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Come and hear me talk in the Lake District!

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Aeons ago I agreed to give a talk – entitled Ladies, Gentlemen and Foxes: The Fantasy Fringe of the Bloomsbury Group – in the Lake District, and the time is rolling around when it will actually be happening.  Indeed, it is Saturday 23rd November at 3pm, and I would love any Cumbrian blog readers to come along and say hello.  If anybody in the area can make it, info and booking is here.  You’ll learn all about Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox and more!

As usual when I sign up for these things, I am getting a bit nervous and terrified lest nobody turns up, so if I know at least one of you is attending, it will ease my nerves a lot…

Tell your friends! ;)

Cullum – E. Arnot Robertson

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I’ve been meaning to read something by E. Arnot Robertson for years, and as part of Reading Presently I picked up Cullum (1928), which my lovely friend Clare gave to me, it being one of her favourite books.  Being a tale of a young woman’s first doomed love affair (we are told in the first line that it is doomed) and featuring my bête noire, fox-hunting, I was a little nervous… but needn’t have been.  Cullum is really good – moving, engaging, and – most importantly – witty.  A novel about love and hunting without humour would have been unbearable.

The girl in question – possibly the one looking poignantly to her left on the cover of my Virago Modern Classic – is 19 year old Esther Sieveking, half-English, half-French, and entirely ready for a sexual awakening which will take her beyond her circle in Surrey.

Which of us could fail to empathise with this statement – one which probably brought most of us to the blogosphere in the first place?

I was desperately eager to find a companion who could enter into the intangible world of books and ideas, where I spent half my time.
Esther thinks she might have found a way out when she learns that a poet, one Mrs. Cole, is living nearby… My mean side emerges in my love of fictive character assassinations, particularly those given in measured, well-paced prose.  If it helps, I share four out of five of Mrs. Cole’s listed traits:

I learnt in ten minutes that she was a vegetarian, a teetotaller, a non-smoker and an anti-vivisectionist, and that she had innumerable other fads.  She was of the type that should have had many children, instead of only one son and many affectations.
She is a poet.  Nobody likes mocking writers like writers, and here is a demolition of Mrs. Cole’s poetry:

I was shown a collection of worn cuttings that had become illegible at the folds through constant handling. They contained sad little pieces of verse which always referred vaguely to ‘you’ in the last line.  ‘You’ had either jilted her of passed away; it was impossible to tell which, but they were all melancholy and had the most comprehensive titles; ‘Life,’ dealt with in eight of ten lines; ‘Love,’ inaptly, being a little longer.
Mrs. Cole isn’t herself a very important character, but she does provide the means by which Esther meets Cullum Hayes.  I don’t seem to have bookmarked any paragraphs which describe him, but essentially he is perfect for Esther.  Handsome, amusing, and persistent, he speaks romantically when needed and flippantly when needed.  Considering the other potential suitors in her life have, to this point, been of the damp, somewhat pathetic variety, the arrival of Cullum is easily enough to sweep her off her feet, and (seemingly) she him his.  (That ending of that sentence almost makes sense, and was too fun to write to ignore.) (So was the ending of that one.)  And, boy, does it get passionate – particularly for 1928.

Did I want him!  Many times, when I was with him and when I was alone, at nights, I had longed for him, almost faint for a second with the desire for his kisses, which I could only imagine.  Love, feeding on itself, had grown greatly.  Cullum obsessed me; all of me, mind and body.
So why did this not aggravate me, as pontifications on love are apt to do?  It was the humour which surrounded them.  Robertson is very amusing on the travails of working for a rubbish women’s magazine if one has any literary pretensions, and also quite biting of the huntin’ fraternity (Esther does hunt, but hates the idea of it at the same time.)  Here’s a sample which made me smile…

I saw a great deal of him.  He formed a habit of dropping in two or three evenings a week at my boarding-house.  Sometimes we talked, or if I had brought back some work to finish from the office, he read or smoked in the arm-chair in my bedsitting-room, to the thrilled horror of several elderly boarders of both sexes, who were convinced that he was my lover, since he had been allowed into a room which undeniably held my bed, even though it might be disguised as a sofa during the day.  That was conclusive.  The old ladies believed the worst because they secretly hoped it was true; the dear old gentleman because, in the virile period of his youth, it would have been so.
And, of course, Cullum turns out to be a bad’un – a liar and delusional fraud, and repeat offender at that.  I don’t know why Robertson chose to reveal that in the opening line – perhaps to avoid the trap of the novel being structured like a romantic penny dreadful? – but it gives Cullum a structure oddly akin to The End of the Affair – except we see the beginning, middle, and end, all the while knowing how it will end.

