Author: StuckinaBook

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

StuckinaBook All 8 Comments

At the time of writing, the world is rain. All that spring we had – rain. The sunshine, the unexpected heat – rain. Luckily, that just makes the world more atmospheric for reading in – which is precisely how I’m hoping to spend most of my weekend, getting through two very good books that are far too heavy to take to work. And I’ll leave you with a book, a link, and a blog post.

1.) The book – obviously I need to get Packing My Library by Alberto Manguel at some point. Three different people recommended it to me – some (cough, Mum) trying to suggest I should get rid of some more books, I think. I love Manguel’s writing about books, though I still have a few unread on my shelves. Should I read those first? Probably. But also… I need this. Right?

2.) The link – I don’t love films as much as I love books (the book is always better!), but I do love films nonetheless. And I particularly love looking behind the scenes, as long as things don’t get too technical for me. I heartily recommend the podcast Awards Chatter, but I wanted to highlight this profile of Nina Gold, who is the casting agent behind many careers. It’s fascinating, and she sounds completely fab.

3.) The blog post – want to know how to read 20 books in a month? In Resh’s post on The Book Satchel, she talks through how you might do it. It’s absolutely not about competitive reading – it’s about maximising our love of books, and tackling the ever-growing tbr piles. I read slower than Resh, but it still looks very achievable!

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

StuckinaBook All , , , 5 Comments

I love Milan Kundera, and I haven’t read one of his books for a while – so it was nice to revisit his writing on my recent holiday. I’ve still not read his most famous novel (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), but have read Immortality, Identity, The Joke, and The Festival of Insignificance – which is both the order I read them in and how much I liked them. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) is one of the best Kundera novels I’ve read – in a translation by Aaron Asher. And translations really matter with Kundera – he is notoriously choosy, but approved of this one. Which, interestingly enough, was translated from the French translations of the original Czech. An earlier English translation – in 1980, directly from the Czech – obviously didn’t quite cut it.

That sort of patchwork is quite appropriate for a book like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which I hesitate to call a novel or a collection of short stories – it is something in between. It is, indeed, a book of laughter and forgetting – themes which haunt the book like characters, offering the only unity available. And why (Kundera seems to ask) should not themes be a book’s unifying thread, rather than characters, time, and place?

Structurally, the book is divided into seven sections. To emphasis the iteration of thoughts and cross-connections, two are called ‘Lost Letters’ and two are called ‘The Angels’. It’s probably best (if you want a full summary) to head over to the Wikipedia page, rather than me paraphrasing what they say. But each section looks at a slice of life in various Czech people’s lives – from a man travelling and being followed by suspicious government agents, while thinking of his past love, to a fanciful scene in which schoolgirls fly away with angels. Most are connected with sex or politics, or both – which are often the two keynotes of Kundera’s created worlds.

But sections are not simple, discrete tales. Within each, Kundera shifts from image to image, thought to thought – in the first, for instance, he includes a description of a 1948 photograph of Vladimir Clementis and Klement Gottwald, from which Clementis was erased when he was no longer acceptable to the politicians’ propaganda. This is one of the senses of forgetting in the book. He also includes himself – or, at least, an author called Milan Kundera – and each section incorporates tangents, anecdotes, fables, parables. There is a section held together by the concept of litost – a Czech word without direct translation, which Kundera describes as ‘a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery’. The book is all a patchwork that requires astonishing deftness, and Kundera is astonishingly deft.

He is very good on the significance of gesture, or of stereotyped movements and how they can be interpreted – it is, after all, the wave of an arm that kicks off the stream of connected images at the beginning of Immortality. Here he is on one of the varieties of laughter in the book:

You certainly remember this scene from dozens of bad films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running, and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theatres: “We’re happy, we’re glad to be in the world, we’re in agreement with being!” It’s a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter ‘beyond joking’.

All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on their billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder.

Kundera has a level of control, and imagination, that makes these patchworks succeed. Indeed, his novels that try to follow a traditional narrative structure are the least successful, to my mind. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is such a triumph because he seems to throw out all the rules, and start from scratch with what a book can be. The characters and their paths, as they appear, are still vivid and vital – and there is a pain and hope throughout that can only come one whose homeland has been political hell. And there is, indeed, much humour – sometimes cynical, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes almost naively joyful.

