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Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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December approaches, and perhaps you have snow in your part of the world… none here in Oxford, but maybe before next week… I’m heading off for a nice early night, but will type this out to appear early on Saturday morning.

1.) The link – is courtesy of The Dabbler, where you can win a copy of the Christmas edition of Slightly Foxed – click here to enter, if you know your Christmas literary trivia.

2.) The blog post – is Harriet Devine’s, because this amused me…


3.) The book – is the Persephone Ninety Diary, which Nicola Beauman very kindly gave me as a birthday present. It’s beautiful – like the Persephone books, but with a more flexible spine, and has pages with the endpapers from all the Persephone books, alongside the diary pages. The question is, of course… is it too beautiful to use? I haven’t made my mind up on that just yet…


Read and Unread

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I’m glad that a lot of you are thinking of joining in the novella weekend – turns out I will most likely be going to the musical, so my time will be cut a bit, but should still be plenty of reading time left. I don’t seem to have much reading time at the moment, and there i one book in particular that I’m adoring, but have still spent two months reading…

So this is another not-very-time-consuming post: the following list (not in any particular order) has been doing the rounds of blogs and Facebook, and I thought I’d join in. Thanks for everyone who sent it to me. I saw it a few years ago, and it is a bizarre list (including some duplications). It’s not the same as the list they came up with during the Big Read – a series I adored, especially the run-down of the top 100; must try and find that video somewhere… ANYWAY, here is the list, with the ones I’ve read in bold. Do comment on that which I have left unread which I ought to have read…

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (well, I’ve read over half…)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (I’m leaving in Nancy’s comment on this, as I wholeheartedly agree: ‘being it’s part of the Chronicles, it’s stupid this is on the list again’)
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79 .Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazu Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare (as opposed to the complete works… hmm…)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Novellas

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I was thinking about my previous weekend of reading novellas, and what fun it was, and musing about what I’d read were I to repeat the experiment… and toying with doing so on the weekend 4th-5th December. So I went around my bookshelves, pulling things off that I wanted to read, and that were around 200pp. or less. And now I have a pile of 13 books… I’m not going to reveal them just yet, because I think that last time it rather spoilt the surprise of what I’d read, and maybe led to book-mention-fatigue (just be grateful Miss Hargreaves isn’t under 200pp.! As the bloggers who met Thomas the other day discovered, I can work Miss H. into more or less any conversation.) But the beady-eyed amongst you may be able to deduce one or two…


If I did provisionally put aside that weekend for novella reading, would anyone be interested in joining me?

Obviously I wouldn’t be able to read all thirteen, but I daresay I’d make something of a dent, and it would be fun to know that other people were engaging in the activity elsewhere in the country. It might be shortened by a potential trip to Cheltenham to see a musical, but… well, we’ll see. December seems somehow appropriate for novellas. Although it also seems appropriate for enormous novels, which is why I have Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch earmarked for a dark post-Christmas evening.

Do let me know if you’d be interested, and spread the word. You don’t have to give up the whole weekend, of course – maybe just try to read one or two novellas at some point? It certainly demolishes the reading pile a little!

Gifts and Prizes!

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A book I forgot to mention the other day, in amongst my haul, is Aloe by Katherine Mansfield, kindly given to me as a birthday present from Claire, known to the blogging world as Paperback Reader. (I still have two other birthday presents to mention, but they’re also going to get posts of their own…) Thanks Claire! I think this completes my collection of Mansfield fiction – now I just have to get her letters… I only have the selected letters at the moment.


And the other thing I must do is hand out the prizes for Pillars of the Earth DVD. Thanks for all your fab ideas for film adaptations – either ones which have never been done, or ones which deserve revisiting (and isn’t it frustrating when you’ve loved a book, and see it was filmed in 1930something, not released on DVD, and like as not had the reels destroyed?)

Congratulations to…. Lucy Evans and Janells!
Let me know your addresses (well, I know Lucy’s…) and the DVDs will be on their way to you!

