Lizixer's Updates

Lizixer is currently reading 'Intervals of Darkness'

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 14:47:22 -0700

Lizixer is currently reading Intervals of Darkness by Ray Newman

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Wed, 04 Jun 2025 07:48:18 -0700

Lizixer is 59% done with Tell Me the Truth About L

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 07:47:07 -0700

Lizixer is 59% done with Tell Me the Truth About Life.

Lizixer added 'Best British Short Stories 2015'

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 04:15:09 -0700

Lizixer gave 4 stars to Best British Short Stories 2015 (Paperback) by Nicholas Royle
The secret with a book of short stories I think is to take it slowly. One a day or even longer gaps between them to let the ideas settle. There’s a danger with short stories that you consume them all in one sitting and feel like you’ve just eaten a big bag of delicious crisps but now you wish you’d eaten them more slowly to keep getting the hit.

With this set of British writers probably only Hilary Mantel became very well known outside of literary circles (although Jenn Ashworth may disagree with that! )

Many of these stories showcase the British love of the weird, the drawing out of the eerie from the mundane, the underlying sense of unease in provincial English towns, I particularly liked Alison Moore, and Charles Wilkinson for that.

Some are exemplars of British magical fantasy, I intend to track down more of Helen Marshall and some of the paranormal or supernatural.

There’s humour too and clever commentary on British life.

Hilary Mantel remains one of my favourite writers and many of her books are already on my bookshelf but
I intend to read more of many of these writers although some are hard to track down to anything like anthologies. The ideas, the scenarios and/or the sheer Britishness of most of these stories made them an enormous pleasure to read

Lizixer added 'The Eagle of the Ninth: Centenary Edition'

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 03:03:23 -0700

Lizixer gave 5 stars to The Eagle of the Ninth: Centenary Edition (The Eagle of the Ninth film tie-in editions) by Rosemary Sutcliff
I first read this book as a child. What I almost certainly took away from it was the gripping plot, wanting a wolf cub as a pet and an interest in historical fiction that persists to this day.

As an adult, all the above still apply but this time I loved Sutcliffe’s constant evocation of the British countryside, describing a landscape that is threatened now but was probably still to be seen in all its glory in her day. Plovers, curlews, hazel and rowan, the sense of people living with the land and not apart from it.

There’s also a deep and abiding story of friendship and hardship here across boundaries that is up there with Frodo and Sam, as one of the great literary friendships.

Sutcliffe’s subtle invocation of pre-Christian Britain from the thrilling ceremony at the megaliths to druids leading attacks or ceremonies to Mithras on the Roman side is also probably what led me to a life-long interest in the religious practices of the past.

I recognise as I re-read this thrilling tale how much stories like this formed the adult me. You can’t beat the intimacy of a story being told, writer to reader, one to one. The skill of the storyteller will take you with her to the past just as clearly as if you were standing there. Sutcliffe is one of the great storytellers.

Lizixer wants to read 'A Twist in the Eye'

Thu, 29 May 2025 14:54:47 -0700

Lizixer wants to read A Twist in the Eye by Charles Wilkinson

Lizixer added 'The Magician'

Tue, 27 May 2025 03:19:16 -0700

Lizixer gave 4 stars to The Magician (Paperback) by Colm Tóibín
Reading about Mann’s family, I think of Tolstoy’s adage: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.��

Mann, probably the most famous German writer of the 20th century moves the through German history of the 20th century conjuring stories from what he sees around him, he is The Magician.

Each story belongs to a particular time and place in the life of a German man trying to survive history be it the mercantile family of ‘Buddenbrooks��, the young man exploring his own sexuality in a pre-war Europe that is not ready to embrace the openness of his children’s generation in ‘Death in Venice�� or the strangeness of living as an exile in the US to save yourself from the Nazis in ‘Doctor Faustus.�� (I have to confess I don’t find Mann easy to read - it felt like a lifetime had passed reading Buddenbrooks).

