Month: October 2009

The Paper House

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Wow, thanks everyone for your great comments on yesterday’s post – it’s such an interesting concept, the book that started the transition into a world where, as Hayley so wonderfully put it in the comments, classics were no longer ‘worthy books that I thought I should read rather than living things I wanted to read.’

A book like Howards End is on the Landing (yes, it’s becoming second only to Miss Hargreaves in how often I’ll mention it… everyone got their copies of Miss Hargreaves by the way, since she happened to come up?) – sorry, as I was saying, a book like Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill doesn’t just finish when you close it. Rather it sends you off in all other sorts of directions, and one of those was The Paper House by Carlos Maria Dominguez. (With some Argentinian accents which apparently aren’t compatible with Blogger’s HTML, sorry…) Hill wrote that it was ‘a charming novella about the perils and dangers of books and book owning […] about a man who has many thousands of books which not only take on personalities of their own but come to replace people in his life.’ And she also quoted this excerpt:

…it was unthinkable to put a book by Borges next to one by Garcia Lorca, whom the Argentine author once described as a ‘professional Andalusian’. And given the dreadful accusation of plaigarism between the two of them, he could not put something by Shakespeare next to a work by Marlowe, even though this meant not respecting the volume numbers of the sets in his collections. Nor, of course, could he place a book by Martin Amis next to one by Julian Barnes after the two friends had fallen out, or leave Vargas Llosa with Garcia Marquez.
Lazy blogging on my part, I realise, but I thought I should share something which made me leap to A Certain Website to buy The Paper House. If you can resist a description and a quotation like that, then you don’t have the same relationship with books that I have (does ‘relationship’ sound more or less healthy than ‘obsession’? Hard to say.) The novel follows the narrator as he tries to track down Carlos Brauer, a bibliophile who has mysteriously sent a cement-damaged copy of Conrad’s The Shadow-Line to one of the narrator’s colleagues, recently deceased. Hit by a car, in fact, whilst she was reading Emily Dickinson’s poems. The narrator sets off on a journey to find out who Brauer is, and why he’s sent the book…

But the plot is only half the book’s point: this is a novella for those who love the sight, feel, idea of books. (Incidentally, the illustrations by Peter Sis – which include the cover image, and the image reproduced below – are bizarre and yet fitting… certainly unique.)


I love reading bibliocentric books, because it makes me feel a lot more sane in my book addiction. Which of us won’t nod in empathy at the following sentences (except perhaps the bit about giving books away…):

Every year I give away at least fifty of [my books] to students, yet I still cannot avoid putting in another double row of shelves; the books are advancing silently, innocently through my house. There is no way I can stop them.

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us.[…] Nobody wants to mislay a book. We prefer to lose a ring, a watch, our umbrella, rather than a book whose pages we will never read again, but which retains, just in the sound of its title, remote and perhaps long-lost emotion.

To build up a library is to create a life. It’s never just a random collection of books.This is a very quick read, but a magically bookish one, which will make you feel a little saner about your own book collection. I’ll think I’ll revisit it over the years…. and anticipate quite a few of you doing the same?

Classics Revisited

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One of my book groups (yes, I’m in several, who’d have thought) has quite a democratic way of choosing the books we read. So do some of the others, but not quite so well organised. Every other month we pick a genre (and every other month we just go with general fiction) and then make a longlist… and then make a shortlist… and then vote on the title online… and finally we have a winner! By the time you read this, we’ll have discussed this month’s choice of Miss Hargreaves (now WHO do you think could have suggested this?) but I want to write about next month’s choice. The genre was ‘alternative worlds’ and the winning book is George Orwell’s 1984 – or, as I should say, Nineteen Eighty-four.

Which spawns two questions for you to answer. I read Nineteen Eighty-four when I was about 13, and it was the first ‘classic’ novel I read, excepting children’s classics. I don’t intend to launch into a discussion of what constitutes a classic, unless Frank Kermode is sitting in the back row, but I know that it felt different – like I’d entered a new world of reading. First question, then, is can you remember what the first ‘classic’ you read was? And what prompted you to choose this title?

Now, that was about a decade ago (and, if you’re doing the sums, yes – that means the supposedly futuristic-sounding Nineteen Eighty-four actually takes place a year before I was born). I haven’t re-read the book in that time, and I’m a little nervous… I thought, when I was 13, that the book was brilliant. Will I still think that? Having read a fair number of books since then (maybe around a thousand, which doesn’t seem like many at all, come to think of it) and having read quite a lot of classic novels, how will I react when I re-read my first? That’s the second question – have you re-read that first classic novel, and if so, what was the experience like?

