Tag: USA

Four Days in Philly

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Philadelphia skyline

In another foray into the drafts folder, I decided it was time to finally post about my trip to Philadelphia just before Christmas. Better late than never, hmm? It was a business trip, as most of my travelling is at the moment, and it was a welcome opportunity to broaden my American horizons beyond New York and Disney World in Florida. Fortunately I enjoyed splendid weather during my stay: very mild, with gorgeous sunshine, which allowed for a lot of walking on the days when I didn’t have meetings. Philadelphia is not the most pedestrian-friendly place in the world, with its main sights rather scattered across the town, but I thought I’d share just a few of the things that really made an impression.

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The Last Days of Summer (2016): Vanessa Ronan

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★★★★

And now for something completely different. This book arrived in the post a few weeks ago, unsolicited and unheralded, and I was a little perplexed at first because it’s so very unlike anything that I normally read. On the other hand, I am not the kind of girl to turn down a free book and so I dutifully plunged in. It has been a strange experience. Lyrical but not poetic, violent yet gentle, it’s the kind of book you can’t quite shake off. Its mood clings to you like the scent of the diner in its pages, or like the thick, draining heat that blankets the Texan prairie on which the story unfolds.

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Dragonwyck (1944): Anya Seton

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Does anyone know of a better photo of Anya Seton than this showing her on her wedding day?

★★★

It’s about time I read Dragonwyck: I bought it at last year’s village fete and we’ve just, last Saturday, had this year’s fete. Of course it initially caught my eye for its rather hideous 1970s cover, but then I realised that it was by Anya Seton, who wrote Katherine, which I’d read and enjoyed, and so I thought I’d give it a go. Now, I’ll be frank and admit that I didn’t enjoy this as much as Katherine, and in fact found the heroine a bit of a wimp, but it was still fun to read as an undemanding piece of Gothic sensationalism. Moreover, I’ve hardly read any historical fiction set in America (beyond Gone with the Wind) and so Dragonwyck went some way towards filling that gap.

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Frog Music (2014): Emma Donoghue

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★★★★

Having enjoyed Slammerkin so much, I was very much looking forward to Emma Donoghue’s new book (all the more so because I’m currently stranded halfway through her Sealed Letter, which I had to give back to the library). Once again the novel is inspired by one of those wonderful pieces of ‘found’ history that she keeps turning up, plucked from the newspapers and scandal-sheets of history, and once again it’s a masterful piece of storytelling: more so, I would say, than Slammerkin in that it manages to keep you absolutely riveted all the way through. It’s a murder mystery where not only the murderer and motive but also the intended victim are uncertain, and you don’t get the full picture until the very final pages, by which point you feel thoroughly immersed in Donoghue’s seedy fin-de-siècle world.

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American Pastoral (1997): Philip Roth

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★★★★

Before American Pastoral, I’d never read any Philip Roth.  I’d only really heard about him through reviews of Everyman, which sounded so completely depressing and pessimistic that I was entirely put off.  However, since I’ve just joined a book club (very exciting!) and this was the first book to be read, I took a deep breath and jumped in.  And I enjoyed it far, far more than I expected to.

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