A century of brilliant books

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Apropos of nothing, I decided to put together a list of a book I’d recommend for every year of the 20th century. Because, why not! And also, I’m musing over doing A Century of Books again next year, and it’s good to throw out some suggestions now in case anybody fancies joining me. I tried not to repeat authors, but there were some years where I couldn’t manage without a bit of repetition. I’m grateful to Elizabeth von Arnim for the first decade of the century.

As I decided to do this, I had a vague memory of having done it before… and, yes, I compiled a list back in 2011. I’m going to make my new list without looking back at that one – and when I’m done, I’ll see how much crossover there is.

So, here are 100 books I think are great from 1900-1999! (I’m going by the dates in my LibraryThing catalogue, so if you spot any discrepancies, let me know and I’ll sub something else in.)

1900: Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome
1901: The Benefactress by Elizabeth von Arnim
1902: The Red House by E. Nesbit
1903: Oxford by Edward Thomas
1904: The Canon in Residence by V.L. Whitechurch
1905: Lovers in London by A.A. Milne
1906: The Man of Property by John Galsworthy
1907: Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther by Elizabeth von Arnim
1908: Crossriggs by Jane and Mary Findlater
1909: The Caravanners by Elizabeth von Arnim
1910: Howards End by E.M. Forster
1911: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
1912: The Unbearable Bassington by Saki
1913: Old Friends and New Fancies by Sybil G. Brinton
1914: The Three Sisters by May Sinclair
1915: Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs
1916: Further Foolishness by Stephen Leacock
1917: Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley
1918: Patricia Brent, Spinster by Herbert Jenkins
1919: Poor Relations by Compton Mackenzie
1920: Tension by E.M. Delafield
1921: Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay
1922: The Heir by Vita Sackville-West
1923: A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
1924: The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
1925: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
1926: Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
1927: The Love-Child by Edith Olivier
1928: War Among Ladies by Eleanor Scott
1929: Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott
1930: Miss Mole by E.H. Young
1931: The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson
1932: Economy Must Be Our Watchword by Joyce Dennys
1933: Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge
1934: A Pin To See The Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse
1935: Mr Pim Passes By by A.A. Milne
1936: Greengates by R.C. Sherriff
1937: They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell
1938: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
1939: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
1940: Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
1941: The Empty Room by Charles Morgan
1942: One Year’s Time by Angela Milne
1943: O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
1944: Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp
1945: Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts
1946: Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd
1947: One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
1948: The Foolish Gentlewoman by Margery Sharp
1949: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
1950: Murder Included by Joanna Cannan
1951: Merry Hall by Beverley Nichols
1952: The Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson
1953: Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton
1954: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
1955: Mother and Son by Ivy Compton-Burnett
1956: Tea at Four O’Clock by Janet McNeill
1957: A House in the Country by Ruth Adam
1958: The Lost Europeans by Emanuel Litvinoff
1959: The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson
1960: The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks
1961: Told in Winter by Jon Godden
1962: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
1963: A Day in Summer by J.L. Carr
1964: The Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor
1965: The Millstone by Margaret Drabble
1966: A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence
1967: At The Jerusalem by Paul Bailey
1968: A Compass Error by Sybille Bedford
1969: Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene
1970: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
1971: The Home by Penelope Mortimer
1972: The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
1973: In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill
1974: The Enchanted Places by Christopher Milne
1975: Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban
1976: The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore
1977: The House By The Sea by May Sarton
1978: The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
1979: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
1980: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
1981: Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm
1982: The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson
1983: Heartburn by Nora Ephron
1984: The Only Problem by Muriel Spark
1985: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks
1986: Family Skeletons by Henrietta Garnett
1987: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
1988: Sheep’s Clothing by Celia Dale
1989: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
1990: Temples of Delight by Barbara Trapido
1991: Wise Children by Angela Carter
1992: The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salamon
1993: Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver
1994: Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro
1995: Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham
1996: Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
1997: The Year of Reading Proust by Phyllis Rose
1998: Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
1999: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Now that my list is complete, how many overlaps did I have with my list from 15 years ago? By a rough count, I make it 21 (including Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, which I attributed to the wrong year last time). I think that is still a good list, but I’m more pleased with this one – it doesn’t rely so heavily in the later century on books about the earlier century!

How many of my hundred have you read?

Blood on the Cat by Nancy Rutledge – #ReadingTheMeow2026

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I had forgotten that Reading the Meow 2026 was coming up until I started seeing blog posts appearing, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to fit anything in. I also couldn’t think what to read, since I had gathered up all the obvious candidates on previous iterations of Mallika’s event. And then – Blood on the Cat by Nancy Rutledge came through the door!

It was published in 1945 and is now being reissued as part of Penguin’s American Mystery Classics series. I’ve had a few of these sent, but this is the first I’ve managed to get to – and even if it weren’t for Reading the Meow, I might not have been able to resist the stare of the cat on the cover.