Having compared Cullum to The End of the Affair, I should point out the difference that tone makes.  The structure and the emotions may have significant overlap, but Cullum – for all its passion and anguish – still felt like a fun, light book with dark moments.  The End of the Affair, on the other hand – even with the comic detective – was a dark book with light moments.  And here ends a spontaneous comparison of two books I doubt anybody has compared before!

Thanks, Clare, for another gem.  I really should immediately read all the books you give me, shouldn’t I?

The End of the Affair – #GreeneForGran

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Remember in the dim and distant past when Simon S organised a #GreeneForGran reading week, in commemoration of Granny Savidge who prized Graham Greene so highly?  It was keenly taken up by bloggers, tweeters, Facebookers etc., and I was one of the number who joined in, picking up The End of the Affair (1951).  And then my blog break happened, and now it’s months late… oops.  But I thought the novel was amazing, so I’m going to write about it now.

And, first, can we talk about how great this Penguin cover is?  It’s a 1962 edition, and it is those 1960s Penguin covers, with layering and elements of the surreal, that I love the most.

The End of the Affair is the third Greene novel I’ve read – you can read my review of Travels With My Aunt, should you so wish, but apparently I never got around to writing about Brighton Rock.  In broad brushstrokes, they were funny and violent respectively.  I loved the former, and didn’t enjoy the latter.  Well, The End of the Affair is neither funny nor violent, but I am ready to state (even without having read almost everything Greene wrote) that it is his masterpiece.  I don’t see how he could have done better – at least not in the line which the novel takes, which is melancholia. Except it’s altogether too British for that word, which conjures up images of dreary French novels like Sagan’s Sunlight on Cold Water; despondence is perhaps a better description.

The novel concerns, as you might have guessed, a love affair.  Maurice Bendrix is the narrator, and his affair was with the wife of a friend, Sarah Miles (based, apparently, on the woman Greene himself had an affair with.)  The title suggests that the novel documents the end of this affair, but, as Bendrix says towards the end:

If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I’m beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end.
I usually hate it when novels include the ‘If I were writing a novel’ gimmick, but I’ll forgive Greene this instance because it raises a useful point – The End of the Affair does not document the end of an affair, but rather the aftermath of an affair – and, in flashbacks, the affair itself.  There is no clean break; there is uncertainty and longing and Sarah continues to dominate Maurice’s mind throughout.  Sarah’s husband Henry asks Maurice whether he thinks Sarah is having an affair (at this point Maurice’s affair is over); in response, Maurice hires a private detective to follow her, and report back.  He is driven, of course, by possessive jealousy – but there is little rage and bluster in him; he is no Othello.  Instead, he is simply unhappy.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.  In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other.  But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.
Books about lovers usually bore me to tears, as do books about unhappiness, perhaps because both have been written about so very often that it is difficult to write anything original, but Greene’s prose is quite astoundingly good.  Par example…

She had often disconcerted me by the truth.  In the days when we were in love, I would try to get her to say more than the truth – that our affair would never end, that one day we should marry.  I wouldn’t have believed her, but I would have liked to hear the words on her tongue, perhaps only to give me the satisfaction of rejecting them myself.  But she never played that game of make-believe, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, she would shatter my reserve with a statement of such sweetness and amplitude… I remember once when I was miserable at her calm assumption that one day our relations would be over, hearing with incredulous happiness, “I have never, never loved a man as I love you, and I never shall again.”  Well, she hadn’t known it, I thought, but she too played the same game of make-believe.
Every page of The End of the Affair was written exquisitely, which meant it couldn’t be a quick read – and, similarly, its depiction of despondence was too well done to make for easy reading.  Somehow unhappiness is woven into every word, and the tone is heavy-laden but realistic.  No histrionics or wailing, simply stating, recording, responding.

