Books, Hobby and Lone Woman in January

 

This year I’ve picked books from my shelf to read mostly according to the prompts provided by The 52 Book Club – 2023 Reading Challenge. I know I can’t read 52 books a year so I skip some unfavorable prompts. 

 

# 1 A book with a subtitle

The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things

Author: Paula Byrne

Genre: Biography

Rating: five stars

* First sentence: This is a watercolour of Lyme Regis on the southern coast of England.

* One sentence comment: This is the most detailed and intimate account of my favorite classic writer, Jane Austen.

It was this prompt that gave me the urge to read this non-fiction I meant to read for some time. I bought this book for a while, but among fantastic looking fictions, this book with a quiet looking cover had been put off for perhaps a year. However, this year I made it my first book to read, and it is a real treat for a new year. Through the objects of Jane Austen’s time, I got close to the daily life, joy and plight of my favorite classic writer. I have read a few biographies about Jane Auten, but never had a book given me such vivid accounts about her romance, friendship and travels, especially her linkage to the West Indies.  

 Against my previous knowledge, Jane Austen actually had quite a few suitors, and one of the proposals was accepted but turned down overnight. The real Austen chose love over heritage just like her heroines in her novels. Austen had a few close friends with whom she corresponded with letters. They became important sources for us to understand her life and thoughts. We know she was playful but stern in her principles. Her experiences with Prince Regent was extraordianry. Reading it put a smile on my face because I was reminded what was written in a previous book I read, about a sycophant to the Prince. I am looking forwards to reading on the book series, A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery.

 The book made me fantasize to visit all the places Austen had stayed, such as Bath, Chawton, and Brighton.

 #2   Featuring an inheritance

The Dutch House

Author: Ann Patchett

Genre: Novel

Rating: two stars

The characters are all too dramatic and unrealistic. The father was too stupid, the mother was too saint like and the stepmother, too ruthless. The plot is boring and the reason why I continued to the end was I wanted to find the ending. After I read it I thought perhaps there was a point in the story.

 #3 Title starting with the letter “G”

Giving Up the Ghost

Author: Hilary Mantel

Genre: Memoir

Rating: four stars

First sentence: It is a Saturday, late July 2000; we are in Reepham, Norfork, at Owl Cottage.

One sentence comment: Mantel’s prose is full of wonders.

 Hilary Mantel was a modern legend that had won the Booker Prize twice in a row. I have read a couple of book reviews written by her and was affected by her prose. More surprisingly, I got to know she’d suffered from chronic illness since her teenage years from her memoir. Endometriosis came back at her mid age, and she described how she had felt as well as how she had seen herself, “My skin turned gray and my weight began to fall so that one day when I saw myself sideways through a mirror, I shocked myself: I looked like one of those beaten dogs that the RSPCA used to photograph, with bones sticking through the hide.”

Near the end of the book, she wrote, “everything about me - my physiology, my psychology, feels constantly under assault: I am a shabby old building in an area of heavy shelling, which the inhabitants have vacated years ago.” I think her words about writing have revealed the innermost longing of many writers, “I feel that every morning it is necessary to write myself into being…. When you have committed enough words to paper you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind.”

 

I couldn’t help wondering what if the ill fate happened to me, and I was touched by her words: “We were taught to be thankful that, whatever is in store for us, it wasn’t crucifixion: unless you were a missionary or really unlucky.”

 

 Fun with the Bookish Pictionary for Once upon a Bookish Club

The author's first memory was her mother walking backwards to take a picture.😛

“I don’t understand why she goes backward, back and aslant, tracking to one side. The tree overhead make a noise of urgent conversation, to quick to catch; the leaves part, the sky moves, the sun peers down at me.”

 

My hobby: making cake

On the 22th of January, it happened to be the Lunar New Year, so we played a game after the church service. I also made a chocolate cake the day before. I seldom made a chocolate cake, and this time I couldn’t get confectioners' sugar in the supermarket to make Creamy Chocolate Frosting. I decided to bake the chocolate frosting; otherwise we would have tasted the sugar’s granular texture. The base was baked for too long; therefore, it tasted a bit hard.

 

A Lone Woman at the Convenience Store

It was a late afternoon on the second day of the Lunar New Year. I went into a convenience store to withdraw some money. Then I strolled to the shelf for food to look for a dinner box. I saw a woman squatting by the shelf, holding a cup of hot soup, supposedly having just bought it from the store. At first I thought she was an old tramp, but when she started to talk to me, I found that she was too well dressed to be a tramp. She recommended me to buy a curry, which she considered very tasty and she often bought it since she just lived in the building next to the store. I told her that I often had curry and today I hoped to buy something I rarely had. I know the building she mentioned is an expensive complex, so I realized that the reason she was squatting there was to look for a chance to talk to someone like me, who looked for one-person food during New Year so that she could converse with another lone woman.