It’s a brilliant mixture that I (at least) have to be in the right mood for, or it doesn’t click. Luckily I was in exactly the right mood when I picked up The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – and I very much recommend you give him a try.

The next club… is 1944!

StuckinaBook All 20 Comments

Thanks for all the wonderful contributions to the 1977 Club – I’m always surprised and delighted by how many people join in, and what a wide variety of authors we get. This time, I knew very few of them – out of my comfort zone – but have come away with the usual list of books to look out for.

Initially, Karen and I had thought we’d go back to the 1920s, and continue on back through the decades. But then we thought perhaps it would be fun to do things a bit differently now – and let random.org decide what year we’ll be doing. And, based on that – we’re going back to 1944 in October!

This will be our first club that looks at a wartime year – which will be a new and interesting perspective. We’ve got six months to go, but I hope you’ll pencil it in your diaries!

Tea or Books? #56: Review vs Recommendation and The Lark vs High Wages

StuckinaBook Tea or Books? , , 10 Comments

We’ve finally done the reviewers vs recommendations episode! Also: E Nesbit and Dorothy Whipple.


 
Every now and then, the critics vs bloggers debate rears its head. In the first half of the episode, we take a slightly different look at that – newspaper reviews vs friend’s recommendations – but we also talk about blogs along the way, unsurprisingly. In the second half, we pit two novels about women finding jobs against each other – E Nesbit’s The Lark (1922) and Dorothy Whipple’s High Wages (1930).

You can support the podcast (and get some rewards) at our Patreon page – including the first bloopers reel! And our iTunes page is here. As always, let us know if you have any suggestions for topics etc. And rate/review if you can work out how to!

If you’re after the complete E Nesbit ebook, it’s available here or through wherever you buy ebooks.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar
The Akeing Heart by Peter Haring Judd
Sylvia Townsend Warner by Claire Harman
Marilynne Robinson
Oliver Sacks
Touching the Rock by John Hull
Dan Brown
Hilary Mantel
A Life of One’s Own by Claire Tomalin
Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff
The Lark by E. Nesbit
High Wages by Dorothy Whipple
The Incredible Honeymoon by E Nesbit
Greenbanks by Dorothy Whipple
They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple
Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
A Pin to See the Peepshow by F Tennyson Jesse
The Enchanted Castle by E Nesbit
They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple
Penelope Lively
Lifting the Veil by Ismat Chughtai
Birds of America by Mary McCarthy
Meatless Days by Sara Suleri
Kamila Shamsie
The Group by Mary McCarthy
Cover designs by Martha Rich!
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

I Want To Be A Christian by J.I. Packer – #1977Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 2 Comments

Sneaking into the final day of the 1977 Club with my second review. And it’s been another great bunch of reviews from everyone – amazing variety, and lots of authors I know very little about. News about the next club soon, but do keep any 1977 Club reviews coming for the next few hours!

I’ve had I Want To Be A Christian (since republished as Growing in Christ) by J.I. Packer since 2004 – it was one of the books my Dad gave me when I went to university. I’ve read bits and pieces of it over the years, finding the bits that were most necessary at any point, but this was the first time I read it all the way through. It is perhaps not particularly relevant to 1977 specifically – its themes are literally eternal – but they do draw a line from to my Dad in 1977, or thereabouts, reading it for the first time.

As the title suggests, this is a book for people looking to find out more about the Christian faith, or perhaps very early in it, and it explores the central tenets of knowing Christ and being part of His church. I’ve been a Christian for my entire adult life, so there wasn’t anything in here that came as a surprise to me – but Packer writes it very well, phrasing it neatly and concisely, as well as bringing out the joy and wonder of what he explains.

The book is in four sections. The Apostles’ Creed, baptism and conversion, the Lord’s prayer, and the ten commandments. For the first, third, and fourth sections, Packer can take the words one by one – explaining what they mean, how they relate to the Bible, and what they mean for a life walked with God. The second section is necessarily a little more abstract, but is backed up with scripture, and gives an overview of some of the discussions theologians have had. But this book isn’t about deep debates and minute interpretations – it’s all about the essentials.

