my favourite books – Page 17

Alex and Me by Irene M. Pepperberg

I love birds, and science, and books, so how could I not love a book about a talking bird, written by the scientist who raised him? Alex and Me is a touching, funny account of a scientist who trained an African Grey parrot to talk, in order to gather information about bird cognition and language. Alex learned how to label colours, materials and objects, knew ‘same’ versus ‘different’, was able to construct original phrases from words he’d been taught, could count to six and possibly add numbers, and even taught himself to segment words into phonemes, after being taught how to link English speech sounds to plastic letters. He played jokes on his trainers, loved to dance and be tickled, and said ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Calm down’ during tense situations after watching people in the lab use these phrases. The book is full of entertaining Alex anecdotes – for example, he once ordered a toy parrot, ‘You tickle!’ and then, when the toy failed to respond, said, ‘You turkey!’ and stalked off in a huff. When recuperating at the vet’s after an operation, he wanted to talk to everyone he saw, including the accountant who was working late one night:

“‘You want a nut?’ Alex asked her.
‘No, Alex.’
He persisted. ‘You want corn?’
‘No, thank you, Alex, I don’t want corn.’
This went on for a little while, and the accountant did her best to ignore him. Finally Alex became exasperated and said in a petulant voice, ‘Well, what do you want?’ The accountant cracked up laughing and gave Alex the attention he was demanding.”

I must admit that Dr Pepperberg is not the world’s greatest writer, and this book would have benefitted from further editing. I really didn’t need to know the details of the author’s childhood or her early studies, for example, and I would have liked more information about how Alex produced human-like sounds when he didn’t have lips or teeth. I’d also have loved some photos of Alex (although I later found a film clip of him in action). Another issue, barely alluded to in the book, is how captivity affected Alex’s life. His beak, claws and wings were clipped when he was young, and he never had the chance to fly, to sit in a tree or to mate with another parrot. Dr Pepperberg had difficulties securing permanent research funding, and the constant moves around the country made Alex so stressed that at times, he pulled his own feathers out. I’d like to think that a similar research project nowadays would show greater concern for the bird’s welfare, although it’s clear from the book that Dr Pepperberg and Alex had a strong, affectionate bond and that she was devastated by his relatively early death at the age of thirty-one.

One thing that surprised me was how resistant many scientists were to Dr Pepperberg’s theories (and evidence) about animal cognition and language, with many refusing to accept that animals could actually use ‘language’. Some continue to believe that Alex was merely repeating the sounds he heard without any understanding of their meaning, and that his intelligent behaviour was simply a ‘Clever Hans’ effect, with Alex responding to cues from his handlers during testing. This seems highly unlikely to me – the research was carefully planned to control for the ‘Clever Hans’ effect by using multiple trainers and testers. Anyway, Alex repeatedly demonstrated complex, novel, situation-specific behaviours that could not have been prompted by his handlers. But perhaps some scientists feel threatened by the notion that animals other than themselves are capable of intelligent behaviour, of using language – of even, perhaps, experiencing human-like emotions.

I’ve never met an African Grey parrot, but I’ve spent the past decade watching the wild rainbow lorikeets that hang out on my apartment balcony and they use language. Rainbow lorikeets don’t imitate human sounds, but are capable of ‘almost continuous screeching and chattering’, as Jim Flegg’s Birds of Australia says. They make happy, murmuring sounds when they’re feeding or grooming each other; enquiring calls if their mate is out of sight, rising in intensity if the other bird doesn’t respond immediately; sharp, angry sounds when another bird muscles in on their territory; and inquisitive, chirruping sounds at me if I’m watering my balcony plants or appear to be eating something they might like. When baby rainbow lorikeets want their parents’ attention (which is pretty much all the time), they make a noise like bits of styrofoam rubbing against each other, and the harassed parents respond as quickly as they can. Isn’t that ‘using language’? But I think they go even further in human-like behaviours than simply using language.

One morning last year, I was awakened by the sound of some rainbow lorikeets screeching with distress outside my window. I went out to investigate, assuming they were being harassed by currawongs, and found a dead adult lorikeet lying on my balcony. It showed no obvious signs of injury or disease – the poor thing had simply died. Two lorikeets were sitting on the balcony railing, looking down at the dead bird and screeching, but they fell silent when they saw me and climbed down the railings to have a closer look. One of them started grooming the feathers around the dead bird’s face; the other took hold of the dead bird’s claw and gave it a couple of tugs, as if to urge it to wake up. The two birds climbed back up onto the railings to watch while I took the body away, and then flew to a nearby tree branch, where they sat for twenty minutes gazing at the spot where the dead bird had been. Did they feel sad? Or confused? It’s impossible to tell, but they were certainly unsettled by what they’d seen – and this was an adult bird that had died, not their baby.

