All

Out and about, bits and bobs, and suchlike

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I’m enjoying a lazy time down in Somerset, now that work has finished for Christmas, and was supposed to be getting down to lots of reading. But somehow I am a bit bored with everything I’m reading, so have reverted to an old reliable (which just happens to fill in one of the few gaps in my Century of Books from the first half of the year – 1932): The Provincial Lady Goes Further. It is my favourite of the Provincial Lady series (as well as being the first one I read), and I laugh aloud to myself despite having read it about a dozen times… particularly, for some reason, at this paragraph:

Door flies open and Pamela Pringle, of whom I have now given up all hope, rushes in, kisses everybody, falls over little dog – which has mysteriously appeared out of the blue and vanishes again after being fallen over – and says Oh do we all know on another, and isn’t she a frightfully bad hostess but she simply could not get away from Amédé, who really is a Pet. (Just as I have decided that Amédé is another little dog, it turns out that he is a Hairdresser.)
Yesterday some of my extended family came over to go to a football match. Well, obviously I didn’t go (I mean, come on) and Our Vicar’s Wife also didn’t fancy it, so we took a trip to see the new Paddington film instead. There were quite a few other mother-and-child(ren) groups there, but I think we were conclusively the oldest. And it was good fun! A little different from the books, but Sally Hawkins and Hugh Bonneville are dependably great, and CGI Paddington was a wonder.

We got to Yeovil very early, so we did a bit of last-min Christmas shopping, and (since we were there) popped into Oxfam to have a look at the books. And – lo and behold – I managed to snare a copy of E. Nesbit’s The Lark! I went on an online hunt for it after reading Scott’s enthusiastic review, because I am always drawn to any novel with spinsters or boarding houses, and this one has both, but the only available copies were prohibitively expensive. Obviously buying books online is great, and it would be a foolish lie to claim I don’t do it, but there’s nothing quite like a serendipitous find in person, is there? (I’ve borrowed the photo from Scott’s blog, as it’s the same edition I bought and I can’t remember where my camera is…)

Also, have you seen that Mystery in White by J. Jefferson Farjeon has become a Christmas bestseller? It’s a British Library Crime Classics reprint of a 1930s murder mystery, and it sounds glorious (Harriet reviewed it for Shiny New Books, fyi). I haven’t actually read any of the BL reprints yet, but it’s exciting that they’re doing so well – and I think the cover designer has to be thanked in a large part (as well, of course, as the people selecting the books).

Christmas is always a time when I watch a lot more TV than usual. Partly because my parents tend to have it on in the evening, partly because of Christmas specials and the like, and perhaps mostly because it’s the only time I really see a TV guide. I’m excited about The Day We Sang (by Victoria Wood, with Imelda Staunton – what a wonderful combination!) and Esio Trot (Roald Dahl; Judi Dench!) not to mention the Christmas special (and final) of delightfully-silly-but-touching Miranda. And let’s not forget the final episode of Radio 4 comedy Cabin Pressure, that my friend Malie successfully got me into this year.

Speaking of Imelda, I’m going to go and see her in Gypsy next April, which is exciting. My other booked tickets for theatre next year include the musical Once and the play Peter Pan Goes Wrong, a Christmas version of the incredibly funny The Play That Goes Wrong, which I saw in Malvern and has now transferred to London.

A review round-up

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I’ve made my peace with not getting to the end of my Century of Books by the end of 2014 – that’s fine; the rules are very flexible – but I will bolster out the list with some of the others I have read which don’t quite warrant a post to themselves, for one reason or another…

A Painted Veil (1925) by W. Somerset Maugham
I read this in the Lake District, and found it rather enthralling if a little overdramatic and a touch sententious. But it was borrowed from a friend, and I didn’t blog about it before sending it back…

The Listerdale Mystery (1934) by Agatha Christie
This was part of my Christie binge earlier in the year, but slipped in just after my other Christie round-up. This is a collection of short stories, some of which were better than others. It also has one with a novelist who complains that adapted books are given terrible names like ‘Murder Most Horrid’ – which later happened to Christie herself, with Mrs McGinty’s Dead.