Mann’s extraordinary and very flawed family range back and forth across continents immersed in the convulsions of the world in the 20th century. One is a minor Nazi but mostly they are left-wing, activist, creative, clever but all of them struggle to live happily in some way with only Mann himself surviving almost unscathed, his only steps out of “respectability�� being his fevered imaginings of couplings with beautiful young men, most of which he doesn’t act upon in real life.

This is not Tóibín’s at his very best, at times the story seems to drag a bit (like life?) and then terrible things happen off stage, the family is sad and then goes back to squabbling and/or ignoring each other with Mann simply sitting in his study hoping to will all blow over. I think that was the way that generation of men and women handled most things.

In that sense, this is a story of how family life goes on in rather mundane ways while unimaginable horror rages elsewhere.

Lizixer is currently reading 'The Magician'

Sat, 24 May 2025 08:00:50 -0700

Lizixer is currently reading The Magician by Colm Tóibín

Lizixer added 'Vanished City: London’s Lost Neighbourhoods'

Fri, 23 May 2025 01:13:01 -0700

Lizixer gave 4 stars to Vanished City: London’s Lost Neighbourhoods (Paperback) by Tom Bolton
bookshelves: books-about-london, books-of-2025
A fascinating little book about parts of London that have disappeared under development and “improvement��. Bolton teases out odd, surprising, interesting facts about parts of London that are now often featureless modern buildings using records from the time and literature set in these lost neighbourhoods.

An excellent addition to any London Lover’s library

Lizixer added 'Jane Austen At Home'

Sun, 18 May 2025 05:34:02 -0700

Lizixer gave 4 stars to Jane Austen At Home (Paperback) by Lucy Worsley
If there’s one novelist that best exemplifies the writing advice “Write what you know�� it is Jane Austen. In Lucy Worsley’s highly readable, well-researched biography, she sets out what Austen knew in detail and how it shaped her writing.

Austen knew financial precariousness; disappointment and grief; she understood what it felt like to be considered a burden; she experienced deep female friendship and sisterly love but also the cold heartedness of families and a distant relationship with a mother who paid her little regard. She knew what it was to be a poor relation in a rich household; to be forced to move due to lack of money; she often lived in cold, damp conditions with little space. She observed how women were worn out by childbirth but equally worn down by being unmarried. She demonstrated how what is “trivial�� is in fact very important and often for women the only way they can assert themselves.

She met odd people, rude people, kind people and pompous people. She mixed in military circles and also briefly what it was to become famous. She also observed infamous behaviour with a critical eye and had firm views on duty, stoicism, and resilience. All delivered with a side helping of wit that is razor sharp.

That’s a lot to know for the highly mythologised, inaccurate view of little (she was tall) Aunt Jane, scribbling her little novels away whilst remaining sweet, virtuous and uncomplaining until her sad and untimely death. The Victorians have a lot to answer for and the “little Jane at her tiny writing desk writing about romance�� is just another thing that modern biographers have begun to demolish.

Unlike her heroines, she never found a Darcy, or a Knightly. We can, according to Worsley, be grateful for this as she gave us her novels, a way in for a younger generation of women to write and find fame and a new way for women to view their prospects in the world.

Worsley’s regard for raising up things that are considered women’s concerns and making us take them as seriously as a way into Georgian society as the Napoleonic Wars, Slavery or Revolutionary fervour is refreshing.

It’s also not entirely fair to suggest that these things don’t appear: war and the military appear in the background of novels all the time in the form of the young soldiers in the streets of Hampshire, naval officers and even explicit mention of slavery. Yet Austen is firm in her belief that you should not attempt to write beyond what you are sure of. If you don’t know what it’s like to live on a ship as a naval wife, don’t try to write it; if you’ve never been to Ireland don’t follow your characters there but let them exit stage left.

I’m a late convert to Austen and like a lot of converts I’m quite enthusiastic in my praise for her work now, after being quite dismissive, essentially falling for the Victorian Aunt Jane myth. Worsley’s book helps to contextualise the books, to tease out the hidden depths and sweep away the myths.