Packer has a great way of summarising the essential truths of something well known, and illuminating them further. I liked this on the Lord’s Prayer:

We need to see that the Lord’s Prayer is offering us model answers to the series of questions God puts to us to shape our conversation with him. Thus:  “Who do you take me for, and what am I to you?” (Our Father in heaven.) “That being so, what is it that you really want most?” (The hallowing of your name; the coming of your kingdom; to see your will known and done.) “So what are you asking for right now, as a means to that end?” (Provision, pardon, protection.) Then the “praise ending” answers the question, “How can you be so bold and confident in asking for these things?” (Because we know you can do it, and when you do it, it will bring you glory!) Spiritually, this set of questions sorts us out in a most salutary way.

There are many, many books that introduce people to the Christian faith. Many would be a lot more like storytelling than this one – there are no anecdotes, no personal testimonies. I love those sorts of books, but I think there’s also a vital place for this gentle, simple, step-by-step explanation of the tenets of faith – particularly one that you can feel recognises, in every word, the glory and wonder of what he is writing about.

Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff – #1977Club

StuckinaBook All , , , , 24 Comments

 

Why am I always super busy during club weeks? I will do catch-ups properly towards the end of the week (yes, it is already towards the end of the week, SORRY) but I’m really excited to be getting the notifications that people are joining in. And Karen is on it like a pro.

My first 1977 Club read is one I picked up in a brilliant bookshop called J C Books in Watton, Norfolk. If you’re ever in Norfolk, make sure you get there. It’s Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff – most famed, of course, for 84, Charing Cross Road, though I don’t hear a lot about her other books. Any fan of 84CCR should get a copy of Q’s Legacy pronto, which is sort of a sequel – but I’ve enjoyed all the books I’ve read by her, more or less.

A few years ago I read Letter From New York, which was about the apartment building she lived in, her neighbours, and generally life in the city – collected, if I remember correctly, from various articles over the years. I rather thought that Apple of My Eye would be the same thing – but it is not. Rather, Hanff had been commissioned to write the accompanying text to a book of photos of New York, designed for tourists to get the most out of the city. I don’t know quite what happened to that book, but Apple of My Eye rather wonderfully combines her recommended highlights with an account of visiting them herself and choosing what to include. It’s not a guidebook, it’s more a witty memoir of writing a guidebook – but could certainly function as an edited highlights of New York nonetheless (or, at least, New York in 1977).

Like many people who live in a touristy city, Hanff found that she had actually visited relatively few of the Must See Locations. (I, for instance, didn’t go to the Pitt Rivers for my first ten years in Oxford, and still haven’t made it to the Oxford Museum.) If you have all the time in the world to do something, then you never do – but Hanff realises she has to do all the things she hasn’t. And someone else who hasn’t is her friend Patsy – who also, apparently, has a couple of months to spare. So off they go!

Now, I’ve never been to New York, and I don’t really like travel guides even to places I have been. So my heart sank a little when I realised what sort of book this might be. But it was wrong to sink! While I couldn’t get my head around 5th Street this and 84th Street that, and have never understood how you know which two streets something like ‘6th and 8th’ might be – because surely that could be the same as 8th and 6th – I really enjoyed this anyway. And the reason is because Hanff is so funny about the experience of exploring – and about her friendship with Patsy.

Hanff is brilliant at writing about her friends. In Letter From New York it was Arlene (and Richard and Nina et al), and here it’s Patsy – she tells us enough about them to understand not only their characters, but how she relates to them and what their friendship is like. With Patsy, Hanff has clearly got to the point in the friendship where they can squabble slightly, tease each other, rely on each other, and say precisely what they mean. Patsy is enthusiastic about coming on this tour, but also openly reluctant to do many of the proposed activities (often because of her fear of heights). Her refrain is “write that down”, often for details Hanff considers irrelevant – though, self-evidently, did write them down. Much is also made of their East vs West friendly enmities.

