All

Back from Edinburgh

StuckinaBook All 18 Comments

Loving the comments on the 50 Books competition post – do keep ’em coming! I think I’ll do the prize draw on Monday.

The long train journey is over, and I am back from a fun, rainy, book-filled week in Edinburgh. Said train journey was slightly spoiled by a group of people blasting out music from their speakers for a solid two hours. So loud, so rude. We were all too British to say anything, but complained to each other once they’d left.

I had a lovely time – a highlight being seeing Karen/Cornflower. And I went to eight or nine bookshops while in Edinburgh, and bought 15 books. Two of them, I realised afterwards, were books I already owned (oops) so I passed them onto a friend I was staying with – and here are the 13 I brought back with me. Incidentally, the best bookshop I went to was Armchair Books – a great selection of reasonably-priced books, though the hardbacks were all on shelves that were unreachable without stools or a stepladder. I perched precariously on a stepladder at one point. But if there are Rose Macaulay books on a shelf I can’t see properly, I’m gonna get a stepladder.

Edinburgh books 2016

The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield ed. J. Middleton Murray
The Life of Katherine Mansfield by Ruth Mantz
I’ve seen these a few times, but never at a tempting price – so I was pleased to stumble across them in Till’s bookshop. Both are Constable hardbacks, and were part of JMM’s rather energetic series of Mansfield-related publications just after her death.

The Rain Girl by Herbert Jenkins
We all know that I loved Patricia Brent, Spinster, so it was great to find one of Jenkins’ other books in a lovely edition – this one was on a high-up shelf in Armchair Books.

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov
I could feel Kaggsy watching me when I picked this one up – a Pushkin and a Russian! It sounds so intriguing – about a man who reads a short story which describes a murder he had himself committed. What comes next…?

Orphan Island by Rose Macaulay
Armchair Books had loads of Macaulay books, though this was the only one I didn’t already own – and one that I have kept an eye out for for a long time. Hurrah! (Must read some more Macaulays. Have so many unread.)

Friends and Relations by Elizabeth Bowen
I need to read more Bowen, and I think she’ll come up on ‘Tea or Books?’ at some point – but which? Maybe this one?

Paul Kelver by Jerome K. Jerome
I keep buying JKJ books, don’t I? Hadn’t heard of this one before, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it sometime.

A Cup of Tea for Mr Thorgill by Storm Jameson
Another one of those authors I’ve been meaning to read for such a long time, and have only read some non-fic articles by her. This one, I’ll admit, I bought chiefly because I really love that cover.

Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Max Beerbohm
Who knew these gents wrote to each other? Well, probably loads of people. But not I! (My Max Beerbohm shelf is growing at a fast rate…)

Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist by Joan Bennett
I’m not the sort of guy who’ll leave behind a book about Virginia Woolf – particularly an early one.

All The Dogs of My Life by Elizabeth von Arnim
How did I not own this before? Being a cat person more than a dog person, I’m not sure this lens will work for me – but I’ll find out. (NB must enthuse more about Sheila Kaye-Smith’s All The Books of My Life, which is wonderful.)

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
More Cunningham for my Cunningham shelf – yes please.

A Sea-Grape Tree by Rosamond Lehmann
I think I might own all of Lehmann’s novels now, and have still only read one (Dusty Answer) – but now I have even more choice.

50 Books: a prize draw!

StuckinaBook All 68 Comments

50

So, after 9 and a bit years, I have come to the end of my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About! That feels like cause for celebration – and I’ll celebrate by offering up (almost) any one of them as a prize! All you have to do comment with how many you’ve read, and which one you’d like to win.

The list – which is in no particular order, btw – can be seen down the right-hand column, or in a table at the bottom of this post. This competition is open to anybody and any country.

(For prize, reasons of scarcity/expense mean I wouldn’t be offering The Lark or Scar Tissue, I’m afraid. Oh, and copies of any title will probably be secondhand, as many/most of them aren’t in print!)

A bit of background: when I started up Stuck-in-a-Book, I wanted it to reflect my taste in literature – which has a heavy leaning towards the neglected and unjustly forgotten. And an ongoing list of books I thought especially deserved attention seemed like a great thread to keep going. Quite a few of them came in the first year of blogging (which is why quite a few of the blog reviews they link to are a bit embarrassing to me – none of us love our earliest reviews, do we?) and I’ve been eking it out for the whole time I’ve been blogging so far. The only rules were that I’d have one book per author, and it couldn’t be too well known – though some of these probably don’t quite fall into the obscure category.