Joy Street

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I’ve mentioned on here before that I like to have a diary or collection of letters ‘on the go’ most of the time – and yesterday I finished the current read. It’s Joy Street: A Wartime Romance in Letters by Mirren Barford and John Lewes (ed. Michael T. Wise), and was a gift from my dear friend Phoebe, who always knows what to buy me.

These letters were sent between Mirren Barford, studying at Somerville College in Oxford, and Lieutenant John Lewes, also known as Jock, who was away fighting. They take up less than two years, in 1940 and 1941, but cover a whole spectrum of emotions, thoughts, philosophies, and document the growing relationship between the young letter writers. What starts out fairly cool becomes a romantic exchange – with all the peaks and troughs that might suggest – and eventually more or less an engagement. ‘Joy Street’ became something of a symbol between them – as a destination for their future, united happiness. From the letters we grow to understand so much about Mirren and John – their differences (they almost split over his intense desire to be a soldier, and her hatred of warfare), their connections, their subtle steps towards one another and their backward glances. This between two people who only had the chance to meet ten times – the reader knows from the outset that John did not return from war. The letter Mirren writes to his parents, months after his death, is quite incredibly moving. I have never lost anybody very close to me, but I shall return to this letter when I do.

It’s always a little uncomfortable reading people’s private letters, especially without their permission. Mirren was dead when this correspondence was discovered in the 1990s by her son. Here are three interesting excerpts on this topic:

[Mirren] Once I thought I could write a pretty phrase or two, but your letter with its magnificence has shattered all my illusions and makes me feel really weak. It was a fine letter; one day I hope my great-grandchildren will take the trouble to have them published for many people would read them gladly if they had the chance.

[John] Your reception of my letter is gracious and generous; your praise is very dear to me always and on this occasion it could not have been higher than by saying that many people would read my letters gladly if they had the chance. And yet the publication of our correspondence is unthinkable, for it is so essentially private to us as almost to be written in code undecipherable to others. Readers may detect a felicity of phrase and even at times magnificence, but the significance of Penelope’s design, wherein surely its chiefest value lies, must inevitably escape them unless they are supplied with a key

[John] It is a very great loss to all who read and write letters and journals that considerations of security forbid the detailed description of the lives that are being led in the multiform war. That is a loss to history and scientific record but it is no loss to literature, for writing is only worthy of that name which submits to a discipline both of substance and of form. and so perhaps, when this war’s writing comes to be read and reckoned up as literature, it may be placed in a higher norm than the indiscriminate journalism which is so well thought of now. The things that matter are not the things that happen, but rather things that grow, and literature if it is to live must deal with life directly and not indirectly through its accidents. […] And so the Journal to Mirren is not for the curious, who would find it dull indeed. It is for a lover of life, and its purpose is to try and present another life as worthy of that love.

Usually, reading collections of letters, there are all sorts of meetings or ‘phone calls which we only hear about in passing; visits which are referred to, or the building blocks of a relationship which the reader cannot grasp decades later. With Joy Street, although there are a few meetings between the couple, we are privileged to witness the majority of their growing attachment. Almost everything that was built between them was built through these letters. And because they are real, they naturally have an authenticity that no novelist could fully craft.

In a letter which John never read, sent but not received before his death, Mirren writes:
Indeed, I want you to go on being alive. Maybe we’ll never marry, but that isn’t the most important thing. You’ll go on, and you’ll give of yourself to the world, for you have the power. And I’ll go on too. If I’m ever capable of loving someone more than I love you, then there is no reason why my little ideal should be wrecked. If you die before we have had time to be together, at least I shall have the faith and love you have given me, deep rooted and eternal in my soul. And with that knowledge, I’ll never be defeated; I may fail to do as much as I hoped but I’ll never be defeated. And if I’m killed and you still love me as you do, then – I don’t know how you’ll feel. But I do know John, that you have given me something, and I, perhaps, to you, that no man or god can ever destroy. We call it faith, ideals, hope, but do we really and truly know what it is? I don’t think so, and I don’t think it matters, either. But it does matter that it is present, unforgettable, a part of my own self.