Curiously, while I find all the south-of-the-river vs north-of-the-river chat in London quite tedious (mostly because they seem exactly the same to me), I really enjoyed the way Hanff wrote about East vs West. For example…

Generally speaking, West Siders look dowdy, scholarly and slightly down-at-heel, and the look has nothing to do with money. They look like what a great many of them are: scholars, intellectuals, dedicated professionals, all of whom regard shopping for clothes as a colossal waste of time. East Siders, on the other hand, look chic. Appearances are important to them. From which you’ll correctly deduce that East Siders are conventional and proper, part of the Establishment and in awe of it – which God knows, and God be thanks, West Siders are not.

Hanff, it should be noted, is from the East Side – though does feel like a fish out of water sometimes.

Luckily for me, Hanff assumes no knowledge of New York at all – up to and including telling us that theatre happens on Broadway. As she darts on buses all over the place, we see Ellis Island, the Empire State Building, Bloomingdale’s, Central Park, and all the things one would expect – with a few little-known gems thrown in for good measure. The strangest part to read about was the World Trade Center  – still having bits finalised at the time of Hanff writing. Obviously she could know nothing of its eventual fate, and to read of it as an exciting new development in the city, with the best restaurant available, felt rather surreal.

Hanff is very concise in her tour – my copy of the book was only 120 pages. Obviously volumes and volumes could be written about New York, and have been, but I think this is a wonderful little book – probably even more so for somebody familiar with New York. For me, it is a funny and charming account of friendship, which just happens to have a dizzying tour of New York as its backdrop.

Better late than never: a 2017 round-up

StuckinaBook All 8 Comments

I’ve never done my annual round-up of reads QUITE this late in the year, and I don’t know how it’s April already. But in the spirit of better late than never, I thought I’d tell you a bit about what I read last year. With some STATS. And with some comparisons with my stats for 2016.

Number of books read
I read 107 books last year – which is seven more than I completed in 2016, and one more than I read in 2015. The only reason I can give for the slight increase is living on my own giving me a bit more time for reading – and perhaps the fact that I had more holidays than usual, with the extra leave time my new job gave me!

Male/female authors
I read 47 books by men and 60 books by women, which is about the usual ratio for me – though I read 44 fiction books (novels, stories, plays etc) by women and only 21 fiction books by men – with the ratio weighted towards men in the non-fiction category. Huh. It’s also the first year for a while where I didn’t read any books written by a man and a woman.

Fiction/non-fiction
65 of the books I read were fiction, and 42 were non-fiction. It did feel like I read quite a lot of non-fiction last year, but I’m still surprised it was quite that high. Still more fiction, of course, and I doubt that will ever swap around, but… watch this space?

Books in translation
An all-time high of eight books last year – so how did I do in 2017? Well, I read six – My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (from Italian), Closely Observed Trains by Bohumil Hrabal (from Czech), Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig (from German), The Man Who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Ayme (from French), and Letters From Klara by Tove Jansson (from Swedish). So, not a huge number – but I do like that they were all from different languages.

Most-read author
There was never going to be any doubt about this. 2017 was the Year of Beverley, and I read six books by him. At least that number still waiting for me on the shelf, thankfully!

Re-reads
I re-read six books in 2017 (one more than 2016), and nearly all of them were either for the podcast or for book group. And, again, I’m pretty happy at keeping the re-read number down – so I can get through the tbr piles.

New-to-me authors
In the past two years, I’ve read 47 new-to-me authors. Have I kept to that number?? Er, no. But pretty close – 53 of the books I read were by authors I hadn’t read before, so it’s still very much on the half/half cusp. Again, I’m pretty happy with that ratio.

Most disappointing book
Probably the Elena Ferrante, because so many people had told me how good it was. And it found it rather so-so and a bit boring. But I’m often a bit bored by books about childhood, so perhaps I should persevere with the next one at some point… or perhaps I shouldn’t. We’ll see.

Oh, wait, it’s got to be The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I’ve had it on my shelf for 14 years, and found it enormously too long, and quite tedious. Sorry! Looking at my list, there were quite a few disappointments… but I won’t linger over those.

Most delightful non-Beverley discovery

All this fuss about Beverley Nichols, it’s important to remember that I also read Emily Eden for the first time. Her Semi-Attached House and Semi-Detached Couple are well-crafted delights that bear comparison with Jane Austen.

