London Observed - Doris Lessing

And this was the first book I read after we left the hospital with our baby daughter. 

It was ideal, London-based, touching and not dated at all despite being made up of stories published over a number of years (for that, I guess you have to thank London and it's ability to remain true to itself even in moments of dramatic change). 

A perfect read for a hectic time in my life, and one of the few collections of short stories to make it onto my bookshelf. 

The Fifth Child – Doris Lessing

Not the book that most would pick as their first Doris Lessing read, but my wife found a surplus copy of The Fifth Child selling for 30p at the Barbican library and – understandably – just had to buy it. So one afternoon I read this novel, expecting it to be soft and romantic before grabbing it from the bookshelf, then actually reading the comments on the back-cover and realizing that it would have been darker than I had expected, and ending up being completely weirded out by it within a couple of hours.

The novel is about our identity (identities?), I suppose, about our darkest aspects and about our animalistic instincts, or, even more generally, about human nature (and also what constitutes a human, I guess). Yet, read as one half of a young married couple, to me it was more about the instability of even the most perfect love and family, about the affection and protective instincts a mother feels towards her children no matter what, and about the destructive power of every one of us.

Probably the novel had an even bigger impact on me because I read it shortly after watching We Need to Talk About Kevin. It’s a book that I’m really glad I’ve read, but maybe not one I would really recommend.

Ben, in the World - Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing’s Ben is still – rather unsurprisingly – a problematic figure even in this sequel to The Fifth Child. Yet, whereas The Fifth Child was one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read, Ben, in the World didn’t quite have the same effect on me.

The first of the two books was fundamentally all about the mother’s struggles with the foetus and, later, the boy. This second book is about Ben’s fight, essentially, for survival. Maybe because of the protected life that I live – much like Ben’s family – I read this book with interest, but not with as much as empathy as I had when I read its prequel.

In the first book, Ben gave readers the creeps. In this one, the readers ultimately want Ben to find his way in the world, but, hell no, no reader would hope of bumping into Ben in real life and actually help him out.