Books to get Stuck into:

–In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill: the best book about grief that I have read, or can imagine reading.

–Love Letters by Leonard Woolf & Trekkie Ritchie Parsons: the letters between Leonard and the woman he loved after Virginia are perhaps more revealing than Leonard would have liked, and a fascinating portrait of an unusual coupling.

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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My week has been slightly confused, since I’ve spent all day convinced that it was Saturday… which has essentially given me an extra day in the week. How could I have thought it was the weekend without my weekend miscellany? Book, blog post, and link coming up…

1.) The blog posts – are myriad. I mentioned earlier in the week a little blogger meet-up to welcome Thomas to our sceptr’d isle, and I thought I’d point you in the direction of the various reports of the day. Especially of interest if you like to see photos of the people behind the blogs… Here are links to the reports: Thomas, Polly, Miranda, Claire, Hayley.


2.) The link – a friend of mine mentioned that the Paris Review Interviews were now available online – here. I’ve bought the collected interviews they’ve published over the years, but now I can have a skim through for any author. Here’s some ideas for you: interviews with A.S. Byatt, E.M. Forster, Graham Greene, Milan Kundera, Iris Murdoch, P.L. Travers, Rebecca West, and P.G. Wodehouse.

3.) The book – isn’t really a book… but Mills and Boon (Heaven knows how they got my email address) sent me this image earlier in the week:

Pass the Buck

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33. The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck
I still have three birthday books to mention – my bounty is seemingly unending! – but I’ve just finished a library book, and wanted to write about that before returning it. This is quite unusual, and it seems I currently wait until all memory of a book has faded before attempting to blog about it… those who can spot a flaw in this plan, you’re not alone. This one is going straight into my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.

I am usually wary of that common book group phrase: “Well, that’s the point of book groups, isn’t it – to make us read things we wouldn’t normally read.” This is almost invariably said when people have hated a book… and, to be honest, there’s usually a reason I don’t read the books that I ‘wouldn’t normally read’. BUT I was forced to use this very expression at book group on Wednesday, concerning Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth.

I don’t know why I’d heard of Buck – possibly because she won the Nobel Prize, and this 1931 novel was a huge bestseller – but there was nothing about this novel which appealed, aside from publication date. Not realising that Buck was brought up in China, I thought this would be akin to a travel guide; the mentions of poverty, peasants, heartbreak, and deception in the blurb made this sound like a tiresome specimen of misery lit; bestselling books, let’s be honest, tend not to equate with great books. But it all just goes to show that all the signs can point in one direction, and yet the novel turn out to be completely unexpected. In the case of The Good Earth, it turned out to be unexpectedly brilliant.

The novels tells the story of a Chinese farmer, Wang Lung. The land is everything to him; it provides or withholds; it is a sign of wealth and status; it is his livelihood. This is the strongest theme of the novel, and one that survives all the human interaction. In bare bones, The Good Earth documents the descent into poverty, and raise into riches, of Wang Lung and his expanding family. They travel south to avoid starvation, begging to survive – always with the intention to return to the land they own. When they do, and when they become rich, there are other intrusions and temptations which mar their good fortune. Across 350 or so pages, the narrative eye does not wander from this family’s experience – Buck decides, wisely in my opinion, to show the state of China in the 1920s and ’30s through the world of a few individuals, rather than great political swathes.

