Book 57: "Borges and the Eternal Orang-Utans" by Luis Fernando Verissimo

My role is to see, describe and, now, write about what I saw. Someone or something is using me to untangle the tangled plot over whose direction I have as little influence as the pen has over the poets who wield it, or the man over the gods who manipulate him, or the knife over the murderer. A plot whose denouement lies in your hands, Jorge.

Or should I say "in your tail".

When an annual Edgar Allen Poe conference is suddenly transferred to Buenos Aires, Vogelstein is thrilled that is is close enough for him to attend. Looking forward to seeing the talks by some of the Poe experts who are known to hate each other, he is thrilled to be introduced to his literary hero, Jorge Luis Borges, some of whose stories he has translated into Portuguese for publication in a magazine.

When one of the Poe experts is murdered and Vogelstein finds the body, he and Borges become involved in the investigation, but is this highly amusing story all that it seems?

Book 58: "Downs-Lord Dawn" by John Whitbourn

Thomas Blades, a seventeenth-century English curate living in the North Downs, finds a portal to another world in the grandfather clock that he inherits from his father. He finds a landscape that matches the geography of the North Downs, but seems completely empty, without houses, roads or agriculture. There are humans there, but living in primitive conditions in underground burrow complexes, as the savage eight feet tall purple humanoids known as the Null are the top predator, hunting humans for meat and tearing them apart when they catch them. Blades rationalises the presence of the Null, saying that they must be biblical giants who never made it into Noah's Ark in our world

He resolves to help the humans fight back against the Null, with the help of seventeenth-century weaponry. Gradually the humans build an above ground society, helped by slaves from our world, who are kidnapped to order for their skills/
Blades becomes their Emperor, the Downs-Lord, but his many wives and children are jockeying for power and his is not the only portal into this world.

I hadn't heard of this author before selecting this book for a ReadItSwapIt exchange, but I enjoyed it and will try to get hold of the sequels. I prefer alternate history stories that don't include fantasy elements, and "Downs-Lord Dawn" just made it, as the Null seemed more like aliens or the result of alternate evolution than like fantasy creatures.

Book 59: "Blind Faith" by Ben Elton

The vast majority of women looked forward to a trip to the gym as it involved almost no exercise at all. The vast Temple-funded facilities which all women were expected to attend after the birth of a child offered a series of massages, steam baths, inspirational seminars, mass holistic 'treatments' and extravagant communal declarations of faith, and clients consumed enormous quantities of 'health bars' and 'health drinks' while sitting about in towels. In fact, because the gym experience consisted principally of hours of sloth, personal indulgence and guilt-free eating, people tended to come out heavier than they went in. Most women would be pregnant again before they had had the chance to get their figures back anyway. Nonetheless it was important to be seen to be making a personal commitment to self-improvement. Pretending to exercise was an important part of the ritual of self-love and self-love was of course the love of God.

Trafford and his wife Chantorria live in an England run by a strange Christian sect, where everyone 'shares' their innermost feelings and the minutiae of their lives with everyone else, and the wish to keep anything private is thought of as a 'perversion', as well as being highly illegal. Trafford knows that he can't be alone in seeing the contradictions in the laws and social customs, and in wanting privacy, but there are spies at work and in his apartment block, and his personal confessor is always there to keep an eye on him, even pulling him up for not posting the video of his child's birth online.

If I lived there I would be tempted to create a totally fake blog, like one of the characters in this book, who copies drivel out of of other people's blogs, and posts photographs and video of women who look fairly similar, safe in the knowledge that nobody is going to look at her blog closely enough to notice, as long as she keeps updating it.

This book reminded me of my least favourite film ever, "Stealing Beauty", which I loathed beyond all reason, due to the intrusiveness of the adult characters with their constant grilling of the teenager as to what she was thinking and how she felt about absolutely everything. But that's my hang-up : (

Book 60: "The Good Woman of China" by Xinran

I'm very glad that I wasn't born a Chinese woman during the 20th century, since the women Xinran interviewed for her radio show seemed to have uniformly harrowing lives. My favourite chapter was about the children's home run by women who lost had their own children in the 1976 earthquake, with the story of the girl who died fourteen days after the earthquake being particularly traumatic. When I read the last chapter of the book, I was stunned that the villagers of Shouting Hill lived in such primitive conditions as late as 1996, but according to Xinran, they were the only women she spoke to who were actually happy.

Book 61: "Grave Matters" by Margaret Yorke

Oxford academic Patrick Grant sees a retired head-mistress fall to her death from the Acropolis, and when her closest friend dies in a fall down steps at the British Museum, he decides to investigate.

I wasn't that impressed by the detective, who is one of those people who seem to trip over corpses wherever they go.