I’m all ears – get commenting.

Hilly Region

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As you’ll have read, I’m rather a fan of Howards End is on the Landing – and it sent me off in pursuit of other Susan Hill books. I had read The Battle for Gullywith, which was ok, but nothing to set my reading pulse into overdrive… but now I want more and more. Spotting that The Beacon was just coming into paperback, I gave Vintage Press an email… well, they didn’t reply, and I gave up the idea, but then the book arrived so somebody must have read the email… thank you Mysterious Lovely Person at Vintage Press.

I’d had my eye on The Beacon for a while, mostly because of the stunning cover (Susan Hill does have some good fortune with these, does she not?) and because the premise sounds interesting. Essentially, it’s a response to the vogue for childhood misery memoirs. Made famous by David Pelzer and his A Child Called It, the genre has seemingly thousands of titles, all with more or less the same cover – a white background with a sepia-child on it. Three were written by people from a family who grew up in my village, in fact. Frankly, I haven’t the smallest idea why anybody publishes or reads these. I completely understand why people write them – it must be a great catharsis – but my only experience, with Pelzer’s first book, left me feeling voyeuristic. Many of them have been written, but I think Susan Hill’s novelistic response is unusual, maybe even unique.

The Prime family live in a small North Country village, in an old farmhouse called The Beacon. The narrative moves between two time frames – we see Colin, May, Frank, and Berenice as they grow up – and we see May, still living at The Beacon years later, dealing with the death of their mother. As one strand follows the children’s gradual maturing, moving away from home to marriage or college or the city, the other strand shows the same family on the other side of a life-changing event. Not the death of their mother Bertha – that is simply the catalyst for the novel’s action – but the book Frank published about their childhood. The Cupboard Under The Stairs tells of his childhood or neglect, torture, and misery – at the hands of his parents, and even his siblings.

Except none of it is true… or is it? Though the other children – now grown-up – come together in horror and denial, yet the doubt which spreads throughout their community is also planted in all of their minds. A very faint doubt, but doubt nonetheless. But for the most part, when the doubt does not assail them, they cannot understand the motives their brother had:

How can you grow up with someone from birth and know nothing about them, she thought, share parents and brother and sister with them, share a house, rooms, a table, holidays, play, illnesses, games and not know them?
The Beacon is a very clever, subtle novella. Like many short books, it packs a more powerful punch than a longer book could have done. The emotions of the characters are never over the top, but understated and quietly devastating. Hill wisely doesn’t ruin the effect by dwelling on Frank’s imagined torture – it is not that kind of book. Instead it is a novella driven by characters’ relationships with one another, and how much in them is unvoiced and unvoiceable. Hill also has the power to make the final few pages of a book – indeed, final few words – make you gasp out loud, and want to start the book all over again. Though I don’t love this book in the way that I love Howards End is on the Landing, that is because The Beacon is a book to be admired and appreciated, rather than loved – I’m definitely pleased I revisited Susan Hill, as I feel there’s a lot more for me to discover. Next up is In the Springtime of the Year.

Suggestions for more, please?

Howards End is on the Landing – Susan Hill

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29. Howards End is on the Landing – Susan Hill

I’ve teased you long enough, and now I am going to write about Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill. I’m not sure of the exact publication date, but apparently it’s already being shipped by some, er, depositories of books. So will be hitting shelves soon, if it’s not there already. As you can see, it’s gone straight into my list of 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About – though I suspect *everyone* will have heard about it before long. It’s just too good not to put into the list.

To set the tone: this is my favourite book of the year so far. It’s everything bookish and literary that you could possibly ask for – basically, if you sigh happily when glancing at the cover (which Hill herself thinks is the best one she’s ever been given) then this is the book for you.

The premise is that Susan Hill will spend a year reading only books she has on her shelves. Not just unread books, but revisiting those from the past – much-read favourites alongside ones she’s always meant to read. As she beautifully writes: ‘a book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.’

And so the year begins. Hill avoids spending much time on the internet – explaining the sudden disappearance of her blog – since it can ‘have a pernicious influence on reading because it is full of book-related gossip and chatter on which it is fatally easy to waste time that should be spent actually paying close, careful attention to the books themselves.’ I find this chatter wonderful, of course (for what is Stuck-in-a-Book but book-related chatter?) and a great resource for finding more books – but I think Hill’s decision is a dream a lot of us have. Wouldn’t it be lovely to retreat into our bookshelves, finally tackling those tbr piles, having everything spontaneous and undecided?