This is Smoky – and let me assure you that Smoky survives the book without injury. I’d put money on her to survive a war. Here is how she opens the first paragraph of the book:

Smoky’s eyes shone yellow and green in the rainy darkness, but her body was only a black shadow punctuated by a dot of white at the tip of her tail. She slid around the corner of the building noiselessly and ran up the railing to the porch. Here she stopped abruptly, her ears back, her wet fur beginning to ruffle. A large object lay on the porch floor, dark and unmoving. Smoky spat at it warningly, received no answer, sat down and regarded it patiently. She circled it, sniffing. Finally satisfied as to its harmlessness and lack of interest to her, she walked over it to get to the window sill. She saw no signs within of what she was seeking, so she walked over it again, descended from the porch, and ran up the large maple tree in front of the building. Halfway up she transferred herself to the roof above the porch, crossed it and landed with a quiet plop on the upstairs window sill.

“Mraw!” wailed Smoky. “Mraw! MRAW!”
A sleepy groan from within. “Go away, cat. Scat!”
“MRAWWW!”
“All right, all right. Pipe down. I’m coming.”
“Mraw,” came mildly from Smoky.

For quite a lot of the book, only Smoky knows of the existence of this object – we can probably work out it is a body – but she does trail blood through the house. Smoky’s owner, Killian McBean, assumes that she has killed some prey and doesn’t think much more about it (which is, admittedly, the first of many things in the novel that don’t quite stand up to examination). Killian McBean writes and edits the local newspaper and is a conscientious, if misanthropic, man.

Killian McBean was a man of perhaps forty, whose lean tough body made him seem younger, and whose tired eyes and face made him seem older. There was grey at the temples of his black hair and it was thinning at the sides. His nose was rather prominent, as was a front gold tooth. Even for his five feet ten his arms were disproportionately long, and his hands exceptionally large and powerful.

But it was his eyes that were his most outstanding feature: cold grey eyes, aloof and disbelieving. Occasionally a twinkle came into them, or a momentary softness, but it soon faded into a granite hardness. His smile, too, was sceptical, almost mocking.

You can see he isn’t necessarily a man to warm to. Easily his best trait, in my eyes, is the respect and kindness he shows to Smoky. I loved Smoky, and I loved their relationship – independent of each other, certainly, but McBean will defend Smoky against anybody. Smoky tolerates him with the secret love of a cat. Rutledge obviously understands cats, and Smoky is very believable.

Ok, so what is the murder mystery? After a few dozen pages, McBean comes across the local wealthy man, tyrannical and disliked by all, dead in his hotel room with a kitchen knife in his back. His name is Bennet Farr. Naturally, McBean pretends not to have been there. But who could have offed him? The candidates are Farr’s son, his prospective daughter-in-law, the local librarian, the local schoolteacher, McBean’s printer, his printer’s daughter, and McBean himself. They all have motives, more or less, and they all seem to have processed through the hotel in a matter of minutes shortly before or after the time Farr died. Again, this novel is not strong on believability.

Things are complicated further by a young woman being found unconscious in a car nearby, and evidence that someone else was in the car with her – missing, but having left plenty of blood behind. When this woman wakes up, she has amnesia and can’t remember who she is. Within the space of 24 hours, she and McBean have fallen in love with each other and she is discussing marriage (!)

What to make of Blood on the Cat? It’s an entertaining novel, and McBean is in the noted American tradition of hardboiled men who seek justice while being unpleasant to everyone. Actually, he is mostly unpleasant to other men, while quite a lot of the women seem curiously charmed by him, and he does behave a bit better towards them. It’s often amusing, and Rutledge keeps the tension up well. There are a couple more deaths along the way to keep us amused.

The downside is that the solution to the mystery is both terrible and obvious. While I guessed who probably did it early on, I never really worked out what their motive was – and the solution relies on a plot hole so ludicrous that Agatha Christie is spinning in her grave that anybody could put it to paper and call themselves a mystery novelist.

Appropriately for Reading the Meow, the strongest part of the novel is Smoky – in my eyes, at least. And it’s a rattling good time, with memorable characters, even if it’s very weak in terms of plot. I’m not sure I’d race to read more by Rutledge because the plotting is maddening, but I still had a fun couple of days with this one. If you go in knowing that it won’t quite make sense, you’d probably have a fun time too.

Unnecessary Rankings! Magnus Mills

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I thought I had read almost all of Magnus Mills’ books, but I’ve just checked the list on Wikipedia and I’m still wading in the shallow waters. He’s written 16 novels (or novellas) and four collections of short stories, and I’ve read a paltry eight of them. Still, I shan’t let that get in the way of doing some unnecessary rankings of this interesting, eccentric, very British novelist.

8. The Maintenance of Headway (2009)

I’ve never read a book by Mills that I disliked, but I didn’t quite chime with him on my first outing. That might change if I re-read it, but this short book about bus drivers left me a bit nonplussed. Having introduced my book group to his writing yesterday, I saw the same bafflement in many faces – so perhaps it just takes a while to get to grips with Mills’ particular style?

