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Raising Demons – Shirley Jackson

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Raising Demons is the 1957 sequel to Shirley Jackson’s hilariously wonderful memoir/novel about being a wife and mother, Life Among the Savages (1953).  I paid a steepish amount for a hideous paperback (pictured), and thus managed to secure Raising Demons, saving it for a treat – and I read it whilst recently beleaguered with a cold.  It is an absurd indictment of the publishing industry that these books are so difficult to find, especially on this side of the ocean.  They are brilliant, and deserve to be classics (please, some publisher or other, please!)  I don’t often laugh out loud while reading, but with Raising Demons (as with Life Among the Savages before it) I sat in the corner giggling away to myself, getting curious and worried glances from my housemates.

I went back and read what I wrote about Life Among the Savages (you can do the same thing if you click here) and basically everything I said for that book is true of this one.  Funny, warm, happy, funny, clever, and did I mention funny?  But I shan’t be lazy; I shall write a new review for this book, and not just send you back to that review…

Despite my enthusiasm for Life Among the Savages, I’m well aware that Shirley Jackson is much more likely to make you think of Gothic, creepy, psychological novels – like the excellent We Have Always Lived in the Castle.  She does that sort of thing incredibly well.  But she also excels at this sort of gentle, family-orientated, self-deprecating writing – a genre which many would dismiss, I’m sure, but which I (and many of you) adore.

By the time Raising Demons starts there are six in the family, plus attendant animals, and they have outgrown the house which was so amusingly bought at the beginning of Life Among the Savages – and so they start hunting for a new house.  Or, rather, everyone tells them which house they should choose – the one with the wonky gatepost, converted into four self-contained flats.  Despite insisting that they don’t want to move, nor rent their house, they find themselves sending all their belongings into storage, and converting the flats into one house.  It is here that they live out their ordinary, hilarious lives.

Jackson has a talent for two types of humour at once: the knowing grin we grant to the recognisable, and laughter at the bizarre and unexpected.  These initially seem like opposite sides of the coin; that authors would have to pick one or the other – but Jackson manages both at once, by taking the everyday, identifiable dynamics of the family home… and exaggerating them.  And then putting them in a pattern, so that events pile on events, creating a surreal outcome.  Yet one which seems entirely possible – had, perhaps, happened to Jackson herself.

Having written about illustrative quotations yesterday, I should provide excellently evocative ones today, shouldn’t I?  I liked this one, about the mother preparing her son for his first Little League game – obviously rather more nervous than he is:

As a matter of fact, the night before the double-header which was to open the Little League, I distinctly recall that I told Laurie it was only a game.  “It’s only a game, fella,” I said.  “Don’t try to go to sleep; read or something if you’re nervous.  Would you like some aspirin?”

“I forgot to tell you,” Laurie said, yawning.  “He’s pitching Georgie tomorrow.  Not me.”

“What?”  I thought, and then said heartily, “I mean, he’s the manager, after all.  I know you’ll play your best in any position.”

“I could go to sleep now if you’d just turn out the light,” Laurie said patiently.  “I’m really quite tired.”

I called Dot later, about twelve o’clock, because I was pretty sure she’d still be awake, and of course she was, although Billy had gone right off about nine o’clock.  She said she wasn’t the least bit nervous, because of course it didn’t really matter except for the kids’ sake, and she hoped the best team would win.  I said that that was just what I had been telling my husband, and she said her husband had suggested that perhaps she had better not go to the game at all because if the Braves lost she ought to be home with a hot bath ready for Billy and perhaps a steak dinner or something.  I said that even if Laurie wasn’t pitching I was sure the Braves would win, and of course I wasn’t one of those people who always wanted their own children right out in the centre of things all the time but if the Braves lost it would be my opinion that their lineup ought to be revised and Georgie put back into right field where he belonged.  She said she thought Laurie was a better pitcher, and I suggested that she and her husband and Billy come over for lunch and we could all go to the game together.

That also gives an example of my favourite technique in the book.  It’s simple, but I find it endlessly amusing: it is what Jackson doesn’t write.  So much of Raising Demons is left to the reader’s imagination.  Not much is needed, to be honest – any reader is likely to deduce that the mother is distrait, and the son calm.  Jackson isn’t trying to be super-subtle with that point.  But I love that it is never quite spelt out – and that other characters thus often miss what is so obvious to the amused reader.  Here’s an example in that vein:

By the Saturday before Labor Day a decided atmosphere of cool restraint had taken over our house, because on Thursday my husband had received a letter from an old school friend of his named Sylvia, saying that she and another girl were driving through New England on a vacation and would just adore stopping by for the weekend to renew old friendships.  My husband gave me the letter to read, and I held it very carefully by the edges and said that it was positively touching, the way he kept up with his old friends, and did Sylvia always use pale lavender paper with this kind of rosy ink and what was that I smelled – perfume?  My husband said Sylvia was a grand girl.  I said I was sure of it.  My husband said Sylvia had always been one of the nicest people he knew.  I said I hadn’t a doubt.  My husband said that he was positive that I was going to love Sylvia on sight.  I opened my mouth to speak but stopped myself in time.