In truth, most of Howards End is on the Landing is speculative, wondering which books might be read, and remembering her experiences with them, rather than reappraisals of the re-reads and newly reads. Is this an autobiography through reading? In a way, perhaps. But it is much more embracing than that – personal anecdotes, yes (her meeting with Iris Murdoch is quietly heart-breaking), but also chapters on how books can be shelved, whether or not to write in them, what constitutes a funny book… It’s a bit like a very well-edited, and selective, blog. And I mean that as a compliment. Individual authors treated to their own chapter include Virginia Woolf, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, WG Sebald, Penelope Fitzgerald, Anthony Trollope… a huge range, for Susan Hill is no book snob. How cheering to hear her say:

Adults may say what they like – parents, teachers and other know-alls. Enid Blyton excited us, took us into worlds of mystery, magic, adventure and fun. Yes, her prose is bland, yes, the vocabulary is not particularly stretching. But Blyton had the secret, the knack.There are sections on diaries, e-readers (not a fan), detective fiction, and how she doesn’t like Jane Austen (intake of breath, but she keeps trying to see what’s what with Jane, and at least she’s honest…) Oh, and lots more.

Towards the end, Hill tries to decide upon the 40 books she’d read for the rest of her life, if she could have no others. I shan’t spoil her list, for the book builds up to it, but it’s a great idea for a gradual, contemplative exercise.

Above all – and I am aware that I haven’t done justice to Howards End is on the Landing, for it is impossible to put across her tone – Susan Hill has written something delightfully, wisely, enchantingly bookish. I feel I have been around her old farmhouse, with its rooms full of bookcases – I feel her surprise when she happens upon an unexpected old friend on her uncategorised shelves. Mostly, I have fallen even more deeply in love with my own books – with those which have lingered for years unread; with my own personal library as a whole.

She picks and chooses, yet is also somehow comprehensive. She writes subjectively, but – whether or not I agree with her – it feels like the last word has been spoken; the whole spectrum of opinion addressed. And Hill can be sweeping (‘Girls read more than boys, always have, always will. That’s a known fact.’) and naive (‘if [some listed Elizabethan plays] were any good we would have heard of them’) but that doesn’t seem to matter a jot. Perhaps it is her sheer love of books that make her the everywoman – or at least everyreader – even whilst having a determined set of views.

There are some books which are read reluctantly; others so addictive that they are read walking down the street. Then there are those – and this is a rare, wonderful category – that are laid aside often, because the thought of finishing them, of having no more to read, is awful. Howards End is on the Landing is in this category – what higher praise can I offer? This might only truly delight those of us who have hundreds of unread books, lists everywhere of books we intend to read. For us (and if you’ve read this far, that includes you) this is a treasure, from the pen of a like-minded friend, to which we will often, happily, joyfully, return.

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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1.) The link: Well, there it is above. This weekend I’m feeling quite silly, and those much-promised book reviews will have to take a back seat for… a video of a kitten discovering a mirror. When people feel low they might eat chocolate, watch a favourite film, have Prozac… I go to YouTube and search for ‘kitten’ and ‘mirror’. Not that I’m feeling down at the moment – I just thought it would be a good ‘link’ to choose for the link, book, and blog post… Ok, I wanted any excuse. This is something you don’t get in The Telegraph.

That’s the link, then… now for the others.

2.) The blog post: Hayley at Desperate Reader has written a rather lovely post today, which covers all the wonderful bases of blogging – good news to share, a good book, a good recipe. And she links back to my blog too, so what more could you *possibly* ask for? Go along and enjoy all three… and enjoy the beautiful pictures she has along the side column, too.

3.) The book: I try to write about something interesting which is in the backlog… so step forward Lord Lucan: My Story ‘edited’ by William Coles. You might remember Coles from the Othello-meets-Notes-on-a-Scandal and rather good novel The Well-Tempered Clavier, which I wrote about here. And, what do you know, he’s happened to stumble across the secret memoir of Lord Lucan, the peer who disappeared in 1974… (In case you don’t know who the real Lord Lucan is, have a shufty here. Don’t you love Wikipedia.) Coles is very amusing and this could prove a quirky, interesting, and unique read… I’ll let you know what I think one day, but for now there’s a heads-up in case you’re interested!

Wolf….

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So, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel has won the Booker. This could have led into my thoughts about the Booker Prize, musings on Mantel’s suitability to win, thoughts about the use of history in fiction.