As I don’t have any photos of Alex, here are some photos of rainbow lorikeets. First, a rainbow lorikeet eating a grape:

And a group of rainbow lorikeets hanging out on my balcony:

And finally, rainbow lorikeets take flight:

Reading Roundup

I’ve read some really good novels lately, which is fortunate for me, because the non-fiction I’ve been reading (as research for my next book) has been very heavy (in both the literal and figurative senses). Here are some of the novels I’ve enjoyed:

The Beginner’s Goodbye by Anne Tyler

I’d feared this might be merely a reprise of The Accidental Tourist, and it’s true the protagonists of these novels have many similarities – they are both introverted, socially-awkward men who write guidebooks, and they have both just lost a beloved family member in shocking circumstances. However, this book feels quite different in a lot of ways. It’s shorter, for one thing, and lighter in tone. In The Beginner’s Goodbye, Aaron’s wife has died in a freak accident, and there is nobody he can blame – not even God, because Aaron is an atheist. He copes with the loss of Dorothy by moving out of the house where she died and throwing himself into his work at the family publishing firm. He tells everyone he’s doing fine and he even believes it, until he suddenly begins to ‘see’ Dorothy. At first, she is a silent presence in his life, but eventually they begin to talk, and to argue, with more honesty than they ever did when she was alive. Aaron’s growing self-awareness feels true, his well-meaning friends and relatives are interesting and funny, and I loved the customary glimpse of a character from a previous Anne Tyler novel (in this case, it’s Luke from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, now grown up and yes, running a restaurant – perhaps he inherited it from his uncle Ezra). My only criticism would be that the final chapter wrapped things up a little too neatly (Luke even provides the moral of the story, as if we couldn’t work it out for ourselves), but by that stage, I was so fond of the characters that I was happy to see that they were happy. This is highly recommended for Anne Tyler fans, even if it’s not her best novel. There’s a good review of the book here and you can read my previous post about Anne Tyler here.

The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson

I had read this before, but that was so long ago I couldn’t remember anything about it, except that I’d liked it. This is a wonderfully honest story of a precocious, headstrong country girl sent to a snobby boarding school in 1890s Melbourne. Poor Laura gets into one scrape after another as she attempts to ingratiate herself with her classmates, but her gaudy, home-made frocks, outspoken manners, and lack of interest in boys means she’s doomed to failure. Fortunately, she manages to make it out of school with her self-esteem intact, and the final chapter implies she goes out into the world and achieves great things (unlike her classmates), because “even for the squarest peg, the right hole may ultimately be found”. The edition I read also included a hilarious review quote from a 1910 journal, which sternly declaimed:

“The book is calculated to impress very unfavourably those who do not know that the Australian girl is a much cleaner, wholesomer and straighter person than any of the characters portrayed. It is a book we should strongly recommend adults to keep out of the hands of girls.”

So, you’ve been warned.

Insignificant Others by Stephen McCauley

This felt a lot like a grown-up version of Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, as both narrators were droll, articulate and perceptive when observing the failings of others, but were quite unable to acknowledge or fix their own problems. And the narrator of Insignificant Others, Richard, has plenty of problems. He has a distant relationship with his live-in boyfriend, who is probably cheating on him; he has an affectionate but futile attachment to a married man; he has become obsessed with exercising at the gym, to the detriment of his health; and he’s frustrated by his job at a software company. I’m not sure I’d usually care about any of these problems, but Richard’s narration makes the whole thing into a very entertaining satire of modern American life. For example, here’s Richard contemplating his homophobic, religious-fanatic secretary:

“The degree to which one is obliged, for the sake of tolerance, to be tolerant of the intolerant has never been clear to me.”

And, when arguing with his cheating partner:

“I hate when truthfulness is offered up as a sign of love and friendship, especially when it’s truthfulness about betrayal.”

