Author: StuckinaBook

Bookish weekend

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Oh dear! I seem to have opened a can of worms with my comments on Dorothy L Sayers… I’ve read two (Strong Poison and Gaudy Night), wasn’t hugely impressed by the former, and liked the latter even less… I shan’t go into much detail, because I don’t want to upset her fans, but suffice to say that Sayers and Lord Peter are not for me! To propitiate Sayers fans, here is a piece written by Diana on the OxfordWords blog today, commissioned by yours truly.

And another reminder that I’ll be appearing (with Elaine) at the Felixstowe Book Festival on Saturday – I spent the evening putting together some notes for it, which has got me quite excited and looking forward to it.  My one hope is that people come, so if you live remotely near Felixstowe, please do come along and introduce yourself!  More details here.

The next few days are going to be really busy, so this might be my last post until Monday.  Have a fantastic few days, and I’ll let you know how the talk went!

And PLEASE bully me until I write about seeing Judi Dench in Peter and Alice, and the excellently funny 1944 film I watched the other day.

In my absence… why not tell me what you’re reading?  I’m just about to finish my first book by Winifred Holtby – but perhaps not one you’d expect to be my first…

Folio & Agatha

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photo source

For those of us who love the book as a physical, aesthetic object, the Folio Society is spoken of with breathless delight.  They are the antidote to the ebook or the mass market paperback – their beautiful hardbacks with slipcovers, with exquisite paper and specially commissioned illustrations, are joys on anybody’s shelves.  Since they’re at the pricier end of the book market, I don’t have huge numbers, although I do prize the first one I ever owned – Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, given by my friend Barbara, which not only introduced me to one of my favourite writers, but to the beauty of Folio.  I’m under no obligations to say anything about them, I should mention, but they really are perfect gift books, and I aspire to having shelves full of them one day.

This became all the clearer when, yesterday evening, I sat in their members’ room in Bloomsbury, shelves and tables filled with their beautiful books.  I managed not to shove any in my bag, you’ll be pleased to know – except for the one they sent me home with in my goody bag, which was the Miss Marple Short Stories – because I was in London to hear a talk about Agatha Christie by her biographer Laura Thompson, in the company of various other bloggers.  I’d only actually met one before, and we just said hello across the room – most of those present seemed to be crime bloggers, and know each other, but I did get to chat to a lady from a fashion blog with a sideline in book blogs.  If a fashionista is going to like any books, they ought to be Folio books.

Anyway, there is nothing quite like hearing about Agatha Christie.  I think only Jane Austen unites so many diverse readers in eager agreement and enthusiasm – but, while most Austen fanatics have read all her novels (even if not her abbreviated novels, letters etc.) it’s quite possible to love Agatha Christie without having read a very big percentage of her prolific output.  Take me, for instance – I love Dame Agatha.  Like many people, she was my transition from teenage reading to adult reading.  And yet I’ve only read (quick scurry to Wikipedia) 16 or 17 of her novels.  So many left to discover!

Thankfully Laura Thompson didn’t assume we’d all have read everything by Christie, and so she didn’t give away endings – or at least she didn’t give away specific endings, so she mentioned that a murderer turned out to be a child, or every possible candidate, or a suicide – but didn’t spoil which novels these endings belonged to.  (Please be similarly considerate in the comments!)

And, indeed, Laura Thompson’s talk and Q&A afterwards was brilliant all round.  She was very personable, and obviously a big fan of Christie as well as a biographer (has anybody read her biography, incidentally?  I haven’t, but want to now.)  Her favourite Christie novel is Five Little Pigs – she said that the plot movements and character movements work in sync beautifully, which makes me want to read that too – and, conversely, The Clocks is her least favourite.  My favourite comment she made was that Agatha Christie didn’t feel the need to prove herself better than the detective novel genre.  She embraced it, and (as Thompson said too) although she thought a lot about what she did, she didn’t analyse what she did.

My feelings are that Agatha Christie is such a perfect detective novelist that other authors don’t only seem inferior, but seem failures.  They have wandered from the blueprint Christie excelled at – her plots are almost always breathtakingly flawless – and so people like Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham barely even qualify as detective novelists to me, however enjoyable they may be in other  qualities (and, for my money, Sayers is short of those too!)

I asked a question about Christie’s romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott – which I’ve never read – and turns out they were better reviewed than her main output!  Thompson adds that some are, indeed, very good.

