The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals – Wendy Jones

wilfredI’m pretty sure I got The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals from my friend Tone, I can see from Goodreads that she really liked it.

Me, on the other hand? Well, I’m torn.

From the Goodreads synopsis: «Wilfred Price, overcome with emotion on a sunny spring day, proposes to a girl he barely knows at a picnic. The girl, Grace, joyfully accepts and rushes to tell her family of Wilfred’s intentions. But by this time Wilfred has realised his mistake. He does not love Grace.»

Extricating himself, however, proves to be more difficult than he had expected. And so the story deepens and expands.

I didn’t not like it. I certainly read it quickly enough. I root for Wilfred, and for Grace. I care for their fate, as I care for several of the other characters. But something seemed to me to be lacking while I read it. Well, for one, one of the major plotlines is left a little too wide open for my taste. That’s one problem I have. The other is less tangible. Because while, as I said, I root for Wilfred and Grace, I somehow fail to be touched very deeply. Several of the events should have been bringing tears to my eyes, but I was left dry-eyed throughout (and that is quite a feat these days, I’m a big sop). I find it hard to pinpoint, but for some reason it felt more as if I was reading a (wordy) plot synopsis rather than an actual novel. Does that make sense?

Maybe it’s just me. Anyway, middling to good, I’d say, not brilliant.

Non-fiction

Twenty Chickens for a Saddle – Robyn Scott
Since I finished Beadle the Bard during the flight to Oslo for a course and I hadn’t brought another book (I wasn’t expecting any reading time, actually), I swooped down on the non-fiction shelves at Tanum at OSL, and managed to pick this up and pay for it and still run to catch an earlier flight that my colleague had just realised we were in time for. (Yay for run-on sentences!) I don’t normally pay much attention to the blurbs on the cover of books, but in this case they had me even before I’d read the book’s title. The top of the cover reads: «A wonderful memoir of an exotic childhood. – Alexander McCall Smith». Sold! And he’s right, too. Robyn Scott grew up in Botswana with an, uhm, excentric collection of relatives and the book is full of wonderful detail and hilarious anecdotes, as well as some more serious topics, amongst them perfectly heartbreaking illumination of the emergence of HIV/AIDS in Botswana. One for your mnt tbr, dear reader.

Martha Jane & Me: A girlhood in Wales – Mavis Nicholson
I’ve never seen Mavis Nicholson on tv, as far as I know, and certainly had no idea who she was when I picked up this book second-hand on one of our pilgrimages to Britain. But then, this book does not really demand any prior knowledge of the writer, and though if you were a fan you’d find it an interesting read, I found it interesting enough in its own right. I’m not really a great one for biographies and memoirs as such, I’m not all that interested in how a great man or woman became great. What I am interested in is stories. That they happen to be non-fiction is fine with me, were they all fiction that would be fine, too.