And, after being berated, yet again, by his sister for not having children:

“The world of parents was divided between those like Benjamin who, worries about Tyler notwithstanding, had unqualified love for their kids and saw childlessness as a disability, and those like my sister Beth, who had ambivalent feelings about their offspring and therefore labelled childlessness as unmitigated selfishness.”

Recommended, unless you’re a fan of George W. Bush (Richard’s hilarious rants about Bush’s inadequacies feature throughout the novel). If you’d like to know more, there’s a review and excerpt here.

Great (and Not-So-Great) Expectations

Life is short and there are many books in the world, so it’s not surprising that readers take short cuts when deciding what to read next. In my case, I often make decisions based on my experience with the author. If I’ve loved an author’s previous books, I’ll probably pick up his or her next book. If I’ve disliked a book, I’m unlikely to give that particular author another try, although I can sometimes be swayed by friends’ recommendations, award short-listings or the fact that there’s nothing else that appeals to me on the library shelves.

So it was that I picked up The Other Family, by Joanna Trollope, at the library last month. I’d read an earlier book by this author (I think it might have been The Choir) and I’d disliked it intensely. I didn’t like the characters, I wasn’t interested in their smug, boring, privileged lives and I thought the plot was stupid and pointless. I didn’t even like the author’s photograph. (Why do publishers put author photographs in books, anyway? I don’t care what the author looks like!) But it was years since I’d read The Choir, and I’d subsequently seen a positive review of Joanna Trollope’s most recent novel, and I was in the library, not a bookshop, so I wouldn’t be investing anything except a little time if I took the book home with me. So I did, and you know what? I liked it.

The Other Family begins with the sudden death of Richie, a moderately successful musician. Chrissie, the mother of his three daughters, is bereft, especially when she discovers he’s remembered his first wife and his son in his will. Worse, Richie never actually got around to marrying Chrissie in the twenty years they were together, so she’s faced with a huge inheritance tax bill and may have to move out of the family mansion in London. I think we’re meant to sympathise with Chrissie, but she came across to me as a spoiled, self-centred idiot, and her two eldest daughters were just as bad. Luckily, there was Amy, the youngest child and still at school, but also the smartest, most compassionate person in the family. Amy is the one who reaches out to Margaret and Scott, her father’s first family, who live in the north of England. Margaret is an especially appealing character – an intelligent, strong-minded woman who managed to bring up her son and establish a successful business after Richie abandoned them. However, I have to admit my favourite character was Dawson, Margaret’s overweight cat:

“If Margaret was restless, Dawson reacted to her by being particularly inert. He would lengthen himself along the back of the sofa in the bay window of the sitting room and sink into an especially profound languor, only the miniscule movements of his little ears registering that he was aware of her fidgeting round him, endlessly going up and down the stairs, opening and shutting drawers in the kitchen, talking to herself as if she was the only living creature in the house. Only if it got past seven o’clock, and she seemed temporarily absorbed in some area of the house unrelated to his supper, would he lumber down from the cushions to the floor, and position himself somewhere that could not fail to remind her that she had forgotten to feed him. He was even prepared for her to fall over him, literally, if it served his purpose.

This particular evening, seven o’clock had come and gone – gone, it seemed to Dawson, a very long time ago. Margaret had been in the sitting room, then her bedroom, then back in the sitting room, then at her computer, but nowhere near the place where Dawson’s box of special cat mix lived, alongside the little square tins of meat that Dawson would have liked every night, but which were only opened occasionally by some arbitrary timetable quite unfathomable to him. He had placed himself in her path at least three times, to no effect, and was now deciding that the last resort had been reached, the completely forbidden resort of vigorously clawing up the new carpet at a particularly vulnerable place where the top step of the stairs met the landing.”

Yes, that’s all it takes to make me approve of a book – the addition of a charismatic cat. But there were other things to like in this novel – for example, the descriptions of Newcastle and the quays of North Shield. The depiction of grief and bereavement felt authentic to me, too, although I never managed to work up much sympathy for Chrissie. I think the concluding chapters wrapped up everything too neatly for each character (even Dawson got his tin of meat for supper), but overall, I enjoyed this book. There are some interesting interviews with the author here and here. And if you have no intention of reading The Other Family, but are curious about the plot, there’s a hilarious (and, I have to admit, accurate) Digested Read of it here.