All in all, a highly enjoyable (if swelteringly hot) evening, which has cemented my admiration for Folio books and my affection for Agatha Christie.  Thank you, Folio!

Some Tame Gazelle – Barbara Pym

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I wasn’t intending to join in with Barbara Pym Reading Week, which I’ve seen everywhere around the blogosphere (well done Thomas and Amanda!) and, it seems, I might be late to the party – because I hadn’t spotted that the week ended on a Saturday.  Oops.  Well, hopefully they’ll let me sneak in as a last minute participant, because I have just finished Some Tame Gazelle (1950) – Pym’s first novel – because I realised Mum had given it to me, and thus it would qualify for Reading Presently too.

This isn’t my first Pym – although it is only my second.  The first one I read, back in 2004, was Excellent Women.  I’d rather expected to love Barbara Pym devotedly, and was a bit nonplussed by my lukewarm response.  I certainly liked it, but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting – it was set in London, for a start, which wasn’t at all what I envisioned Pym being like.

Some Tame Gazelle, at any rate, is set in the countryside.  That helped me get in the right frame of mind.  It has the same “three or four families in a country village” that Jane Austen recommended as the perfect novelistic topic (for her niece at least, and to many Pym is a figurative niece of Austen) – more emphatically, it reminded me of the close-but-carping rural communities inhabited by Mapp and Lucia in E.F. Benson’s series of novels.

The families in question are really households, I suppose.  I shan’t write too much about the plot, because there have been so many reviews of Some Tame Gazelle in the blogosphere this week (scroll through Thomas’s blog to find all Barbara Pym Reading Week links), but I’ll give a brief precis.  Belinda and Harriet Bede are eldely sisters living together, and we see most of the goings-on of the village through Belinda’s eyes (although Pym often gives a moment or two from perspective of other characters, which gets a bit dizzying.)  Neither are immune from the arrow of Cupid – the title, indeed, derives from the poet Thomas Bayly:

Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:
Something to love, oh, something to love!
 Harriet develops a love for every curate she sees – a love somewhere between maternal and romantic – while Belinda is more constant in her love.  It’s for their local vicar, an Archdeacon, who was with Belinda at university, is unaffectionately married, and gives sermon which were ‘a long string of quotations, joined together by a few explanations’.  Indeed, a less lovably man would be difficult to create.  He is selfish, snaps at everyone, quotes self-importantly and at length at the drop of a hat, neglects most of his vicarly duties… and yet I get the idea that we are not supposed to think Belinda foolish in her affections.  Is he in the same boat as Jean-Benoit Aubrey, Heathcliff, Rochester, and all manner of other literary romantic heroes whose charms entirely pass me by?  Belinda, on the other hand, is very lovable – as, indeed, is Harriet, despite one being cautious and the other impetuous.

But I suspect Pym is chiefly read for her tone.  As I mentioned, she is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Jane Austen – recently by Thomas himself – and while (from my limited experience of two Pym novels) I would say she has neither Austen’s genius nor her tautness, Pym is certainly a worthy successor to Austen’s love of irony.  And now, of course, I can find no examples.  But time and again the narrative voice says something which coyly suggests – oh so innocently – that the character is foolish, or doesn’t know as much as they pretend, or in some other is not being honest.   This narrator is far too polite to say so outright, and isn’t so common as to wink, but… raises her eyebrows a touch.

As for me?  I still like Pym.  I liked Some Tame Gazelle rather more than Excellent Women – it was funny, affectionate, moving without being heavy-handed.  As the son of a vicar, I relished reading about church families, even while it all seemed rather unlikely from my experience. It even felt like the 1930s novels I love so dearly (although published in 1950, I couldn’t work out when it was meant to be set – everyone has servants, and levels of propriety are decidedly pre-war, but I suppose these things were both true for some 1950 villages).  But I still don’t love Pym.  I love Jane Austen, and (later) E.F. Benson, E.M. Delafield, and other authors who laid out the blueprint Pym picked up – but I still felt as though I were reading at one remove from the originals.  And, of course, even Austen was not an original – if I’d read Pym before I’d read Austen, perhaps I would love Pym more.

If other people did not love Pym so wholeheartedly, then I think I would sound very enthusiastic.  I think Pym is a very good writer, and Some Tame Gazelle is a lovely novel – but it will not be on my top ten for this year, I suspect.  Perhaps I am still too young?  Perhaps I am too familiar with the generation above Pym. When so many people rate her as one of their absolute favourites, even my very-much-liking of Pym feels a little bit like a failure.