It’s Too Late Now (1939) by A.A. Milne
One day I’ll write a proper review of this glorious book, one of my all-time favourites. It’s AAM’s autobiography and I’ve read it four or five times, but have left it too late this time to write a review that would do it justice. But I’m bound to re-read it, so we’ll just wait til then, eh?

Summer in February (1995) by Jonathan Smith
This novel is an all-time favourite of my friend Carol’s, and for that reason I feel like I should give it a proper review, but… well, it’s already seeped out of my head, I think. It was a good and interesting account of the Newlyn painters. I didn’t love it as much as Carol, but it was certainly well written and enjoyable.

The Blue Room (1999) by Hanne Ørstavik
I was going to review this Peirene translation for Shiny New Books, but I have to confess that I didn’t like it at all. But was I ever going to like an X-rated novel about submission? Reader, I brought this upon myself.

Making It Up (2005) by Penelope Lively
I wasn’t super impressed by my first Lively, I have to confess. I heard her speak about this book in 2005, so it was about time I read it – but it’s a fairly disparate selection of short stories, tied together with the disingenuous notion that all of them have some vague resemblance to sections of Lively’s life or people she saw once on the train. Having said that, some of the stories were very good – it just felt like the structure was rather weak. Still, I’m sure there are better Lively novels out there?

The Man Who Unleashed the Birds (2010) by Paul Newman
This biography of Frank Baker (author of Miss Hargreaves) has been on my on-the-go shelf for about four years, and I finally finished it! The awkward shape of the book was the main reason it stayed on the shelf, I should add; it wouldn’t fit in my bag! It was a brilliantly researched biography, with all sorts of info I’d never have been able to find elsewhere – most particularly a fascinating section on his relationship (er, not that sort of relationship) with Daphne du Maurier after he’d accused her of plagiarising ‘The Birds’.

The Siren Years by Charles Ritchie

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One of the greatest pleasures I have had in blogging is getting to know Claire’s blog. We all know and love her as The Captive Reader, and I am lucky enough to have very similar taste to Claire – we have both followed up each other’s suggestions, and have only had the occasional mishap. When I received Charles Ritchie’s The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad, 1937-1945 (1974) as a gift in the post, I was very touched – and a little nervous. I trust Claire. But… I thought she might have made a mistake. A book about politics? Me? And the cover did nothing to convince me… Lucky for me, I was wrong and Claire was right. Which makes a total of no recommendations from her that have turned out to be duds.

Ritchie often seems more like a society gossip than a diplomat, and that – you will not be surprised to learn – makes him much more up my street. He describes the people around him with a catty tone, albeit one au fait with national and international politics. Not to mention literature; Elizabeth Bowen was a large part of Ritchie’s life, and he is a sensitive interpreter of people.

And who can fail to be moved by any war memoir? The experiences of war, even on the home front, are so foreign to those of most of us today that any description of life then is both fascinating and poignant. Indeed, it is perhaps more so on the home front – because the places, relationships, and roles are recognisable, but thrown into extraordinary relief.

Since it’s been far too long since I read this wonderful diary, I shall just give you a series of quotations I noted down from it. After all, I am only going to say ‘I love this’ after each one, if I elaborate any further.

On public figures from Eton…
What happens to them at Eton? However innocent, stupid or honest they may be they always look as though they had passed the preceding night in bed with a high-class prostitute and had spent the earlier part of the morning smoothing away the ravages with the aid of creams, oils and curling tongs.

On politicians
[…] a few senators and political big-shots whose faces give one a feeling of familiar boredom like picking up an old twice-read newspaper.

On work rituals
Being a Private Secretary is a busy unreal sort of life – unreal because it makes one’s day such a programme of events. One does things in a certain order not because one feels like doing them at the time or even because this is the order of their importance, but because they appear in that order on the day’s programme. This programme is dictated by the engagements of the Chief, who is in turn a victim of his engagements and spends most of his day in doing unnecessary things which he does not want to do. Yet neither of us is unhappy. We feel that the ritual of our lives is obligatory – we grumble but we submit with satisfaction to the necessity. A day of telephone conversations, luncheon parties, notes acknowledged, visitors received, memoranda drawn up. Exhaustion is merely staleness – we return with zest to the game. What an extraordinary amount of time is spent in saving our own face and coddling other people’s vanities! One would really think that the people we deal with were a collection of hypersensitive megalomaniacs.