7. The Scheme For Full Employment (2003)

And this was the book that I got my book group to read! I wish I’d gone for one I love more, in retrospect, but I still found much to enjoy and admire. It’s about a group of men working for UniVan, driving between various depots seemingly pointlessly – under a scheme where everyone is employed, however uselessly. It has Mills’ trademark simplicity and matter-of-factness that gradually reveals itself as satire, but I found it rather less funny than other examples.

6. Screwtop Thompson (2010)

The only short story collection I’ve read by Mills has many brilliantly odd stories in it, alongside one or two that worked less well for me. In a commentary that will become familiar, they are really horror stories disguised as funny stories disguised as stories about nothing.

5. The Trouble With Sunbathers (2020)

Since 2020, Mills has self-published his books and been pretty prolific, with at least one every year. This is the only of those books I’ve read, and it is excellent – gatekeepers man the gates along the British coast that keep everyone out of the now-American-owned land. As ever, totally odd and very matter-of-fact, which somehow makes it odder.

4. All Quiet on the Orient Express (1999)

Mills really has an eye, or perhaps ear, for excellent titles. This is a cautionary tale for those of us who find it impossible to say ‘no’, as the unnamed narrator is asked for a favour which becomes another and somehow spirals into indentered slavery. But in a lighthearted way?

3. The Restraint of Beasts (1998)

These top three are absolute masterpieces. Mills had worked as a fencer (building fencers, rather than thrusting swords) and turned his experience into this novel that has a dark, funny twist on the job. No less than Thomas Pynchon described it as a ‘demented, deadpan comic wonder’, which I think is very accurate. It was my third book by him, and when I realised I loved him.

2. The Forensic Records Society (2017)

Mills’ final ‘mainstream’ book is about a group who gather to listen to records in a room where time seems to pass at a different rate to the world outside. Rival factions start up, and the whole thing is an excellent example of how Mills’ novels are somehow laced with threat and surrealism even when you can’t work out why.

1. Three To See The King (2001)

My favourite of Mills’ books is about someone who has built a tin hut in the middle of nowhere in a desert. Someone else has another one a few miles away, and another pair aren’t much further away. But then rumours come of a charismatic man arriving in the region. As I wrote in my review, ‘What makes it all the more unsettling is that it isn’t at all clear WHY it’s unsettling. It seems to be a simple story of harmless people doing numbingly ordinary things. And yet the reader feels constantly anxious, as though there is something around the corner; some horror that has perhaps been in full sight the whole time.’

Have you read any Mills? Are you tempted to try any of these? And which of the remaining 12 books should I prioritise?

Ordinary Wonder Tales by Emily Urquhart

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As mentioned in my Canada haul post, I chose Ordinary Wonder Tales (2022) by Emily Urquhart after looking through all the books in a bookshop that had ‘Canadian author’ or ‘Canadian press’ slips in the top of them. This one turned out to be both, published by Biblioasis which, like Emily Urquhart, is based in Ontatio.

Well, I’m so glad I picked out Ordinary Wonder Tales – I thought it was a fantastic book, and exactly the sort of thing I love: an essay collection that skilfully combines personal memoir with the author’s particular expertise. In this case, that is folklore – Urquhart has a doctorate in folklore, and a wide-ranging knowledge of examples from around the world. Better still, she is excellent at explaining them in an accessible way, filled with curiosity.

In each essay, Urquhart takes incidents from her own life, and the contemporary world more broadly, and intertwines it with folklore from the centuries. It is such a brilliant idea for giving depth and intrigue to stories which would be interesting on their own. For example, in ‘Lessons for Female Success’, she recounts different experiences she has had of violent men – most surreally, being tasked with removing the graffittied name of a serial killer from bunkbeds as a camp counsellor, alongside equally shocking but more common interactions with male violence:

He took my hand in a strong and painful grip. I pulled away, hard, and freed myself. The white mitten that I’d been wearing fell to the ground. I felt a rush of air, as if a sudden gust of wind had blown from the shadows behind me. I turned slightly to see a blur of movement. It was a second man running towards me from an opposite shadowy corner than the first. I wondered if I had been screaming and if the man was coming to my rescue. He was not. He threw me to the ground with a full-body slam. My tailbone bore the initial impact of my fall. Then, the back of my skull hit the pavement. I heard a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I struggled, kicked, and bit, but the men overpowered me. I had two thoughts in quick succession: first, I thought I might die. Second, I thought, No, my voice will save me. By then I could hear myself screaming. I didn’t know if I was using words in English or Ukrainian or Russian or if I was shrieking into the abyss. I thought I was saying, “No, no, no.” I might have been asking, “Why?”

In another instance in this essay, Urquhart and her friend are flashed by man waiting in an alleyway – and the shock of that moment is compounded by the unsympathetic dismissal by police officers. Even when another police officer later apologises for this dismissiveness, it puts the weight of it back onto her: “I guess what I’m asking is, do you want him to apologize to you in person, or in writing, or what? Do you want this man to lose his job? He’s got a family, but, you know, if that’s what you want.” Alongside her own experiences, this essay explores Child ballads – a collection of 305 British sung poems, collected by 19th-century folklorist Francis James Child and drawn from four centuries before that.