What I really do love is the cover, and indeed all the covers of these Virago Pym reprints.  But curiously I can’t find any information about the designer or artist on the book jacket – I hope I’m just being dozy, because otherwise very poor show Virago.  Very poor show indeed.

Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs – Jeremy Mercer

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First things first: I added an Oxford comma to the title of this book in the subject line, and I’m going to be doing the same throughout.  That’s just how I roll.

Secondly – I’ve found that any exercise which makes one turn to unread books on one’s shelves, whether that be the TBR Double Dare, A Century of Books, or Reading Presently, brings up all sorts of unexpected joys.  That’s hardly a surprise, perhaps, but it does give me pause for thought – how many wonderful books are waiting for me in my own room?  I have about 1000 unread books, probably – if a tenth of them are as good as Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs (2005) is, then I’ve got some definite treats ahead of me.  Thank you Charley, for buying this for my birthday in (gulp) 2010.

Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs was published as Time Was Soft There in the US, but for some reason the publishers decided we Brits couldn’t cope with such high-flown language, and gave us this variant title – rather unfairly, since at one point it is made clear that there weren’t any bedbugs.  I’m getting ahead of myself – this is Mercer’s non-fiction account of living in Paris’s famous Shakespeare & Co bookshop for a year.  I’ve visited it myself – indeed, the first ever photograph I put of myself on Stuck-in-a-Book is outside the shop – and although it isn’t much of a treasure trove for the secondhand bibliophile, being mostly new books now, it is an amazing place to visit.


But I was a few years too late to move in.  Although (unbeknownst to me) George Whitman was still alive when I visited in 2010 – he died in 2011 – it was no longer a haven for artistic types from around the world.  When Jeremy Mercer arrived at the turn of the 21st century, he could not really be considered an artistic type.  Before I started reading Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs, I’d rather assumed it would be about cosy, literary folk, and that Mercer myself would be the sort of bespectacled, cardigan-wearing book-fiend that I am myself.  Turns out, no.  He was only in Paris (from his native America) because someone had threatened his life after some criminal confidences were broken.  Mercer was a crime reporter who also wrote trashy true crime books, and his past exploits include attacking a neighbour and drug dealing.  Not exactly a lovable guy – and, although he is mostly repentant, I have to say I had a hard time reading the bits where he complained about being judged for attacking the neighbour.  Hmm.

But, if Mercer isn’t exactly a man I’d invite round for a night watching As Time Goes By, he certainly knows how to write an engaging memoir.  In exchange for bed and board, he was chiefly expected to help out around the shop, and follow George’s often curious whims:

The official store hours were noon to midnight, but most days George opened earlier to accommodate the crowds.  The major rule was that residents were expected to be out of bed in the morning to cart out boxes of books for the sidewalk display and sweep the floors before the customers arrived.  Beyond that, George liked everyone to help out for an hour each day, whether it be sorting books, washing dishes, or performing minor carpentry chores.  More idealistically, George also asked each resident to read a book a day from the library.  Kurt said many chose plays and novellas to meet the quota, but he was still tackling novels.
George does sound rather a strange taskmaster, expecting everyone to live on food taken from restaurants as they close for the night, criticising anyone for spending any money at all – but then losing thousands of francs by leaving the till unattended or hiding wads of notes behind books (some of which ended up being a nest for mice.)  George is 86 at the time that Mercer moves in, and as eccentric as they come – but still with an affection for young ladies.  This isn’t romantically reciprocated by any of them, but it does explain why so many young women find themselves working curious hours at Shakespeare & Co.  And then Mercer discovers that George has a teenage daughter, and decides to reunite them…

That’s quite a big moment in the memoir, engineering significant upheaval, but for the most part Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs just tells of Mercer’s everyday experiences with the hopeful, but yet slightly hopeless, artistic people surrounding him – from the ageing poet Simon to handsome, lost Kurt.  It;s not at all the portrait of Shakespeare & Co that I was expecting, but it is a fascinating glimpse into a small society that has only recently disappeared, and yet stretches back to the camaraderie and ethos of another time.