And yet, in the midst of this, is a fantastic comic character – in the shape of the hired private detective, Alfred Parkis.  The End of the Affair contains one of the most wonderful detectives I’ve encountered in fiction, and had Greene chosen to take that route, I could envisage a fantastic series of novels featuring Parkis (note to self: craft a spin-off series).  He is delightfully dim, and a curious mixture of eager, officious, and melancholic.  It is a dark comedy, because he is continually afraid of looking foolish in front of ‘his boy’, who trails around silently after him at all times – and invariably he does look foolish.  But he is also a very sympathetic character, and I would have loved more of him in the novel.

I am aware that I am one of the last to the party on this one, and that I’m hardly uncovering a forgotten classic, but I was bowled over by how tautly good The End of the Affair was.  The blurb to my copy says that it is ‘distinct from any other major novel by Graham Greene’, which is a curious way of phrasing things and gives me hope that perhaps some of his minor novels (whichever they might be) run along similar lines?  I’ll certainly try more Greene, waiting to see what else he can do – and will metaphorically raise a glass, or literally raise a book, to Granny Savidge when I do so.

Others who got Stuck into it:


“[It] is a dark, intense little gem of a novel, as wintry and stark as the post-war January landscape in which it takes place” – Victoria, Tales From the Reading Room


“This is an incredibly moving story that brims with pathos and anger throughout.” – Kim, Reading Matters


“Greene is often bleak but not often this bleak.” – Catherine, Juxtabook

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Gosh, it’s been a while since I did one of these, so I have quite a few things to catch you up on!  Here are just ten of them…

1.) Angela Young’s brilliant novel Speaking of Love is now available as an e-book for Kindle (etc.? I don’t know how these things work.)  You can see/buy it here, and it’s only £1.99, which is crazy cheap for such a good book.  Go give it a try!

2.) National flags created by the foods the countries are associated with!

3.) Daunt Books recently sent me a beautiful new edition of Virginia Woolf’s The London Scene.  I reviewed this collection of stories back in 2007, and highly recommend this really lovely edition – maybe as a Christmas present?

4.) Jura Whisky are running some flash fiction competitions #WinningWords – more info here.

5.)  If you haven’t see Blue Jasmine and get the chance, do.  It’s the best film I’ve seen this year, and Cate Blanchett is astonishingly good.

6.) Jennifer Walker has written a biography of bloggers’-favourite Elizabeth von Arnim (called Elizabeth of the German Garden: A Literary Journey) – I’ve not started it yet, but I’m excited about reading it.

7.) An interesting book bloggers’ survey (to which I contributed) has results here (four results posts linked from that link).  I was mostly surprised by what a high percentage of bloggers are paid to write reviews for publications or other sites.

8.) I loved Susan Sellers’ Vanessa and Virginia (review here) and thought that you might like to know that she has a new book out – Given The Choice – published by Cillian Press.

9.) I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t heard of Elie Wiesel, whom the good people of Souvenir Press assure me is one of the best-known European writers, but I shall find out more with The Testament (trans. Marion Wiesel) which they’ve sent me.

10.) Someone sent me Amazon.com’s 100 Best Books of 2013.  I have heard of 4 of them, and read none.  I do quite want to read three of those four – the Tartt, Rowling, and Humans of New York.

The Perfect Hostess (short fiction)

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A little while ago I put some short fiction up here – Oranges – and people said nice things, so I thought I’d do it again!  It’s a bit different this time… Picture again irrelevant; I just don’t like putting up posts without pictures…

“Oh, did you get a moment’s sleep?”

I answered that I had slept perfectly well, thank you.

“Oh, but you look shattered.  I’d be surprised if you did as much as close your eyes.  The spare bedroom is terribly uncomfortable, I’m afraid – especially for a man, I always think.”

I didn’t try to work out her reasoning; instead, I said again that my night’s sleep had been all I could have wished, and we spent another moment or two politely disagreeing with each other on the matter.  She obviously believed herself to be the perfect hostess, and would have been shocked to find that anybody thought anything else.

“Here’s a nice cup of coffee, that will help.  Unless you’d prefer tea?”