I first encountered them in graduate school and was immediately taken by their imagery and gory drama. The action in these tales is present-tense and immediate, the past a vague and unmentioned country. The stories focus on a central event and begin at the height of the tension – an incident that is, almost always, sexually violent. These are sorrowful songs where women are raped, punished to death for loving the wrong man, abducted by vicious relatives and strangers, and burned at the stake for affairs of the heart. The narrator never editorializes; she offers the story but no analysis or comment.

It’s interesting that Urquhart mentions that lack of editorialising, because the same thing strikes me about her own writing too. Urquhart’s approach to memoir is always restrained. She tells us what happens, she explains how she felt, but she knows that the stories do not need grandstanding conclusions. We can conclude for ourselves. Nor does she draw unduly heavy-handed comparisons between the folklore and the aspects of memoir. Obviously there are some comparisons, but mostly she reveals these simply by telling the stories of her life and of centuries of tradition alongside each other. They interweave, with Urquhart’s pacing expertly flowing from one to the other. It shows how her experiences are simultaneously deeply personal and eternal.

Another chapter explores Urquhart’s experience of pregnancy – including the devastation of miscarriage, as well as giving birth to her two children. Alongside her experiences of antenatal care (or perhaps ‘care’), she tells the story of a miller’s daughter who is inadvertently promised to the devil, and her continuing attempts to escape him – and the violence she experiences because of it. It is so compelling, even when the comparisons are less direct. The stories, alongside each other, give such richness and pain and significance to each other.

It’s hard to single out the most moving or thought-provoking sections – I don’t have space to tell you about chapters concerning her father’s dementia (brilliantly told alongside folklores of ‘years become days’ where someone goes to the underworld or another world for a short period and returns to find many years have past), or plague legends told alongside her Covid experiences, or the long shadow of radiation, or (the weakest in the collection in my opinion, and the first, which doesn’t give the best sense of the book) hauntings in her childhood home. But I’ll end with an essay that hit me hardest, since it concerns her brother.

After he died, I began to see my brother with surprising frequency. These appearances were not ghostlike apparitions, nor were they dreams. Instead, I saw him in the bodies of strangers. He was waiting for the traffic light to turn so he could cross at a busy intersection. A man tipped his hat skyward to read a street sign and my brother’s face hovered beneath the brim. He was the token collector at the subway entrance, the lone soup-eater in the basement food court of a downtown shopping mart.

Her accounts of her relationship with Marsh and his sad, premature death are somehow all the more moving because they were not closely bonded siblings. There is nuance and generosity to her examination of their relationship and his abbreviated life, related alongside bereavement hallucinations – not seeing spectres, but seeing your loved ones’ faces in other people’s. They are common and largely unspoken, and I found Urquhart’s exploration of them very poignant – partly because they seemed to bridge a distance that had existed in their actual knowledge of each other. It’s another example of Urquhart using honesty as a tool that gives depth and detail, rather than simply exposure.

Urquhart has such a fascinating slant on the world. I think Ordinary Wonder Tales would have been an excellent, immersive, resiliently honest collection if it simply included her autobiographical experiences. Incorporating the folklore elements makes it something really special. It shows the long, long history of humanity, and of making narrative from human (often women’s) lives, as a background to one individual’s most poignant, intriguing or traumatic moments. Each essay is so cleverly structured, and with such artistic restraint that amplifies the power of each account. I long to read more by Urquhart in the same vein, and urge you to seek it out – if you’re in Canada, that’ll be pretty easy. If, like me, you suffer the misfortune not to live in Canada, then I hope you’ll manage to track it down nonetheless.

The Friend in Need (1957) by Elizabeth Coxhead

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Cover of The Friend in Need shows woman with two yung boys approaching a crescent of houses

There’s always a danger, when reading a novel almost 70 years old on a potentially sensitive topic, that it will not be readable by today’s standards. When I saw that The Friend in Need (1957) by Elizabeth Coxhead was about a social worker I was torn – it would be fascinating to read a novel on this topic from the 1950s, but would elements of classicism, racism or simply outdated methods make it feel unreadable?

Thankfully, I needn’t have worried. There are definitely some things that would be phrased a bit differently today, and I can’t imagine Isobel Fairlie’s approaches as a social worker would be endorsed by anybody working in that field now, but it’s a novel that vibrates warmth, compassion and sense. It also, incidentally, has one of the more lovable romantic pairings I’ve come across in a long time.

We first meet Isobel Fairlie, social worker, through the eyes of a man in a teashop – he is waiting for his girlfriend Mercedes (he lives with her and her mother) and not with any especial enthusiasm.

He closed his eyes, summoning up the energy to greet her decently when she did arrive. And the next thing he knew, someone had pushed half a cup of cold tea into his lap.

“Oh lord, I’m frightfully sorry,” said a woman’s voice above him. He roused himself to explain to her that it didn’t matter. A very superior young lady too, tall and fair and nicely dressed, and in the act of setting down the outsize tray they supplied you with in these places, so that there had not been room for it and the dirty crockery.