Four Hedges – Clare Leighton

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I have no recollection why I put Clare Leighton’s Four Hedges (1935) on my Amazon wishlist, but I’m assuming it was either because of a blogger or something Slightly Foxed mentioned (any guesses/answers?) – but it was enough to get my good friend Clare (not Leighton) to send this beautiful Little Toller edition to me for my birthday last year.  And where better to read a book about a garden, thought I, than in a garden.  So over the past few days, I’ve been reading it in study breaks from doing DPhil editing.  And reading it in a hammock.  Jealous at all?

It really wouldn’t have worked to read Four Hedges in a city, because it is such a hymn to nature.  It’s non-fiction (I always seem to forget that you can’t know these things unless I mention them), and tells of Leighton’s experience creating a garden, through the course of a year – the year isn’t dated, but the garden is about three years old, and presumably it wasn’t long before the book was published in 1935.

As you might have guessed by the cover, the book is filled with Leighton’s woodcuts (I assume ‘engravings on wood’, as they are termed in the book, are the same as woodcuts?)  It was this that undoubtedly attracted me to Four Hedges – there is something so simply and dignified about a woodcut; such a celebration of the forms and movements of nature.  Leighton writes at one point that people don’t appreciate the feel of nature enough, valuing only sight, sound, and smell – and, later, writes that flowers are considered too much for their colours, rather than their shapes.  Woodcuts are a rebuttal to both these errors, aren’t?  Without colour, they somehow offer texture as well as appearance – at least, they do in the hands of a craftswoman like Leighton.

As you would suppose, a lot of her woodcuts show plants – and I can only presume that they are accurate, and might well be of especial interest to the botanist.  For my part, I particularly appreciated the ones with people or animals in them.  For I am almost entirely ignorant about nature.

That’s a shocking thing to confess, for a country-boy who is desperate to get away from the city (even a city as beautiful as Oxford) and live in the countryside.  Right now I’m in my parents’ garden in Somerset, listening to the cows in the adjacent field eating parts of the hedge (indeed, I can see a couple about two metres to my left) and I love it.  One day I will write properly about my deep love for everything about villages.  But, with nature, my love is passionate but uninformed.  I love nature in the way that I love friends – joyously living alongside them, discovering more about them when they want to share, but not needing to know everything in order to love.

But I was a bit nervous before starting Four Hedges.  A few years ago I read some letters between gardeners and, while I enjoyed the camaraderie and friendship, I didn’t have much of a clue what was going on.  I don’t know when certain plants need bedding, or when others need pruning.  Latin names are so many Flowerus floweriori to me.  I love gardens, but I love walking through them and not doing an ounce of work in them – because I loathe gardening.

Luckily, Four Hedges was still perfect for me.  True, Leighton took it for granted that her reader loved gardening, and would be entirely unable to resist weeding (believe me, I resist it very easily), but she also writes in a way that can be loved by anybody.  She writes about watching birds being reared and caterpillars metamorphosing; she writes about a baby goat moving into a nearby field, and the perils of windy days – most importantly of all, she writes about her thoughts, feelings, and responses.  It is a delight to hear how thrilled she is about bulb catalogues, and I was swept away with her admiration for certain weeds, reclaiming them from gardeners’ snobbery.

It struck me how timeless this book was.  No mention is made of experiences outside the garden – barely even the house, to the extent that I thought there wasn’t a house for a great part of the book.  Certainly no hints of a forthcoming war (which was obvious to most by the mid-’30s) or anything like that.  Everything in Four Hedges could be happeningin 1835, or today – the only anachronism would be the non-electric mower and the scythe.  (Having said that, in the last place I lived in Oxford, our landlords only gave us a non-electric mower – one of their very many oddities.)

Although Leighton does not write humorously (nor intends to), there is a great deal in common between joyful writing and comic writing.  They reach towards the same goal, of sharing and bringing delight – and Leighton is so joyful, so able to find excitement and hope in the smallest detail, that it is a lift to the spirits to read her words, even for the non-gardener.  And which entirely humourless gardener, after all, would write this:

We should never take our gardens too seriously.  It is hard to curb ourselves in this, if we have any love for our plants, even as it is difficult to take a walk round the garden without pulling up weeds.  But too professional an attitude is apt to give us the same taut, strained feeling that comes into the faces and lives of all specialists.  It is better to have a few weeds and untidy edges to our flowers beds, and to enjoy our garden, than to allow ourselves to be dominated by it.  To be able occasionally to shut our eyes to weeds is a great art.  Let us relax in our gardens, and as a dear old countrywoman used to say, let us “poddle” in them.  We waste else the very beauty for which we have worked.
I am never in danger of taking gardening too seriously, but it is refreshing to hear Leighton say this nonetheless – any expert or avid hobbyist should include humour and self-awareness in their activities, shouldn’t they?  Now excuse me while I tend to my book collection – it’s getting rather overgrown, and it’s threatening to take over the floor.  A bit of weeding, and it’ll be fine.

