I groped for lights, got into a dressing-gown, and let fly a few whispered maledictions aimed at the head of Bacchus. But what I saw before me, when I opened the door, was no reeling Blix, nor even a swaying one. I have seldom seen a man so sober. He was grim, he was pale, he was Death warmed over. He shook like a harpstring.

He said: “Beryl, I hated to do it, but I had to wake you. The head rolled eight feet from the body.”

There are various techniques for coping with people who say things like that. Possibly the most effective is to catch them just under the ear with a bronze book-end (preferably a cast of Rodin´s “Thinker”) and then scream – remembering always that the scream is secondary to the book-end.

West with the Night are Beryl Markham´s memoirs about her childhood in British East Africa up to the point of her solo flight across the Atlantic and as you might tell from the excerpt above, she sure knows how to write. Markham´s writing is stunning and beautiful and whether she described one of her flights across the African wilderness or a horse race, I felt like I was right there with her.

However, I had some problems with this memoir. The main one being that Markham doesn´t disclose a lot of personal feelings and thoughts. The whole book comprises of personal anecdotes about dogs, horse-breeding, hunting with the natives and of course flying, but most of the time she doesn´t tell the reader very much about her personal life and to be honest, I haven´t been particularly interested in the things she has experienced as a child.

Take the chapters about Bror von Blixen-Finecken. He and Beryl are working together and all of a sudden Beryl wants to go back to England. And Bror simply says okay. And then he goes with her. Not a single explanation why he is going with her, not a single word from Markham that these two might be more than colleagues (which I guess he is).

In the end, I didn´t get a feeling for this woman, simply because she kept me as a reader constantly at a distance.

I´m not well versed reading memoirs, so I might miss something in this one. I´m glad that I have read West with the Night, though, because it is well worth reading for the writing alone.

By then he understood, in his own way, that the girl loved him. Also he understood now why it was that when she had lain hurt in his box, he could not trample her with his hooves, not allow any other living thing to touch her - and the reason for this frightened him. 

Beryl Markham´s writing is stunning, but I find this chapter, in which she is psychoanalyzing a horse, incredibly dumb. 

How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, "This is the place to start; there can be no other."

But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names - Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Molo, Nakuru. There are easily hundred names, and I can begin best by choosing one of them - not because it is first nor of any importance in a wildly adventurous sense, but because here it happens to be, turned uppermost in my logbook. After all, I am no weaver. Weavers create. This is remembrance - revisitation; and names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart.

I´m trying make an effort in reducing my TBR pile and this book has been sitting on my shelf for ages. And I feel now is the right time to dig into Beryl Markham´s life story.

Oh wow, this second book really just went downhill for me. Tracey is 100 percent scared to be single. I really wish besides some characters giving that some lip service here and there, it actually had been addressed. Tracey throws herself into a something with a guy she meets at her job called Jack while also still harboring feelings for her ex and sort of wanting to be with a long time guy friend. The ending made me roll my eyes. 

Tracey, without realizing it, is pretty much advocating taking pills (she takes them for anxiety) cause they are helping her to lose even more weight. She is still talking to her ex-boyfriend Will twice a week cause apparently she has no spine and cannot just ignore his freaking phone calls. When Tracey ends up meeting a guy at her job named Jack, she tells herself to just think of him as a transitional boy, but she of course starts thinking about weddings and being with him forever. She also still harbors a crush or something on her guy friend Buckley. 

This whole book felt exhausting to me. I just wanted Tracey to get her crap together. Instead she is sitting in judgement of mostly everyone she is close to and ping ponging between two guys. I say two since Will is mostly just a voice on the phone for this book. 

So back in the day I was obsessed with Red Dress Ink books. I have all of the "Slightly" books still on my Kindle along with Kindle and paperback copies of books by Sarah Mlynowski, Melissa Senate, Brenda Janowitz, Carole Matthews, and other writers. I was in love with all things chick lit back in the day and these writers and their books delighted me.

Now reading the first two books in the "Slightly" series by Markham this weekend has me realizing that the main character Tracey kind of sucks. Okay, no kind of, she really does suck. Self absorbed and nasty about her friends and family (mentally and not to their faces), I had a hard time rooting for her. I liked her okay in this first book, but found myself getting increasingly irritated by her in book #2.  You do have sympathy for Tracey, she is in a long time relationship (his name is Will) with a struggling actor who really doesn't care about her (just a few scenes with the guy should let you know that he is not in love with Tracy) and she is determined that while they spend the summer apart, she is going to work on improving herself for him.

Tracey is overweight and not really trying to do much about her apartment. She is just passing time until Will deigns to propose to her so she doesn't see much of a point in making her life better without him. When Will goes away during the summer to participate in Summer Stock, Tracey decides to focus on losing weight and reading books.

If Tracey was doing any of these things without Will being the main reason behind it, I would cheer her. Instead Tracey wrongly believes that if she was somehow perfect, Will will propose and they will live happily ever after.

Most of this book is just Tracey telling you how much weight she has lost and it seems barely eating any food. We also have her being highly judgmental about her two best friends (Raphael and Kate) who love Tracey as she is and keep telling her that Will really isn't the right one for her. Tracey also looks down her nose when it comes to her coworkers. 

Tracey ends up meeting a guy named Buckley who she starts to think about romantically, but really wants to keep him on the back burner cause there is still Will.

If that isn't enough, Tracey goes into her blue-collar family that lives in Brookside, New York, about 500 miles away from her current location of New York, New York. She also looks down on her family due to her mother and sister not doing anything but living for their spouses and both being overweight. She seems indifferent towards her brothers. 

I think if the book had shown Tracey really dealing with her relationship with Will and coming into her own I would have liked it better. The ending was such a non-starter for me when re-reading. It doesn't feel like Tracey learns anything since she still seems to hate being alone and doesn't get why her life didn't magically get better when she lost weight. 

The other characters don't feel very developed to me. Will is, but Raphael reads like a gay stereotype. Tracey pretty much calls Kate a gold-digger. Or at least she is referred to that in book #2. Tracey's work friends seem pretty awesome and have a better handle on their own lives. 

The writing is typical chick lit. The main premise of most of these stories is to tell a romance usually dealing with a single woman having semi-comedic situations happening to them. I guess for me while reading, there was not that much that made me laugh. 

The setting of New York is used very well here. Tracey makes New York sound hot, gross, and smelly most of the time. I could feel the heat and also felt slightly hampered by her describing her tiny apartment. 

The ending leaves Tracey on a different path than the one she envisioned.