“It don’t matter a bit, miss,” he said, and as she still looked stricken, tried for further reassurance. “It’s the sort of thuing that’s always happening to me.”

“Oh, but that makes it worse,” she said, and now she was nearly laughing, but still worried to death.

It was an interesting choice from Coxhead to introduce Isobel through the POV of Walter (for such is his name), when she is the main character – but I think it is an instructive choice. Isobel’s professional life moves largely among the working-classes, and she is very much upper-middle-class, so it is useful to see her slightly out of her element in the beginning. So much of the novel is about how she sees people in a different class from her – and somehow the balance is preemptively redressed by seeing her from the vantage of a working man.

(Yes, this is a classic of the British literature genre, where class is incredibly important.)

We’ll certainly come back to Walter, but there is lot of actual social work in this novel too. This element of the novel can feel a bit episodic – Isobel heads out to visit children needing homes, existing foster homes, prospective foster families, and in one case a biological mother who seems to simply Need A Talking To in order to sort the whole thing out. There are a couple of well-rounded, interesting and sympathetic boys – Don and Jacky – who play a larger role in the novel, but by and large these are fleeting background characters. It’s really about giving an insight into the life of a social worker in the mid-1950s. I have no way of knowing how accurate it is, but it certainly gives the impression of being thoroughly researched. Isobel breaks any number of safeguarding laws by modern standards, and certainly doesn’t divide the personal and professional in the way that would be recommended, not to say enforced. But it comes from a place of deep care.

Having the perspective of Walter is useful in showing when the ignorance of her class is a stumbling block. He certainly understands Don and Jacky in a way that she can’t, but we are also able to see the impressive extent of her professional knowledge, her tireless care, and her insistence of doing things as thoroughly and compassionately as possible. While she is unable to fully understand the children for whose fates she is partly responsible, she does have a self-awareness that helps make her a delightful character to be around, rather than a frustrating one. Here she is, in an argument with her own sister:

“How dare you. Sometimes I think she isn’t the only one in the family you can’t stand.”

The bell rang.

Wonderful, aren’t I? – thought Iosbel, going to answer it. The trained social worker, the expert on human relations, the handler of domestic broils, and this is how I handle my own flesh and blood. Gilly and I – it was always the same. No adult reasoning alters the patterns of our childhood. And then I have the nerve to expect the ignorant and poverty-stricken to show a self-discipline in their personal relationships that I never attain.

But the truly lovable character in this novel is Walter. As mentioned, he is living with his girlfriend – but it’s really in a daze after the loss of his wife and their young child. It seems to be controversial to some, and even effete, that is mourning the death of a child after a number of years – thankfully conversations about grief have moved on in the past 70 years – but Coxhead knows that Walter is exactly the sort of thoughtful, kind, reluctantly taciturn hero that we are going to fall in love with. Of course, there are plenty of obstacles to a possible romance with Isobel, but I’ll leave you to guess whether they are insurmountable… and I will add, I am seldom particularly invested in romantic subplots in novels, but this one really won me over.

The Friend in Need is a wonderful surprise. I’d hoped it would be eye-opening and not offensive. It turned out to be much more than that. Coxhead has a lightness and charm to her writing that brings her characters live, and I thought this was a real triumph – and one that would be wonderful to see in print again.

The books I bought in Canada!

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Back-to-back haul posts! Though there was quite a gap between the book-buying excursions – and this one was all the way to Canada. I’ve just come back from a couple of weeks visiting Calgary, Banff, and Vancouver, which were really fun. Some lows along the way (emergency dental trip; heavy rain and storms in apparently-usually-sunny Calgary) but lots of highs (beautiful Lake Louise and Moraine Lake; aquabusing in Vancouver; having lunch with Claire the Captive Reader; strolling through parks and eating a lot of pancakes, poutine and Dairy Queen). And our flat in Vancouver was so beautiful, with the most extraordinary views out over the city.

 

And, of course, the bookshops. We didn’t have any hold luggage, so I decided that I would be very abstemious with the books I bought.

Reader, I was deluding myself.

I bought plenty of books, relying on the fact that they don’t weigh cabin bags, and throwing out a pair of jeans that had a well-timed hole in them. I also left behind the plaid worn above, which was an emergency thrifted item when we realised that Banff was going to be about 20 degrees colder than originally forecast.

As on my previous trip, I was trying to buy only books that are hard to find here – and I stuck even better to my resolve to buy Canadian authors, with only one American author sneaking in alongside them. Here are the books I bought, divided into categories of why I bought them…

THE BOOKS I WENT HOPING TO FIND

There were a handful of books on my wishlist for this trip, and I found pretty much all of them! I don’t think any of them are very hard to track down in Canada, but they’re all pretty unusual in the UK.

The Innocent Traveller by Ethel Wilson
My Golightly and Other Stories by Ethel Wilson
I think I have everything by Wilson now. And had the happy bonus of the man in the bookshop telling me that Mr Golightly and Other Stories was one of his favourite books – I was looking for both of these throughout my trip, and eventually located them in the enormous MacLeod’s in Vancouver. It thankfully had a section devoted to Canadian authors.