Sherpa vs. hammock

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I’m enjoying some time in Somerset, cat-sitting and thesising – with breaks for lying in a hammock and reading a book!  If you sit in a hammock in the Rectory garden, chances are you’ll be joined by Sherpa, who is not only the most beautiful cat, but the silliest, and the cat with the worst balance.  As you’ll see in this brief clip…

The Egg and I – Betty Macdonald

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There are some authors, because of the influence of the online reading group I’m in, that I stockpile before I get around to reading them.  Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth von Arnim were among the number for years (and I love them now, of course) – on the other hand, so were Margaret Drabble and Iris Murdoch, and now I’ve tried them without success, I’m left with piles of their books to keep or give away…

Anyway, long-winded introduction to: Betty MacDonald.  I believe it was Barbara or Elaine who first mentioned Ms. MacDonald to me, and her books were definitely compared to E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady novels – which is, of course, a surefire way to get me to try them.  It’s taken me a few years, but I’ve finally read one – The Egg and I (1945), which I bought in Edinburgh in 2009.

You might be disappointed – but you’ll probably be relieved – to learn that no supernaturally large egg features in the novel, but it does feature farming. Indeed, that is what The Egg and I is about – an account of being a farmer’s wife in 1920s America. As with the Provincial Lady books, and my other favourites by Shirley Jackson, it’s memoir thrown to the wolves of exaggeration – or fiction tempered by reality, depending on which side you see it.

And it is very amusing.  MacDonald realises the comic potential in the astonishing workload of running a small holding with an ambitious husband, and there is plenty to delight the reader in accounts of a recalcitrant stove, suicidal chickens, and uncooperative bread.  My chief reaction was gratitude that the shifting class system in Britain meant that my father and I could go to university and pick our careers, and that I didn’t end up in the great tradition of Thomas farmers (which stretches back as far as anyone knows, I believe.)  Nothing wrong with being a farmer, of course, only I have always suspected that I would be totally hopeless at it – a suspicion confirmed by reading The Egg and I.  You have to assume that Betty MacDonald deeply loved her then-husband Bob, because nothing else could possibly persuade a sane woman to embark on this venture with him.  It is a mark of her exceptionally good nature that, even when she is being teasing about the chores Bob suggests, there appears to be no deep-seated malice (which would be entirely justifiable):

By the end of the summer the pullets were laying and Bob was culling the flocks.  With no encouragement from me, he decided that, as chicken prices were way down, I should can the culled hens.  It appeared to my warped mind that Bob went miles and miles out of his way to figure out things for me to put in jars; that he actively resented a single moment of my time which was not spent eye to pressure gauge, ear to steam cock; that he was for ever coming staggering into the kitchen under a bushel basket of something for me to can.  My first reaction was homicide, then suicide, and at last tearful resignation.
Did I mention that she has a baby in the middle of the four years spent on this farm?  Betty MacDonald basically IS superwoman – and with a sense of humour too.

Then there are her neighbours – on one side is a large, lazy couple with about a dozen children.  Mrs Kettle seems quite good-natured (if not wised-up to the etiquette of everyday living), but Mr Kettle and his progeny seem to have no object in life but getting other people to provide food and assistance – and they do charmingly awful things like burning down their barn and starting a forest fire.  On the other side is the direct opposite: a farm kept so spotless you could eat your food off the floor.  All these secondary characters seem like exaggerations, but that didn’t stop the Macdonalds’ old neighbours filing lawsuits, according to the Wikipedia page.

The Egg and I doesn’t have the same laugh-every-page that I found in the Provincial Lady books, has a slightly slow start, and the workload is exhausting even to read about, but I still loved reading it.  Anybody drawn to self-deprecating, cynically optimistic accounts of a person’s everyday life (albeit an everyday life few of us would recognise), then this is a great book.  As so often, reading about the author’s real life changes things a bit – she was divorced from Bob, and remarried to Donald MacDonald, by the time the book was published (one wonders quite what her current husband thought about her achieving fame writing so fondly about her ex-husband) – but it’s easier simply to let The Egg and I be the simplified, all-American tale it wants to be.  As I wrote before – it’s neither fiction nor non-fiction, but a delightful amalgam of the two.

