Author: StuckinaBook

It’s been quite the week for theatre and cinema – if going three times counts as ‘quite the week’, which I rather think it does. And that’s not even including watching Crush on DVD because it has Imelda Staunton and Anna Chancellor in it (word to the wise: they’re glorious, but not enough to make up for a rather shaky plot and Andie MacDowell handing in a rather underwhelming performance – but kudos to whoever put the Behind The Scenes section on the DVD that is literally just behind the scenes footage without any voiceover, including watching a man move cones around).

The film I saw at the cinema was La La Land (watching for the second time, and liking even more this time around), but you already know that that’s great. So I thought I’d mention the plays I’ve been to see.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

On Monday I went to see a production of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and managed to walk into a door on the way in (or, rather, the glass surrounds to a door that I couldn’t see). Ouch. I only realised the day before I went that it would be rather a tough watch – and, indeed, it was. At times I had my fingers in my ears and my eyes closed – there were some very realistic depictions of torture. But, ultimately, I was impressed with the production – it should be unsettling, after all – and the staging was very effective. TV screens were all over the stage, along with lots of floor-level strip lighting; the TV screens showed what was on stage, alongside pre-recorded footage of the same actors, and it was disorientating in the right way.

Sometimes I thought that more had been put into the staging that the rest of the production – two things especially: Julia seemed oddly unpleasant, and Winston and Julia fell in love at the first instant of their first encounter. (Does that happen in the book? I’ve read it twice, but clearly misremembered some of it – there was a central aspect to the plot that I thought they’d changed, but the Wikipedia summary corrects me.) There was an exceptionally good performance from the woman who interrogates Winston, though, and I was pretty impressed.

In the current political climate, an added dimension was there. Comparisons between Trump’s presidency and Nineteen Eighty-Four have brought about a huge rise in sales of the book (which is a brilliant novel, incidentally). Seeing the production in front of me, it was slightly reassuring to see the things that Trump doesn’t do (yet), but watching realistic waterboarding in the week that Trump announced he wanted to reintroduce it… well, it hit home how immoral torture is, and that it hasn’t disappeared. Similarly, the doublethink (whereby you will believe contradictory things, or that 2 + 2 = 5, if Big Brother instructs you to) felt so relevant to today and Trump’s constant, pathological lying. A very apt choice of play for 2017. See more about Creation Theatre’s production.

Travesties

I was in London for a couple of days this week, at a very good Introduction to International Development course, and I thought I should use the opportunity to go to a play. Having not planned ahead, I was scrolling through what was on that night, seeing what still had tickets available, and landed on Travesties by Tom Stoppard.

I thought I’d read it when I was an undergraduate, but apparently not – or, if I did, I forgot every single thing about it. I certainly wrote about reality in Stoppard at some point, but maybe not this play – though it would have been a great one to choose. Travesties is the faulty reminiscences of ex-consular officer Henry Carr, talking about his dealings with Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara, putting on a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Only Stoppard would think of that, right? (Although it is based in the very loosest way on fact: all four men were indeed in Zurich at the same time.)

He’s certainly a whizz at crafting an entertaining play out of something that should really only be an intellectual exercise. The production (currently at the Apollo Theatre, with Tom Hollander in the lead role) was frenetic and fun, and there was plenty of laughter in the packed audience. But we often laughed in different sections – as different people clearly ‘got’ different allusions. I know The Importance of Being Earnest inside out, so loved all the many references to lines and scenes from it. Many of Wilde’s scenarios and quips are altered (subtly or otherwise) to fit the various other occupants of the play – it was great fun spotting where they all were. And so I assume that the same was true for Joyce, Lenin, and Tzara. I know a bit about Joyce, an outline of Lenin, and had never heard of Tzara – and it left me wondering: who on earth would understand everything in this play?

It does seem rather ambitious, to expect anybody in the audience to have a thorough working knowledge of all four elements of the play. I’m going to wager that that was also the case in 1974, when the play was first put on. But I suppose that is Stoppard’s talent – to make such a curio intensely entertaining, even while I knew that I must be missing much. (It’s at the Apollo until April, if you want to go and see it.)

And I’m going to the theatre again next week, to see Silver Lining. What better way to ride out 2017 than with books and plays? (And, yes, probably wine and chocolate.)

I’m looking after my friend’s cat this weekend – yes, you’re right, I do live the high life – and trying to make sure I’m not actually heading into reader’s block. And I’m doing that by sneakily pretending I don’t even want to read, and thus fooling reading into being available later. That works, doesn’t it?

Rather than exploring the inner workings of my mind, let’s look at a book, a blog post, and a link.

1.) The link – my National Trust magazine arrived yesterday (again, yes, I do live the high life – you can stop asking) and I was excited about the Rex Whistler exhibition at Mottisfont. Lord only knows where Mottisfont is, but I’ll find out and get there before April 23rd. (And do seek out the excellent book about Edith Olivier and Rex Whistler by Anna Thomasson btw.)

2.) The blog post – I meant to join in with Margery Sharp Day and didn’t manage it, but you can read Jane’s round-up of the reviews that were posted, and get tempted to read more. She’s fab.