Crackpot by Adele Wiseman
I didn’t know anything about this before, but when I saw it listed in the back of This Side Jordan by Margaret Laurence (which I read on the trip) and saw it had an afterword by Laurence herself, I was keen to stumble upon a copy – and stumble I did.

Wild Dogs by Helen Humphreys
And A Dog Called Fig by Helen Humphreys
Humpheys’ novels are usually historical and usually set outside Canada, and neither of those things were what I wanted – but I knew that she had an early novel, Wild Dogs, set in modern-day Canada. Not only did I find it in the basement of a shop in Inglewood, Calgary, but it was signed by her! Staying on the dog theme, I was also keen to read her newish non-fiction that traces her writing life alongside the dogs she has loved.

THE BOOKS I WAS RECOMMENDED

When I was in the lovely Pages, Books bookshop in Kensington, Calgary, I asked a couple of people for recommendations – firstly one of my fellow shoppers, who recommended the Urquhart, and then the people behind the desk. It was really fun. All I said was that I wanted Canadians writing about Canada, so I didn’t tell them a lot about my actual tastes, but fingers crossed.

Prairie Edge by Connor Kerr
I’ve already finished this novel, about a couple of disaffected young Métis people releasing Bisons into downtown Edmonton, Alberta, and I thought it was excellent. Good recommendation!

River Mumma by Zalika Reid-Benta
A New Season by Terry Fallis
The Whirlpool by Jane Urquhart
I don’t know much about these, other than that Fallis is apparently funny and Urquhart’s novel is set in late-19th-century Niagara Falls, but the enthusiasm of the recommendations won me over.

THE OTHER BOOKS THAT TEMPTED ME

The Irrational Season by Madeleine L’Engle
The Summer of the Great-Grandmother by Madeleine L’Engle
Here is my sole non-Canadian. I’ve already enjoyed the fourth of her autobiographical books, Two-Part Invention, so now I can read some of the others.

Ordinary Wonder Tales by Emily Urquhart
No relation to Jane, so far as I can tell. A new-books bookshop in Calgary had a little slip inside all books by Canadian authors or Canadian presses (or, as in this case, both) and I went through every single one of them. None were crying out to me, until I got to the very last one in the shop – and I was very intrigued by this essay collection. I’ve finished it already, and it’s a brilliant combination of folklore with Urquhart’s (and other women’s) everyday experiences. Really well done.

Deep Hollow Creek by Sheila Wilson
A Canadian classic, according to the blurb, and written in the 1930s about a woman taking up a teaching post in a one-room schoolhouse in a frontier settlement. Yes please!

The Student by Cary Fagan
I can’t remember why I picked this one up, but fingers crossed!

The Book of Eve by Constance Beresford-Howe
Another one picked from shelves dedicated to Canadian authors (in Fair’s Fair in Calgary, possessors of the excellent sign at the top of this post) – I was tempted by the story of a 65-year-old woman walking out of her stagnant marriage and setting up in a boarding house. I read it on the plane on the way home, and really enjoyed it.

So far, I’ve read five of my new purchases already, and they’ve all been very good – watch this space for full thoughts on them all… anything that particular catches your eye?

A great big pile of books from Hay-on-Wye

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I went to Hay-on-Wye at the beginning of the month, but it’s taken me a good while to get around to listing all my spoils. And, goodness, I bought a lot of books. I was actually really encouraged by my trip this time. Usually, there are slightly fewer bookshops and over the past 20 years, there has been a creeping sense that Hay’s identity is slipping away. But not this time! A couple of new bookshops have arrived since I last went (including the excellently named Christie and Doyle), and I’m pleased to report that Richard Booths had a lot more fiction on the shelves than the last couple of times I’ve been there – the sad, half-empty shelves are no more.

Anyway, I certainly didn’t come away empty-handed. Here’s what I came home with…

Sunwise Turn by Madge Jenison
Subtitled ‘a human comedy of bookselling’, I couldn’t resist this one – seems in the same style as Shaun Bythell’s books, but 100 years earlier.

Autobiopsy by Bernice Rubens
I Sent A Letter to My Love by Bernice Rubens
The Ponsonby Post by Bernice Rubens
One day I’ll stop adding Rubens books to my shelves, but today is not that day (though I did leave two behind – one because it was enormously long, and the other because it had the most unsettling TV tie-in cover image.)

The Unforgiving Minute by Beverley Nichols
Always time to grab a Bev.

Two and Two Made Twenty-Two by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning
Loved their The Invisible Host, so was pleased to come across a lovely edition of another of their murder mysteries.

Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams
The theme of this one put me off a bit – cattle ranching, maybe? – but I thought Stoner was excellent, so why not.

Crescendo by Phyllis Bentley
One of those interwar women novelists whose name I see, but have yet to read…

Common Sense About Drama by L.A.G. Strong
I love any book about the theatre, but perhaps particularly this sort of mid-century ‘everyman’s’ guide.

