History of the Rain in Reading with Style

Jun 08, 2018 Elizabeth (Alaska) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: twenty-first-century, library, 5-star-reads

This is a book for readers. Although I cannot now find the reference to the exact number, I seem to recall that Ruth Swain is lying in her room surrounded by her father's 3,598 books. Ruth herself is intensely interested in 19th Century literature, and I immediately had a friend. The books are referred to in the course of Ruth telling her story.

He was to go up to Oxford and read Classics - which were not in fact the red hard-covered James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (Book 7, Rege

This is a book for readers. Although I cannot now find the reference to the exact number, I seem to recall that Ruth Swain is lying in her room surrounded by her father's 3,598 books. Ruth herself is intensely interested in 19th Century literature, and I immediately had a friend. The books are referred to in the course of Ruth telling her story.

He was to go up to Oxford and read Classics - which were not in fact the red hard-covered James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (Book 7, Regent Classics, Somerset), the fat full water-swollen Oliver Twist (Book 12, Penguin Classics, London) that has come unglued at Chapter the Forty-Fifth, 'Fatal Consequences', and smells amazingly like toast, or even Tolstoy's Master and Man (Book 745, Everyman edition, New York) which belonged once to someone who left no further mark on this world other than the peculiarly rigid handwriting with which he wrote belongs to Tobias Greaves on the flyleaf of that stiff paperback.

Ruth's story is not completely chronological and I admit there were a few times when I thought "Now who was that?" Early on, I thought her style stream of consciousness, but no, that would be wrong. Her writing style is definitely not such, but her thought processes are. It didn't take me long to adapt and to recognize that while her sentences are mostly complete, her writing style leans toward the conversational. She is a story teller, and this is the way stories are told. We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.

I hesitate to say the characters are fully-fleshed. Still, I was fully invested in them by the time she gets to the crisis in her story. I remarked to myself that here is Williams who has put himself squarely into the head of a teenage girl who may or may not be dying, and have me in the room with her (and her father's books) as she tells the story of her family. She began with wit and humor, but eventually settled down and just let her emotionally-charged story be told.

I think I came across this looking at Booker lists, but could just as easily have been because some of my GR friends have read it. I'm glad in either case, and that I was able to find a place for it in my challenge. I'll put it on my 5-star reads shelf, but it just barely climbs the bar. ...more

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Oct 04, 2018 Rosemary rated it it was amazing

Set in rural County Clare, Ireland, after the economic collapse of the 2000s, this beautiful story of poetry, fish, water, and tragedy is narrated by teenage Ruth Swain who, for reasons unexplained at the beginning, is confined to her bed on the narrow top floor of a rain-drenched, ramshackle house full of books on the shores of the River Shannon.

I spent a long time reading this one because the prose can’t be gulped down but needs to be savoured. It meanders like the river, but it rewards patie ...more

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Jul 27, 2014 Jane from B.C. rated it really liked it

4.5 out of 5
This is a beautiful lyrical book. It is the story of a young bed-bound woman recounting the history of her family. It is told in her voice and peppered with literary connections. It is a story about a family, literature, poetry and Ireland. It will make you want to travel rural Ireland and experience the rain.

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