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25 Books in 25 Days: #10 As Far As Jane’s Grandmother’s

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I hope these 25 Books in 25 Days posts aren’t getting tedious for people? Nearly halfway! And today I wasn’t sure if I was going to find time to read As Far As Jane’s Grandmother’s (1928) by Edith Olivier, particularly since I’d had an aborted attempt to read it a couple of years ago. As it turns out, I liked it much more this time around.

It was the limit of their nursery walks, and all through their lives it remained for them the most explicit measure of distance.

The title refers to the distance that Jane usually travels as a child – no further than her grandmother’s. If memory serves from Anna Thomasson’s excellent A Curious Friendship, the phrase was one Edith used in her own life. In the novel, though, it takes on a second meaning – the metaphorical parameters of life determined by Jane’s grandmother, outside which she cannot pass. Having had a childhood and young womanhood circumscribed by what her grandmother believes moral and correct, the book shows us people entering Jane’s life who might transform it – whether friends or lovers, or even a nunnery. And will she ever be able to escape the role set out for her?

I’ve now read all of Olivier’s novels (there aren’t that many), and none come close to The Love Child, her first. This one followed a year later, and I think is my second favourite – what made the first so special was a sort of fairytale naivety that she could never quite recapture, but this is a very engaging novel nonetheless. I think it would fit alongside many of the green-spined Virago Modern Classics.

25 Books in 25 Days: #9 Tell It To A Stranger

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When I go to an independent bookshop, I try to always buy a book – to support them. And in 2009 in Woodstock, I bought Tell It To A Stranger (1947/1949) by Elizabeth Berridge. Both those dates are there, as the book selects stories from two collections – but I think it’s chiefly 1947. Now, I read the first half of this earlier in the year, but finished it today (which technically fits my ‘finish 25 books in 25 days’ motto). Look, I was at dinner and the theatre after work today, so I didn’t have much time.

The stories here are often about the effects of war – whether that is loneliness or readjusting to the old life or grief. Berridge draws so sharply, encasing dramatic moments in the everyday lives of ordinary people so subtly that you almost don’t realise until they’re upon you. It’s as though you’re scanning across a pleasant domestic scene and suddenly notice that somebody has a knife in their back.

In a quick review, I can’t summarise each story – and I think that might almost be pointless. Rather, I shall just say that Berridge is a very adept crafter of stories and I heartily recommend the collection, perhaps spacing them out a little. I’ve got a few of her novels on my shelves too, so it’ll be interesting to see if Angus Wilson (who wrote the preface) is right, and she is equally adept at both.

25 Books in 25 Days: #8 Death in the Clouds

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I thought it might be nearer the end of the 25 days when I started depending on the addictive joy of Agatha – but I could resist no longer, and picked up Death in the Clouds (1935) by Agatha Christie. It’s a relatively early Poirot novel, and thus I could feel relatively assured of it being a good’un.

The murder takes place, as the title suggests, on a plane – called the Prometheus – and Madame Giselle is discovered dead. The only sign is a puncture mark on her neck – and so all the passengers are under suspicion. Well, all except one – because Hercule Poirot happens to be on the flight.

We follow the usual twists and turns of a Poirot novel, and my foolish belief that I’d worked out the ending turned out (but of course) not to be true. Sadly no Hastings or Ariadne Oliver, both of whom I love and always want to pop up in a Poirot, but it’s a neat murder mystery with all the clues laid out well – if only the reader is able to spot them… And there’s the good fun of a detective novelist, Clancy, on board – with Agatha Christie obviously enjoying teasing the profession. Here’s Inspector Japp on the topic:

“These detective-story writers… always making the police out to be fools… and getting their procedure all wrong. Why, if I were to say the things to my super that their inspectors say to superintendents I should be thrown out of the Force tomorrow on my ear. Set of ignorant scribblers! This is just the sort of damn-fool murder that a scribbler of rubbish would think he could get away with.”

25 Books in 25 Days: #7 Two By Two

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Lovers of irony, listen up. For my 25 Books project, I’ve been choosing the next day’s book before I go to bed. And I chose Two By Two (1963) by David Garnett, a retelling of Noah and the flood. Imagine my DELIGHT when I was going to bed… and discovered my immersion heater was leaking water. My very own flood! Cue my dependable and nice plumber, and lord knows how many books worth of money. Eek! Still, later today I sat down with Two By Two, which I bought in 2014.

I’ve read Lady Into Fox many times, and wrote a lot about it in my thesis, but I’ve not read much else by Garnett. This novella comes relatively late in his very long career – and he reimagines Noah and the Ark from the perspective of Niss and Fan. They’re two teenage girls who get by through hunting – but determine to stowaway on the ark when they think there might just be something in this crazy plan of Noah’s.

