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Busy busy busy at the moment. Off to London today to see Once, and yesterday my team won the Abingdon Book Quiz put on by Mostly Books. It’s all GO. The quiz is always great fun; this year we had Annabel on our team, as she was taking a year off from writing the questions. And I picked up a few books as prizes or the book swap – Hawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway (after John Self raved so much about it), Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe, and Humor by Stanley Dorwood (mostly for the beautiful cover).

So, it’s not even January any more, but I’ve been meaning to do my annual stats round-up for a while. Leaving it so late at least means that I shan’t be overshadowed by everybody else doing it at the same time…

Number of Books Read
Only 98, which is the lowest I’ve read since I started keeping records – although only five fewer than last year. It makes me realise how unlikely A Century of Books was to be completed…

Fiction/Non-Fiction Ratio
72 fiction and 26 non-fiction. Non-fiction had been growing every year, and I’m surprised that it slumped in 2014, since it felt like quite a non-fiction-heavy year.

Male/Female Authors
62 by women, 36 by men – which is more or less what I expected.

Re-reads
10, most of which were by or about A.A. Milne.

Reading slumps
One, and it lasted for weeks and weeks. Hence the number of Agatha Christie titles I read.

Oldest book read
I think the oldest book I read was exactly 100 years old – Love Insurance by Earl Derr Biggers. Very good it was too.

Newest book read
Shiny New Books meant I read loads of new books. Well, a few. I guess the most recent was Marilynne Robinson’s Lila.

Shortest Title
Another victory for Lila!

Books in Translation
5, I think – including lots of Tove Jansson.

Books Added to my 50 Books List
Just two – Charlotte Mew and Her Friends by Penelope Fitzgerald and Patricia Brent, Spinster by Herbert Jenkins.

Most Books by One Author
Agatha Christie (quelle surprise) with 9. A.A. Milne had a healthy showing with 6.

Most Baffling Book
What on earth happened in Gertrude Stein’s Blood on the Dining-Room Floor? I couldn’t tell you.

Most Disappointing Book
Agatha stood me in good stead, but Elephants Can Remember was dire.

Most Overdue Read
I should have read Swallows and Amazons decades ago. Better late than never!

Best Title
I didn’t love the novel as much as I’d hoped, but Nancy Spain’s Cinderella Goes to the Morgue still has a beauty of a title.

Animals in Book Titles
This has become an essential category for me now. Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie, Here Be Dragons by Stella Gibbons, Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi, Lets Discuss Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris, Mr Fox by Barbara Comyns, Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford, The Man Who Unleashed the Birds by Paul Newman, and The Midnight Fox by Betsy Byars.

Strange things that happened in the books I read in 2014
Everyone’s favourite category! People teleported and stuck monkey glands to necks, the fifth child turned out to be a demon, the apocalypse came to a country house, a fake chemist entered a dystopia, a woman and a dog swapped minds, Virginia Woolf wandered through modern day New York, enormous silkworms crushed crowds, a hotel was used as a kidnapping front, oh, and lots of ingenious murders, of course.

It’s here! I got up early this morning to play with menus and links and whatnot, culminating the hard work of our team over the past few months (particularly, as always, the extraordinary Annabel). Annabel, Victoria, Harriet – we’ve done it! Issue 4 of Shiny New Books is LIVE.

Please do go and enjoy exploring. I’ll post more about highlights soon, and will also enjoy exploring myself as (as always) there is plenty that I’ve not read yet. For starters, do have a go at our book group competition on the homepage where, as is becoming tradition, you can win the editors’ favourites from their sections.

…just because I had to share this fun article about secondhand books.

The next issue of Shiny New Books is coming out next Thursday, so I’m at my usual stage of reading and writing madly, wishing I’d allowed myself more time to do so… but I’m also enjoying the books tremendously, so it is no hardship.

I thought I should put something down quickly, as I mentioned A Century of Books yesterday. No, I haven’t started again – but I am going to finish off the 100 at some point this year, since I failed to cram it all in 2014. So, no rush at all – I’ve got about 20 years to fill, or thereabouts, and books pencilled in for most of them. But that’s my only challenge for the year. I toyed with a few others, but I think it’ll be nice just to read what I fancy for a bit. My Shiny New Books commitments will be plenty enough for the year, not to mention book groups and the like.

One event I am still hoping to participate in is Margery Sharp Day. You can read Jane’s reminder post, and hopefully be similarly cajoled. I’ve had plenty of her books on my shelves, unread, for years and years – since I read The Foolish Gentlewoman in about 2002 – so there’s no reason why I wouldn’t, expect for those shiny books I’ve yet to finish… well, we’ll see.

Apart from that, I’m off to Malvern on Saturday to see Peter Pan Goes Wrong – the pantomime equivalent of The Play That Goes Wrong – and to the cinema on Sunday for The Theory of Everything. I think I need another Christmas break fairly soon…

There are books at the bottom of this post. I’ll get to them.