My husband laughed self-consciously.  “I remember,” he said, and then his voice trailed off and he laughed again.

“Yes?” I asked politely.

“Nothing,” he said.
Lovely!  I really can’t recommend this book, and Life Among the Savages, enough.  It’s such a shame they’re so difficult to find – but I promise they are worth the hunt to anybody who likes Provincial Lady-esque books.  (Hopefully you’ll find a nicer copy than mine – I quite like the other image featured, yours for $500.)  Like the PL et al, I know I’ll be returning to this family time and again.  I’m rather bereft that only two were written… and on the hunt for other, potentially similar, books.  And more on that before too long…

A little about When God Was A Rabbit, but not really.

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I’ve mentioned it before – I’m always fascinated by the behind-the-scenes of blogging.  I know when, how, and where I write my own blog posts, but I’m aware that each blogger does these things slightly (or, indeed, very) differently.  I’ve recently finished When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman, which I’m going to talk about a tiny amount, because my musing on it headed me off in a different direction – about how we structure blog posts.  Yep, it’s going to be a meta-post, if you will (stolen joke alert: I’m so meta, even this acronym.)

How do you start?  (Sorry, non-bloggers, these questions won’t mean much to you.)  How do you structure your posts?  I have realised that, increasingly, I start from one or two key quotations, noted in the book (in pencil, naturally) and one or two key bullet points, in my head.  Without those (especially given the gap in time between reading and reviewing) I am rather lost.

But how do I go about finding those quotations?  The short answer is, I don’t know.  I think my blog reviews are a little more reliant on supportive quotations than many bloggers, but I know there are some of you who also quote a lot – how do you choose?  Studying English literature, especially when at undergraduate level, I was well trained in the art of reading a novel without knowing how I would write about it – usually, then, without having a predetermined essay question – so I’d just be reading, say Fanny Burney’s Evelina and hoping to find a good essay topic in the midst of reading.  (In Evelina‘s case, I wrote about laughter… did you know that she half-laughs and almost-laughs and thought-of-laughing a huge amount, after the embarrassing laughter scene at the ball, but doesn’t actually laugh again until she is engaged?  Truedat.)

Gosh, I am easily sidetracked.

So, how do I (how do you) choose these excerpts?  I tend to have a pencil at the ready, to note down any particularly amusing or poignant sections – or, preferably, a paragraph or two which seem to me to encapsulate the feel of the book.  Which is quite a nebulous and ill-defined brief, but perhaps you do the same, and thus can understand?  I certainly have almost no hope of finding a useful quotation once I’ve finished reading the book.  Once I’ve got that, I can expand outwards – my summary and response of the book needs that central few examples to circle out from.  If I didn’t make a note of the page number whilst I was reading, then… those are the posts which don’t have any excerpts.

Which brings me onto Sarah Winman’s When God Was A Rabbit (2011), which I read recently for book group.  I quite liked it; I thought the writing was good and the structuring not very good.  There was just far too much in it – a bit like a soap opera.  I think Winman will either go on to write increasingly good novels, or she will stop now, having put everything she could think of into When God Was A Rabbit.

But the main reason I’m not going to write a full-length review of the novel is because I got to the end of it without having noted down any excerpts.  There wasn’t a single passage which struck me as being especially noteworthy – for whatever reason.  Of course, you could simply say that this makes Winman very consistent; there weren’t any pages I noted down for being awful, either.  But it does make it more or less impossible for me to begin to structure a post about the book.  Or, rather, it would end up like one of the reviews I wrote when I started my blog – very short and very hazy!

So, there you have it.  If a novel doesn’t present two or three of these excerpts whilst I’m reading, I’m all lost at sea.  How about you?  Do you flick back for quotations after you’ve finished, or make notes as you go along?  And are there any books you’ve just felt incapable of writing about – for different reasons than those discussed in relation to In Cold Blood last week!   Just because you don’t know where to start, or how to frame it.

Gosh, Stuck-in-a-Book is just becoming a place where I discuss why I’m not reviewing books, isn’t it?!

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Hope you’re having a good weekend!  I’ll be off on one of my trips to villages with odd names – this time it’s the turn of Ready Token.  Brilliant, no?  I’ll leave you with a book, a link (or two), and a blog post.


1.) The links – I started writing a post last November on book covers (and by ‘started writing’, I mean I copied out two links and wrote ‘COVERS’ as the post title) but I’ve realised that it’s not going to come to fruition for a while. So instead I’ll just give you the links.  The first is to an excellent Caustic Cover Critic  interview with designer Alison Forner, which includes many examples of her beautiful work – one of which is above.  The second is a sort of review of the best covers of 2011 (which sadly too few illustrations), from the Guardian.  JUST what you wanted in the middle of March, no?

