and middle-class mean that this isn't that big an element of the story, the same features that often temper society's view of single-motherhood today. Rosamund's equivocation about whether a baby is actually the millstone of the title and her changing feelings and the attitudes of the community around her felt much more timeless than the medical details.

It's definitely still a good read, and still relevant, sixty years later. It's a short novel and though I found the lack of chapter breaks disconcerting at first once I got into the story I didn't mind that. And yes, it's left me wanting more and I'm definitely making a note to read more of the author though time will tell whether I act on that or not!

[^1]: Though I also noticed this whilst scanning her Wikipedia page: Drabble admitted, years after writing The Millstone: "I didn't realise until many years later that some of the medical details I invented were way off the mark."

Inside the Box

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:00:00 GMT

I was really looking out for David Epstein's last book Range when I found this newer book of his and decided it sounded like a good read as well. This one is about "how constraints make us better". That felt like the kind of thing I've slowly figured out over the course of my life and I was certainly up for a bit of confirmation bias.

The book walks through a series of examples of how companies with almost limitless resources have failed to do anything much whereas those who have, or are forced to, put tight constraints on creativity come up with much more innovative ideas. And after a while it all started to feel a bit repetitive. I wasn't particularly surprised by the thesis so although it's well written I wasn't finding it especially informative.

It's the kind of non-fiction book that I often let languish for a while at this point - I've confirmed the author's talking sense but I don't feel like they've got enough to say for me to want to finish the book off quickly. (I usually do finish books I've got half way through though.) I was definitely thinking I could let the book simmer a bit before reading the rest. Then I found that the library system wasn't going to let me renew the book so, quite appropriately, there was a constraint on the time I had available to read the book.

The second half of the book got deeper into the hows and whys and I found it more engaging than the first half. The Theory of constraints is a whole management philosophy thing and I found the examples of people looking for and widening bottlenecks really interesting and probably useful. The end of the book was all about putting a positive spin on the idea of "satisficing" which is a term I've generally seen used in a negative way and I've gradually come round to the take that it's fine to be fine with things being just fine over the course of my adult life. Epstein's a fan of Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman which I also liked for it's light on this topic. There were quite a number of quotes and stories here that I've read before but it was nice to be reminded of them.

A lot of it is stuff that's feels a bit obvious when you think about it but that's rather the point - it has certainly been considered obvious that if you have infinite time and money you'll be able to do great things but the evidence is against that. There's a recurring thread through the book about Mendeleev's miraculous solo breakthrough in creating the periodic table of the elements and how it wasn't at all a miraculous solo breakthrough. I was finding that thread quite repetitive but the payoff at the end of the story is worth it.

It's definitely a good book to read for anyone who doesn't have infinite time or resources to play with (!), and though it was confirmation bias territory for me I definitely got some new things out of it.

Howards End

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:00:00 GMT

I'd never read any E M Forster so I started reading The Longest Journey which I found on a bookshelf at home. I was just a chapter in to it when Darren suggested I read Howards End instead which he'd found much more engaging. Both copies are his books but a bookmark shows he never finished The Longest Journey - that's not necessarily a bad thing, he leaves a lot more books unfinished than I do, but I was happy enough to switch books and see what this one had to offer.

Published in 1910 this is a well structured tale examining the English class system. I'd expected the book to take place at the house named in the title but actually very little of it does but there's a whole undercurrent about the relation of people and property. Most of the book is told from the point of view of Margaret Schlegel, the eldest of three siblings who have inherited their parents home in London. The book begins with her sister Helen having a brief unsatisfactory romance with one of the sons of the Wilcox family who live at Howards End, and then the two families twist together for the rest of the story. The business running Wilcoxes are better off than the more cosmopolitan and intellectual Schlegels but both are much wealthier than the third family - the working class Basts - who are added into the mix as well.

For me the book was as much about sexism as it was about class. And I'm really quite impressed with how insightful Forster is about the way women's lives were constricted at the time and the condescending way they often get treated by the male characters. One of the sisters asks the man who has just asked to marry her (I won't spoil the details) if he knows that she's walked over the Apennines with her luggage on her back and his response is "I wasn't aware, and, if I can manage it, you will never do such a thing again." He hasn't even married her yet! The complete deadpan delivery is fabulous. For a book with a strong political message it is very readable whilst still being beautifully written. There's at least one rather bizarre plot twist but on the whole I'd say it well deserves to be a classic and I'll definitely be reading more Forster. It easily grabs a place in my favourite novels list anyway (not that I know what else is on that list!).

