The gift note tucked inside the cover of this book tells me that Charlotte bought this for me in 2012 during my law exams, bless her. My exams finished, I subsequently became distracted by things that did not involve having to look at words on pieces of paper. It happens. Three years down the line and I really wish I'd read this sooner. Sorry Charlotte.
Plot summary: Barbara Bunde is in a bind. Times are harsh, and Barbara's bank account has seen better days. Maybe she could sell a novel ... if she knew any stories. Stumped for ideas, Barbara draws inspiration from her fellow residents of Silverstream, the little English village she knows inside and out.
To her surprise, the novel is a smash. It's a good thing she wrote under a pseudonym, because the folks of Silverstream are in an uproar. But what really turns Miss Bunde's world around is this: what happens to the characters in her book starts happening to their real-life counterparts. Does life really imitate art?
Dorothy Emily Stevenson (later Peploe) was a Scottish author in the 1930s and 1940s. She wrote a lot (40+) of light, romantic novels, in the good old days where nobody had sex and marriage proposals were conducted with a cup of tea in front of the fire. Miss Buncle's Book follows suit, although it seems to be her most famous work. This book is just lovely - it made me want to snuggle down into an armchair and drift into the world of Silverstream.
Or Copperfield, as the little village is described in Miss Buncle's new book. A little short of cash (and flatly refusing to have anything to do with keeping chickens), Miss Buncle decides to earn some money the only way she can - by writing a book. By her own admission she is slightly devoid of imagination, so she writes about the only thing she knows - the inhabitants of the village around her.
Miss Buncle's Book charts the release of her book and the desperation of the villagers to uncover just who is responsible for that 'despicable piece of trash.'
It's just so nice. Even the characters who are slated in her book aren't really nasty - they just receive a gentle nudge in the right direction. Not that they see it that way, of course. However, it's also quite clever in a subtle, satirical way. Miss Buncle is naive, but Dorothy Stevenson was most certainly not. Her observations are framed in such a way that will make readers smirk, even while Miss Buncle is chatting quite unknowingly to the two young lesbians next door.
On that note, it's quite a forward-thinking book. There are lesbians (in trousers!) and a man and a lady are friends. It makes the book cute and lovely, but at the same time it doesn't feel horrendously outdated. Now I think about it, it could have been set this year and it wouldn't have seemed any different.
I've now added a good four books of Ms Stevenson's to my wishlist, including the sequel to this book, Miss Buncle Married. From this book alone, I would read everything she has ever written, although admittedly it may take me a while. I do wonder why less than ten of them are back in print, but I'll worry about that when I've exhausted the accessible novels.
In short, I really do recommend Miss Buncle's Book for a charming, witty novel that gently pokes fun at village life.
I bought this off the back of Ready Player One, which I loved and I've been trying desperately to find something similar ever since. I haven't quite managed but I have found some really interesting books along the way. Redshirts is one of them and definitely one of the best - I completely fell in love with its geeky sci-fi tone and little nods to pop culture.
Plot summary:
Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It's a prestige posting, and Andrew is even more delighted when he's assigned to the ship's Xenobiology laboratory. Life couldn't be better ... although there are a few strange things going on:
(1) every Away Mission involves a lethal confrontation with alien forces
(2) the ship's captain, the chief science officer, and the handsome Lieutenant Kerensky always survive these encounters
(3) at least one low-ranked crew member is, sadly, always killed.
Suddenly it's less surprising how much energy is expended below decks on avoiding, at all costs, being assigned an Away Mission. Andrew's fate may have been sealed ... until he stumbles on a piece of information that changes everything ... and offers him and his fellow redshirts a crazy, high-risk chance to save their own lives ...
So I'm going to sit here with my blue hair, my large black glasses and my 50s dress and cringe a little as I talk about how 'totally meta' this book is. Apparently I've morphed into a fully-fledged hipster and I now loathe myself a little bit. Still, there's no getting around it - Redshirts is meta, I do love it and I am going to talk about it.