Much of the rest of the novella is about Niss and Fan trying to avoid detection on the ark (Noah and his family aren’t shown as benevolent as in other accounts), and interacting with the other animals. It treads the line between whimsy and darkness slightly uneasily, but I think that might just be because of the length. The perfect novella – like A Lost Lady by Willa Cather from earlier this week, for example – couldn’t be any longer without losing the power. With Two By Two, I’m not sure there is quite the power in its brevity – I think it should have been longer. And it’s not often you’ll hear me say that about a book!

And here are the opening lines:

In the days before the Flood, when even the smallest babies were antediluvian, there was a pair of twins who were nobody’s business. Their father was old even for those days and claimed that when he was a boy he had stolen apples from a tree grown from a pip that Eve had saved when she was turned out of Eden. Their mother had been a girl friend of Methuselah’s before her marriage. 

25 Books in 25 Days: #6 Patricia Brent, Spinster

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I’ve been re-reading today – Patricia Brent, Spinster (1918) by Herbert Jenkins, for the next episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ I shan’t spoil too much before that episode, but I will say that I loved it just as much the second time around – and a Saturday spent mostly lazing around and reading with a cat on my lap has been just dandy.

Since it’s a weekend, I’ll also share a few links alongside this post…

1.) I love The Truman Show, and I found this Vanity Fair article behind the scenes extremely interesting. Can you believe it’s been 20 years since it came out?!

2.) I also love Brandi Carlile, and she has a new album out. Check out the amazing song ‘The Joke’, which also has a great video.

3.) Apparently (according to The Cooler podcast), the song that was #1 on your 14th birthday essentially characterises your life. I got ‘Lift Me Up’ by Geri Halliwell – make of that what you will.

4.) Please enjoy the Google Reviews on the Atlantic Ocean – sort to ‘worst rated’ and have a great afternoon. The same can be done for all sorts of historical sites and geographical landmarks.

5.) Champions has debuted on Netflix, after a network series. I think it’s a really fun sitcom, and will have to take the place of Great News, which was too good for this world and got axed. (Check that out too, if you can – it was the funniest sitcom, in terms of writing, on air.)

25 Books in 25 Days: #5 Blow Up the Castle

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When I was in Canada last year, Darlene kindly gave me a couple of books – one of which was Blow Up the Castle (2011) by Margaret Moffatt. You can read Darlene’s thoughts about it on her blog; in brief, it’s about three vicars with very similar names (Peabody, Peacock, and Peasly) and tells of their lives. It’s more or less a collection of short anecdotes or witty events, rather than a novel as such, set in 1930s England.

In amongst all the little jokes and curious events, I have to put a word in for somebody mistakenly entering ‘The Lost Slipper’ into an art competition to depict The Last Supper…

25 Books in 25 Days: #4 Our Heritage of Liberty

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Image result for stephen leacock
Image via WikiCommons.

I’ve loved Stephen Leacock for years, and was intrigued when I found Our Heritage of Liberty (1942) by Stephen Leacock in Hay-on-Wye a couple of years ago.

It’s a brief (75pp) history of liberty – from the medieval world to the 1940s, via Rousseau, the Victorians, etc. etc. Curiously, it is largely only about Western Europe and the USA – Leacock largely overlooks his own country of Canada. It’s quite interesting as a potted history, but I found it most valuable in the final quarter – where he talks about the various conditions of freedom in the 1940s, from housing to working. It’s not as witty as I’d hoped Leacock might be (Milne, for instance, can be very amusing even on serious topics – c.f. Peace With Honour), but it’s pretty good. It’s also interesting that every age thinks itself the exception and pinnacle…

To-day there are no new lands, and the machine in a certain sense has become the master, mankind the slave. Most of the habitable world has been explored and appropriated. Invention still goes on, but finds its readiest application in the means of death. Nor can even the industry of peace follow its perpetual changes. Nor is there left any longer the escape from civilisation, the new start in the wilderness. The last frontier is vanishing. From our narrowed world there is no getting away, except by what mathematicians call the velocity of escape – meaning to be fired off into space at the rate of seven miles a second – on which terms no traveller returns.

We cannot wonder that this imprisoned feeling, this loss of one’s own control, breeds in many people something like despair, a wistful longing for the “good old times”.

25 Books in 25 Days: #3 A Lost Lady

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I fancied a Virago Modern Classic, and didn’t have all that many that were slender. I wasn’t sure which to choose – but thankfully I pulled down A Lost Lady (1923) by Willa Cather. I bought it in Oxford in 2015, and it’s the second Cather novel I’ve read – and it’s really good.

It’s essentially a portrait of Mrs Forrester from the perspective of a younger man – who knew her when he was a boy and she was recently married to a man much older than her. The novella follows her over the years, as his admiration for her kindness and happiness becomes tempered when he realises that she has feet of clay. It’s beautifully, sparely written – and the drawing of the characters is expertly done. I suspect it might be one of my books of the year – perfect in what it is doing. (And a perfect meeting of book and bookmark!)