Of course, just as I am sometimes pleasantly surprised by a book, there are times when I’m disappointed, and so it was when I read The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst. I’d loved his previous novels, particularly The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker Prize in 2004. And The Stranger’s Child sounded so promising. An aristocratic family with scandalous secrets! A rambling old house in the English countryside! A beautiful young poet, tragically killed in the First World War! The poet’s biographer, who has secrets of his own, struggling to unravel truth from lies! And yet, this novel dragged. There was simultaneously too much detail, and not enough useful information. There were too many unnecessary characters – what, for instance, was the point of introducing the Strange-Paget family, when they added little to the narrative and were never mentioned again after that chapter? And while some of the prose was sharp and amusing, there were too many sentences like this:

“Daphne’s second husband’s half-sister married my father’ s eldest brother.”

That was actually a relatively clear explanation of one of the complicated relationships in the novel. Mostly, the reader was left to figure all this out for herself, and I often found myself flipping back to earlier sections, muttering, “Now, what was Revel’s surname? Does that mean Jenny is his daughter? Or no, she’s too young, must be his granddaughter, except wasn’t he gay? Did he end up marrying Daphne, anyway?”

There were parts I found interesting, particularly in the first section, but I had to force myself to finish this book. (Maybe Alan Hollinghurst should have added a cat or two for my benefit.)

To end on a more positive note, I just finished reading the latest novel of one of my favourite authors of all time, and it really did live up to my extremely high expectations. I’m referring to The Beginner’s Goodbye by Anne Tyler, which was absolutely wonderful, and highly recommended if you like her work. I will get around to writing a proper blog post about it soon.

Careful, He Might Hear You by Sumner Locke Elliott

There’s always a bit of trepidation when you re-read an old favourite from your teenage years. Will the book turn out to be No Good At All? Will it be obvious and sentimental and vacuous? Will it reveal that you used to have appalling taste in literature? Thankfully, Careful, He Might Hear You proved to be just as good as I remembered – perhaps even better, because I can now see the immense skill that went into the construction of its apparently effortless prose.

Careful, He Might Hear You was Sumner Locke Elliott’s first novel. It was published in 1963, but he’d been writing plays, radio serials and television scripts for decades before that, and it really shows in his writing. He knew all about plot and pacing, how to balance action with introspection and how to reveal character through dialogue. But writing a novel also allowed him to write beautiful descriptions of a setting he knew very well, that of Sydney during the Depression. The novel is based on his own childhood, in which he was the focus of a bitter custody battle between several aunts. His mother, a popular Australian writer, had died giving birth to him and his father, an irresponsible alcoholic, played no part in his upbringing. On one side of the battle was his anxious, motherly Aunt Lillian (named ‘Lila’ in the book), the wife of a hard-working but poor Labor politician; on the other was rich Aunt Jessie (‘Vanessa’), recently returned from England and determined to transform her nephew into a proper little gentleman. The situation was complicated by his odd Aunt Agnes, disciple of a bizarre American cult, and his bohemian Aunt Blanche (‘Vere’). The author does a superb job of narrating events from the perspective of six-year-old PS, who is by turns amused, baffled and angered by the grown-ups running his life. It’s a pleasure to watch him slowly gain some control over the adults, although the author also manages to evoke some sympathy for them. There is poor, over-worked Lila; her long-suffering husband, George; emotionally-repressed Vanessa; even exuberant Vere is revealed to have hidden sorrows. There are also gorgeous descriptions of Sydney in the 1930s – a cruise liner steaming into Sydney Harbour, a train trip to dusty Woronora Cemetery, Lila’s suburban backyard and Vanessa’s Point Piper mansion and Vere’s chaotic flat in King’s Cross:

“Vere poured the golden-coloured bubbles into two peanut butter glasses and handed one to Opal. They immediately forgot him and began talking about their friends who were all in a mess, thwarted, broke, maddened or suicidal, my dear. They had wonderful names like Dodo, Ukelele, Widget and Gussy. When they came to visit Vere, they brought her old shoe buckles, brooches, half-used pots of cold cream, combs and long, cool bottles because they were always dying of thirst, just dying of thirst, my dear, and their voices would grow brighter as the daylight faded, would fly around the small room like birds let out of cages telling about gay-sounding things, about parties and dancing, full of mysterious words that had to be spelled out in Lila’s house and which made his heart jump for the time when he would understand and be a part of the things they told about with such laughter.”