Instead, it reminded me of this post I wrote a couple of years ago, where I asked you to think of books with animals in the title.

Ahem.


Sorry, proper reviews soon, promise. I do have a pile of ten books I’ve finished, and am going to write about… maybe I’ll just blitz them all one night. But not tonight.

Badly done… or not?

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Have any of you seen the first part of Emma, the BBC’s latest costume drama? And last for a while, if reports are to be believed. There hasn’t been a big production of Emma for over a decade, so Romola Garai has rooted through the bonnet cupboard, and a four part series started last weekend.


I’ve watched the first episode, and I enjoyed it a lot, though am still more or less straddling the fence. I love Romola Garai in everything she does – mostly I Capture the Castle, but also Amazing Grace, Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel, and Atonement. She makes a feisty, self-confident Emma, and could turn out to be rather great.

Michael Gambon is a wonderful hypochondriac as Mr. Woodhouse, wrapped in scarves and uncertainty. Tamsin Greig wasn’t quite as funny as I know she can be, but perhaps her Miss Bates is played more for pathos than humour.

My issues? Their Mr. Knightley (Johnny Lee Miller) was young and handsome and everything a modern film hero should be, but not remotely like Mr. Knightley is. Miller is much too young, and the match is much too suitable… on the page, I found it a little creepy, since they are much more brother and sister than anything else… Still, Miller may do for Knightley was Alan Rickman appears to have done for Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, and made a rather bizarre, unromantic match seem like a dream come true.

And the other thing… the language was so often too modern. I found myself muttering to the television, ‘is there no historical advisor?’ When the credits rolled, I saw that there was… and he is my tutor at Magdalen! Well, there you go.

All in all, fun and fresh way to ‘do’ Emma, and only slight misgivings. I’ll certainly be watching the rest. (Any UK readers who missed it, the programme is available through BBC i-Player.)

London Books…

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Some would say that I don’t absolutely, definitely, incontrovertibly *need* any more books, especially after my recent haul in Edinburgh, but going through two of the cheapest bookshops in London left me with quite a few, then a trip to Charing Cross Road revealed a couple of gems which it would have been foolish to leave behind… I’m going to start with them, in fact.


Like a lot of us, I loved Henrietta’s War by Joyce Dennys, recently republished in the much-beloved Bloomsbury Group series. When in Henry Pordes Books, on Charing Cross Road, I spotted the name ‘Joyce Dennys’… only true book-lovers will recognise that leap in your stomach you get, when you spot a book you never expected to find. And there were two of ’em… Repeated Doses (a sequel to a book I don’t have, Mrs. Dose the Doctor’s Wife) and the sublimely titled Economy Must Be Our Watchword. They were both *quite* pricey, but – in an unprecedented act of technological capability – I crept into a corner of the bookshop and used my mobile ‘phone to check whether or not Amazon and Abebooks had cheaper copies. They didn’t – in fact Economy Must Be Our Watchword doesn’t seem even to be available anywhere – and these beautiful 1930s books, complete with Dennys’ quirky illustrations, were quickly mine.


Less exciting, but still great, were my other finds:

In the Springtime of the Year – Susan Hill
A Bit of Singing and Dancing – Susan Hill
– I will write about Howards End is on the Landing soon, promise, but it’s already sent me away to find more of her work. The first of these is one I really want to read.

Saraband – Eliot Bliss
Cousin Rosamund – Rebecca West
Beyond the Glass – Antonia White
– Three Virago Modern Classics which I couldn’t leave behind. Never heard of the Eliot Bliss or her/his book, but it charts the emotional life of a girl in the 1930s, so the blurb says. The other two are sequels to books I haven’t read, so might be on the back burner for a while… but were found in the wonderful Book & Comic Exchange in Notting Hill Gate, which has a large three-room basement of books for 50p each.


The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
– a friend recommended this to me, but now several others have told me not to bother… what do you think?

The Lottery and other stories – Shirley Jackson
– this beautiful new edition, already secondhand! You’ll have realised by now that I think Jackson is great – looking forward to delving into these. I have read ‘The Lottery’ online, and it is beyond chilling… you can do the same, here.

The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
– I struggled with The Last September a while ago, and took great encouragement from your similar tales of woe. But Susan Hill says this is her best, and at 40p for a rather nice paperback, I thought I could give Lizzie another shot…


Family and Friends – Anita Brookner
– Susan Hill has a lot to answer for. HEioTL has sent me off in Anita B’s direction…

And I also came away with three lovely gifts, celebrating our fifth birthday:

Hostages to Fortune – Elizabeth Cambridge
– my second favourite Persephone book, after Richmal Crompton’s, but somehow I didn’t own a copy… thank you Nichola!