And whilst I'm not particularly trying to read my way through it that's the 22nd of The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time that I've read.

Love Lane

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:02:55 GMT

This is a sequel to A Place Called Winter which I found I still remembered reasonably well despite having read it when it came out eleven years ago. I couldn't remember all the details but when I was dropped back into Harry Cane's life on the Canadian prairies at the beginning of this book things came back to me very quickly. I don't think you need to have read the first book to enjoy this one. In fact the beginning of this book is a little devastating after the happy ending of the previous one.

In Love Lane a now elderly Harry takes a trip to see the now grown up daughter he left in England in the previous book. The storytelling is passed around between different members of the family and I did find this rather discombobulating when I realised we weren't going to have enough time to revisit some of the characters again and I wanted to know more about them but in the end I think it all worked out. You see things differently from different viewpoints and the story emerges as a whole from the parts.

I'd remembered that Harry Cane was a fictionalised version of one of Gale's own great-something grandfathers who went to farm in Canada. This story is set in the early 1950s and I wondered how much was being invented here. There's a lot of little details that just seem too ridiculous to be anything but true, and some big details that seem almost too fitting to possibly be true. A read through various articles written by or about Patrick Gale in the The Guardian over the years makes it clear that though I'm sure there is a lot of fictionalisation to the narrative there's also a core of definitive plausibility to the story. You probably don't want to read those articles until after you've read the book!

All in all it's a really well told story that's much more than a family memoir. Very much recommended.

Beloved

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:00:00 GMT

I don't put a lot of stock in "books you must read" lists and often find them filled with books I don't really think I'd enjoy but I still read them and still often find something I think I'd like. I had a scan through the The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time when it came out a couple of months back. I'd read about 20 of the books already. It's hard to figure out exactly how many because despite the fact I've been keeping records for 26 years I haven't read any Thomas Hardy or Virginia Woolf in that time but know I read some previously but not exactly which ones. I guess it's probably time I tried them again, but mostly I'd rather read new-to-me things. Middlemarch, which came in first on this list, was already on my list of books I ought to get round to reading, and still is. Beloved was the book that earned second place on the list, and the one I decided to add to my collection.

And it was both fabulous and profoundly disturbing. The writing is utterly brilliant and original and I really enjoyed it. The way the prose flows really brings the characters to life. When viewpoints switch, as they occasionally do later in the book, the prose is distinctly different. I'm not generally a fan of ghosts in books - I think I was burned early by children's authors who used them as deus ex machina for getting out of any plot hole - but here the way that you're never quite sure what is haunting and what is really bits of the character's memories and experiences is very evocative. And I realise that I can't actually remember when I last read a bad ghost story so I should probably lose that prejudice.

The story is centred around Sethe, who is escaping slavery with her young children when she gives birth to her daughter Denver, and the narration comes from a viewpoint eighteen years later when another slave she knew, Paul D, turns up on her doorstep. The events of the preceding years are gradually revealed as the book goes on. The farm on which Sethe, along with her husband Halle, and Paul D are slaves seems to be relatively benign[^1] and this is muddled up with some violent events that happen after Sethe escapes and it's all rather confusing. But this is the kind of storytelling I really like, it lets you figure out what has happened and doesn't spoon feed you. Lots of things that make little sense at the beginning of the book gradually fall into place as the whole back story is revealed. The way the picture slowly emerges is definitely a masterpiece of storytelling.

There are some awful descriptions of slavery here and you should be highly disturbed by them. I think we need fiction like this to remember the past with empathy so that we don't repeat it. I'm very glad I read it. I love Toni Morrison's own description of the book as being about "the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting" and I definitely plan to read more of her work now I've got started.

[^1]: I'm aware that that seems that a really weird thing to say; and I need to add that I definitely don't think slavery was ever good, but in the context of the story I think it makes sense.