The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard
Hazzard seems like one of the biggest omissions from my reading life. This isn’t one I hear talked about the most, but I decided it’s the one I’ll be giving a go.

The Whiskered Footman by Edgar Jepson
I don’t know anything about Jepson, but flicking through this one it reminded me of Wodehouse, perhaps via Herbert Jenkins, so decided to give it a go.

I Knew A Phoenix by May Sarton
At Seventy by May Sarton
Adding another couple of Sarton’s autobiographies to my heaving bookcases, so I can continue to read them all out of order.

Vice Versa by F. Anstey
This body-swap comedy is probably more talked about than read, but I should really give it a go.

Our Town; The Skin of Our Teeth; The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder
As I mentioned in May, I started reading Tom Lake by Ann Patchett and it assumed knowledge of Our Town, so I grabbed a copy.

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
Speaking of Patchett – having loved this novel when I took it out of the library, I knew it had to be on my shelves at some point.

The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks
My copy is falling apart, and I know it might fall apart completely on another read or two. So when I stumbled across a first edition in Hay’s charity shop, I had to have it – I don’t really care about first editions, but I love this one on its own merits.

Explorers of the New Century by Magnus Mills
This is one of the few Mills novels I didn’t have, so I was really pleased to stumble across it.

Travels With Alice by Calvin Trillin
Whenever I find a Trillin in the UK, I grab it.

Teresa of Watling Street by Arnold Bennett
I haven’t read an Arnold Bennett for a while, and need to rectify – this one looked good fun, and I have my policy of assuming books with character names in the title are probably up my street.

The Dancing Bear by Frances Faviell
I’ll pick up any Furrowed Middlebrow books in the wild, even if I haven’t yet read the Faviell I already had.

The Triple Echo by H.E. Bates
Truth be told, this is because Addyman Annexe has a £2 card limit, so I picked up a £1 book that could be interesting.

Harpole & Foxberrow by J.L. Carr
Ending with my most exciting find – a signed copy of a Carr book I didn’t have. Not only signed, but dedicated to the person who organised the book signing!

A slightly chaotic end to #ABookADayInMay

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I always knew I wouldn’t be able to post for the final days of A Book A Day In May, but entered into it optimistically anyway. Frankly, I’m amazed that I have managed to post every day for almost the whole month, rather than my usual round-ups. It definitely helped that I went for shorter books than usual this year – I didn’t feel the need to go for a 180-pager on a day with more opportunities to read, and it made the whole thing easier. When I get to #ABookADayInMay2027, I may regret having used up all the short books on my shelves…

Not quite rounding things out, but nearly, here are some very quick thoughts on a couple of audiobooks that I’ll be finishing off at some point in the final days. And thanks for being along for the ride!

Our Endless Numbered Days (2015) by Claire Fuller

I must have bought this is an Audible sale at some point. It’s Fuller’s debut novel, about an eight-year-old called Peggy who, during the 1976 heatwave, is taken by her Dad to the wilderness. He tells her that everyone else in the world has died, and they must fend for themselves. There is a parallel story in 1985, where Peggy has been reunited with the outside world, and is reflecting on her experiences.

It’s an interesting idea, and I sort of enjoyed the book, but I was frustrated by the strange structure. The actual interesting part of the book – the survivalist period – comes quite late in the book, and the years flit past without really getting to grips with how they’re surviving. I loved some details, like a makeshift piano, but I thought the novel was weaker than the premise made me think. And don’t get me started on the Shock Twist Ending that doesn’t make much sense if you think about it for more than half a second. A serviceable novel, but I’m surprised it was lauded the way it was.

Coming to Our Senses (2021) by Susan R. Barry

I came across Susan Barry from her book about her friendship with Oliver Sacks, and she wrote a lot about Coming to Our Senses in that. She had her own experience of gaining stereovision late in life, and is fascinating – particularly in Dear Oliver – about that, and indeed wrote another book about it that I haven’t read. It inspired her to write this book, about other people who have gained senses later – chiefly Liam McCoy (who gained sight aged 15) and Zohra Damji (who gained hearing aged 12), but there are plenty of other examples along the way.

It’s an enjoyable, sympathetic and very thought-provoking book. There is much that is gained when a sense is gained, but there are also things that are lost, and a great deal of disorientation. Barry makes no sweeping conclusions, and is very keen to honour her subjects – you can certainly see the influence of Sacks in her writing. If she isn’t as brilliant as Sacks – well, who is?

Ordeal By Innocence by Agatha Christie – #ABookADayInMay – Day 28

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I read all of Ordeal By Innocence (1958) on a long coach journey, and what better way to make the hours go by than with Agatha?

I didn’t know anything about this Christie, nor had I seen the TV adaptation from a few years ago, so it was quite fun to go in totally blind.

It opens with a man called Arthur Calgary going to visit a family in a house called Sunny Point (though built on land traditionally called Viper’s Point). He has a strange mission. He has come to tell them that Jack, one of the sons of the house, is not a murderer. He is just a couple of year’s late.

