Nose in a Book

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith

Read for: Global Reading Challenge – Scotland

This is the 5th book in the 44 Scotland Street novels, which were originally written as a serial in The Scotsman newspaper.  I absolutely love these books.  I love the short little chapters and I love the characters.  They are so entertaining to read about.  I wouldn’t recommend reading this book before reading the first four though.  It’s not that you’d have a hard time following the plot, but there is so much character development that goes on in the previous novels that you’d just be missing out on so much of the fun!

My favourite character is still Bertie – a six-year-old with an extremely overbearing and slightly crazy mother.  He is constantly baffled by her behaviour but because she is his mother, he goes along with her strange ideas.  But there are other familiar faces as well – Bruce, the narcissist, Domenica and Angus who begin to realize they are lonely, Matthew – newly married and Big Lou with her Jacobite boyfriend.

The book is, as always. light and fun and the characters get themselves into some pretty entertaining circumstances.  Anyone who has enjoyed the previous four books will definitely like this one.

Read for: Orbis Terrarum Challenge

I was going to write a book review for my most recent read, but I realized that I really like all of the books by the same author and since he tends to write series’ I wouldn’t really be able to do a plot summary without giving away details from previous book.  So I decided to review his writing in general.

McCall Smith has written four series’ of novels.  He has also written a couple stand alone novels and a few collections of short stories.  I was also surprised to discover that he has written several children’s books!

The first series I was exposed to was the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.  This series is about a woman in Botswana who starts a detective agency.  Each novel contains simples mysteries that she solves. There are nine novels in this series so far with a tenth to be released in April 2009.

The second series I read was The Portuguese Irregular Verbs Series.  There are only three novels in this series and I read them a long time ago and I didn’t like them as much as the others so I’ll just leave it at that!

The next series I read was the Isabel Dalhousie series.  This one is probably my favourite.  The books are about a woman called Isabel Dalhousie who is a philosopher and the editor of a poorly read philosophy magazine.  Isabel is a bit nosy (but likable) quite often takes it upon herself to help people solve the problems in their lives. So far, there are five novels in this series.

The last series of novels is unique.  They were originally written as a serial in a Scottish newspaper and then collected into a novel.  It’s makes reading easy because it’s divided into nice short chapters.  This series originally centred around an apartment block and told the stories of the occupants and the people that came into their lives.  The story has since expanded as characters have moved on from that particular address.  So far, there are four novels in this series.

I love reading these books.  Something about McCall Smith’s writing style is so simple and smooth and easy to read.  The stories are light and funny and uplifting.  He definitely likes to poke fun, but it’s polite and lighthearted.  Although he writes his novels in series’ it’s not neccesary to reread (or even read at all) any of the previous novels to understand the plot and enjoy the characters.

And that’s another thing, all of his characters are enjoyable, even the less likable ones. My favourite character is from the serial.  His name is Bertie and he’s six years old.  He has an extremely overbearing and slightly (or maybe more than slightly) insane mother whom he deals with very well for such a young child.  McCall Smith allows the reader to see into his thoughts and without being precocious he is very intelligent and insightful and believable.  I have a six year old and I can just imagine him thinking the kinds of thoughts that Bertie does.

I would reccomend almost any of his books to almost anyone.  The books are easy to read and clean and uplifting.  Just about anybody would enjoy reading these books.