My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell: I adored reading about young Gerald, his animals and his whacky family. It´s the perfect feel good read and I consider this book to be the bookish equivalent to the movie Mamma Mia.

 

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin: Leave it to Le Guin to tell the most tropy story in a refreshing, engaging and deeply moving way. Out of all the Le Guin´s I have read so far, this is my favorite. 

 

The Expendable Man by Dorothy Hughes: There is one specific thing about this book that turns this into an exceptional and unforgettable read. And this is all I´m going to say about this book.

 

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki: Or you could swap this book with "My Year of Meats". Both books are amazing and Ozeki is an exceptional writer.

 

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates: A gut-punch of a novel.

 

Honeysuckle Cottage by P.G. Wodehouse: The most charming and sweet haunted house (short) story ever written. 

 

Sovereign by C.J. Sansom: This stands for the whole Shardlake series, book number three has been my favorite so far, though. The mysteries are compelling, the setting of Tudor England is glorious and Shardlake is one of my favorite characters ever.

 

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane: This is so good. The setting, the atmosphere and the story are simply amazing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My plan is to read all of Richard Yates´ work in chronological order, so next up after Revolutionary Road has been his first short story collection. And as always with short story collections, it has been a mixed bag for me.

 

The main theme of this collection is loneliness in 1950s America in all its forms and how the characters deal with it. There is the child, who gets bullied in school, the patient in a TB ward, the unhappy spouse in a marriage, the unsatisfied worker of a newspaper and the dreamer, who wants to create but doesn´t have the means to do this himself.

 

Richard Yates just has that uncanny ability to give his characters a personality and a soul, whether he writes about them on 300 pages or on merely twenty. The stories are quite sad and depressing and especially the first story, "Dr. Jack-O-Lantern", has been a total gut-punch (at least for me). Some stories worked better for me than others, but there hasn´t been a story that I disliked and overall it´s a strong collection of short stories. 

I read Revolutionary Road for the first time last year and I was deeply impressed by it. It´s a harsh and devastating look on a dysfunctional marriage and on the lives of two people, who blame each other for their own shortcomings. If you are searching for a book that feels like a gut punch while reading it, you should definitely pick this one up.

 

After having listened to the audiobook, however, I have to change my rating from five to four stars, because the part in the middle (the whole "moving to Paris" part) has been to drawn out and some narratives of minor characters haven´t been that interesting as well.

 

The narration by Mark Bramell was pretty good, eventhough his narration of April was too whiney. I like to think that April is somewhat of a fierce character, who is perfectly able to give Frank the hardest time of his life (he certainly derserves that). The narration unfortunately didn´t give me that impression and I would urge you to either read the book and give April a voice of her own in your head or to watch the excellent movie adaption. Kate Winslet gives a sublime perfomance as April Wheeler.

 

 

This isn't a book you really enjoy, but rather one you admire and secretly identify with in odd, personal and idiosyncratic ways. Most of the characters, their loneliness stems from their own self-loathing and lack of agency in their particular situations. This is most often the source of loneliness in my life when I experience it.

Not all the stories are great, but the ones that aren't are at least good. The first and last are both excellent 'bookends' for this collection.

Just like in Revolutionary Road, Yates looks at the flips the American dream and shows us the lives of many of those who find it just out of their reach.

What a book! In 338 pages Yates dismantled the myth of consumerism and conformity with the family as the functional unit propagating both of these 'values'. Not everyone is happy living out a stereotype and most of society's stereotypes don't fit most of us most of the time anyway.

It also skewered this idea of 'American exceptionalism'. Both April and Frank believed they were exceptional and that the normal mundane rules of existence didn't apply to them because they were special. What drives their disillusionment, especially April's, is that they are ordinary and their lives are as mundane and small as they believe their neighbours' to be. They never seemed to come to the conclusion that within every ordinary person is a little nugget of exceptionalism.

I thought it was clever the way Yates wrote the story largely from everyone else's perspective, mainly Frank's, but the story was about April. And I don't think there was a happily married couple amongst the characters.

I started off feeling for Frank, but that gradually waned. It started with Maureen. But by the time he suggested that April should see a psychoanalyst I had completely defected from 'team Frank'.

Don't get me wrong, April was no saint, I just felt that she was required to sacrifice a lot more in the relationship. At least she had the guts to admit to not loving Frank. I was just disappointed she let him off the hook at the end. And he was emotionally stunted enough to believe her. While April takes responsibility for what she did, in reality this was a responsibility that was shared by Frank. It may well have been her last act of compassion, or it could have been a sign that she had truly given up.

This was a great book which made me very grateful that my life choices haven't led me down that particularly tortuous garden path of domesticity. Most of us dream that when we get married we will be happily married forever. To be unhappily married must be a form of truly exquisite torture.