As she was holding the coffee towards me, I could hardly do anything other than take it and drink, but luckily it was exactly what I wanted.  Although the bed had been comfortable (“like sleeping on broken glass, I know“) and the room an entirely ordinary temperature (“it blows gales through that room, you don’t have to tell me – or otherwise it’s a perfect oven“) I hadn’t slept quite as well as I made out.

“And what would you like breakfast?  There’s only one egg, but I could pop out and get some more?  Nothing would be easier.”

She started towards to the door, and I quickly intervened.  Of course I was quite happy without eggs.  I didn’t normally have anything except coffee for breakfast as it was.

“Nonsense!  I don’t want people saying that I’ve neglected you.”

I was a bit startled.  Why would anybody say that?  Who would say that?  I couldn’t imagine anybody considering me to be the victim of neglect, especially when I’d had to throw away four pairs of trousers while packing yesterday, as they’d all been noticeably too tight.

“Just a spot of toast, then.  You remember where the plates are, of course?”

Of course, I did.  I hoped fervently that she’d sit down, or – better yet – leave the room completely, and let me eat my undesired toast alone. But she simply stood in the middle of the room, perhaps uncertain how to act, despite the stream of words.  And yet, when she spoke, it was with the confidence of an actress who has thoroughly memorised her part.

“I’m going to get everything sorted today.  Well, as best as I can.  (I’m afraid the jam isn’t homemade, but I believe it isn’t actually inedible.  But, please, do say if it is.)  If I have any questions, would it be too much of an inconvenience to phone you?”

I wished that she would say a sentence precisely the way she thought it, without any of the trappings of etiquette and show.  Everything would be so much simpler.  I chewed the toast and jam (certainly edible – pleasant, even) and said as little as I could without seeming terse.  When she was quiet for a few moments, I looked up; she was staring at my hand.  After a second, she recovered.

“Look!  It’s quarter past eight.  You have to leave at quarter past eight, don’t you?”  She picked up my plate and took it towards the sink, but stopped after a step.  “Unless you’d like anything else – ?”

No, no, I did indeed have to go to work now.  The office had never seemed so inviting.  As I did up my shoelaces and put on my coat, she fussed around me, asking whether I’d like an apple, or to borrow an umbrella, and (not, apparently, one to leave a point unlaboured) apologised again for the bed in the spare room.  Her voice followed me down the short path to the pavement.  “And – if I may – I’ll speak to you soon.  I do so hope it doesn’t rain today.”

I got into my car feeling more or less how Dorothy must have felt upon landing in Oz.

To think – that, until yesterday, this woman had been my wife.

Happy birthday me!

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This is the real-life-birthday, rather than the blog birthday – and although today will be quite quiet, I spent the past couple of days in Bristol seeing Colin (cos it’s his birthday too!) and my ex-housemate and joint-bestie Mel.  And because everyone should have a birthday cake at least near their birthday, I took one to Colin.  It looked a little the worse for wear after a train journey and wandering around Bristol for ages, but this is what it looked like initially…

Despite having made hundreds of cakes, I’ve never really decorated one.  This does look like a child made it, but I was pretty pleased for a first attempt with fondant icing etc.!

Floater – Calvin Trillin

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One of the books I bought when I was in Washington DC, and read immediately within one day, was the unfortunately-named Floater (1980) by Calvin Trillin.  I didn’t realise when I picked it up, but it’s about journalists living in Washington DC – extremely apt, since I was staying with journalists living in Washington DC.

So, what is a floater, I hear you ask?  The floater in question is Fred Becker, and the title means that he has no permanent position in the office of the national newsmagazine for which he works, but moves from section to section, filling in for holiday, illness, or whatever.  Becker steadfastly resists any attempts to tie him down to a single section, preferring the peripatetic life, even if it leaves him jack of all trades and master of none…