2.) The book – fans of the Mapp and Lucia series by E.F. Benson will be pleased to know that another sequel has been written by Guy Fraser-Sampson (also known as Pursewarden).  His Major Benjy really caught the spirit of the original series (my thoughts here) and, if we can’t have Benson writing new books, then Guy Fraser-Sampson is second best.  And although these things shouldn’t matter, I’m glad that he’s been given a lovely cover this time around – for Lucia on Holiday.  If you’re quick, you might be able to hear Guy talk about it about on Radio 4’s Open Book.  Lucia on Holiday is published on 29th March.

3.) The blog link –  is Trevor’s fantastic review of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, on his site The Mookse and the Gripes.  If you’ve yet to be convinced to try it out, I think he might just do the trick.

Dear Octopus – Dodie Smith

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When I was reading Dodie Smith’s first volume of autobiography, Look Back With Love, the title which cropped up most (and most intrigued me) was her play Dear Octopus (1938).  She didn’t write much about its creation or production, since obviously she didn’t write the play during her first eleven years, but she makes allusions now and then.  My attention was grabbed by the mention of family reunions, John Gielguid, and that curious title.  Actually, I’ll instantly put you out of your misery, lest you think this is a play set in an aquarium.  The title derives from the speech Nicholas gives at his parents’ Golden Wedding Anniversary:

“To the family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.”

Despite being an only child, Dodie Smith seems very able at portraying sibling relationships within large families.  (Indeed, one character claims to be ‘crazy about large families’, and their husband caustically remarks ‘That’s because you’re an only child.’)  Rose and Cassandra always seemed very believable in I Capture the Castle (albeit Thomas rather less so) and Dear Octopus is no different.  The size of the cast, and the various familial and marital relationships, was rather dizzying – but, of course, it would have been rather easier to identify everyone when seeing it on the stage, rather than reading the play.  We discussed reading plays a couple of years ago, and it seems that I am in a minority – although it has to be said that I do prefer reading plays with small casts, rather than the mammoth ensemble of Dear Octopus.

The situation is a tried and tested catalyst for all manner of action: a family reunion.  I don’t think there’s much point in me going into specifics, but it involves all the expected angles.  A daughter returns after a seven year absence, holding a secret; a sister-in-law holds resentment about a long-ago rejection; siblings compete and misunderstand each other; children try to understand the adult world; the gathering draws further attention to one family member who has recently died.  And, naturally, there is a romance plot threaded through – which culminates rather too neatly, perhaps, but everyone likes a bit of feel-good theatre.

There is plenty in Dear Octopus which does remind one of the insouciance of much of I Capture the Castle – and, indeed, Cassandra’s faux-sophistication.  Like this, for example:

MARGERY: Ken’ll carry on with anyone who crooks their little finger at him.
HILDA: Don’t you mind?
MARGERY: Not in the least.  It’s a safety valve.

Young love and young marriages are treated quite flippantly at times, although elsewhere the oncoming war (they must have known it was oncoming?) does crash through this flippancy:

LAUREL: Your father’s picture.  He was exactly your age when he was killed. (Suddenly.)  Oh, darling, darling–
HUGH: What?
LAUREL: Sometimes I wish we were quite middle-aged.
HUGH: Good lord, why?
LAUREL: So that you wouldn’t have to go if there’s another war.
HUGH: It’ll take a damn good cause to get me to war.
LAUREL: Oh, you all say that.

But the focal point is not budding romance – it is the security and trust of a fifty-year long marriage.  There is a lovely sense through that the anniversary couple in question (Charles and Dora) can cope with the antics of their family because of the depth of their bond.  For a young(ish) unmarried woman, Smith conveys this very well, and very calmly.

Dear Octopus doesn’t reinvent the wheel.  There are a lot of plays in a similar mould, and even with a similar tone, but Smith’s construction and balance throughout is so well done that this seems like an exemplar within its crowded genre.  Perhaps it won’t overly excite the reader, or transform any lives, but it does its job rather well.  I don’t know how often the play is revived now, but you do get a chance to see it, grab the opportunity.  Otherwise, I recommend you track down a copy, and have an entertaining afternoon…

Short non-review today…

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For the sake of A Century of Books, I must record that I have read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) – but I have no desire to write about it.  I hated reading it.  The writing was good.  But it is a horrible book, about a horrible murder committed by horrible people.  People will, I daresay, suggest that I am shying away from ‘real life’, but unpleasant actions are no more real than pleasant ones.  The usual, indeed, is rather more real than unusual.  There is a greater amount of reality in the Provincial Lady books than within the pages of In Cold Blood.  I cannot understand why anybody wants to read crime books, let alone true crime books: one half of the world does not understand the pleasures of the other.  Reading In Cold Blood could never be a pleasure for me, and the amount of displeasure it caused me wholly obscured any admiration I should feel towards Capote for his writing ability or his experimentation with genre.  I wish I had never read it.

Any books for which you feel like this?