She had a fascinating gift of mimicry. When she mentioned the fat iceman, or Thad Grimes at his meat block, or the Blum boys with their dead rabbits, by a subtle suggestion of their manner she made them seem more individual and vivid than they were in their own person. She often caricatured people to their faces, and they were not offended, but greatly flattered. Nothing pleased one more than to provoke her laughter. Then you felt you were getting on with her. It was her form of commenting, of agreeing with you and appreciating you when you said something interesting, – and it often told you a great deal that was both too direct and too elusive for words.

Long, long afterward, when Niel did not know whether Mrs Forrester were living or dead, if her image flashed into his mind, it came with a brightness of dark eyes, her pale triangular cheeks with long earrings, and her many-coloured laugh. When he was dull, dull and tired of everything, he used to think that if he could hear that long-lost lady laugh again, he could be gay.

25 Books in 25 Days: #2 Prater Violet

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My second book for this challenge is Prater Violet (1946) by Christopher Isherwood – the second novel I’ve read by him, and apparently one I bought in Ambleside in 2012.

Completely coincidentally, this (like book #1 in my 25 Books in 25 Days) is another novel about the cinema – though looking at the 1930s and the arrival of talkies. Christopher Isherwood (or at least a character of the same name) is roped into the weird world of scriptwriting, slightly reluctantly. It’s a very fun account of working with a histrionic but visionary Viennese director, scathing cutting room experts, offended actresses, and all. I liked it much more than the previous Isherwood novel I read (Mr Norris Changes Trains) and I’m now really excited about reading more of this witty, self-deprecating Isherwood.

“You see, this umbrella of his I find extremely symbolic. It is the British respectability which thinks: ‘I have my traditions, and they will protect me. Nothing unpleasant, nothing ungentlemanly, can possibly happen within my private park.’ This respectable umbrella is the Englishman’s magic wand. When Hitler declines rudely to disappear, the Englishman will open his umbrella and say: ‘After all, what do I care for a little rain?’ But the rain will be a rain of bombs and blood. The umbrella is not bomb-proof.”

“Don’t underrate the umbrella,” I said. “It has often been used successfully by governesses against bulls. It has a very sharp point.”

“You are wrong. The umbrella is useless…Do you know Goethe?”

“Only a little.”

“Wait. I shall read you something. Wait. Wait.”

25 Books in 25 Days: #1 A Way of Life, Like Any Other

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After reading Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch – a reading memoir by someone who reads a book a day for a year – and then watching Madame Bibliophile do ‘Novella a Day in May‘ – I’ve decided I’m going to try something similar myself.

I’ve done a few weekends where I read as many novellas as I can, just to whittle down my tbr piles. And now I’m going try… 25 Books in 25 Days. Basically a book a day, though I may end up finishing off some I’ve got on the go. And sometimes those books will be SUPER short, depending on what else I’ve got on. But it’s a fun challenge, especially to see if I can fit it around my job etc., and will help me read some of the books I’ve got waiting for me.

And I’m going to write really quickly about all of them, as they happen, at least until I fail. OPTIMISM. I’m just going to go with where/how I got the book, a quotation, and quick general thoughts.

A Way of Life, Like Any Other (1977) by Darcy O’Brien

I bought this in April 2012, in Barter Books up in Alnwick, presumably because it’s a lovely NYRB Classics edition – though I do also seem to remember seeing it around the blogosphere.

It’s told as though a memoir by the child of Golden Age Hollywood actors (who are now a bit down on their luck). The main character negotiates a life dominated by his temperamental mother, but also filled with larger-than-life and slightly surreal other characters. The tone is heightened, but extremely engaging – and I really enjoyed it as a quirky, disruptive, often disjointed view of Hollywood. I’ve not read the introduction yet, so I don’t know how much Darcy O’Brien had to base on his own life.

“Stand there a minute,” he said. “I think I see a resemblance to your father.”

“I’m tired, Mr. Pines.”

“Please call me Peter. It’s in the mouth. You have his mouth. He was a very handsome man. You love him, don’t you.”

“Every son loves his father,” I said, getting into bed.

“You’re very young. It’s very hard on you, isn’t it? I know. I went through it myself. My father walked out when I was five.”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to hear about Mr. Pine’s father. He meant well. We all do.

“I think your mother deserves better than that cretin, don’t you?”

“He’s all right,” I said. I felt like crying all of a sudden. I turned my face to the wall. Poor Mother was going to be alone again. And poor Anatol, what would he do? Go on at Disney till he dropped? I felt sorry for everybody. What was I going to do? I wished people could stay together. I thought about baseball.