There is some convoluted backstory that we can swallow in order to get on with the story. Essentially, Calgary could have given Jack an alibi for a murder he was jailed for – and where he died of pneumonia, a few months into his sentence. The murder? Jack’s mother, blugeoned to death in her study.

Calgary thinks he is bringing good news by clearing Jack’s name – but really he has thrown the cat among the pigeons. Now they know the murderer is still among them. And everyone suspects each other.

I’m not even going to go through the characters in detail, because really it’s that central idea that sets the novel apart. We have a family of adopted children, now adults, all of whom seem to resent their murdered mother for her benificence. There is her widower – and the secretary he is close to. There are various other in-laws and staff milling about to complete the picture, though Christie considerately left most characters unmarried, to limit our canvas.

But it is that idea that really strikes through the novel – that, actually, the ones who suffer most are the innocents who are under suspicion, and who suspect others. It could be true in almost any of her novels, but it’s here that she really explores the idea, and I think she does it well. Perhaps it is this psychological angle that made it one of Christie’s own favourites.

Without Poirot or Marple at the helm, it helps that Calgary is enjoyable company – resolute on finding the culprit of this cold case, perhaps to atone for his inadvertent opening of old wounds. There are a lot of red herrings and directions the story could go in that it doesn’t. The ultimate solution is satisfying enough, but – perhaps unusually for Christie – I found the journey more interesting than the denouement.

I wonder why it isn’t more popular. Perhaps the lack of her superstar detectives, or perhaps some rather dated language and use of race, disability and adoption along the way. But, with those misgivings acknowledged, I think this is one of the more interesting Christies I’ve read, and an excellent accompaniment to a long journey.

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff: #ABookADayInMay – Day 27

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Today’s book is a re-read. I recently re-read 84, Charing Cross Road for my book group, and I’ve read it umpteen times over the years – as well as seeing the stage play, the film etc. But I haven’t re-read The Duchess of Bloomsbury Group (1973) since I first read it many years ago.

Hanff’s name had been made, at least to an extent, by the publication of 84, Charing Cross Road three years earlier. In that collection of letters between Hanff and Frank Doel, a bookseller in London, Hanff always promises that she will come and visit her beloved London – but she never manages it during Frank’s lifetime. I got the feeling she never fully intended to – but The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street proves me wrong, because she takes advantage of a significant cheque and some press opportunities to come to London – with no real view to a return date. She won’t let a little thing like recovering from an operation stand in her way.

The night before I left, two friends gave me a farewell party. I’d spent the day packing, to the indignant fury of all my vital organs, and I left the party early and was in bed and asleep by midnight. At 3 A.M. I came staring awake, with my insides slamming around and a voice in my head demanding:

“What are you doing, going three thousand miles from home by yourself you’re not even HEALTHY!”

I got out of bed, had hysterics, a martini and two cigarettes, got back in bed, and whiled away the rest of the night composing cables saying I wasn’t coming.

The book takes the form of her diary of her trip. She meets Frank’s widow and family; she spends time with various fans who take her under their wing, and has a fun time caricaturing them – including a man she constantly refers to as the Colonel. Along the way, she even spends time with Joyce Grenfell. You get the impression that she tolerates the company that flocks to her, rather than cherishes them – including poor Nora Doel who, reading between the lines, perhaps hoped for more from Hanff’s visit than she received. Or perhaps that’s just the bluff New Yorker coming through, who knows.

I remember not warming to Hanff the first time I read it. Perhaps her boistrous humour and sharp-speaking needed Frank Doel’s gentle kindness to offset it? I particularly recall the scene in Oxford where she has a tantrum because her guides are showing her their favourite haunts, rather than Oriel and Trinity Colleges. But this time around, I am clearly more tolerant – or perhaps have aged to match her level of intolerance. Either way, she felt like more of a kindred spirit, and I found it warm and enjoyable, even if she keeps human connection at arm’s length a bit.

But she is unbridled in her affection for England. That was rather touching to read about – particularly as someone who takes Oxford and London and the Cotswolds for granted.

I walked slowly along the street staring across it at the houses. I came to the corner, to a dark little park called Bedford Square. On three sides of it, more rows of neat, narrow brick houses, these much more beautiful and beautifully cared for. I sat on a park bench and stared at the houses. I was shaking. And I’d never in my life been so happy.

All my life I’ve wanted to see London. I used to go to English movies just to look at streets with houses like those. Staring at the screen in a dark theatre, I wanted to walk down those streets so badly it gnawed at me like hunger. Sometimes, at home in the evening, reading a casual description of London, I’d put the book down suddenly, engulfed by a wave of longing that was like homesickness. I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die. 

If you’re looking for a sequel to 84, Charing Cross Road, I’d always recommend Q’s Legacy instead, which looks at the success of the book and the process of it being adapted as a play. But this is a delight too. Frank is missed on every page, and it does require a bit of sympathy wth Hanff’s bombastic approach to the world – but this time around, I could very much get on board with her style, her humour, and her undisguised enthusiasm for the experience.