I’m going to stop beginning all my blog posts with an apology for not having blogged enough recently… soon… but I do really intend to post more frequently, honest. Life has been surprisingly busy of late, considering there’s no real reason why things should have changed.

One of those busynesses was very nice, though – this Saturday I was in London. I was there for two reasons – firstly to meet up with some lovely people from the Virago Modern Classics group on LibraryThing (including your friend and mine Kaggsy), discussing books, eating pancakes, and generally having a high old time.

This was where things started to go wrong.

Turns out the buses aren’t running to the railway station in Oxford. So I had a very tiring fast-paced walk to get to the station… just in time to see the train leave. Oops. So I caught the next train, only to discover (when I eventually arrived at Paddington, and had headed off on the Central Line) that the tube stop I wanted to go to was closed. After visiting most of London (so it felt), I eventually turned up, a little the worse for travel, but very pleased to see everyone.

I was only there for a bit of the extravaganza, though (the pancake bit, at My Old Dutch, but not the book-buying bit afterwards). And that was because I was dashing off to the British Film Institute to see For Services Rendered by W. Somerset Maugham, a BBC Play of the Day from 1959. It was being screened as part of the Maggie Smith Festival, and my lovely friend Andrea (whom you may recall from Simon and Andrea’s Film Club) had got me a ticket for my birthday.

I went to a BFI screening of The Home-Maker back in 2005, put on by Persephone. So I went to the place where I had seen that screened. Turns out… there are two British Film Institutes. And I was at the wrong one. As I discovered while on the phone to Andrea about 5 minutes before the film was due to start… so ran across London, and tubes and whatnot, and eventually got there only ten minutes late… and it was, in conclusion, brilliant.

After the film, we scoured the book stalls on the Southbank – a search which is fun but which has always been fruitless; does anybody else find this? And then I went off to the Notting Hill Book & Comic Exchange, which has never proven fruitless. Yes, I bought a few books… and added to the couple that Luci from LibraryThing had kindly given me. And here they are…

A Reading Diary – Alberto Manguel
I can’t get enough of books about books, particularly when they’re by our Alberto.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris
Last weekendm I had the annoying experience in a charity shop of somebody buying Me Talk Pretty One Day just as I got to the bookshelves, and my book group is reading that Sedaris soon. But I’ll settle for adding this one to my collection!

Owls and Satyrs – David Pryce-Jones
I know nothing at all about this book or this author, but it looked intriguing and was only £1. Anybody know anything?

The Golden Apples – Eudora Welty
This edition was rather lovely, and I am determined to read more by Welty soon (after loving The Optimist’s Daughter).

A Meeting by the River – Christopher Isherwood
Curse my love of matching books… I keep buying Isherwoods in this series, when I stumble across them, despite not actually loving the one Isherwood I’ve read…

Our Hidden Lives – ed. Simon Garfield
I’m a sucker for diaries, and this one brings together various different people in post-war Britain.

Better Than Life – Daniel Pennac
This book, and the one above, were from Luci. To circle back to where I began this list – I do love a book about books!

Another short post, but one which I’ve been mulling over while reading Barchester Towers – since, as any followers of @stuck_inabook on Twitter might have noticed, I flipping love Septimus Harding. He is the hero of The Warden and, to a lesser extent, Barchester Towers – and he is about the most moral, kind, and self-sacrificing gentleman imaginable.

He thus joins what has become a trio of literary men whom I admire wholeheartedly. Alongside Septimus H are Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird and lovely Joe Gargery in Great Expectations. What all three have in common are absolute goodness. They are basically my fictional moral compasses.

But… what’s also struck me, subsequently, is that (much as I continue to admire these men) I’m not sure how much I would like to know them in real life. Because none of them (correct me if I’m wrong) are especially funny, and a sense of humour is pretty much the thing I value most in a friend or acquaintance. Yes, Joe is fond of larks, but I’m not sure I would find many of the same things larkworthy.

Would knowing Septimus or Atticus in real life just make me feel unworthy all of the time? Would they be able to have a giggle over a cup of tea? I’m not sure.

Plenty of the characters I love reading about (Miss Hargreaves, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mapp & Lucia) would be nightmares in reality, but I’ve come to realise that it’s not just the appalling ones who wouldn’t work out well on a day to day basis, it’s the good’uns too.

Or are there characters who are very funny but also very good? By which I mean moral-mentor-good, not Elizabeth-Bennett-sort-of-good. Or is a sense of humour always a slight moral flaw (or at least a moral diminishment) in a novel?

Here endeth the stream of consciousness…

A few people have been in touch to tell me that The Great British Bake Off is now available on US television! On PBS, to be precise, and now called The Great British Baking Show. They’re three episodes in, but I’m sure you can catch up… and it also means you can read my Bake Off recaps and they’ll make a little more sense!

The tag for my recaps is here, but they will appear in reverse…