I love books like this. The Thursday Next books, Between the Lines... books where you're involved in the storytelling or where the creation of the book is part of the whole plot. I was instantly, totally and absolutely hooked about three pages in.
Essentially, it's a sort-of-but-not-really parody of Star Trek and those other futuristic sci-fi shows, where dramatic events continuously unfold but every episode is always self-contained. There are four people, main characters, who always survive, possibly injured, but they recover ridiculously quickly and then there are the redshirts. The expendable crew members, a few of whom die every episode just to point out to you how dangerous the mission is. Redshirts is their story.
Let me just say first of all that you don't need to have seen Star Trek to love this book. You only need to know what I've just said - that the main characters always survive and and someone expendable always dies. Oh, and there's usually some dubious science kicking about as well. It's self-explanatory and I assure you it it's hardly a difficult concept anyway.
As befits the genre it's parodying, it does sometimes take a second or two to work out the 'science.' I mean, the writers of Star Trek didn't exactly put a lot of effort into making their sci-fi logical or rational (and it was fine, it worked regardless) so a similar style has been recreated here. Either that or I'm giving John Scalzi too much credit and his knowledge of physics is just rubbish!
I admit that it lost me a little bit when I reached the epilogues. Well, they're called 'codas,' but they're essentially epilogues. Which I hate. I have incredibly mixed feelings about these chapters. First, I accepted their existence as they do sort of add something new to the story, although I wasn't sure if they quite fit the theme. Then I basically turned into Hanna Hulk because one of them is written in the second person and this infuriates me. Then the last one is quite deep, quite philosophical and I really enjoyed it and started wondering if maybe I just hated them on principle? Confusing.
Redshirts is so much more than a parody. It's funny, clever, occasionally philosophical and really made me care about characters I expected to be two-dimensional and flat. I loved this book an awful lot more than I expected to, and I can't recommend it highly enough, regardless of whether you've ever seen a Star Trek episode in your life.
Read Katie's review of Redshirts at Katie Who Can Read.
Ahh Attachments. This is almost infamous now, for its creepy-in-a-not-creepy-way premise and lovely, witty e-mails. So naturally I only got round to reading it when everybody else has moved on to Eleanor & Park and Fangirl. Ah well, such is life. Anyway, Attachments is a wonderful book that I read pretty much in one sitting as I just couldn't bear to put it down.
Plot summary: It's 1999 and for the staff of one newspaper office, the internet is still a novelty. By day, two young women, Beth and Jennifer, spend their hours emailing each other, discussing in hilarious detail every aspect of their lives, from love troubles to family dramas. And by night, Lincoln, a shy, lonely IT guy spends his hours reading every exchange. At first their emails offer a welcome diversion, but as Lincoln unwittingly becomes drawn into their lives, the more he reads, the more he finds himself falling for one of them. By the time Lincoln realizes just how head-over-heels he really is, it's way too late to introduce himself. What would he say to her? 'Hi, I'm the guy who reads your e-mails - and also, I think I love you'. After a series of close encounters, Lincoln decides it's time to muster the courage to follow his heart and find out whether there really is such a thing as love before first-sight.
In case you didn't bother to read the above (I'm a big girl, I can handle your rejection), Lincoln's job is to read employees' e-mail. He keeps noticing certain amusing conversations between Beth and Jennifer and eventually falls in love with a woman he knows only through her e-mail. It's almost epistolary as it's told primarily through the women's inboxes, although it does switch over in Lincoln in standard narrative form.
This is the kind of book you just want to hug. It's really fun and light-hearted, just... happy-making, if that's a word. You close the book and feel like all is well with the world. For me, I think I liked the book so much because it felt real. This is a situation that could actually happen, and that's rare in chick-lit. There's no beautiful, quirky women setting up a cupcake shop that is successful over-night, no fairy godmother and no stereotypically gay best friend. It could happen and that's awesome.