I love me some stats. Here you are…

  • 34 books by women; 15 books by men; 1 book by a man and a woman.
  • 33 fiction; 17 non-fiction (though the fiction does include a few strongly autobiographical books).
  • 3 books in translation.
  • 13 living authors; 39 dead authors (52 authors in total because two of the books are volumes of letters between two people).
  • I was going to do something about average date, but that would require rather too much digging around. Evelina is the oldest and Speaking of Love the newest, though, I’d imagine.
  • It’s not the most diverse in terms of author nationality, but does include British, American, Canadian, New Zealander, French, Hungarian, and Finnish.
  • The list includes a father and son, a husband and wife, and somebody with my aunt’s name. Also three people I’ve met in real life.

Happy choosing!

50: The Lost Europeans – Emanuel Litvinoff 25. The Enchanted Places – Christopher Milne
49. The Lark – E. Nesbit 24. Deceived With Kindness – Angelica Garnett
48. Nuts in May – Cornelia Otis Skinner 23. White Cargo – Felicity Kendal
47. The Shelf – Phyllis Rose 22. The L-Shaped Room – Lynne Reid Banks
46. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends – Penelope Fitzgerald 21. The Long Afternoon – Giles Waterfield
45. Patricia Brent, Spinster – Herbert Jenkins 20. Frost at Morning – Richmal Crompton
44. Phantoms on the Bookshelves – Jacques Bonnet 19. As It Was and World Without End – Helen Thomas
43. Skylark – Dezső Kosztolányi 18. The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow – Jerome K. Jerome
42. Stet – Diana Athill 17. The Love-Child – Edith Olivier
41. Guard Your Daughters – Diana Tutton 16. The Haunted Woman – David Lindsay
40. More Women Than Men – Ivy Compton-Burnett 15. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead – Barbara Comyns
39. One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes 14. Speaking of Love – Angela Young
38. The Element of Lavishness – William Maxwell & Sylvia Townsend Warner 13. Lady Into Fox – David Garnett
37. Christopher and Columbus – Elizabeth von Arnim 12. Portraits – Kate Chopin
36. The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton 11. Ex Libris – Anne Fadiman
35. Love of Seven Dolls – Paul Gallico 10. Joyce & Ginnie – The Letters of Joyce Grenfell and Virginia Graham
34. William – E.H. Young 09. One Pair of Hands – Monica Dickens
33. The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck 08. Scar Tissue – Ruth Mary Hills
32. Loitering With Intent – Muriel Spark 07. Watching the English – Kate Fox
31. Being George Devine’s Daughter – Harriet Devine 06. Evelina – Frances Burney
30. Nella Last’s War – Nella Last 05. It’s Too Late Now – A.A. Milne
29. Howards End is on the Landing – Susan Hill 04. Miss Hargreaves – Frank Baker
28. We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson 03. The Piano Shop on the Left Bank – Thad Carhart
27. Selected Stories – Katherine Mansfield 02. The Provincial Lady – E.M. Delafield
26. Literary Lapses – Stephen Leacock 01. The Summer Book – Tove Jansson

 

 

The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge

StuckinaBook All , , 9 Comments

The Bottle Factory OutingIt’s Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week, guys! Somehow, I haven’t actually read any more books by Beryl Bainbridge since the last week organised by Annabel – during which I read Injury Time, Sweet William, and Something Happened Last Week, reviews of all of which you can find under my Bainbridge tag by clicking on the tag above or choosing ‘Bainbridge’ from the dropdown Browse menu. Well, I’m very glad that Annabel resurrected this reading week, as it has brought The Bottle Factory Outing (1974) to the top of my tbr pile – and it was everything I would expect from Beryl.

I actually read the whole thing on train journeys to and from London – i.e. it’s pretty short. And I even finally managed to stop calling it The Bottle Factory Opening in my head; it is, after all, focused on an outing rather than a grand opening. That is the main ‘event’ of the novel: all the workers at the bottle factory are going to go on a picnic, from the families of immigrants who put up with the low wages offered to the two women who are the focus of the novel, and who stick labels on wine bottles (while maintaining that all the wines are the same).