As a back-of-the-book floater, he had accumulated a store of knowledge on all sorts of subjects – a knowledge of millenarian sects from his bondage in Religion, familiarity with the workings of hot-air balloons from a summer week in Sports, more than he wanted to know about New Math from a period spent in Education when Milt Silvers went to the hospital with an alligator bite.  One of the problems with a floater’s knowledge, though, was its spottiness.  He knew a lot about millenarian sects, but he had no idea what, say, Methodists believe.  From several weeks in the Business section at one time or another, he happened to have learned a lot about Asian currency manipulation and the speculative market in bull semen, but he wouldn’t have had the first notion about how to go about obtaining a mortgage.  He knew practically nothing about French impressionism, but he could have delivered an after-dinner speech on the work of one abstract expressionist who happened to die when the regular Art writer was on vacation.
Lovely!  Trillin has a way with words which I love, never quite tipping over into ba-dum-crash joke territory, but with a light absurdity which is just the sort of thing I love.  Take, for example, the incident where Becker tries to get off the Religion page by writing ‘allegedly’ after everything mentioned – ‘the alleged birth of Christ’, for instance.  And then there is the Lifestyles piece on ‘2/3 stockings’.  Becker can find nobody who has a clue what this means, but plenty of people willing to pretend.  Floater reminded me a lot of Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, which is no bad thing, but without nearly Waugh’s level of meanness.  Like Tepper Isn’t Going Out, this novel (which was Trillin’s first) is often about the stupidity and irrationality of the workplace, but never with the menace of Magnus Mills or the dark claustrophobia of Kafka – rather, again like Tepper, there is an amiability about it all.

That, I think, is the novel’s main achievement: the amiability of Becker.  There is a managing editor who isn’t pleasant, and an officious staff member desperate to be offended by everything that is said, but ultimately everybody is a little bit selfish but essentially amiable.  I’m using that word again, because it is the one which fits best – the characters are not good, except in the way that a sort of weary inertia prevents anybody doing anything outright bad.  But to make a character as unwittingly charming as Becker is an impressive feat, one replicated two decades later in Tepper.  One of my favourite characters – or, rather, my favourite lampoon – is Silvers.  He is that self-conscious eccentric we all know (particularly in Oxford); the sort of person who describes themselves as ‘a bit mad’, and makes sure they are surrounded by props to back it up.

“The deal on the London taxi is closed,” Silvers said.  “Of course, you should have heard my insurance man’s voice when I called to switch the insurance over from the John Deere tractor.  He thinks I’m a little unusual.”

Becker had never figured out how to reply to Silvers in a way that did not provoke more stories.  Usually, he just stood there nodding dumbly while using the Thai’s concentration methods or glancing around for escape routes.

“One of the great advantages of a London taxi, of course, is that if you happen to have a unicycle, which I just happen to have, the unicycle will fit snugly in the luggage area right next to the driver.  Of course, when your average New York traffic cop sees a London taxi drive by with a unicycle right…”

Becker briefly considered pretending to have a heart attack.
There is a narrative threaded through it all, concerning rumours about the President’s wife, with all manner of intrigue, plot, and counter-plot, but (although rather satisfying when it all comes together) it is largely incidental to Floater, which is primarily successful because of the creation of Becker and the tone Trillin achieves.

I’ve only found one other blog review – Teresa’s – and she wasn’t a huge fan, so there’s fair warning.  I found it a quick, wryly amusing, delight; a send-up of an environment for which Trillin obviously feels a great deal of affection.

My Life in Books: Redux

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Thanks everyone, this has been a really fun week!  I hope you’ve enjoyed yourselves, and thanks again to the fourteen wonderful bloggers who agreed to participate in series four.  There will be another series at some point next year – I already have some people in mind, but I’ll also be asking for suggestions in a few months’ time.

If you’re relatively new to Stuck-in-a-Book, or came for the first time this week, (welcome and) you might have missed some of the previous series – and I’m pretty sure you’ll want to catch up on the other 44 bloggers and blog-readers who have participated before.  Yes, 58 people have taken part in My Life in Books since it began here!  How lovely.  The full list is below…

Series One

Karen and Susan’s Life in Books
Lyn and Our Vicar’s Wife/Anne’s Life in Books
Lisa and Victoria’s Life in Books
Darlene and Our Vicar/Peter’s Life in Books
Annabel  and Thomas’s Life in Books
David and Elaine’s Life in Books
Harriet and Nancy’s  Life in Books

Series Two

Rachel and Teresa’s Life in Books
Claire and Colin’s Life in Books
Hayley and Karyn’s Life in Books
Jenny and Kim’s Life in Books
Danielle and Sakura’s Life in Books
Claire B and Nymeth/Ana’s Life in Books
Gav and Polly’s Life in Books
Eva and Simon S’s Life in Books