On Writing – A.L. Kennedy

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Although I have never read any fiction by A.L. Kennedy (which is about as inauspicious a way to begin a review as any), I couldn’t resist when Jonathan Cape offered me a copy of On Writing to review.  This isn’t so much because I intend to be a writer myself (although I have always rather hoped to be – and, I suppose, in some ways I am – just theses and blog posts rather than novels, at the mo) but because I thought it might reveal more about the author’s life and processes.

It’s just as well that I approached On Writing with this proviso, because it’s a bit of a misnomer – there isn’t a great deal about writing, particularly not about how to write, but there is a great deal about being a writer. A crucial distinction. Rather than giving step by step instructions, or even general guidelines, Kennedy writes about the life of a writer – which seems to consist almost solely of travelling, getting ill, and running workshops for other people who want to be writers.

No one can teach you how to write, or how you write or how you could write better.  Other people can assist you in various areas, but the way that you learn how you write, the way you really improve, is by diving in and reworking, taking apart, breaking down, questioning, exploring, forgetting and losing and finding and remembering and generally testing your prose until it shows you what it needs to be, until you can see its nature and then help it to express itself as best you can under your current circumstances.  This gives you – slowly – an understanding of how you use words on the page to say what you need to.
So, that explains why she concentrates on other matters.  If, however, you are desperate to read about the act of writing itself, in the minutiae of prose details, then turn straight to chapter 22.  That’s precisely what A.L. Kennedy does there – building up the opening sentence to a story, rejecting versions, explaining why she doing so and what thought goes into the construction of each sentence.  Granted, I didn’t much like the end result (it didn’t encourage me to read her fiction, I must confess), but it was fascinating to observe.

This early part of the book is a collection of blog columns Kennedy wrote for the Guardian, and I found them compulsively readable. I love her sense of humour, the dryness of her writing, and her obvious love for the craft of writing. Occasionally, I’ll admit, I wanted her to lighten up a tiny bit – as she often admits, writing is not back-breaking labour – but I suppose that’s better than flippancy about writing, in a book about writing.  And while Kennedy writes about the horrors of appearing in public or having her photo taken – being very deprecating about her own appearance – she has the sort of face that, if you saw her on a bus, you’d say “By gad, good woman, you must write!” It’s so wry and cynical, and you get the feeling that it would be world-weary if she didn’t find every facet of existence ultimately so amusing.

The next section of the book has longer essays, significantly about running workshops – offering a really interesting insight to a world I know so little about, and showing how much thought Kennedy puts into preparing them (as well as her scorn for those who put on workshops without similar levels of thought.)  There is also – of course – more about writing, and I particularly loved this paragraph, which brilliantly demolished a tenet of writing which I have always thought nonsensical:

Personal experience may, for example, be suggested as a handy source of authenticity, perhaps because of the tediously repeated ‘advice’ imposed upon new authors: “Write about what you know.”  Many people are still unacquainted with the unabridged version of this advice: “Write about what you know.  I am an idiot and have never heard of research, its challenges, serendipities and joys.  I lack imagination and therefore cannot imagine that you may not.  Do not be free, do not explore the boundaries of your possible talent, do not – for pity’s sake – grow beyond the limits of your everyday life and its most superficial details. Do not go wherever you wish to, whether that’s the surface of your kitchen table or the surface of the moon.  Please allow me – because I’m insisting – to tell you what to think.”
And finally in On Writing is a piece she refers to often throughout – one which she takes to the Edinburgh Festival, as well as performing around the country.  It’s very, very funny – in a rather broader way than the rest of the book, and if it feels less natural than her blog writing, then that is because it is a performance piece. Some of it repeats things she has mentioned earlier, but for a book which is compiled from various sources, and also for a blog-based book, On Writing is remarkably unrepetitive.  I dread to think how repetitive Stuck-in-a-Book has been.  I dread to think how repetitive Stuck-in-a-Book has been.  (A-ha-ha.)

All in all, a great book to have on a bibliophile’s bookshelf – perhaps not the first place to go if you are penning your own novel – although if you’ve got past the ‘getting published’ stage, On Writing might well be an invaluable guide to the life of the writer.  For the rest of us, it’s simply a great read.