The Bottle Factory Outing would work very well with other novels I grouped back when I was doing Five From the Archive regularly (I must bring that back) and grouped together five excellent books about pairs of women. It’s chiefly about Freda and Brenda, who have a typically Bainbridgian dysfunctional relationship. They’re not quite friends – they moved in together after a moment of misunderstanding, and they’re not particularly compatible as housemates. Not even housemates: they share a bed, with a bolster and a line of books down the middle.

Freda is forthright and confident; Brenda is nervous and awkward. But nobody in a Beryl Bainbridge novel deals well with others (it seems) and she lends the same spikiness and discomfort to The Bottle Factory Outing that I’ve come to love elsewhere. There is affection and well-meaning alongside, but of the sort that cannot survive the awkwardness of everyday encounters.

Oh, and Beryl is funny. This awkwardness definitely permeates into both humour and unpleasantness. This paragraph combines the two…

She couldn’t think how to discourage him – she didn’t want to lose her job and she hated giving offence. He had a funny way of pinching her all over, as if she was a mattress whose stuffing needed distributing more evenly. She stood there wriggling, saying breathlessly ‘Please don’t, Rossi,’ but he tickled and she gave little smothered laughs and gasps that he took for encouragement.

‘You are a nice clean girl.’

‘Oh, thank you.’

It’s basically assault, of course, but the mattress comment is quintessential Bainbridge – a moment of levity thrown in that also illuminates the situation and gives a unique description.

And the outing? Well, it is not free from disaster. And it is the culmination of the different strands of the novel in a dramatic way that one feels Bainbridge has earned throughout; every moment leading up to it somehow both dramatic and mundane at once, wrapped together in her slightly distorted view of the world. She finds the bizarre amongst the ordinary, and somehow turns it back upon itself to seem ordinary too. It’s been great to get back to Beryl.

The Lost Europeans by Emanuel Litvinoff

StuckinaBook All , , , , 4 Comments

Lost-EuropeansJudging by the number of comments, reviews where I get you to click somewhere else aren’t necessarily as popular as reviews here – but THIS one is hopefully different because, guys… THIS IS THE LAST BOOK ON MY 50 BOOKS YOU MUST READ BUT MAY NOT HAVE HEARD ABOUT. (That list is over in the right-hand column, fyi.)

The list has been going since I started the blog in April 2007, although it has slowed over the years as I ran out of the backlog of titles I wanted to add, and worried about the end drawing near.

Do I start another list? Don’t know. But watch this space for a little celebration of 50 Books next week.

ANYWAY The Lost Europeans by Emanuel Litvinoff is the book in question. It was published in 1958 and is about Germany after the war, and what it was like to visit as a Jewish German who was evacuated to England. But what makes it so good is Litvinoff’s extraordinary writing.

It doesn’t hurt that the book is beautifully produced too.

Head over to Shiny New Books to read all my thoughts, but here is the beginning of my review. And look out for 50 Books celebration and PRIZE next week!

Have you ever had the experience of starting a novel and, before you’ve got to the end of the second page, you are so bowled away by the writing that you already know that you’ve found one of the best books you’ll read that year? It happens to me very seldom – Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude did the sane thing – but it certainly happened with Emanuel Litvinoff’s 1958 novel The Lost Europeans, reprinted as part of a beautiful new series by Apollo.

An unusual Vita and books for the train

StuckinaBook All , , , 18 Comments

A quick note that I’m over at Vulpes Libris today, writing about a novel by Vita Sackville-West that you might not have heard about… Grand Canyon is quite unlike anything else I’ve read by VSW.

Sorry for the lack of book reviews actually on SIAB for a while. Holidays and RSI and busyness have all collided, it seems, though my pile of books ready to review is steadily growing. And next week I’m off to Edinburgh, with a pile of paperbacks to read on the train… I thought these would be small and light enough to leave plenty of room for buying more!

books for Edin train

 

Let’s see how many I manage read on the long train journey…

The links effect

StuckinaBook All 12 Comments

I was going to save these for some sort of Weekend Miscellany, but I keep forgetting at the weekend… so here’s a midweek miscellany! It’s also a way for me to test whether or not WordPress have started emailing comments to me again… I thought everything had gone very silent, but it just turned out I wasn’t getting alerts.