One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes

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Back to normal now, folks!  You’d think I’d have taken the opportunity to write lots of reviews, ready to post… but… I didn’t.  Although I hope you were suitably intrigued by the little clues I gave yesterday… the first one up is the brilliant re-read.  So brilliant, in fact, that it’s leaping onto my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About…

39. One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes

I do more re-reading now than I used to, but I tend towards books I already know I’ll love.  So there are some novels I’ll read every two years or so, and some that I don’t remember much about, but knew I loved ten years ago, say.  What I seldom do (understandably, perhaps) is re-read books that I didn’t love – those that I disliked, or thought only quite good.

Thank goodness I decided to re-read Mollie Panter-Downes’ One Fine Day.

I first read it back in 2004, and thanks to never emptying my inbox (currently at 76,992 emails – all read, don’t worry) I can tell you that I reported thus to my online book group: “I did enjoy this, but not as much as I was expecting given Nicola’s love love love of it.  I was expecting E.M. Delafield and it landed more Virginia Woolf than I thought it would??  Memorable, though.”  The Nicola in question is Nicola Beauman, doyenne of Persephone Books, who has often held up One Fine Day as an almost perfect novel.  Indeed, it was she who rediscovered the book for Virago’s Modern Classics series.

Well, turns out Nicola was right, of course.  I had initially thought One Fine Day only fairly good, whereas now I believe it is an absolutely excellent – and, indeed, important – novel.

My early comparison with Virginia Woolf is one that I stick by, although why I would have thought that was a bad thing, I can’t imagine.  But I am aware that a lot of you will be turned off by the mention of Woolf – let me encourage you not to be!  One of the reasons that I think One Fine Day is an important novel is that it is something of a bridge between the middlebrow and the modernist.  It is Panter-Downes’ style which makes the novel so exquisite, and yet it has none of the inaccessibility of which Woolf can be accused.  She has all the fluidity and ingenuity of the great prose/poetry stylist, combined with the keen and sensible observation of the domestic novelist.  Time for me to hand over to Mollie Panter-Downes for a fairly long excerpt:

The bus was full of women, sighing, sweating gently under the arms of their cotton dresses as they held on to their baskets and their slippery, fretful children.  A tiny boy screamed like an angry jay, drumming his fists on the glass.  He wa-anted it, he wa-anted it!  Bless the child, wanted what?  It, it, ow-w-w! he wept with fury at adult stupidity already frustrating his simple world.  A spaniel on the floor at somebody’s feet shifted cautiously, lifting a red-cornered eye towards his owner, hoping and trusting that no one would tread on his paw.  Human uneasiness and irritability seemed to fill the bus with hot cottonwool, choking, getting up the nostrils.  If it did not start in a moment, it might burst with pressure from its prickling cargo.  Only a young man, a hiker, seemed to sit aloof and happy in the heat.  He wore a blue shirt and drill shorts; on his knees was a knapsack.  His neck was a dull red, so was the brow of his cheerful, ordinary face.  Perhaps he had only just come out of the Army or the Air Force, thought Laura, watching him study his map with such happy concentration.  Ow, ow, ow-w-w, wept the tiny boy, unable to escape and go striding off amongst the bracken, still handcuffed to childhood.  I’ll smack you proper if you don’t stop, threatened his mother.  The young man studied his map, reading England with rapture.  The driver, who had descended to cool his legs and have a word with a crony outside the Bull, swung himself up into his seat.  An angry throbbing seized the bus, the hot bodies of the passengers quivered like jelly, the jaws of an old woman by the door seemed to click and chatter.  With a lurch, they started.  The tiny boy’s tears stopped as though within his tow-coloured head someone had turned a tap.  His brimming eyes stared out at the streets as he sat quietly on his mother’s lap, clutching a little wooden horse.

I think that’s brilliant, just beautiful.  Mollie Panter-Downes also has a great way with metaphors and similes, offering unexpected images which somehow don’t jar, and convey much more than a simple statement could.  I’m not going to be able to resist quoting MPD (if you will) quite a bit, by the way, so here’s an example: ‘Now that he was home, he could not abide the thought of other people’s bath water running out, meeting on the stairs with forced joviality, someone else’s life pressed up against one in a too small space like a stranger’s overcoat against one’s mouth in a crowd.’

It’s unusual for me to talk about the style of a novel before I address the rudiments of the plot, but I do think it’s MPD’s style which sets her apart from her contemporaries.  In terms of plot, nothing really happens.  One Fine Day, as the title suggests, is all set during one day.  The war is over, and people are beginning to get back to their old lives – only, of course, nothing can ever really be the same.  Laura (the central character, through whose eyes we see most of the novel) goes shopping, visits a family in the village, tries to retrieve her dog from a gipsy encampment, and walks up a beautiful hill.  The events of the day are, in fact, uneventful.  It is this ordinariness, in contrast to the uncertain and unkind days of war, which resonates throughout One Fine Day.  Laura’s observations and reflections are not dramatic or life-changing – but that is their beauty.  What a relief it must have been to read about the pursuit of a gardener, or the view from a hill, rather than menacing newspaper headlines and the constant worry about loved ones.  The novel relaxes into this peacefulness and freedom – but with a continuous backward glance.  The war has changed Laura.  She is

a bit thinner over the cheekbones, perhaps, the hair completely grey in front, though the back was still fair and crisply curling, like rear-line soldiers who do not know that defeat has bleakly overtaken their forward comrades.

