The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
“Harriet and David met each other at an office party neither had particularly wanted to go to, and both knew at once that was what they had been waiting for.” A reread for me that I liked better than I thought the first time I read it, but still not as much as I might have. This novel follows a young couple meeting, getting married, and beginning to have children. The first few children go more or less well enough, but they begin to start […]
Landlocked by Doris Lessing
I guess I could explain the plot or something here, but this is the fourth book of a five book series, and while there is a plot, it’s also a lot like the other books here in this series. We have Martha (nee Quest) marries to Anton Hesse. She finds herself weary at the end of WWII both from the exhaustion of working in the local war office, but also from the sheer distance she feels from the actual combat and conflict in much different […]
Stories by Doris Lessing
1978 is a pretty good time to stop collecting the stories of Doris Lessing for publication. That’s not to say that she didn’t continue to write and write well thereafter (though I am waiting to read a few more things post 1980 for her to see exactly what she did write), but in the late 1970s is when she really dove into her science fiction phase with the Canopus at Argos books (which I actually love in their strange imperfection) as well as her Jane […]
Ben in the World by Doris Lessing
The answer is 18. Ben is 18. This is a sequel I didn’t like to a book I didn’t like. Oddly, and I have ended up reading a lot of Doris Lessing in the interim, the first book in this series The Fifth Child is the first book I ever read from Doris Lessing. I read it shortly after she won the Nobel Prize, and I was kind of annoyed because I just didn’t think it was very good. It’s about a fifth child of a […]
A Ripple from the Storm by Doris Lessing
This is the third book in the Doris Lessing series “The Children of Violence” which are her semi-autobiographical novels about Martha Quest, initially a young woman living on a farm in Rhodesia who confronts her mostly unambitious family and seeks to run away in the first book, he marries and confronts her immediate regret about conforming to patriarchal culture of young marriage in the second book, and who now finds herself in the midst of a political and intellectual awakening among the Communist intelligentsia of […]
The Diary of a Good Neighbour by Doris Lessing
If the Old Could... by Doris Lessing
So sometime in the early 1980s Doris Lessing decided to become anonymous again and try her hand at publishing without the benefit of being Doris Lessing. She explains in the opening introduction to the collected volume of these two novels that in part she was feeling somewhat pigeon-holed or labeled, not necessarily as a particular type of writer so much as herself. And if you’re familiar with her writing, many of her novels are similar in a lot of ways, but many of them go […]