Most deceptive mention of an author in a title

I loved Nina Sankovitch’s memoir about reading a book every day for a year – Tolstoy and the Purple Chair – but only one of them was Tolstoy, and it was such a bizarre idea to call the book that. It can only have put off readers fearful of Tolstoy-heaviness, and disappointed Tolstoy fans.

Most deceptive mention of a book in a title

Does Jacob’s Room is Full of Books by Susan Hill count? I don’t know if I can get over my frustration that the title doesn’t work on two levels in the way that Howards End is on the Landing did.

Most horrifyingly racist book

The Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells took a rather unexpected and vile racist turn towards the end. Ugh.

Favourite comparison

Reading two novelised accounts of the Bywaters/Thompson murder case back to back – F Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin To See the Peepshow and E.M. Delafield’s Messalina of the Suburbs – was extremely rewarding and interesting. It also led to one of my favourite podcast episodes.

Animals in book titles
There are always some, somehow. I never think about this until I get to the end of the year (ahem, or April) and find that a whole bunch have turned up again – so which were there in 2017? Mostly birds, oddly. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, A Footman for the Peacock by Rachel Ferguson, Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives by Gerald Durrell, The Pelicans by E.M. Delafield, The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson, and Swans on an Autumn River by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Strange things that happened in books this year

Always my favourite section – and everybody else’s too, as far as I can tell from the comments. Here’s a selection of this year’s oddities – a man travelled through time to medieval England; a man slept for decades and found he was the leader of a revolution; time was rationed based on wealth; a servant was reincarnated as a peacock; the Brontes popped up in Woolworths; a man walked through walls; a hearing trumpet opens up a surreal world; a couple thought they might be father and daughter; a couple were brother and sister; someone got murdered in the theatre; someone survived suicide to be murdered; an ape went loose in London; boating rights somehow led to communism.

 

The 1977 Club starts today!

StuckinaBook All 39 Comments

Yep, somehow six months have passed – and the 1977 Club kicks off today.

To join in, just read and review a book published in 1977 – any sort of book, any language – and put a link to your review in the comments here. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to link to GoodReads or wherever, or put a whole review in the comments if you want to!

Because of A Century of Books, I’ll probably only manage one or two 1977 books myself – but I’m really looking forward to what you all come up with. Between us, we can get a really good overview of the year.

Dancing Girls by Margaret Atwood

1streading’s Blog

HeavenAli

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge

Madame Bibi lophile Recommends

Starring Sally J Freeman as Herself by Judy Blume

Booked for Life

Dreaming of Babylon by Richard Brautigan

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo

746 Books

The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter

Pining for the West

Adventures in reading, writing and working from home

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Literasaurus

A Flat Man by Ivor Cutler

Intermittencies of the Mind

The Golden Child by Penelope Fitzgerald

Madame Bibi lophile Recommends

JacquiWine’s Journal

The Women’s Room by Marilyn French

Mirabile Dictu

What Me Read

Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff

Travellin’ Penguin

Stuck in a Book

Midnight Express by Billy Hayes

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Fluke by James Herbert

Intermittencies of the Mind

Little Mountain by Elias Khoury

1streading’s Blog

The Shining by Stephen King

Annabel’s House of Books

The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carre

What Me Read

Pining for the West

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

Shoshi’s Book Blog

The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz

Winstonsdad’s Blog

The Danger Tree by Olivia Manning

HeavenAli

Coming into the Country by John McPhee

What Me Read

Sextet: Six Essays by Henry Miller

Intermittencies of the Mind

The End of a Family Story by Peter Nadas

Winstonsdad’s Blog

I Want To Be A Christian by J.I. Packer

Stuck in a Book

A Morbid Taste for Old Bones by Ellis Peters

She Reads Novels

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Book Jotter

Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym

Tredynas Days

Bookword

Hard Book Habit

Books and Chocolate

Ramblings of a Red Headed Snippet

Staying On by Paul Scott

Harriet Devine’s blog

The Box Garden by Carol Shields

The Dusty Bookcase

Buried in Print

Die Widmung by Botho Strauss

Beauty is a Sleeping Cat

Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones

Adventures in reading, writing and working from home

Staircase Wit

A round up of a number of books!

