Fiction Can Be Fun

A blogging friend writes every month about the films she’s watched, the shows she’s seen at the theatre, the galleries or museums she’s visited, and yes, the books she’s read. This is her methodology of keeping a record but, as I keep a record on Goodreads, I’ve not felt the need to blog about them unless there is some evident pattern – like when I’ve decided to do a Prize read-along (usually the Booker, although I added the Women’s Prize this year).

One of those regular patterns is that, with the approach of the festive season, I seek out seasonal reads – either Christmas related, or those which are wintry. As is normal, I put together a list of candidates to choose from – some left over from previous years, plus some I’ve added anew, and top of the list was Louise Penny’s Still Life, the first of 20 Inspector Gamache tales. The reason it was (still) on the top of the list is that, having watched the excellent series Three Pines (which is based upon Penny’s Gamache books), I made a decision to hold back on reading the books, giving a chance for the storylines to fade a tad. Then, as these things happen, I forgot why I’d made that decision, so that first book kept being brought forward, year upon year.

Until this year…

I finished Still Life on November 27th and, while sitting down to write this on December 29th, I am reading book 15. Although clearly I won’t finish all 20 in the series by the end of the month (and year), it is such an unusual thing for me to have done, I felt it merited examination. While I often read many books in a series, I rarely read them one after the other after the other, and certainly not 15 on the trot! So, why?

Firstly, they met the requirement of wintry reads, being based in and around Three Pines – a small village in Quebec, Canada – where the weather makes it necessary for them to have their own local snow plough operator. Next there being two genres of tales regularly set around the festive period – romance and murder mysteries – my not being a fan of romance meant murder mysteries tend to feature strongly. While not Agatha Christie, there’s an element of coziness involved in the setting – crackling fires, good food, friendship, wit, all this added to the remoteness of the setting, coupled with limited connectivity (of the internet and mobile signal kind) to the outside world.

One final aspect which is doubtless playing a bigger role than usual is when choosing murder mysteries, a person can generally rely on good prevailing over evil, the bad guys getting caught by the good guys. When life is unsettled and unsettling, having a central character such as Inspector Gamache, someone both good and principled, as well as dedicated to putting things right – it helps.

But the bigger why is why did I ignore the remaining books on my list? What kept drawing me back to the world of Three Pines? Didn’t I find it annoying to read the repeated scene setting and the same language being used to describe regular characters? Oddly, I found it easy not to be annoyed and instead to accept its necessity – that new readers who’ve mistakenly picked up a book mid-series, even those who read each book upon its annual release date, may appreciate a brief reminder, especially those who are prolific readers. Indeed, I found the more books I read, the less that repetition bothered me – instead they became almost akin to recognising an old friend.

There’s no denying that, in practical terms, the fact I read all my fiction on a Kindle makes that process easy. I don’t have to plan in advance, I just buy the next one when I finish the one before. Except I’ve had pre-ordered titles delivered during that time period which haven’t tempted me in the slightest. And so, I believe it’s my reaction to those repeated descriptions which is key. It’s why I’ve found it not just easy, but completely natural to finish one and start reading the next one immediately. Reading this series of books has felt akin to putting on my Dad’s old cardigan – both physically and emotionally comforting – and it’s that warm hug of a feeling I’ve been leaning in to.

What will I do when I’ve read all 20 currently available? I’ll have to do what everyone else does and wait until the next one is released – and find a really good book to get lost in till I can get over my supply of Three Pines comfort being put on hold.

My thanks to David for the recommendation, made so long ago he’s probably forgotten 😀 But if he – or anyone else – has recommendations of the same ilk and quality, I promise I won’t wait as long to read them as I did with these!

As it seems likely this will be the final post here this year, may I offer thanks to those who’ve been kind enough to pop in, despite our sporadic posting schedule during 2025, and to send you the best of wishes for a wonderful year of reading and writing in 2026!

© 2025, Debs Carey

These words are ones I’ve used, and more than once, to talk about the books written by a friend of FCBF – Iain Kelly – for Iain’s books positively reek of place, even when his story happens in a dystopian future.

There’s no doubting it’s a skill, and while AI can provide a tick list of how to – does the act of following such a list end up leaving the reader feeling rather like they’ve eaten too much chocolate? I’m not thinking of the 80% plus high quality chocolate, but that of the high street – overly laden with palm oil, somehow both sickly sweet and ultimately unsatisfactory.

In an attempt to avoid being becoming the writerly equivalent of a bar of Galaxy chocolate, I’ve started training myself to notice how those who have this skill deploy it.

Some decades ago, I read Midnight’s Children, that seminal piece of work by Salman Rushdie. Like much from the pen of Rushdie, it weaves aspects of the magical world into the real one – in this case, the Indian sub-continent. For me, despite it’s departures from reality, I felt its sense of place. In trying to put my finger on quite how that was achieved, I considered how much I could actually recognise in descriptive passages from my childhood when I lived in both India and Bangladesh – and all I could come up with was the mention of the advertising hoarding as you crested the hill in Bombay – a sight I’d have passed during the two years my family lived in Bombay, and last seen when I left aged 8/9. Rushdie lived in the same area of Bombay as my family, until he himself left for school in the UK aged 13.

