We are all Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler

it is difficult to write about this book because you really don't want to say too much to anyone who has yet to have the pleasure of reading it, except to say that it is about a family in which the father is an experimental psychologist and the narrator is one of the daughters. The family has fallen apart and the pain of her siblings' disappearance is constantly in the mind of the daughter. But there is great humour and wit in the telling of the story which makes it quite an addictive read. It also has an interesting structure - the narrator starts in the middle and then has to tell the beginning, and as she says, the ending is also a beginning. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but it didn't win.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris: funny and serious

From the blurb on the back cover:

"Introducing Paul O'Rourke: New Yorker, dentist and reluctant non-believer. Modern life disappoints him and love never solves any of his problems."

He is 38 years old, he has come to terms with himself and he is doing well, professionally, but he wants more. From the first chapter:

"When the Prozac stopped working and my Spanish stalled, I started going to the gym. My friend McGowan had encouraged it. Together we would lift things and put them down again. That was something that was almost everything for about a month and a half, the gym's racks of shiny weights and promises of sexual prowess, until the dismal lighting got to me and I took up indoor lacrosse."

The dismal lighting! Yes!

"Betsy Convoy was my head hygienist and a devout Roman Catholic. If ever I was tempted to become a Christian, which I never was, but if I was, I thought I would do well to become a Roman Catholic like Mrs Convoy. She attended Mass at Saint Joan of Arc Church in Jackson Heights where she expressed her faith with hand gestures, genuflections, recitations, liturgies, donations, confessions, lit candles, saints' days, and several different call-and-responses. Catholics speak, like baseball players, in the coded language of gesture. Sure the Roman Catholic Church is an abomination to man and a disgrace to God, but it comes with a highly structured Mass, several sacred pilgrimages, the oldest songs, the most impressive architecture, and a whole bunch of things to do whenever you enter the church. Taken all together, they make you one with your brother."

Here you get the general tone of the piece. Paul is flippant (the writing is very funny), gets very angry sometimes, and yet he is serious. He wants to believe but he doesn't and doesn't want to be the sort of person who does believe. He is envious of those who believe, and when he has a Jewish girlfriend, he longs to be part of her family. He longs to be an atheist Jew.

The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn't the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God - no small things - but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them. I had to borrow those words from an old dead order....

So there's the plot, he wants a religion that has all the benefits of religion but he doesn't want to believe. The book is a bit sprawling and many people who write it up on Amazon find the ending very unsatisfactory but in these serious matters of belief, a happy ending is not possible.

Oh woe is me.

I have got a cold. Oh, I am so not well I am writing this from my bed even thought it is a lovely day and I could be doing things in the garden and buying Christmas cards and sending said cards, and it is all because of my nose. My head is fine but not at all sensible. Yesterday in London I kept initiating conversations with complete strangers about their backpacks and their travel plans, or their country of origins (Romanians are begging in hordes in London, just as we had been warned before they joined the EU) or admiring their babies. I had a lovely time with my friend Sarah and fended off the cold with Strepsils and alcohol - a sherry in Gordon's wine bar, a mulled wine on the South Bank and when I got home, another glass of red because it was Friday.

Today I was meant to go to London with Amanda to sing carols and I just couldn't. It's a real shame. Every one has to keep well away from me. They have to keep well, away from me.

Christmas fundraiser for Save the Children

When I started teaching English at the Maybury Community Centre I inherited 2 volunteers from my predecessor. They are both remarkable retired women, had been volunteering for some time and are very helpful. V. continues to help me at Maybury and Ginny (aged 80+) stopped and helped me at Bellfields instead for a while, where I had a large class and needed some support. Then Ginny had an operation on her feet, so couldn't come, and then said her hips hurt so much she couldn't get out of bed. Suddenly her G.P. went into action but the specialists found that Ginny's body is full of cancer and she hasn't got long to live.

Until she got diagnosed, Ginny played the accordion and keyboard in a Barn Dance band, and also looked after their bookings. She had been a primary school teacher - hence she has nice clear writing - and she had 7 children of her own. She was the sort of person you can trust with your worries. I did, anyway.

Now she can't get out much, she is trying to raise money for Save the Children by selling cards. I think you'll like the designs: they are really cheerful. Have a look here! There is also a great picture of Ginny. She is now knitting squares as well. She hates not to be useful.

See Ginny's cards here - it's a website where you can order.

Descriptions and comments: P.D. James, the Murder Room.

p 76 Comments: "Wasn't accidie, that lethargy of the spirit, one of the deadly sins? To the religious there must seem a wilful blasphemy in the rejection of all joy."

p 78 "His sister openly voiced her disparagement of psychiatry. "It isn't even a scientific discipline, just the last resort of the desperate or the indulgence of fashionable neuroses. You can't even describe the difference between mind and brain in any way which makes sense. You've probably done more harm in the last fifty years than any other branch of medicine and you can only help patients today because the neuroscientists and the drug companies have given you the tools. Without their little tablets you would be back where you were twenty years ago."

p 84 "Belief had its social uses. We haven't exactly found an effective substitute. Now we construct our own morality. "What I want is right and I'm entitled to have it." The older generation may still be encumbered by some folk memory of Judeo-Christian guilt, but that will be gone by the next generation."

p160 "Now for the first time she felt a terrible grief. It wasn't that a man was dead and had died horribly. They were, she knew, only partly a reaction to shock and terror. Blinking her eyes and willing herself to calmness, she thought, it's always the same when someone we know dies. We weep a little for ourselves; but this moment of profound sorrow was more than the sad acceptance of her own mortality, it was part of a universal grieving for the beauty, the terror and the cruelty of the world."

p 282 "Love, the satisfaction of being wanted, is always something of a triumph. Very few people mind confessing that they have been desirable. Where sexual mores today are concerned, it isn't adultery that's contemptible."

352 "I said that believers can deal with guilt by confession, but how could those of us without faith find our peace? I remembered some words I'd read by a philosopher, I think Roger Scruton. "The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation."

Sample description, p 79

 " England had rejoiced in a beautiful October more typical of spring's tender vicissitudes than of the year's slow decline into this multicoloured decrepitude. Now suddenly the sky, which had been an expanse of clear azure blue, was darkened by a rolling cloud as grimy as factory smoke. The first drops of rain fell and he had hardly time to push open his umbrella before he was deluged by a squall. It felt as if the accumulated weight of the cloud's precarious burden had emptied over his head. There was a clump of trees within yards and he took refuge under a horse chestnut, prepared to wait patiently for the sky to clear. Above him the dark sinews of the tree were becoming visible among the yellowing leaves and, looking up, he felt the slow drops falling on his face. He wondered why it was pleasurable to feel these small erratic splashes on skin already drying from the rain's first assault. Perhaps it was no more than the comfort of knowing that he could still take pleasure in the unsolicited benisons of existence. The more intense, the grosser, the urgent physicalities had long lost their edge. Now that appetite had become fastidious and sex rarely urgent, a relief he could provide for himself, at least he could still relish the fall of a raindrop on his cheek."