1.) Backlisted on Barbara Comyns – I love listening to the wise, wide-ranging, and witty Backlisted podcast, where (much like Tea or Books?) their focus is on older, often lesser-known titles. They’ve done SIAB favourites like Nancy Mitford and J.L. Carr, but imagine my delight when they turned their attention to one of my ALL-TIME faves: Barbara Comyns. The novel under scrutiny is The Vet’s Daughter (my review here) but they also talk about most of her books. It’s fabs. Also: read Comyns.

2.) Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week – don’t forget, this is kicking off at Annabel’s next week. I’m actually on hols, but I’ve read my Beryl and will schedule something for next week, time permitting.

3.) Rachel Ferguson and the indomitable Furrowed Middlebrow – Scott is renowned for his exhaustive research into middlebrow authors so obscure that the ones I write about seem like household names. You might well know Rachel Ferguson’s Alas, Poor Lady or The Brontes Went to Woolworths, but the rest of her oeuvre isn’t discussed much. Scott has written about some early works, and (not by coincidence) The Stag at Bay is now in my hot little hands.

4.) Virago documentary – an excellent Facebook group about undervalued interwar British women novelists shared the fab news that there is to be a BBC documentary about the origins of Virago. Firstly, I am super excited. Secondly, if they mention the Whipple line then I am going to seethe. Thirdly, if they don’t mention it then I might seethe a bit anyway. But yay Virago nonetheless!

5.) What do the French call French toast? – one of my articles for OxfordWords, sorry for plug, but it fascinated me!

Shiny New Books: Issue 10

StuckinaBook All 2 Comments

Issue 10 of Shiny New Books is here! For those not in the know, it’s the online recommendations magazine that now comes out every two months – under the editorship of Annabel, Harriet, Victoria, and yours truly.

Another one of our slightly smaller (more manageable for you!) issues – but jam-packed with great stuff. I think the smaller issues have just made us keener only to include the very best things from the past two months.

SNB-logo

Go on over and enjoy – I’ll be highlighting some of my favourite things soon.

When We Were Alive by C.J. Fisher

StuckinaBook All , , , 2 Comments

When We Were AlivePraise be, my RSI seems to have died down! I can use both hands again! Thanks for thoughts and support – it’s been a bit of a rubbish fortnight or so, and the underlying issue will still need to be dealt with, but at least I’m back typing.

I still have plenty of reviews and whatnot to come, but for today – since the next issue of Shiny New Books is coming up this week – I thought I’d link to my final review from Issue 9. It’s a bit unusual for me, being a new book by a vlogger – but not one who is keen to publicise the relationship between YouTube and book, refreshingly. Anyway – over to C.J. Fisher and When We Were Alive. Full review here.

Anybody who keeps an eye on book news, or the stands in WH Smith at Christmastime, will probably have observed the sensation of the YouTube Book. The 20-something year old with a camera and a cheery smile has been unleashed on an unsuspecting audience of people with preteen children, and Zoella is just the most famous of a gathering mass. Well, it’s true that I first came across C.J. Fisher in her persona as Ophelia Dagger on YouTube, but she would be the first to disavow the title of Vlogger Novelist. It may be how I discovered her as a novelist, but they are very different entities.

Song for a Sunday

StuckinaBook All 1 Comment

Hey all! I’ll be limiting my blogging activity until RSI has gone down, as I’m trying to keep to essential typing (like, erm, the conference paper I’m supposed to be writing this weekend). See you soon, hopefully, but here’s a song from Kathryn Williams’ awesome album Hypoxia, which is all about Sylvia Plath.

The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West

StuckinaBook All , , , 7 Comments

EdwardiansWriting with one hand at the moment, for various boring health reasons, which is why you’re likely to get a few short posts from me for the time being. Including this Shiny New Books link to an excellent novel by Vita Sackville-West. The more I read by her, the more I think her social history has unjustly overshadowed her writing – and The Edwardians was her bestseller. And while you’re there, check out Five Fascinating Facts about VSW.

While Vita Sackville-West is today best remembered as having (probably) been the lover of Virginia Woolf, and as the mind behind the garden at Sissinghurst, she was also a novelist of repute during her life. Indeed, The Edwardians – now republished alongside All Passion Spent by Vintage, both with Gosia Herba’s striking cover designs – was such a phenomenal seller that it helped keep Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s publishing house, Hogarth Press, afloat. Has this 1930 novel stood the test of time? Short answer: absolutely. It is somehow both riotous and thoughtful, borrowing from the modernists without losing its popular touch.