'Careful, He Might Hear You' by Sumner Locke Elliott and 'Sumner Locke Elliott: Writing Life' by Sharon Clarke

Careful, He Might Hear You was a huge success in the United States, Britain and Germany, but didn’t sell very well in Australia, as Sumner Locke Elliott explained:

“I distinctly remember that [his agent] told me 50,000 copies had already been sold in Germany, where there had been three editions in six months, and naturally I was elated. Then I asked about Australia and she said, ‘Seven.’ And I said, with some delight, ‘Well, 7,000, that’s not bad at all – it’s only a small country.’ But she said, ‘Not 7,000, just seven – seven copies.’ And you know, I just couldn’t believe it – my own country and only seven copies!”

Actually, it wasn’t his own country by then, because he’d moved to the United States in 1948, escaping a country that had banned his plays and had little tolerance for gay men. He lived in Los Angeles, and then New York, where he died in 1991. Several of his novels (Waiting for Childhood, Eden’s Lost and Water Under the Bridge) revisit the autobiographical themes of Careful, He Might Hear You, but it is his final novel, Fairyland, that’s probably the closest to his real life. Fairyland is the depressing tale of a young man growing up in Australia, desperately ashamed of his desires for other men but longing to find true love. It includes scenes taken from the author’s life, such as when he was bashed nearly to death in Wynyard railway station, and it shows the conservatism, violence and hypocrisy of the country where he grew up. Sharon Clarke wrote a good biography called Sumner Locke Elliott: Writing Life, which I recommend for anyone wanting to know more about the story behind Careful, He Might Hear You. There’s also an excellent film version starring Robyn Nevin and Wendy Hughes, which came out in 1983. (At least, I remember liking it when I saw it, but that was a very long time ago. It is possible I had terrible taste in movies then.)

Anyway, I was very pleased to see that Text is bringing out a new edition of Careful He Might Hear You as part of its Australian Classics series. This book deserves to find lots of new readers.

My Favourite Books of 2011

Okay, it’s not the official end of the year just yet, but here’s my list so far. It was a bit easier to compile than last year’s list, because I now keep a book journal, which allows me to report the following statistics:

Number of books read so far this year: Fifty-seven (not including the two novels I disliked so much that I couldn’t finish them)

Number of books read that I’d previously read: Seven (actually, there were more than seven, but I stopped noting them down in my journal, so most of them aren’t included in this book tally)

Number of Young Adult books read: Fifteen

Number of children’s books read: Eight

Number of memoirs read: Three

Number of other non-fiction books read: Nineteen

Number of graphic novels read: Three

Number of anthologies read: Two

Number of books by Australian writers: Fourteen

Number of books by British writers: Twenty-seven

Number of books by North American writers: Fourteen

Number of books by Scandinavian writers, translated into English: Two

Number of journals subscribed to this year: Two (Viewpoint on Books for Young Adults and Australian Author)

And now, here are the books I read this year that I loved the most. Note that none of them were actually published in 2011 (I’m still trying to catch up with reading from the nineteenth century).

Favourite Novel About Terrifying Creatures with Supernatural Powers

I don’t read many horror novels – if I want horror, I can just read the newspapers. However, Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist received a lot of favourable publicity when the two film versions were released, so I decided to give it a try and it was amazing. It’s incredibly gruesome, but the author does such a terrific job of narrating events though each character (even a squirrel, at one point – truly) that I could not put the book down. I must say, it doesn’t paint a very pretty portrait of late twentieth-century Sweden. Practically every character is desperately lonely, an alcoholic, a drug addict, mentally ill and/or a violent criminal, and yet all the modern-day villains (and there are many of them) have plausible reasons for their vile actions. Ultimately, it’s a hopeful story about two outsiders helping one another. I should also note that this is one of the few translated novels I’ve ever read where the prose was completely seamless, as though it was originally written in English – the translator of the edition I read (whose name I forgot to write down) did a wonderful job.

Favourite Novel About Victorian Clergymen

Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope is a clever and very entertaining satire of church politics and middle-class English society – think Jane Austen with added snarkiness, or Charles Dickens without the sentimentality. I’m not sure who is my favourite villain – Mrs Proudie, self-appointed Bishop of Barchester, or the oleaginous Reverend Mr Slope, the chaplain who rapidly falls from grace after he gets tangled up in a few too many love affairs. There’s also a good BBC television series based on this book and its prequel, The Warden, with Alan Rickman as Mr Slope.