Series Three

Jackie and John’s Life in Books
Iris and Verity’s Life in Books
Tanya and Margaret’s Life in Books
Stu and Florence’s Life in Books
Lisa and Jane’s Life in Books
Laura and Jodie’s Life in Books
Frances and David’s Life in Books

Series Four

Pam and Peter’s Life in Books
Barbara and Lisa’s Life in Books
Vicki and Sasha’s Life in Books
Alison and Mystica’s Life in Books
My and Christine’s Life in Books
Alex and Liz’s Life in Books
Erica and Karen’s Life in Books

Series Five

Jenny and Eric’s Life in Books
Scott and Catherine’s Life in Books
Aarti and JoAnn’s Life in Books 
Belle and Tony’s Life in Books
Nicola and Barb’s Life in Books
Scott and Anbolyn’s Life in Books

My Life in Books: Series Four: Day Seven

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Erica, as well as running the blog Reading 1900-1945, has written a book about Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth von Arnim and is my frequent conference buddy!

Karen blogs at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, and it was as ‘Kaggsy’ that I first met her (I believe) in a LibraryThing group which celebrates Virago Modern Classics.

Qu. 1.) Did you grow up in a book-loving household, and did your parents read to you? Pick a favourite book from your childhood, and tell me about it.

Erica: I did grow up in a book-loving household, and I think my parents must have read to me, but I don’t remember it! I think I must have learned to read at quite a young age; I can remember early on at primary school there being a book sale and being very excited about it. I chose a bumper Mr Man book that I think I still have somewhere with my name in the front and various scrawls.

I remember being a wide-ranging and omnivorous reader, and taking pride and comfort in my own bookcase filled with books in my bedroom, and finding various small spaces to become book-reading dens. I remember that I read Alice Adventures in Wonderland at the age of seven and became deeply attached to it despite not understanding most of it! What were these ‘conversations’ that Alice couldn’t find in her sister’s book? Not a clue. But, importantly, this didn’t seem to matter at all. So much of the pleasure of Alice is in the sounds of the words, and I think those that I didn’t understand were still enjoyable (and many of them are, of course, made up by Carroll). I find the conventional wisdom that children’s books must not contain vocabulary considered to be beyond the level of the readership rather frustrating. How else do you learn new words?

Through the Looking-Glass always had a different feeling to me than Alice; somehow it was more resonant, and more disturbing. I imagined myself going through the mist of the looking-glass into that world which seemed rather nightmarish to me.

Karen: Yes I did – both parents were always readers: my dad liked factual books (Chariots of the Gods and the like when I was growing up) plus thrillers and sci fi, whereas my mum reads more traditional ‘women’s books’ (Santa Montefiore being her current favourite). They always read to me from an early age – in fact, my parents tell me that they thought I had learned to read particularly early as a young child, until they realised that I had simply memorised the stories and was reciting them back to people and pretending to read!

It’s hard to pick out just one book that I loved from my childhood as I tended to read in series – Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, ‘Mystery‘ and Five Find-Outers were particular favourites, and once I started to get pocket money, it would go on a new Enid every week. I was also keen on the Narnia books though I came to them a little later. Trying to pick out one, I keep oddly enough coming back to a book I kept getting out of our local library (and I can still visualise the inside of the building where I would get it checked out) – Dr. Seuss’s I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. It was the strange, surreal, alien imagery that appealed to me, so unlike my real life – I guess books have always been something of an escape for me!

Qu. 2.) What was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books that you really enjoyed? What was going on in your life at this point?

Erica: I continued to read books I didn’t understand – I remember my Mum not having any children’s books in the house when I was visiting one weekend (complicated family) and giving me Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. At the age of 10 or so I really couldn’t see what was funny about it! (But I soldiered on, as you do, and read all the works of Austen without understanding much by the age of 14.)