But I found a missing piece of the puzzle in an article where Rushdie is interviewed about India and this book, forty years on from its date of publication. In a passage where Rushdie talks about his choice of language, how he aped Philip Roth’s use of Yiddish by using words he called “a melange of Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi and English”, he shared how he wanted to depict India as hot and noisy and odorous and crowded and excessive. “Everywhere you go, there’s a throng of humanity. How could a novel embrace the idea of such multitude? My answer was to tell a crowd of stories, deliberately to overcrowd the narrative, so that “my” story, the main thrust of the novel, would need to push its way, so to speak, through a crowd of other stories.” I – for one – believe he was successful for there is no doubting Midnight’s Children‘s sense of place.

I’m currently reading Caledonian Road from the pen of Andrew O’Hagen. I have lived just off the Cally as it is known locally – and to be fair to O’Hagen – how certain of the book’s characters refer to it. And yet I do not recognise it in these pages; I get absolutely no sense of place from reading it. I kept waiting for my ‘advertising hoarding’ moment, but it hasn’t happened yet, despite the fact that I lived there – just one block away from where the central character lives – longer than I lived in Bombay, and it was during my early 20s, whereas in Bombay, I’d been still a child.

I understand that O’Hagen lives in a part of North London which isn’t a million miles away, and we get the terraced Victorian/Georgian properties with their lovely gardens, with mention made of them being sold for a song back in the day. We see the less glossy aspects – the bolshy sitting tenant occupying the basement flat, the young men in gangs, performing rap (or is it hip hop), partying, taking the latest cocktail of drugs, their casual knife use.

Nevertheless, it could be any one of a number of areas in London where you’ll find a mix of ethnicity, financial status, and lifestyles. There is nothing to demonstrate a knowledge that comes from walking the street, frequenting the local shops, drinking in the corner pub. The description feels like it was written by someone who Ubers in and out… much like the central character Campbell Flynn. And when O’Hagen writes about the Cally as experienced by the secondary character Milo, it feels flat and formulaic.

I’m still reading it and finding that zoomed back perspective is preventing me from connecting with either character, and it’s a huge shame that somewhere I know well – and is the title of the book – still feels utterly anonymous.

Today, quite unexpectedly, I came across a brief passage where the story moves to the POV of a minor character where she reminisces about her mother and her home in Scotland. That descriptive passage, so imbued with her feelings of being lost, of deep sadness, the words positively dripping of longing for home… that’s when I finally got a sense of place – it’s just a shame it wasn’t the place where the book takes place and was named for.

It was so striking that I went to look it up, and you know what, it turns out O’Hagen was born and brought up in Scotland – make of that what you will…

What this comparative exercise has taught me is if you’re going to place your story somewhere real, just slipping in facts and inserting descriptive passages without purpose does not a sense of place make. There’s as much of a skill involved in not only making somewhere you know recognisable to your reader, as there is in making your reader feel they know somewhere even when they’ve never been there. Working out the how of giving your writing a sense of place is one that’s worth working at.

What has worked for you in creating a sense of place – either as a reader or a writer?

© 2025, Debs Carey

After a few years of Booker Prize read-a-thons/read-a-longs, I’ve become used to my pick not matching the winner as selected by the panel of judges. Until last year that is, when I was finally able to celebrate picking the Booker Prize winner. And while it was a good feeling to have finally cracked the nut, if I’m honest, achieving that aim while 5 of the books remained unread did leave me with a sense of incompleteness… especially as there was a big hitter among the non reads.

The big hitter in question was Richard Powers, and every year a Booker longlist featured a Richard Powers book, I’d presume it would make it through to the next stage – and so I’d not rush to read it. Often times there’d be no choice in the matter, as the book’s release date was later than the announcement of the shortlist. So when the unthinkable happened – that a Richard Powers book didn’t make it to the shortlist – in 2024, it threw me completely. Even more weirdly, the book has managed to lurk – unread – on my Kindle ever since.

The only reason I can offer for this oddity is that it’s been an unusual year for me, with difficult emotions demanding more in the way of comfort reads than a challenging tome. But that’s now changed and, last week, I picked up Playground.

No Powers book is an easy or light read – the subjects are meaty and complex, and he doesn’t do neat endings or happy-ever-afters. He makes you think, to question and to feel. As a result, there can be a feeling of dissatisfaction once you finish.

I’m not suggesting this book is perfect in any way – despite it being my first 5-star rated Powers read – but the unexpected twist at the end meant I had so much to think about, even after the reading was done, that the usual lack of satisfaction was absent.

So, how does it compare to Orbital, my pick (and the Judge’s pick) for the Booker last year? Let’s start by asking if I’d been able to read Playground before discovering it wasn’t on the shortlist, would I have railed at the judges? The simple answer to that is “yes” I would have railed – because this deserved a place on the shortlist… in my clearly not so humble opinion 😉 And yet, while I believe it deserved its place, I accept that things change, and that includes the make-up of a Booker prize shortlist.

The one thing which hasn’t changed… is I’d still have picked Orbital for the prize.

Orbital (at 224 pages) despite telling a tale via six characters, said what it had to say simply, and in a manner which was stripped down and sleek. Reading it was simply a beautiful experience of joy and wonderment. In contrast, Playground (at 400 pages) took us on one hell of a journey via the POV of just four characters, weaving multiple complex threads and storylines around some truly Big Ideas. It makes you think while you’re reading it, and you’ll keep on thinking even after you’ve finished.

I believe it was that difference in pace and tone which made Orbital stand out from the crowd in 2024. With 2025 comes not only a new panel of judges but also a much changed world – it’ll be interesting to see what pace and tone will appeal this year.

How do you prefer your books – short and sleek, or meandering and meaty?

© 2025, Debs Carey