Obviously the premise probably should seem a little bit creepy, but it doesn't at all. I think it works because Beth is a tiny bit creepy herself - she does basically follow him around in a completely stalkerish way. Saying that, who hasn't positioned themselves in a certain spot just before a particular gentleman walks by, or done something else vaguely creepy for love? Neither of their behaviour is beyond the realms of possibility. Either that, or I'm the only one and I've just outed myself as a crazy loser.
Lincoln doesn't sit there wanking over their e-mails; the focus is actually more on his life and he even goes so far as to acknowledge that stalking them would be inappropriate and weird. So shame on you Beth!
The ending is a little rushed and twee; it's the only part that feels like a chick-lit novel. It didn't annoy me on a grand scale as I was too high on happy fumes from the rest of the book, but it could have been better. I just couldn't put this down. I wanted to be reading it every single second that I could - it's a rare gem that can be this funny, but also this unique and this easy to relate to.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance (and that's the one and only time I'm typing that title out) is actually about, although it seems like it should be obvious. While it is about a lonely Mormon girl trying to find a partner, it's also about weight loss, religion, self image, sisters, careers and a whole lot more besides. Elna Baker is a great, funny author and I will definitely be reading anything else she decides to write.
Plot summary: It's lonely being a Mormon in New York City. Every year, Elna Baker attends the New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance - a virgin in a room full of thirty-year-old virgins doing the Funky Chicken. And once again, Elna is alone at the punch bowl, stocking up on Oreos, exactly where you'd expect to find a single Mormon who's also a Big Girl. But loneliness is nothing compared to what Elna feels when she loses eighty pounds, finds herself suddenly beautiful... and in love with an atheist.
I didn't know a whole lot about Mormonism before I read this book, but then I didn't realise that I didn't know until I read it, if that makes any sense. Elna Baker manages to present her religion in an explanatory way, that manages to be neither condescending nor judgemental and I now feel much more informed than I did before. Mormonism states that you must marry another Mormon before you can get to the highest level of Heaven - with that kind of pressure, it's no wonder Ms Baker couldn't settle for an athiest.
Still, don't think for a second that this book is just a lengthy religious lecture as the best thing about The NYRMSHD is Elna's voice. She actually sounds like a real person, which can be rare in memoir-esque books like this one. I'm not convinced the veracity of some of the events themselves, but that's fine - it's not like it's a signed witness statement, and a little exaggeration is par for the course.
I actually laughed out loud at certain chapters and just didn't want them to end. My favourite is the outline of her time working in the doll department at FAO Schwarz.
The display baby was on display for a reason. It could not be sold. Something terrible happened in the factory on the day of its birth because the doll's fingers were not like the other babies [sic]. They had been molded together - making it look like it had flippers instead of hands. As if that weren't bad enough, it had curly red Chuckie hair and scary green eyes, and it's head weighed at least five pounds more than all the other babies' heads. As a result, when you lifted the baby, its head would automatically flop back, and its little flippers would flip up - making him look like a tabloid monster baby.
Which is how the doll earned its nickname: Nubbins. And because Nubbins was for display purposes only, he didn't have an incubator like the other babies. Instead, he was kept in a cupboard. This was especially disturbing because Nubbins had a knack for looking dead. So when you opened the cupboard you'd find him slumped over onto his enormous head with his arms flopped behind him, like he died in Downward-Facing Dog.
However, as is often the case in this genre of book, it did lose its way towards the end. It seems to be A Thing though - frequently the funniest memoirs will be repetetive and bland by the end, and The NYRMSHD is no exception. The last few chapters are the weakest when they should be the strongest, as they're the parts people remember when they're thinking back on the book as a whole (or writing a review!). Instead they were very self-pitying and, frankly, kind of boring.
On the whole, I really did enjoy this book. There were some incredibly funny parts and Elna Baker has a wonderful 'voice' that makes me positive I'd love her in real life. Unfortunately, the chapters at the very end felt like they'd been tacked on to make up numbers as they didn't really 'gel' with the rest and came across as rather self-pitying.
