Good Material

Hi Bookworms, I hope you’re doing well. You might wonder why I still have a winter header up above. Well we still have some snowflakes here and there so I will keep it up for a while longer. It’s been a busy week of doing taxes (ugh) and swapping out my old laptop for a new one and having things transferred over. Wow it’s been over a decade. This new one is shiny and clean, which I’ll try to maintain. The photo is from one of our walks near here, where we take the dogs up a hill and this was coming back down. The fields give me some solace.

And since it was another brutal news week, my husband and I started and finished another 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle. This one called Greetings From Canada is a bit similar to the last one we did in that it spotlights the various Canadian provinces and what they’re about. It’s put out by Cobble Hill puzzle Co. for those interested. I was a bit blown away that Rachel at the blog Waves of Fiction actually found and did our last puzzle. She probably did it in her sleep as she seems a master “dissectologist” (puzzle aficionado). I had to look that word up, which seems a strange fit, don’t you think?

Lately at night we’ve been watching The White Lotus Season 3 set in Thailand. It’s pretty frivolous but all right for an escape. We finished the thriller series Prime Target starring British actor Leo Woodall as a mathematician who’s on the run from those trying to stop his work with prime numbers, which was okay. And we’ve been watching the series Pachinko, which has a dual timeline and is a pretty good drama, set in Asia during the ’30s and ’40s, and in New York in current times. I liked the 2017 book and still await Min Jin Lee’s next novel. 

Meanwhile, last week after I highlighted the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, Carmen reminded me of some other big literary prizes going on that look good and have their shortlists coming out in April. For translated lit fans, there’s the International Booker, which will announce its shortlist April 8. I’m trying to read more translated foreign fiction this year, so I’m eyeing this longlist (above). I only know about the novel Hunchback by Japanese author Saou Ichikawa so far, but I will look into the other books more. Apparently several on the list are very short books, for example Hunchback is just 112 pages. So here’s our chance to sample some shorter works of translated lit. 

Also similar to the Women’s Prize, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction celebrates the excellence in women authors from Canada and the U.S. and will announce its shortlist on April 3. There’s several novels I recognize on the longlist (above), including All Fours, Creation Lake, Liars, Bear, and River East, River West. I’ve only read River, East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure, which is a good coming-of-age debut set mostly in Shanghai, but I still need to check out some of the others.

Next up is the Walter Scott Prize, which honors achievements in historical fiction and has its shortlist coming out April 15. I’ve read two on the longlist (above) so far — The Safekeep and Clear, which were both quite good. I might try to get to Kevin Barry’s novel The Heart in Winter which apparently is a rip-roaring western set in Butte, Montana. I’ve been reading quite a bit of historical fiction lately, but I don’t know of some of the ones listed here. Do you? 

And lastly I would be remiss not to mention the Stella Prize, which celebrates Australian women writers and will announce its shortlist on April 8. I’m a newbie to this award now in its 13th year, but I like Aussie writers and look forward to trying a couple of these on the longlist. Apparently the longlist includes seven fiction, four nonfiction and one poetry collection. They mix the prize’s nominees of various formats together. Hmm … which must be tough a bit to judge. I’ve been eyeing The Burrow novel (above) with the rabbit on the cover.

So there you have it — enough book prize lists for a while. I’ll be keen to see which books make the shortlists when they come out next month. And now I’ll leave you with a review of what I finished lately.

Good Material by Dolly Alderton / Knopf / 336 pages / 2024

3.75 stars. This light-ish relationship kind of novel, which surprisingly made the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2024 list, is about a British couple that has recently broken up. Andy, a 35-year-old comedian, is having a terrible time coming to grips with why his girlfriend Jen broke up with him and especially right after they came home from a vacation in Greece. They had been together for over three and a half years and lived together, but Jen seems to have had enough of Andy and said she’d rather be alone. So poor Andy around and around he goes wallowing in the heartbreak and trying to figure it out for six months or so. 

It’s put him into a sad sap frame of mind and he starts drinking during the day and his comedy career hits the skids. He’s in a bad way, obsessing about Jen. But luckily there are some light amusing moments along the way … his attempts to live on a small leaky house boat and later with an odd 78-year-old roommate who corresponds with Julian Assange, oh my. Then Andy runs into Jen on a date with a man named Seb, and he starts seeing a 20-something model-ish woman named Sophie. But can the two really move on from one another? 

You have to wait to near the end to see what becomes of Jen and Andy, but the story’s narration changes hands from Andy to Jen near the end. Both characters are narrated well by actors Arthur Darvill and Vanessa Kirby for the audio, which I listened to driving back and forth from the city. All and all, I thought it was entertaining and heart-affirming despite the sad sack of both Andy and Jen who spy on one another after they’ve broken up. I didn’t get Jen’s side of the story as well as I did Andy’s … who came off more appealing to me. 

I’m new to British writer Dolly Alderton who’s a newspaper columnist in the U.K. and has also written a popular memoir, but she writes with such ease in a conversational and often witty way. Though I wondered at times if Andy’s narration seemed authentically how a guy would react to things along the way, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. And I look forward to seeing what Alderton writes next. 

I was going to add another review, but I’ll post it next time as this has gone on long enough. So that’s all for now, what about you — have you read any of the books pictured above and if so, what did you think?