December 2011 books

Let's start with Sarah Wheeler's biography of Cherry - a life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard. This is a stunning book that fills in a lot of gaps in his own book of The Worst Journey. Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower: a voyage to war is an excellent account of the voyage across the Atlantic to New Plymouth, the founding of the settlement, relations with the Indian tribes there and how things went awry. Gripping. The last Non-Fiction I read this month was Harriet Anne Jacobs' Incidents in the life of a slave. It took her a long time to escape to freedom and is filled with her fear of recapture.

Historical fiction this month includes Edward Marston's The Repentant Rake, a murder set in Restoration London and two set in early white Australia by Kate Grenville: The Secret River and The Lieutenant. Both books explore the relations between Aborigines and the convict settlers, a consideration of Australia that is too often ignored.

I enjoyed reading Joanne Harris's Blackberry Juice concerning the relationship between a young boy and an old man and how the latter influenced the former. Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicles is an extraordinary book. It's long, but the trouble is that once you've got beyond page two, you don't want to put it down, much to the irritation of your other half. And what happened during World War II keeps on coming back and being mirrored in the present.

Ken McClure's Pestilence was the only sci-fi I read this month. I did enjoy it, even though this is not my favourite genre.In the thriller/murder-mystery line I read a few. Alex O'Connell's Lost in Shadows is about gruesome gangland murders. Darcia Helle's Enemies and Playmates is both a romance and a murder-mystery as is Eve Gaddy's Too close for comfort. Tess Gerritsen's Freaks was my final murder of the month. They were all pretty well written and definitely enjoyable. I don't think it was obvious who the killer was in any of them, so the author's did their job well.

I always tell myself to leave the romances to one side, but each month I fail. They are all easy reads and most are page-turners, as well. So that explains why I tend to read them: light relief, I suppose. So to start with there was Lisa Mondello's  All I want for Christmas ... is you. Then Maureen Child's entertaining Wedding at King's convenience. Ruth Ann Nordin's A Chance in Time is a rather good romance set in the wild west before the 1848 Gold Rush. Linda S Clare's The Fence my Father built is pretty good. There is a really wierd family involved and war with a greedy landowner.