There is an undercurrent throughout One Fine Day of changed times – not just the working-class villagers who no longer want jobs in domestic service, or need to pay strict adherence to codes of class civility.  Laura has been separated from her husband Stephen for years; he has not watched their daughter Victoria grow up.  The family is not destroyed by this, nor is it even unhappy – but it is strained, and it is tired, but resilient.  Mollie P-D conveys so perfectly the triumph and relief of this weary, determined little family unit, who do not fully understand one another, but who stand together, grateful for all they have managed to keep.

Alongside Panter-Downes’ beautiful writing, it is the character of Laura which is the novel’s triumph.  Perhaps the two cannot quite be separated, because she is built of this wonderful style – it is not quite stream of consciousness, it never leaves the third person, but it flits through thoughts and noticings and reflections as Laura does.  And she is such a wonderful character.  She reminds me a bit of Mrs. Miniver, but without her slight tweeness.  Laura loves beauty, especially beauty in nature; she is a little absent-minded and uncertain, but she is strong and caring and optimistic.  Laura is observant but not judgemental; intelligent but not an intellectual.  A line of poetry runs through her head, in relation to her everyday activity:

Who wrote that? Laura wondered absently.  She could not remember.  Her mind was a ragbag, in which scraps of forgotten brightness, odd bits of purple and gold, were hopelessly mixed up with laundry lists and recipes for doing something quick and unconvincingly delicious with dried egg.

Laura is a perfect heroine for the wave of feminism which re-evaluated the worth of domestic life.  Perhaps especially because she does not entirely idealise it herself; she describes her class and people as ‘all slaves of the turned-back fresh linen, the polished wood reflecting the civilised candlelight, the hot water running into the shining bath.’  But she is a willing slave – all grumbles and laments are covered in the sheer gratitude Laura feels for life and freedom.  I can’t convey quite what a wonderful character Laura is, nor quite how perfectly Panter-Downes understands and shapes her.  To create a character who is both realistic and lovable must be one of the most difficult authorial tasks.  She is as psychologically well-developed as Mrs. Dalloway or Laura Ramsay, but as delightful as Mrs. Miniver or the Provincial Lady.  It is an astonishing combination.

I wrote blandly, back in 2004, that One Fine Day was ‘memorable, though’, unappreciative wretch that I was!  Truth be told, I had not remembered much of the novel.  And I doubt I will remember which steps Laura took, which neighbours she encountered, nor which views she expressed.  This is the sort of novel which cannot be remembered for its contents; only for the impression it leaves.  And that I certainly shall not forget.  I’m so grateful that I returned to One Fine Day, and was given a second chance to appreciate properly the work of brilliance that it is.  I am only left wondering, of course, quite how many other novels I have underestimated in this manner…??

Others who got Stuck in this Book:

“An ordinary day, an ordinary family, ordinary lives, but an extraordinary novel.” – Margaret, BooksPlease

“The author’s love for this part of England absolutely sings through this little gem of a novel” – Geranium Cat’s Bookshelf

“But there were also fundamental changes in England’s social fabric, which this short novel portrays in exquisite and sometimes painful detail.” – Laura’s Musings

“It is a moving, elegiac novel about love, beauty, and most importantly, freedom” – Rachel, Book Snob

My Life in Books: Round-up!

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Well, I hope you enjoyed that, I certainly did.  Don’t forget to go back and comment on the posts this week (I always get overly protective when I feature other people!)  – and I’d love to know which recommended book you’re now most keen to read?

I thought I’d link to all thirty (thirty!) of the bloggers and blog-readers who have participated in My Life in Books in Series One and Series Two.  This is set up so that clicking on the person’s name takes you to their blog (if they have one) and clicking on the ‘Life in Books‘ bit takes you to the post where they were featured.

Tomorrow, back to normal – which I hope won’t be anti-climactic!  Coming up there will be a re-read that was much better the second time around, a brilliant sequel, and a book I really wish I hadn’t read.  Intriguing, no?

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

My Life in Books: Series Two: Day Eight

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Awww, it’s over!  This is the final day of what has been a really great week (and a bit) of interviews.  I’ll do a proper round-up post tomorrow, but I will quickly thank everyone who agreed to participate – you’ve been brilliant.  And I hope everyone has enjoyed it as much as I have!  If I summon up enough energy, and find willing participants, it may appear later in the year…


Simon S (as he shall be known today to avoid confusion with me) is something of a double threat.  He writes the wonderfully enthusiastic and witty blog Savidge Reads, and is also the other half of podcast duo The Readers.  He was also the first blogger to put a roof over my head for a night…!

Eva describes herself as ‘an amateur reader and full-time library aficionado’, and blogs at A Striped Armchair, one of the most wide-ranging and thought-provoking blogs I know.  I wish she’d come over this side of the Atlantic, so I could say hello in person…

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.