Favourite Short Story

‘Different for Boys’ by Patrick Ness (in Keith Gray’s YA anthology, Losing It) is one of the best short stories I’ve read in years. Vibrant teenage characters, a school that felt completely authentic, real sex and real heartbreak, lots of jokes, all in forty-four pages.

Favourite Graphic Novel

Admittedly, I only read three graphic novels this year, but Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds would probably have been my favourite even if I’d read fifty of them. It’s a loose modern adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd, set mostly in a writers’ retreat in rural England. There’s lots of biting satire about self-indulgent writers, academics, celebrities, middle-aged philanderers and ‘liberated’ young women, but the story is engrossing and includes a sad but realistic portrayal of disenfranchised rural teenagers. The art is great too, expressive without being too fussy (and is it just me, or does Glen, the American writer who’s moved to England, look exactly like Bill Bryson?).

Favourite Book About Punctuation

Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, which I have previously discussed here.

Favourite Children’s Book

Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce is the very best sort of children’s story – funny, exciting and moving. A bag containing thousands of pounds lands in young Damian’s lap, and he and his brother Anthony have only a couple of weeks to spend it before it loses all its value. They trigger hyper-inflation in the school yard, realise that material goods don’t buy happiness, and discover that trying to do good in the world is harder than it seems (for example, when they give a large donation to the Mormon missionaries down the street, the men spend it on a dishwasher and foot spa). Damian’s family are beautifully portrayed, but so are all the secondary characters – Damian’s long-suffering teacher, the local policeman, a lady who visits their school to explain about the introduction of the Euro dollar, the various saints who appear as visions to Damian, even the robber trying to retrieve his stolen money. Highly recommended!

I must also mention two other children’s books I enjoyed: The Secret Language of Girls by Frances O’Roark Dowell, about two best friends gradually growing apart during sixth grade, and Cicada Summer by Kate Constable, an intriguing time-slip story set in a drought-stricken Australian country town. (I also re-read From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg, which is still awesome.)

Favourite Book About Germs

I read quite a few ‘popular science’ books this year, some written by journalists, others by scientists, and I decided I much preferred the ones written by people who actually understood the science they were writing about. Anyway. Killer Germs: Microbes And Diseases That Threaten Humanity by Barry E. Zimmerman and David J. Zimmerman was a very clear, interesting account of the history of microbiology, with technical but accessible descriptions of how germs cause diseases. It did have an overwrought ‘We’re all doomed!’ chapter about bioterrorism and antibiotic-resistant bacteria and so on, and the edition I read was out of date (published in 2003), but overall, it’s very good. Also, it was written by science teachers who are identical twins (I’m not sure why the book pointed that out, but I couldn’t help imagining them as looking like the Winkelvoss twins).

An honourable mention in the ‘popular science’ category (although this book is not specifically about germs) goes to Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools Of Us All by Rose Shapiro, which examines a variety of ‘alternative medicines’ popular in the UK, ranging from chiropractic to homeopathy. The author points out that there is no scientific evidence to support most of these treatments, and she laments the money and time that the UK government devotes to ‘quack remedies’ that can be very dangerous (for example, chiropractic neck manipulations can cause strokes, and some herbal medicines contain toxic levels of lead and mercury).

Favourite Novel About Teenagers

I really enjoyed Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan, a book about friendships between teenage boys – some gay, some straight, but all of them interesting, realistic characters. There was lots of humour and the story moved along at a perfect pace, but most importantly, it was emotionally resonant. I cried at the end, but I didn’t feel manipulated into it by some sentimental epiphany on the part of the characters, because their emotional journeys seemed real. I also liked that while being gay wasn’t ‘normal’ in this book, it wasn’t the cause of unending angst, either. Maybe the girl characters could have been nicer or had more depth, but overall, I thought this was a great YA novel.

So . . . I don’t seem to have read many new books this year – perhaps because I was so busy writing. I was reading online newspapers, magazines and blogs, but not that many books made out of paper (even though I don’t own an e-reader, iPad or laptop, and my only internet connection is extremely slow dial-up). I do have a list of To Read books for 2012, but it’s too long to type out, and I still haven’t read a couple of books from my 2011 To Read list.

I hope that you’ve all had a great reading year, and that 2012 brings you many entertaining and intriguing books!

More Favourite Books of the Year:

1. Favourite Books of 2010