3.) The book – I looked through the NYRB Classics bookcase in Blackwell’s today (quite excited that they have one), and Notes on a Cinematograph by Robert Bresson caught my eye. I think it might go wildly over my head – it’s all about cinema theory and whatnot – but I was tempted nonetheless. More details here. But let’s face it, Project 24 is making most books look tempting. I’m still on zero – almost bought one last weekend, but then my friend kindly gave me the book I was umming and ahhing over. THAT DOESN’T COUNT.

Apparently I wrote my 2015 stats on the first day of 2016, which suggests I was rather more organised then than I’ve managed so far in 2017 – but at least it’s still January, right? I particularly enjoy coming up with my favourite reads of the year (you can see my 2016 faves here), but it’s also fun to do a few more bits and pieces around the sorts of books I read. And I always enjoy reading other people’s too, so do pop a link in the comments if you’ve done it.

Number of books read
I read exactly 100 books in 2016 – and, yes, on December 30th that number was 98. That was so close to a hundred that I quickly finished off two books that were on my bedside table. (It’s also slightly fewer than I read last year – 106 – but makes working out percentages extremely easy.)

Male/female authors
I read 40 books by men, 57 by women, and 3 that had male and female authors. That’s a much higher percentage by women than last year, but that year was something of an anomaly – this was pretty par for the course.

Fiction/non-fiction
74 fiction, 26 non-fiction. That is a lot lower for non-fiction than I was expecting, since it felt like I read a lot more non-fiction than usual in 2016. I think I just had a few periods where I blitzed a lot of non-fiction in one go. I don’t know if I’m disappointed in this statistic or not, but I’m certainly surprised.

Books in translation
Conversely, I thought I’d done quite poorly for translation this year, but actually read 8 – which might be an all-time high? They were from French, German, Swedish, Flemish, Turkish, and Spanish. Mostly French, I think.

Most-read author
3 books seems to be the most I read by any single author – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and E. Nesbit both landed on that number (and it was also the first time I tried Adichie – ‘discovering’ her was one of the keynotes of 2016’s reading for me).

Re-reads
Only 3, which might be my lowest ever – and none at all in the first half of the year. I re-read The Summer Book by Tove Jansson and The Victorian Chaise-Longue for podcasts, and Raising Demons by Shirley Jackson because it’s fabs. I do like the idea of re-reading less, because I’m hoping to get further down the tbr pile.

New-to-me authors
This one was surprisingly high – 47 of the books I read this year were by authors I’d never read before. In a handful of cases it was because they were writing about authors I had read before, but mostly not. I do like it being about half-and-half returning to older authors and exploring new ones; I’ll keep to that in 2017 if I can.

Looking back at 2015’s stats, I apparently read 47 new-to-me authors that year too. Maybe that’s my number.

Oldest book read
I didn’t read anything at all from before 1900 during 2016 – is that the first time ever? More precisely, I didn’t read anything from before 1908: Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wive’s Tale takes this particular crown.

Newest book read
On the other hand, I read 8 books published in 2016 – mostly non-fiction. I think the one published latest in the year is probably Terms and Conditions by Ysenda Maxtone Grahame.

Most disappointing book
There were a handful of books I thought I’d love and ended up… not. None of these were bad books, per se, but I really wanted to be enamoured by The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, and Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury – but they were all misses, for the most part.

And then there was Third Girl, which turned out to be a pretty weak Agatha Christie – but we all know that there are a handful of poor books among her output. I can cope with that one better.

Most frustrating book
Why the actual flip did Anthony Doerr need to make All The Light We Cannot See so very long? And so mediocre? And so totally pointless? I get crosser about the further I am away from the reading experience.

Most surprising delight
I had no idea I’d love Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee as much as I did – and it’s been waiting on my shelves for SO long.

The book I’d been nagged about for ages
I finally read some Colette! Probably not the best one to pick, but I did like The Other One a lot, and now Peter can rest contented :)

Best title
I can’t praise the punning Terms and Conditions enough – a brilliant title for a study of girls’ boarding schools.

Worst title
I really enjoyed The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley by Diana Petre, but that orchard didn’t mean anything at all. It was a bizarre metaphor that can only have caused confusion to the book-buying public. (And, while I’m criticising, Cider With Rosie may be brilliant, but the cider-with-Rosie bit is quite negligible.)

Book I still haven’t reviewed and should but will I?
I finished Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther by Elizabeth von Arnim back in May, and it’s excellent, but I never got around to writing about it. And if I don’t soon, I’m going to forget even more about it than I’ve already forgotten.

Whither Virginia?
I read a book by Virginia Woolf (Roger Fry – a good biography, but confusing to read her in biographical mode) and a book featuring Virginia Woolf (Priya Parmar’s Vanessa and Her Sister; much better than I’d imagined).

Animals in book titles
Guys, I need you all to check your reading for animals. Somehow there are always some. This year: The Lark by E. Nesbit, Panther by Brecht Evens, Dolphin Street by G.B. Stern, and The Bird of Night by Susan Hill.

Strange things that happened in books I read in 2016
Always the category I enjoy the most! Twins destroyed an art gallery, a toyshop disappeared, a wife was hypnotised to think her husband was invisible, dead people paced the Grand Canyon, the royal family lived in council housing, the world nonchalantly prepared for the end times, a tree haunted a boy, a man healed with his hands, St Francis steps in to save a donkey, Agatha Christie oversaw an argument between her detectives, Jane and Mr Rochester fell in love – but not the ones you’re thinking of – while the ones you are thinking of fought a battle.