On war in London
Never has there been such a colourless war – not a drum, not a flag, not a cheer – just sandbags and khaki and air-read shelters and gas-masks and the cultivated, careful voice of the B.B.C. putting the best complexion on the news. London is waiting for the first raid like an anxious hostess who has made all the preparations to receive formidable guests – but the guests do not seem to be going to turn up. Every time the door-bell rings she thinks, “At last there they are,” but it turns out to be the grocer’s boy delivering a parcel. So the day pass. We look at our watches, turn on the wireless, pick up a novel and wait.

On Oxford, and a building I used to work in
The moment I stepped out of the station I smelt the familiar smell of Oxford. What nonsense the woman was talking the other day when she said that it did not matter if a city were destroyed physically, if its soul lived. Cities are nothing without their bodies. When you have destroyed Paris and Oxford what happens to their souls? Oxford rebuilt in this age! It would be easy to see what it would be like by looking at the new Bodleian Extension – that blankly commonplace hulk which they have dared to plant in the face of the Sheldonian. That is the most distressing thing about Oxford – for the rest the changes are temporary.

On Elizabeth Bowen
“Take it from one of the best living novelists that people’s personalities are not interesting,” Elizabeth said in a dry voice; “except,” she added, “when you are in love with them.” Her books show much that you would expect if you knew her only as an acquaintance, he intelligence, her penetrating eye, her love of houses and flowers. These things you would have gathered from talking to her in her drawing-room. But there are certain passages in which her peculiar intensity, her genius, come out, which would be hard to reconcile with this cultivated hostess. That purity of perception and compassion seems to come from another part of her nature of which she is perhaps not completely aware.

On wartime
We have long ceased to find the war thrilling – any excitement in the movement of historic events is gone. There is a vague but persistent worry in people’s minds about the coming air raids this winter, but like everything else this is accepted as inevitable. The truth is that the war has become as much a part of our lives as the weather, the endless winter, and when the ice does break there will be no cheering in the streets.

Bits and Pieces

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It’s not the weekend, so I can’t call this a Weekend Miscellany, but here are a bunch of things I’ve been meaning to link to or mention…

1.) My doctoral supervisor Sally Bayley is writing a book called The Private Life of the Diary, from Pepys to Tweets and is publishing through publishing house de jour Unbound. It’s one which is pledge-based. Find out more about the fascinating-sounding book…

2.) I can’t remember whether or not I’ve shared this video before, but it’s by one of the vloggers I sometimes watch (kickthepj) and an example of how creative young ‘content makers’ can be…

3.) I wrote the rules for a lolcat geneator on the OxfordWords blog, believe it or not.

4.) The Thomas family made their annual Christmas Show outing… in a Dickensian Great British Bake Off.

5.) Maggie Smith Festival at the BFI. I’m hopefully going to something in the new year… maybe The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, which means I need to get busy and read the book first.

6.) And I’ve hit my 2000th post! In fact, I think this is the 2004th. Gracious!

The Midnight Fox by Betsy Byars

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A little while ago I got a very nice email from someone called Vicki, saying how much she enjoyed reading Stuck-in-a-Book, and asking if she could send me one of the books she loved as a sort of thank you. Well, I was very touched, and – not one to turn down a book recommendation or, indeed, a book – said yespleasethankyouverymuch. And shortly afterwards Betsy Byars’ The Midnight Fox (1968) arrived.

I hadn’t heard of it, but I think The Midnight Fox is well known in some circles. Yet again, having only read Enid Blyton for years on end means that I don’t know that much about other children’s classics. But now I have read, and very much enjoyed, this sweet and touching tale of a holiday on a farm.