Simon S: I did grow up in two very book loving households. As mother had me when she was 16 I spent my time between the hustle and bustle of Newcastle, where she was doing her degree, and with my grandparents in the Peak District and both my mother and Gran are voracious readers so I never wanted for books or people to read me bedtime stories. Though woe betide anyone who should try and skip a page or two of bedtime story thinking I wouldn’t spot it. 

I suppose I should go for a book like Roald Dahl’s Matilda or The Witches, both of which I adored, but I am going to say that The Adventures of the Witch Esmerelda and Marmalade the Cat were my favourite tales. My granddad wrote them and illustrated them by hand and sent me on a week, I dug them out the other week to read to his two youngest granddaughters (he sadly passed away a few years ago) and it was so lovely to see a new generation loving them too. Though they did keep asking why I was in the books and why I wasn’t a man in them.  [Simon T: you can read more about these lovely books here.]

Eva: My dad read a bit, but my mom was the big reader of our family.  I was read to every night before bed up until I was maybe 12 or 13.  As I got older, my mom and I would alternate reading the chapters.  Oh, and if I chose to spend my (very small) allowance on books, my mom would match my spending, effectively doubling my book budget (we also went to the library regularly).  So yes, my household definitely encouraged my book-love!

I had all kinds of favourite books when I was a child, but one of the lesser-known ones was The Children of Green Knowe by L.M. Boston.  A little boy in boarding school is sent to spend his holidays with his great aunt in this fabulous old house, Green Knowe.  Once he’s there, his aunt tells him the most marvelous family stories & he soon discovers that the house holds a fair amount of magic.  She wrote several books about Green Knowe, but that first one has my heart; I still have my copy and reread it just a few years ago.  More famous titles I loved include The Giver, Anne of Green Gables, the Nancy Drew series, and the Chronicles of Narnia.

Qu.2) What was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books that you really enjoyed?  

Simon S: Without a doubt it would have to be Sherlock Holmes.  As an early teen I would be dragged, or maybe I should say taken away, on long walking holidays involving 10 miles a day treks through the Peaks or the Lake District. My great uncle Derrick gathered that mid morning and mid afternoon I would tire and so would have memorised, almost word for word, at least ten Sherlock short stories each ‘holiday’ and tell me two of them during those lulls. Interestingly these stories, along with others of Arthur Conan Doyle’s, are books that encouraged me to read again after a wilderness of reading in my late teens and early twenties. I still turn to them now when I have a reading funk too.

Eva: Hmmm…I read a lot of classics when I was younger that weren’t necessarily children’s books; I remember reading White Fang when I was 9, for instance. When I was 11, my mom and I read Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera together. We had just moved back to England, and I remember us laying on my bed with my new pink bedspread reading it together.  For my 12th birthday, my mom took me to see the musical in London: it was magical!


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

Simon S: It would have to be Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier because it was the book that made me want to go  and read anything and everything again and reminded me of the power of a great story told by a brilliant storyteller.  I picked it up because it had a ridiculous cover and looked a bit ‘spooky’, I was in no way prepared for the wonderful journey, which I know sounds a cliché but its true, which I went on for 400 pages which just seemed to rush by.  I loved the gothic elements and mystery, but mainly it was the prose. It set me off reading again after several years of not, I can’t think of a better direction a book could give.

Eva: Honestly, as much as I love reading and feel that I would be a very different person without books, I can’t really point to a specific title that changed my life.  That being said, I remember discovering Salman Rushdie when I was 17 (I started with The Satanic Verses) and being blown away by the magical realist style & international setting.  It definitely opened my eyes to how incredible fiction outside of the white US/UK bubble could be.  Don’t get
me wrong, I still read and adore lots of white authors, British,
American, and otherwise!


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

Simon S: I wanted to say Gillespie and I because it’s a modern neo-Victorian masterpiece which plays with your head and leaves you shocked, but that doesn’t have a link to blogging as I would have read that from loving Jane Harris’ debut novel.  Instead I am going to chose The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  I wouldn’t have heard of Persephone Books, and indeed this overlooked sensation novel, if it hadn’t been for several bloggers like you, Claire, Verity or Rachel.  I am so glad I did because it introduced me to a wonderful story that was long forgotten… and then onto others.

Eva: The book blogosphere has definitely changed my reading habits; I now read far more women than men, which wasn’t always the case.  I used to participate in all kinds of reading challenges set up by book bloggers, which introduced me to a ton of different genres and geographic areas and more that I’d never thought about before (can you believe I didn’t even know of the books-about-books nonfiction topic before bloggers started mentioning various titles?).  In fact, one such challenge inspired me to take a hard look at how whitewashed my reading was and to begin searching out more authors of colour.  And of course, there are so many authors and books that I hadn’t heard of pre-book blogging that are now firm favourites.  My book horizons have been broadened immeasurably, at the same time that my previously-existing loves (i.e.: classics, mysteries, fantasy, international fiction) have been reinforced.