The Literary Sisters

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

StuckinaBook All 11 Comments

As I write this, a little in advance of the weekend, we are being promised heat and sun and all sorts. I intend to spend the weekend reading, but I might go as far as opening a window. MAYBE TWO WINDOWS. Crazy, huh?

I have more links than usual this weekend, so don’t let anybody tell you I don’t spoil you. In fact, I’ll focus just on links this weekend.

1.) In Praise of Margery Sharp – from the New York Times. I’ve read three Sharp novels over the past 15 or so years, and really must read some more from my shelf – as they’ve all been brilliant.

2.) Do we need more than 120 words? – I wrote a piece for OxfordWords about Toki Pona, a recently created language with only 120 phonemes. It was really interesting researching the piece, and you can read all about it by following the link above.

3.) A new Marilynne Robinson novel! – don’t get too excited yet; it’s been announced, but there’s not even a title yet. Actually, do get excited – cos it’s the fourth in the Gilead series!

4.) Copy editors chat – this isn’t a new link, but I found it this week. The style guide doyenne of the New Yorker chats about her career, and maybe even tries to justify some of the New Yorker‘s sillier aberrations. (Did you know they use teen-ager and coöperative?)

5.) Judi, Maggie, Eileen, Joan – did somebody somehow bottle my dreams and hopes? This documentary is already my favourite film and I haven’t even seen it yet.

Tea with Walter de la Mare by Russell Brain

StuckinaBook All , , , 6 Comments

This is one from my books-about-authors shelf – more particularly, my books-about-authors-by-people-who-knew-them-a-bit shelf. It’s one of my favourite genres, and the king of it has to be the memoir of being Ivy Compton-Burnett’s secretary, by Cicely Greig. Well, Sir Russell Brain was not a secretary, but he did become friends with Walter de la Mare later in life – and Tea with Walter de la Mare (published in 1957, the year after de la Mare died) is an account of that friendship.

More particularly, it’s an account of the various times Brain and his wife (and sometimes children) went to visit de la Mare – and he clearly rushed straight back to make notes afterwards. Incidentally, I didn’t know who he was – but all the info you might need is on Wikipedia. It really amuses me that he was a scientist, with the surname Brain… As for his companion – I suspect de la Mare is chiefly known for ‘The Listeners’ and ‘Fare Well’ (“look thy last on all things lovely”…) and perhaps Memoirs of a Midget, but is no longer the literary giant he was at the time of his death. And he’s also related to my friend Rachel, so she tells me.

And the book? I enjoyed this insight into knowing de la Mare (‘W.J.’ to Brain), but it has to be confessed that Brain isn’t particularly good at writing. You can only enjoy this as you might enjoy a series of index cards. His accounts are often more or less “and then he said this… and then he said this… and then he said this”. It is a jumble of topics and thoughts, from the deeply philosophical to the frivolously anecdotal. Brain faithfully records it all, and retells stories in the most pedestrian way possible. Here, for instance, is a story sapped completely dry:

Janet told him a ghost story she had heard of a man who went to stay in the house of some people whom he did not know very well. He was visited in a dream by an ancestor of the owner of the house, who revealed to him some facts which the family did not know, and which ultimately proved to be correct.

Isn’t that almost a satire of how not to tell a story? I picked it because it was amusingly bad, but it’s not a huge outlier. Though there was at least one story I very much enjoyed:

He told us about the only occasion on which he had sat on a jury. It was a slander case before Lord Reading – so good-looking. He spoke so well, and was so polite. A butcher was suing the local medical officer of health. When the jury retired, there were at first ten, and then eleven, for the medical officer, but one stood out for the butcher. He said he knew what medical officers of health were. All the rest of the jurymen argued with him in vain. finally W.J. said: “We must get this settled: I’ve got to catch a train.” Whereupon the recalcitrant juryman said: “Oh, well, if it’s a question of a train, I am with you.” So British, thought W.J.!

So, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. It’s a little frustrating that a much better book was hiding behind this one – had Brain been a better writer, this could have been a wonderful gem of a book. As it was, I enjoyed flicking through it – but in much the way that I’d enjoy reading a list that gives me a taste of a period and a man, but not an enormous amount else.

But… it does smell really nice. It’s maybe the nicest-smelling book I have. So, there’s that.