One of the first adult books I really enjoyed was Wuthering Heights, an A level set text. But unfortunately, and surprisingly given my current profession, I hated being made to analyse it – or ‘pick it apart’ as I considered it then. I wanted to be transported, to enjoy that narrative hypnosis which I thought was the point of novels. In retrospect this may be related to the fact my life was difficult at this point – more family breakdown – but I also suspect that 16 year old girls are suckers for a doomed love story and do not wish to made to relinquish that surrendered reading!

I did not do an English degree because I thought it would ruin reading for me!

Karen: Again, this is really hard to pick out just one, but I guess I would plump for The Hobbit. Some relatives heard that I loved the Narnia books (I would probably have been about 11 or so) and sent a copy of The Hobbit which both me and my dad devoured, and then followed up by raiding the library for the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy and reading the lot. After that I really never looked back – I borrowed my mum’s romances (Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart etc al) and the Agatha Christies that were lying around the house, plus other crime authors like Ed McBain, and then followed this up by discovering Solzhenitsyn and the Russians when we studied the Russian Revolution at school. I was a fairly troubled teenager, as my favourite grandmother died when I was 11 and it took me a long time to deal with it – like I said, books were an escape, my coping mechanism.

Qu. 3.) Pick a favourite book that you read in your 20s or early 30s – especially if it’s one which helped set you off in a certain direction in life.

Erica: Of all the books I read in my 20s, there is a clear winner for the one that changed my life. My post-degree working life was all about books, at different stages in their production. First I worked at Waterstone’s, then in marketing at a publisher, then in editorial. My work was pretty routine and unchallenging, and I was wondering what to do next when I saw an advert for a part-time MA called ‘Women, Gender and Writing’ at Roehampton University. I absolutely loved my MA. It was truly like a door opening. It showed me a way of thinking about books that stimulated and inspired me, and I felt that I had finally found my bookish world. After those years of resisting analysis I now loved thinking in a critical, informed way.

The book that changed my life was A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor (1951). We had a seminar with the brilliant Nicola Humble who explained that this novel, and others like it were regarded as ‘middlebrow’ and as light, comforting reads for women, bless their feather-brained heads.

I couldn’t believe it. The novel I had read was funny, yes, but also incisive, acute and downright cruel in its dissection of the disappointments of life. A Game of Hide and Seek tells the story of Harriet and Vesey. As the novel begins they are eighteen and in love. At the end of the summer they will part, Harriet will marry someone else, and they will not enter each other’s lives again for another twenty years. Harriet and Vesey never protest and declare their love, yet it is omnipresent, and entirely credible. I thought it was one of the best novels I had ever read, and so well-written it almost hurt.

It formed part of my MA dissertation, which I called ‘The Reassurance of Cruelty’ – for the only reassurance I could see in it was that Taylor was saying yes, domestic life is as difficult and cruel as you thought. A reality is reflected back: yes, life is like that. A Game of Hide and Seek, my sense of outrage that it wasn’t recognised for the exceptional novel I considered it, and trying to understand why that was, started me on the road to an academic career.

Karen: Well, my early 20s were a pivotal time with my reading – this was when I discovered so many of the writers whose work I still love and return to. So that makes it really difficult to pick a favourite. But I think I will go for a slightly unlikely book, Literary Women by Ellen Moers. It was published by The Women’s Press and I was a recent convert to feminism at the time, having recently discovered Virago too. Literary Women was a revelation, opening my eyes to an amazing amount of women writers I’d never heard of, let alone read. I finished up with a huge list of authors I wanted to discover which led me onto another pivotal book, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I’d never read anything like it and it set me off on a whole new lifetime of reading, mainly because I was no longer intimidated by literature, and felt I could read anything I wanted to, from de Beavoir, Sartre, Camus et al to Italo Calvino (whose “If on a winter’s night a traveler” almost got picked here as it caused me a major obsession with the author which still continues to this day!)

Qu. 4.) What’s one of your favourite books that you’ve found in the last year or two, and how has blogging changed your reading habits?

Erica: I started blogging as part of my work on the collection of popular fiction published between 1900 and 1950 at Sheffield Hallam University. I don’t think I would have started a personal blog, but I’ve found I love being part of the conversation about books that happens in blogs.