I’ve been blogging for over five years, so forcing me to choose a favourite seems cruel! But I’m going to focus on the ‘one of’ part of the phrase and go with Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s her debut novel and centers around a young Nigerian girl who has an abusive father. Adichie is an incredible storyteller, and this book has stuck with me over the years since I’ve read it. In fact, just writing about it is making me want to reread it!  Fortunately, I have a copy on my shelves due to the kindness of a book blogger who sent me her ‘spare.’ :)

Qu.5) Finally – a guilty pleasure, or a favourite that might surprise people!  

Simon S: I don’t believe in books being guilty pleasures, just pleasures.  So… One that will surprise people… Hmmmm!  I guess M.C Beaton and Tess Gerritsen have surprised people so they are out.  Oh, I have a secret passion for Batman graphic novels, it’s my only remaining geek out since childhood.  I wanted to be Bruce Wayne for years or one of the villains on occasional and I do like turning to these now and again, does that suffice?  I don’t think many people would know that, I keep it under wraps like a secret identity.

Eva: Let’s see…my newfound love for the Hamish Macbeth series is a bit lighter than my normal fare.  Oh, and I adore Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely!  I can’t say I really have any guilty pleasures though; in fact, I’m far more likely to feel guilty when I don’t care for a book that everyone else in the blogosphere loves. :)

And… I’ve told you the other person’s choices, anonymously.  What do you think these choices say about their reader?
Eva, on Simon S’s choices: This reader must have had a bookish childhood, with a handmade book from a grandfather! From the title, it sounds like an adventure/plot-focused book, which might have influenced the later interest in Batman and Sherlock Holmes (both crime fighters, if in different manners!). The person must be a bit of an anglophile too, with several British authors on the list. And I’m guessing the person has a taste for old-fashioned stories: most of the books are classics.  And even the Batman books, while not perhaps what one would traditionally call a classic, do have the “good end happily, the bad end unhappily” approach to fiction. I suspect I would find more than a few books I’d wish to borrow on their shelves! :)

I actually have a suspicion as to who my partner is: Simon S. I know he’s a huge fan of du Maurier & Sherlock Holmes, and although you told me not to guess the gender, I can’t help thinking of a boy reading those Batman books!

Simon S, on Eva’s choices: I felt a slight philistine when I first saw these books as I had only heard of three of them and only read Salman Rushdie and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who I think are great authors so this person clearly has good taste and likes the literary reads with a worldwide feel.  Even though it’s a diverse list, I would also say they like quite dark and gothic books, so really their taste isn’t far off mine… I want to find out what their top ten books are as I have a feeling I might like all the ones I haven’t yet encountered.


My Life in Books: Series Two: Day Seven

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It is the end of the week – but, fear not, it is still not the end of My Life in Books!  Tomorrow is the final day – for now, taking the spot usually reserved for Song for a Sunday, I hand over to two bloggers, both of whom (incidentally) were introduced to me by Simon Savidge…

Polly writes at Novel Insights, and ‘loves books with stylish covers and what’s inside them too.’  I love the way she recently announced her engagement!

Gav, who blogs at Gav Reads, couldn’t have a much more different reading taste from me if he tried – such is the charm of the blogosphere!  I came across Gav through the excellent podcast he co-presents, The Readers.

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.

Polly: I did indeed grow up in a book-loving household.  Many a weekend was spent in the lovely old Waterstones in Newcastle with it’s ‘W’ monogrammed stained-glass windows, leafing through the childrens books there in the basement.  I’m sad to say that it’s now moved and been replaced by an H&M!  It’s hard to pick a favourite childhood book. My thought immediately turn to classics such as Winnie The Pooh and The Chronicles of Narnia and of course I loved fairy tales.  I had a copy of Terry Jones’ Fairy Tales which was much loved and the stories repeatedly re-read.  I loved it for it’s fabulous illustrations as much as the original and charming stories – full of magic and with a moral.  I was always able to persuade my Mum to read ‘just one more story’ at bed time by choosing one of the tales ‘The Three Raindrops’ which was always a good bet because it was just a paragraph long.

Gav: My dad definitely isn’t a reader, he doesn’t like reading instruction manuals.  My mum though definitely is.  I didn’t really grow up in a house of books.  Though my mum used to but me the odd book.  I recall a copy of Wind in the Willows that stayed in a drawer in the living room for years and years. And I never could get on with it.

I think if I had to choose one book from childhood it would have to be The Twits by Roald Dahl though really it could be any Dahl novel from Matilda, The Witches, BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  I think The Twits is probably the least fanciful but most grotesque of his novels especially the part of about food in beards.  But Dahl in general is an amazing children’s writer.  He just gets what childhood is and how adults seem to children.  Plus he gets how easy it is a child’s imagination can run wild.  Oh I forgot the illustrations by Quentin Blake! Absolutely perfect.