The premise has a surprising number of similarities with Philippa Pearce’s much-loved children’s book Tom’s Midnight Garden, published ten years earlier. In both, a boy named Tom must reluctantly go and stay with his aunt and uncle, and greatly misses a boy called Peter. In both, a certain midnight aberration becomes an obsession, and changes the stay into a much happier event; Peter is written to from a distance, and becomes an accomplice in the discovery. I doubt that Byars plagiarised the book, but the similarities amused me.

The story is simple – Tom is beguiled by the beauty of this unusual fox, who is entirely black. He starts to look out for her, and becomes increasingly keen to observe her playing with her small fox cub; he is almost bewitched by this elegant, elemental life lived near to him – and must find a way to stop his hunting uncle from trapping the fox.

What makes it such a special little book? The style, I think. It’s not told with the gung-ho naivety of some children’s books, but treats Tom’s anxieties and concerns seriously – not least because we read it in the first person. Here is the opening…

Sometimes at night when the rain is beating against the windows of my room, I think about that summer on the farm. It has been five years, but when I close my eyes I am once again by the creek watching the black fox come leaping over the green. green grass. She is as light and free as the wind, exactly as she was the first time I saw her.

Or sometimes it is that last terrible night, and I am standing beneath the oak tree with the rain beating against me. The lightning flashes, the world is turned white for a moment, and I see everything as it was – the broken lock, the empty cage, the small tracks disappearing into the rain. Then it seems to me that I can hear, as plainly as I heard it that August night, above the rain, beyond the years, the high, clear bark of the midnight fox.
Thanks again, Vicki, for sending me this book; it was so generous and kind of you. I really enjoyed reading it – and I especially think this would be good to read aloud to a child, if any parents are on the look-out for something!

A ghost story for Christmas…

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….but perhaps the least scary ghost story you will ever read! It’s R.A. Dick’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947) which I read for Shiny New Books. Here’s the beginning of my review…

Nobody loves a good reprint better than I do, and so I was quite excited to see a series from Vintage called ‘Vintage Movie Classics’, wherein they republish the books that were adapted into great films. (This series may only be available in the US; I have to confess that my conversations with Vintage did not entirely illuminate the matter.) I expected to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Godfather, and those sorts of texts – it was a surprise to see entirely books and films I’d never heard of (Back Street, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Cimarron etc.) which doubtless says more about my filmic knowledge than anything else. It was a lovely surprise, though – what better than reprints that will be unknown gems?
The one title I had come across before was R.A. Dick’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir, as I had had my eye on it during doctoral research – and found it too difficult to track down. So I was certainly grateful that a new copy was forthcoming – and The Ghost and Mrs Muir was every bit as enjoyable, silly, and entertaining as I’d have hoped.

A Day in Summer by J.L. Carr

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Quite a few of us in the blogosphere are fans of J.L. Carr’s 1980 novel A Month in the Country – that gentle tale of a man who goes to help restore a rural mural. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist that rhyme.) But I don’t remember seeing reviews of any of his other novels – and had thought he might be rather a one-trick pony.

So, I was glad when my book group opted to read A Day in Summer (1963), Carr’s first novel – and evidence that he was fond of A [Time] in the [Situation] titles early on. But, except for similar titles, these novels have very little in common – except, that is, for quality. Both are very good.

A Day in Summer sounds a very halcyon title, but this is belied by the opening few pages. Peplow is on a train, coming into Great Minden. He has an imaginary conversation with his Manager; one of several in square brackets throughout the novel, from different characters’ perspectives, that give a very open access to their imaginations and projections:

