I finished Eva Horung's The Minstrels last night. It had potential, but I found it melodramatic and emotionally manipulative. Not my kind of book - it won't stay with me, and I'll forget I ever picked it up. I like a book that haunts you.
This morning I was chatting with students during my cover lesson. They were reading 1984 for English, so I talked with some of the boys about censorship, surveillance and the meaning of the term “Orwellian” - and how there are scenes in that novel I'd never forget, even though I'd never read it again. Another girl was reading The Doctor of Hiroshima, so I recommended John Hersey’s Hiroshima — a short but important piece of journalism published soon after the bombing. I remembered reading Burnt Shadows, with the haunting image of the black cranes from the kimono burned into Hiroko’s skin, but little else about the novel.
Sometimes I like to go to AI to discuss books — my own personal (and occasionally overly agreeable) book club companion. We talked about the kinds of writing and novels I have loved across my life, trying to understand why they stayed with me. It came up with some interesting observations about the patterns in the books I return to.
In 'Never Let Me Go' the bags on the fence represent how the clones are trapped by fate - and are disposable vessels to carry human organs. To this day, when I see anything caught on a fence, like this seaweed, I think of that book.
I love restrained writing, where every sentence feels necessary and every insight is earned rather than announced. This is what draws me to books like D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and later, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and All the Pretty Horses. I want to be trusted as a reader. I don’t want to be told exactly how a character feels; I want to understand emotion through what is left unsaid — through action, memory, silence and circumstance.
I am drawn to writing that is precise, restrained and deeply observant, where every sentence feels deliberate and every insight into human nature feels earned. This is why I love novels such as The Life and Times of Michael K and Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
I also seem to love an acute awareness of how people are shaped by the times they inherit — how history presses itself into ordinary lives. Perhaps that is why I am drawn to books like Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Louis de Bernières’ Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française. It is also why I return to war literature: Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way, and Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown.
Chatty suggests these features are my jam:
The books that haunt me are often carried by a single image: the burnt cranes on Hiroko’s skin in Burnt Shadows; Pelagia waiting on the steps as the war ends in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin; the father and son walking along the ash-covered road in The Road; the helmet caught between rocks as the river guide drowns in The Narrow Road to the Deep North; the bags hanging on the fence at the stranded boat site in Never Let Me Go; the sacrifice at the altar of the tree in To a God Unknown, the blood offered as a gift while storm clouds gather.
Images that wrap wire around your heart and lungs and draw tight.
Perhaps that is also why these ballads stay with me — two songs by the extraordinary English folk musician Richard Thompson.
Oh, the last I heard she's sleeping rough
Back on the Derby beat
White Horse in her hip pocket
And a wolfhound at her feet
And they say she even married once
A man named Romany Brown
But even a gypsy caravan Was too much settling down
And they say her flower is faded now
Hard weather and hard booze
This song is about freedom, and the cost of it - the subject's wildness and independence are beautiful, but ultimately heartbreaking. There's compassion for her, and how she lives outside society's expectations - like many of the books I love. The tragedy is in how living outside social expectations can come at great cost. The bittersweet nostaglia in this poem of a song is heart wrenching, but you can't help admire her for living on her own terms. 'But maybe that's just the price you pay For the chains you refuse' is a stunning lyric well delivered.
I know all the words for this off by heart and still recall the first time Dad played it for me, and the look on his face as he watched me respond to the lyrics. Dad'd always hold you hostage when he liked a song -you had to listen, without talking, absorbing the music, the lyrics, the feel of the song.
"Come down Red Molly, " called Sargent McQuade
"For they've taken young James Aidee for Armed Robbery
Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside
Oh, come down, Red Molly, to his dying bedside"
I haven't listened to it for a long time because it's a song that requires you to listen exactly like that - attentive, absorbed. It's a mini tragedy and a love story, about mortality and love, passion the fleeting nature of life. I dare you not to cry.
The quiet longing in this song gets me every time - it's my favourite Townes Van Zandt song along with 'Lungs'.
Well, if I needed you, would you come to me?
Would you come to me and ease my pain?
If you needed me, I would come to you
I would swim the seas for to ease your pain
There's such quiet, forlorn longing in this song - a deep ache, a timelessness. It's not grand, and it's quite ordinary - like the best novels, there's such sharp human emotion in it without overstating. Something tightens in my heart when I hear it.
When I asked Chatty to recommend me some books based on my choices, here's what they recommended. It took a while - it was recommending books I'd already read, so had to keep revising my list.
| Books I've Read | ChatGPT Suggestions |
|---|---|
| The Rainbow — D.H. Lawrence | Gilead — Marilynne Robinson |
| For Whom the Bell Tolls — Ernest Hemingway | A Month in the Country — J.L. Carr |
| The Road — Cormac McCarthy | Austerlitz — W.G. Sebald |
| All the Pretty Horses — Cormac McCarthy | Life and Fate — Vasily Grossman |
| Life and Times of Michael K — J.M. Coetzee | The Blue Flower — Penelope Fitzgerald |
| Waiting for the Barbarians — J.M. Coetzee | Maps for Lost Lovers — Nadeem Aslam |
| Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro | Kristin Lavransdatter — Sigrid Undset |
| The Narrow Road to the Deep North — Richard Flanagan | Outer Dark — Cormac McCarthy |
| Captain Corelli’s Mandolin — Louis de Bernières | The Emigrants — W.G. Sebald |
| Suite Française — Irène Némirovsky | Independent People — Halldór Laxness |
| Regeneration trilogy — Pat Barker | The Wall — Marlen Haushofer |
| A Long Long Way — Sebastian Barry | The Rings of Saturn — W.G. Sebald |
| To a God Unknown — John Steinbeck | The Death of Ivan Ilyich — Leo Tolstoy |
| Burnt Shadows — Kamila Shamsie | The Book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa |
| The Things They Carried — Tim O’Brien | The Solitude of Prime Numbers — Paolo Giordano |
| Atonement — Ian McEwan | The Yellow Birds — Kevin Powers |
| Station Eleven — Emily St. John Mandel | The Return — Hisham Matar |
| Leave the World Behind — Rumaan Alam | The Siege — Helen Dunmore |
| The Unbearable Lightness of Being — Milan Kundera | A Fine Balance — Rohinton Mistry |
| The Book of Laughter and Forgetting — Milan Kundera | The Sense of an Ending — Julian Barnes |
With Love,