Qu.2) What was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books that you really enjoyed?  
Polly: Hmmm… struggling to remember now!  When I was about 10 and 11 I read alot of cross-over books that had an older edge but still had an element of magic (Watership Down, The Hobbit).  I think the first really ‘grown-up’ books that I read were around the time that I was in school.  I remember reading Animal Farm and not quite getting all of the references but enjoying it.  I got really involved in William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies which I thought was superb at the time – I studied it for my GCSEs.  I think as a result of this, for a long time I was mainly interested in ‘modern classics’ and particularly those with a darker edge.  It’s not until recent years that I’ve started to explore books set pre-1900.

Gav: Now that’s really grey I didn’t get bookie until I was 16 and I delved into science fiction and fantasy mostly, which to most people isn’t really grown-up reading.  And I really can’t recall what I was really reading.  I can see snapshots.  But if we’re looking for challenging language, you could say it was Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.  I’d read The Hobbit but that is definitely more a child’s book as it’s simpler in lots of ways. But Lord of the Rings stretching over a trilogy

I’ll let you into a confession though: I’ve never read the very ending of the book. 


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

Polly: As mentioned above, the experience of really studying modern classics such as Orwell and Golding and then Muriel Spark influenced me in the sense that I tended to look out for modern classics. Additionally a local secondhand bookshop near my Sixth Form College which sold Penguin Classics for a pound each led to me becoming a little obsessed with those lovely orange covers.

Gav: Ha well that’s got to be Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett.  I’ve already said that I didn’t read a lot.  I tried to read but found it hard to find an author that really connected with me.  Well this book started a passion for reading that’s lasted the last 17 years.  It helped I think that he had a lot of books out so I could read them all to satisfy some internal hunger.  That I’ve just kept feeding 


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

Polly: I’ve read alot more classic novels since blogging and reading recommendations – for example I fell in love with Wilkie Collins and really enjoyed reading Persephone Classics such as The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I think it’s broadened my reading horizons by making me braver about reading more widely or books that I thought would be boring before!

Gav: One??  You’re kidding right!  But if you insist it’s going to be The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indridsaon.  It was the first book of cold crime I’d read and it took me in to the whole area of cold crime and then crime in translation in general. And that’s one of the thing that I love about blogging is that there are bloggers who stick to one niche.  They do it very well but they never seem to grow or change as readers.  And I do like to see my pushing the edges of my reading flipping from one literary obsession to the other.  And The Draining Lake was a great doorway for me.


Qu.5) Finally – a guilty pleasure, or a favourite that might surprise people!  

Polly: I’m pretty open about the books I read so there may not be any surprises!  My favourite page-turners are usually by crime authors such as Sophie Hannah, Val McDermid and Tess Gerritsen but I think these are excellent so I don’t feel any measure of guilt about reading them.  I also LOVE Daphne du Maurier who has been written off as trashy romance by certain foolish (in my humble opinion!) people in the past.  She’s definitely one of my favourite authors and her novels are wonderfully atmospheric and beautifully described.

Gav: I’m pretty honest about my reading.  I don’t really think of anything as a guilty pleasure as I don’t see anything to feel guilty about.  I guess that I love Bridget Jones’ Diary might cause a moment for pause…

And… I’ve told you the other person’s choices, anonymously.  What do you think these choices say about their reader?
Gav, on Polly’s choices: Fairy Tales: A book of fairy tales written by one of the Monty Python crew? What could be a more wonderful treat for a child or an adult for that matter. What a lucky reader there were. I’m highly jealous.  I’d say this reader has a great imagination.
The Lord of the Flies: You know I’ve never fancied reading this book. I shy away from books that reinforce that we are only one stage removed from other animals.  I’m not sure if this book does show humanity in a good light at some points but I must admit to not wanting to go into those dark places first.  The person that loves this book is much braver than me.  Though it might be they were forced to read it in school and just happened to fall in love with it.
Muriel Spark: I always think of Muriel Spark’s work as fun and intelligent.  I could be very wrong.  I know she’s best known by me as the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie but again I’ve not read her and not sure she’d be my cut of tea.  But I think this shows a bit of refinement in a reader.  I wonder what affect Spark had on them as a person as well as a reader?
The Shuttle: I’m going to stick my neck out and say this book is somewhat obscure?  With all the Britishness of the other choices I can’t see this person as an American so it does make me curious about why this was an important book in their life.
Daphne du Maurier: Daphers has been mentioned a lot to me this last year.  I honestly didn’t know how diverse a writer she was.  Rebecca is such a favourite by so many people.  Jamaica Inn and My Cousin Rachel come up frequently.  It say this shows again a reader that likes the darker side of humanity.  Though we seem to have lost that childhood pleasure in reading we started off with in Terry Jones’ Fairy Tales.
Polly, on Gav’s choices: I think that this person is a child at heart with a wicked sense of humour judging by their love of The Twits, and the fantasy books make me think they read to escape from the real world. Judging by the crime novel they have a bit of a dark edge but the Bridget Jones’s Diary choice suggests day to day are approachable and down to earth. The overall mix suggests someone warm-hearted who has a good sense of humour and doesn’t take themselves too seriously.

If I had to place bets I would say this person’s name starts with the letter S… But I might be wrong!
[Simon: who could you have been thinking of, Polly?]