[“I wonder if you’d mind very much if I take Friday off?””I suppose not. Is someone ill? Is it urgent?”No – well, it is and it isn’t. As a matter of fact I have to go off to a place in the country and shoot a man. Yes, that’s right, a man. They call it Great Minden. Perhaps you know it?””Really! Great Minden! I had an aunt living near there. If you wouldn’t consider it an impertinence, may I ask who – whom?””It’s the man who ran down my boy last summer. He’s with a fairground outfit, and on Friday he’ll be at the Fair there I understand. So it would be very convenient.””Naturally! Shall we see you again on Saturday? Monday?””Well, no. I’ve more or less decided it would be better for me to finish myself off too. In comfort, on the way back, all being well. It would by-pass the embarrassing formalities that usually follow. I’m sure you understand.”]
This isn’t precisely the tone that the rest of the novel takes – although it would be rather fascinating to read a whole narrative in this style. He isn’t really flippant about his action, and it is the thread that pulls the novel together, but Peplow isn’t really the leading character of A Day in Summer. And that is because, more than any other novel I can remember, this is an ensemble piece. Once Peplow arrives in Great Minden, the narrative flits from character to character, weaving their stories together so that the baton naturally passes from person to person.

There is a lascivious young schoolteacher who is having an affair with the vicar’s wife; the teacher is rightly terrified of the elderly spinster who runs the school with an iron fist. The vicar is desperate to hold his marriage together, but his wife despises him. There is a poor family with too many children, also with marital troubles; there is a dying man whose young son wonders why his mother left the family years ago. And, taking the cover on my book, is the man in a wheelchair, invalided by war, who happens to have been in action with Peplow.

There are, you see, too many characters to describe all that goes on; the plot is planned perfectly, and yet it feels less like a plot and more like observing villagers living their lives. Their unhappy lives, it should be said; misery is widespread, and marriages seem incapable of being content. Indeed, Peplow’s paternal grief seems perhaps less vivid than the teacher Croser’s sickness of being in a frustrating job, of the vicar’s pain.

Throughout, Carr’s tone is quite darkly witty, and I really loved it. Fans of A Month in the Country may find little to recognise, but this is by no means a weak first effort at novel-writing. Carr has a very impressive confidence even at this early stage, and handles a difficult tone and potentially unwieldy plot extremely well. Although A Month in the Country is a better book to curl up with for comfort, this is a stark, moving, and (yet) very amusing novel that is arguably equally good, in a very different way.

Land’s End – Michael Cunningham

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While I was cat-sitting for a friend recently, I read (or finished) five books in quick succession, and it wasn’t until I got there that I realised that three of them were books I got when I was in Washington DC last October. I mean, I bought so many books there that I was almost inevitably going to find them about my person somewhere (I jest…). I wonder if it’s worth keeping track of how longer I have books on my shelves before I read them, and see if 15 months is the optimum time…

Anyway, I bought Land’s End (2002) because I’ve been wanting to read more Michael Cunningham ever since I loved The Hours back in 2003 or thereabouts. I’ve only got as far as watching Evening, the adaptation of Susan Minot’s novel for which Cunningham wrote (or, rather, rewrote) the screenplay. I have to confess that I was also sold on the Cunningham because of this:

Thomas/My Porch informed me that signed Cunninghams are ten a penny Stateside (they have pennies in the US, right? Whilst we’re on that, how confusing is the tax thing there? You just have no idea how much you’ll have to pay when you get to the till). But this is something fun and rather special. And I had my fingers crossed that the book would also be fun and special…

It’s a non-fiction book about Provincetown, Massachusetts – the very tip of Cape Cod. My horrendously inadequate geographical knowledge was, for once, approaching adequate – as I had heard of Provincetown, and knew of its peninsular qualities and unusual character. For why, you ask? A couple of my favourite vloggers (Grace Helbig and Mamrie Hart) went there during their HeyUSA tour, as you can see here. From which I learned that Provincetown is full of creative people and drag queens (with, presumably, some overlap).

Cunningham’s view of Provincetown is not as an insider or an outsider. He definitely defines himself in opposition to the tourists, who make the streets jam-packed during the summer months, so that getting groceries is almost impossible. But he does not live there all the year round, despite owning a house there; he prefers the anonymity of New York. Because Provincetown is apparently the gossip capital of the East, and everybody knows everybody. The year-round population (Wikipedia tells me) is around 3,000; this goes up to twenty times that number in summer.