Blogging has definitely changed my reading habits, because the reviews are of books in the collection. I very rarely find time to read books that fall outside this 1900-1950 time period. Now, hang on… this is just the same as when I was writing my PhD! I better face it. Contemporary fiction is a bit of a closed book to me. (Actually I did just read Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate (2013), borrowed from my Mum. It was HORRIBLE. I am mentally scarred. There was a clue in that it is publisher by Hammer, of Hammer horror fame, but I didn’t clock that….)

One of my favourite books of the last few years is Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman (2011). I read it on a long train journey and I snorted and wept with laughter for several happy hours. So much of what she said resonated with me, and she said it all so well. A good rant is an underappreciated genre! And it is part of the splendid resurgence of feminism in recent years.

Karen: I’ve been blogging for a year now, and really enjoyed it – and probably discovered a lot books because of it! I enjoyed so much reading other blogs and the pleasure it gave me that I wanted to get involved and give something back. I really enjoy interacting with other bloggers and being part of a community, particularly as I don’t actually know many people in real life that read the same sort of thing as I do! Blogging *has* changed my reading habits, for the better I think – I read more thoroughly and analytically now, and think much more about what I’ve read because I have to try and communicate what I feel about the book to any readers!

A favourite book? Again, it seems cruel to only pick one – but Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita stands out as having totally engrossed me and changed the way I look at things a lot – I see the absurd everywhere nowadays! But I think honourable mentions should go to the wonderful Persephone Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day which I couldn’t put down and had me grinning from ear to ear; and Miss Hargreaves, which I heard about from your blog and really must read again!

Qu. 5.) Finally – a guilty pleasure, or a favourite that might surprise people!
Erica: My not-guilty-at-all pleasure is to read Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics. For my birthday and at Christmas my Dad is instructed to buy me the latest volume – for my birthday just gone it was Series 9, volume 2 – thank you Dad! I love the humour, insight and feminist sensibility of Buffy, and the visual experience of reading a comic, probably because it is so different from what I usually read. I also think it is important to have some reading for which you will NEVER take notes. I guess it is back to the ‘surrendered reading’ of my childhood.

Karen: Cookbooks! I have a weakness for reading them and have three shelves in my kitchen…. It probably stems from when I went vegetarian when I was 18 and had to read up on it a bit – this was a *loooong* time ago without all the veggie conveniences we have now. Some of my oldest are from the 1970s and though I probably wouldn’t cook much from the older books, they read almost like a kind of social history – it’s amazing how our culinary habits have changed!!

And… I’ve told you the other person’s choices, anonymously. What do you think these choices say about their reader?

Karen, on Erica’s choices: Well, the first thing that springs to mind here is that this person obviously likes reading about feisty heroines – starting with Alice and ending with Buffy, both of whom are strong and individual, though in different ways. Alice is contrary from the point she runs off after the White Rabbit to her defiance of the Court and is definitely a good role model for young people! And Buffy is a character who takes no nonsense either.

This reader also seems to have a taste for the dramatic and passionate, as Wuthering Heights is certainly that, and also features another feisty woman in the form of Cathy, refusing to let death get in the way of her love. Although A Game of Hide and Seek might seem like a quieter proposition, it also features a heroine who marries for money, not love, but never stops caring for the man in her heart, so both of these books show a reader who likes to examine the motivations of people’s passions.

As for Caitlin Moran – well, there’s another feisty one! She’s pithy and funny and so although this reader isn’t necessarily female (plenty of men I know like spiky, in control females!), he/she certainly has a fondness for dominant women – I could foresee interesting time spent in their company discussing books!

Erica on Karen’s choices: Oh, I might know who this is! Is it Karen, from Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings? It is the Bulgakov that makes me think this, but then by Googling I have just found out that there is a whole website devoted to The Master and Margarita alone, so there are many fans out there. This person sounds very well-rounded, with tastes that range from Dr Seuss (who I love too – his Sleep Book was a favourite as a child) through to Tolkein (who I think of as peculiarly male – is it the questing?) to Literary Women and cookery books. There’s a strong thread of fantasy (and in The Master and Margarita it sounds a very dark fantasy), and then the cookery books bring this reader back into the material world. I had to look up Ellen Moers’ book as I’m ashamed to say I have not read this ground-breaking book – I will be looking it up in the library. I too like reading cookery books for relaxation – and for planning all the lovely things I am going to cook and eat, of course!