Month: February 2018

Watching and listening (mostly watching)

StuckinaBook All 6 Comments

What have I been listening to and watching recently, you ask? Well, you might not have asked that, but I’m in the middle of about eight books at the moment, and haven’t finished any of them – so I have to write about something else for a moment or two.

Capital

This is a brilliant improvised podcast which looks at the UK after a referendum has narrowly decided that capital punishment should come back. It follows four members of the civil service who have to decide who the first person killed should be, and when – one of them is ardently pro-capital punishment, one is trying to destablise it from the inside, one is trying to prove her leadership skills, and the other is genially hapless. It’s hilarious. (NB you probably have to be anti-capital punishment and anti-Brexit to enjoy it – because yes, of course, it’s a thinly-veiled spoof of Brexit and Brexit negotiations.)

Loving Vincent

I saw this animated film at the new Curzon cinema in Oxford, which I love because it was legroom and seats that tilt back. Thankfully the film was also good – and astonishing. It is entirely made up of oil paintings – 65,000 of them, I think – mostly done in the style of Vincent van Gogh. It looks at his final days, as a distant friend tries to work out whether or not he was murdered. The story is a bit expositiony in places, but the spectacle of seeing the oil paintings form an animation is once-in-a-lifetime.

Phantom Thread

I love Lesley Manville so I wanted to see what earned her an Oscar nom for Best Supporting Actress. Well, she was fab but didn’t have much to do in this beautiful, finely-acted, and supremely dull film about a dressmaker. I really wanted to love it. And in the right mood, I might have done. But I have never seen such a slow, slow, slow film.

First Monday in May

I just watched a documentary about the Met Gala and the creating of the exhibition it accompanied – which, in turn, brought together the costume department and the Asian department of the Met. It was great – beautiful pieces, some lovely people, and Anna Wintour being her Anna Wintourest. Higher on art and lower on gossip than I’d imagined.

Meet the Patels

Geeta Patel filmed this documentary following her brother Ravi as he tries to find a wife – mostly at the behest of his parents. The filming is amateurish (she is a director, not a cinematographer) but the film is wonderful. It shows the difficult blend of cultures for an Indian family that moves to America (and Ravi as a first-generation American), but mostly it shows a really loving, beautifully depicted family.

#PersephoneReadathon: Day One

StuckinaBook All 13 Comments

I’ve only just spotted that Jessie at Dwelling in Possibility is running an eleven-day Persephone Readathon. What a good idea! You can read more here, and by exploring a few of Jessie’s most recent posts, but I definitely want to jump on board. While I’m still deciding which of my unread Persephones to pick up (and which of those tick years in A Century of Books, of course), I thought I’d join in with the challenge for Day One: First Impressions Challenge: Tell us how you first discovered Persephone Books and/or the first Persephone book you read.

Well, there are a couple of potential answers to that – because I read a Persephone or two in non-Persephone covers before I’d ever heard of them. But my route to Persephone was through Richmal Crompton – I’d picked up Family Roundabout (I think) in Hay-on-Wye, intrigued because I’d loved her William stories throughout my childhood. That set me off on a little RC binge, for any of the books I could find easily – Frost at Morning, Weatherley Parade. And so I was rather intrigued when I saw a copy of Family Roundabout as part of a display in Pershore library, the little library local to be in Worcestershire. Yes, that copy was in Persephone clothing.

This was in late 2003, I think. I went to Amazon and saw a review of it – back in the days when Amazon would tell you email addresses of reviewers. I emailed the reviewer to say how much I’d like the novel too – and that reviewer happened to be Lyn, of I Prefer Reading. She told me all about Persephone Books, and invited me to join an online book group discussing them – from which I have never looked back.

So, the first Persephone book I read in its Persephone edition was either Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd or Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day by Winifred Watson – they were both books I found in the library (and I should really check my notebooks to see which I read first). They’re also both brilliant.

To date, I’ve read 56 Persephone books. Which, wonderfully, leaves almost seventy still to read – plenty of happy years of reading ahead of me!

Do join in with the Persephone Readathon if you can, and head over to Jessie’s blog to find out more.