I have trouble with travel literature. Visual descriptions don’t work for me, and writers of travel lit often want to give purple depictions of flora and fauna. But a genre I do love is memoir, and Cunningham treads the line between the two – falling, thankfully, more heavily into memoir. Or, rather, he describes Provincetown through a personal lens, rather than the anthropologist’s. If he is neither insider nor outsider to the town, then he is closer to the former than the latter.

The beautiful setting I read it in.

There is plenty for the anthropologist in Provincetown, though. Its character differs strongly from the surrounding area; it is (Cunningham says) the refuge of the outsider and eccentric. Some of those outsiders (and I now realise I’ve overused that word) are from the LGBT community, and – um – anything apparently goes in Provincetown. Cunningham very casually describes the beaches where you’ll find men having sex in the undergrowth, and those where you won’t. He mentions (and repeatedly re-mentions) this with such calm that it seems like a normal thing, to find people having sex when you pop down to build a sandcastle. Hmm…

But once we’ve left all that behind, I felt more at home in Provincetown – with its focus on art, friendliness, community, and (yes, I confess) gossip. Cunningham does a great job of explaining why he finds the town so special, more from the warm tone he uses than the facts he states. He incorporates the history of the town – did you know that the Pilgrim Fathers landed there first, before heading off to Plymouth Rock? – and its primary exports, but it is the affection with which he writes that really sells Provincetown.

I say ‘sells’; I still don’t think I’d go out of my to visit, still less live there, but anybody writing with wisdom and passion about their favourite place, and the experiences they have lived there, will win me over. From meeting his partner (and not forgetting his dramatic ex-partner) to the 2am gatherings outside a place that sells middle-of-the-night pizza, Land’s End is a curiously charming and almost old-fashioned depiction of a not-at-all old-fashioned place. Here is an excerpt to finish with, and to give you a taste of how he combines the personal and the observational:

If you do walk to Long Point, you will find yourself on a spit of sand about three hundred yards wide, with bay beach on one side, ocean beach on the other, and a swatch of dune grass running down the middle. It sports, like an austere ornament, a lighthouse and a long-empty shed once used to store oil for the light. You will be almost alone there, through the water around you will be thoroughly populated by boats. It is a favorite nesting ground for terns and gulls. When I went out there years ago with Christy, the man with whom I lived then, he strode into the dune grass and stirred up the birds. If I tell you that he stood exultantly among hundreds of shrieking white birds that circled and swooped furiously around him, looking just like a figure out of Dante, grinning majestically, while I stood by and worried about what it was doing to the birds, you may know everything you need to know about why we were together and why we had to part.
What a beautiful image, and moving reflection.

Anybody read this? Or been to Provincetown??

Stuck-in-a-Book’s 2014 in first lines

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This lovely annual meme is all over the place again, and I can’t resist. Essentially, it means copying the first line from the first post of each month, as a nice (if perhaps aleatory) overview of the year… Go ahead; do it yourself! (And click on the links to go to the original posts.)

January
Happy new year! For those not in the know – my plan in 2014 is to read a book for every year from 1914-2013, review them, and put the links on this page.

February
This has been my jam this week:

March
Do you ever just go and look along your bookshelves, reminding yourself of the exciting and interesting books you’ve been meaning to read?

April
Thanks for all your lovely messages yesterday – it now feels mean to make you wait a week before unveiling the Shiny New Books magazine properly, but if you follow us on Twitter we’re giving a few teasers from reviews and features.

May
Another month, another cold… and I still haven’t written properly about the book that got me through the last cold.

June
One of the types of books I most love are those incidental, silly-humour books from between the world wars.

July
Six months in, let’s assess where I am with A Century of Books.

August
We’re changing contracts with our internet provider, and so won’t have internet for a week or so… which means I’m going on an enforced blogging break!

September
Another book review to point you to in Shiny New Books! This one is by an author I’d love to know more about – Sybille Bedford.

October
And now I’m going to do this records, since I obviously couldn’t resist!

November
As I’m sure you all know, November is NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month.

December
A quick post to announce that we’ve uploaded the Shiny New Books Christmas update – over 30 new reviews and features!