Virginia Woolf: An Illustrated Anthology
– everything Woolf is good in my book – thanks Barbara!

The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac – Eugene Field
– a late-19th Century book with a rather apt title – many thanks Sherry!

As always, any comments and thoughts on my new arrivals? Thanks everyone!

Ready Stead… Ivy!

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Ok, have you got your copies of Manservant and Maidservant by Ivy Compton-Burnett? Or perhaps you have it under the original American title, Bullivant and the Lambs. Either way, there is still sometime to get prepared, even though I’m shouting GO! at the top of my voice. Because I don’t think we can all agree to read the novel in the same week, I’m decreeing the whole of October as your time limit…. I AM excited!

So, over October, secure your copy, and get reading. The beautiful New York Review of Books Classics edition is available in the US, but also from some bookshops in England – I spotted two copies in the Kensington Persephone Bookshop, for example. Otherwise, plenty of secondhand editions to find. It was first published in 1947, but has been reprinted a fair number of times.

And, in the first week of November, I’ll encourage everyone involved to post on their experiences with the novel – either in comments on my blog, or – of course – on your own blogs. You’re welcome to post before then, obviously you can do as you like, but it might be fun to all write about Manservant and Maidservant at the same time.

This experience might well be giving up on page two, or it might be sheer delight and ordering all of her novels – or, of course, something in between. I’ve not read it yet, I don’t know how I’ll react. But it will be exciting to know that we’re all reading ICB together – I’ll remind everyone about halfway through October, and see how you’re going…

Feel free to comment now, to reassure me that I’m not reading all on my own, and let the festivities begin!

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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A bit later than usual this week, mea culpa, but I hope you’ve all settled into a nice weekend. I had fun this week, going up to London for a celebratory meet-up of an online reading group I’m in: five years together. Actually a bit longer than that, but five years since we changed our name. A lovely tea at the Orangery at Kensington, and some, ahem, moderate book-buying… I’ll treat you to a list later in the week. Whilst I London I also met up with Simon S (Savidge Reads) and Claire (Paperback Reader) for a quick coffee – which was good fun. We chatted and gossiped about blogs, I mentioned Miss Hargreaves two or six times, and a good time was had by all.

Without any further ado… the link, the book, and the blog post. A bit like the good, the bad, and the ugly – except instead it’s the good, the good, and the good.

1.) The link – You might remember that I’m a fan of the gals behind 3191. Two ladies have been inspired by 3191 to start their own daily comparative photograph site – but one showing the charity work of SOS Children. The charity works on a huge scale, securing homes for millions of children and helping thousands of families stay together – but when we hear ‘millions’ it all seems too vast to understand. Using photography, they can show the detail and the individuals affected.

Every day two new photographs will appear side by side, as well as a few paragraphs on what the photograph represents, and what the charity is doing. It’s a great idea, do have a look – the website is www.twotalk.org.


2.) The blog post – Kirsty at Other Stories writes about secondhand bookshops, following the Guardian’s list of the ten best in the UK. Might inspire me to write something similar soon… I was pleased and surprised to see my local bookshop in Somerset, Gresham Books of Crewkerne, make the list. And, with Kirsty, I mourn the absence of any great independent secondhand bookshop in Oxford, since Waterfield’s closed. We just have charity bookshops, and the hugely overpriced secondhand department of Blackwell’s.

3.) The book – I told, or warned, readers about a new Winnie the Pooh book, back in January. Well, it’s coming out on Monday. The Telegraph printed the first story, about Christopher Robin coming back from school, and you can read it by clicking here. I have surprised myself by liking both David Benedictus, the author, and his story. He’s obviously done a lot of research (he even tried to use the word convolvulus in another story, which might be a reference to the novel-within-a-novel ‘Bindweed’, in AA Milne’s Two People) and the story has a good tone. It makes more in-references than Milne ever did, and it’s obviously not from Milne’s pen, but I don’t think an imitation could be much better. Of course, it’s still up for debate whether a sequel is wanted, but given that one’s being written… I think it might be ok. Doubtless forgotten in a decade, but fun for the moment. Though I’m still worrying about the illustrations by Mark Burgess… the one accompanying the story is ok, but has nothing of EH Shepard’s wonderful spirit. Well, we’ll see.