Wang Lung lives with his father, and early in the novel he has decided to get himself a wife. This is no Austenesque tale of courtship: it has been decided before the narrative begins that Wang Lung will be married to a slave from the house of the area’s great family – meekly, uncertainly he enters these courts to collect O-lan, who is described thus by the Great and Ancient Lady of the house:

“This woman came into our house when she was a child of ten and here she has lived until now, when she is twenty years old. I bought her in a year of famine when her parents came south because they had nothing to eat. They were from the north in Shantung and there they returned, and I know nothing further of them. You see she has the strong body and the square cheeks of her kind. She will work well for you in the field and drawing water and all else that you wish. She is not beautiful but that you do not need. Only men of leisure have the need for beautiful women to divert them. Neither is she clever. But she does well what she is told to do and she has a good temper. So far as I know she is a virgin. She has not beauty enough to tempt my sons and grandsons even if she had not been in the kitchen.”
The blurb of my borrowed copy tries valiantly to turn The Good Earth into a feminist text, but it is not that. It is true that O-lan is ultimately the means of raising the family’s fortunes; it is true that she sacrifices much for her family, and is one of few in her family to remain steadfastly loyal, wise, and unselfish. But Buck doesn’t paint O-lan as a paragon, or hold Wang Lung up to disapprobation. It is the brilliance of The Good Earth, and Buck as a writer, that there is almost no sense of the author at all. Sometimes an author is evident in every word of a novel, through style or voice – and this can be either wonderful or dreadful. But I think it takes an even greater talent for the author to fade behind the characters and events, so they do not intrude at all. And this certainly isn’t because the characters’ minds take centre stage – Buck resists giving any sort of psychological insight, and instead allows events and dynamics between family members to have the most impact. Even the dialogue rarely wanders from the surface of characters’ thoughts and feelings – and while Wang Lung, sometime into marriage, ‘had learned now from that impassive square countenance to detect small changes at first invisible to him’, O-lan remains a closed book to the reader for much of the novel. A closed book psychologically, that is – it would yet be impossible not to be moved by O-lan’s life, including one moment where I gasped aloud.

If I had to choose one word to describe The Good Earth, it would indisputably be the word ‘authentic’. Presumably because Buck lived many years in China, she knew the culture inside out. Even reading it as an outsider, I felt enveloped by the culture – details I didn’t know (for example, wearing white for mourning) were mentioned, but subtly, not drawing attention to the reader’s ignorance. Somebody at book group commented that it occasionally felt as though it had been translated from Chinese – that’s how accurate the language and insights felt. Where a modern writer might feel they had to explain their own views, or condemn the sexism inherent to 1930s rural China, Buck bravely allows the characters simply to exist – without approval or disapproval. Instead there is simply the most involving and, yes, authentic narrative I have read for some time. Not a novel I would have imagined responding to thus, but I am very grateful to Yoanna for suggesting we read it – and hope to have encouraged you to do the same.

More books!

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Today I’ll be talking about a fun outing on Saturday, and some more birthday books which have found their way to me, courtesy of my brother – I think I’ve had 19 or 20 books for my birthday, which is more or less the same number as I’ve bought all year. Famine really does make you appreciate the feast.

But first – one of the nicest, and most unexpected, pleasures of blogging is meeting bloggers in person. I must have met at least 25 or 30 now (including 20+ at the UK meet-ups) and it’s always been great fun. What’s even better is when we can form some sort of welcoming party for those visiting from distant shores. So when Thomas (My Porch) put up an open invitation for UK bloggers to assemble in London and meet him, of course I was delighted and excited.

A group of us (Polly, Hannah, Claire, Hayley, Miranda, and Donna) met Thomas at the Persephone bookshop, then went for a fabulous afternoon tea at the British Museum…



Thomas, being the lovely guy that I suspected he would be, had brought us all books as presents – chosen to suit us, by careful examination of our blogs. I was so, so pleased to get Tepper Isn’t Going Out by Calvin Trillin – it was in my Amazon wishlist ever since I saw Thomas call Tepper his favourite fictional character. Little did I suspect that I’d get the book from the man himself – always a bonus when a book has what the Bodleian calls ‘notable provenance’.


And these are the lovely books my brother got me for my birthday – courtesy, once more, of that Amazon wishlist. Such a good idea:


– Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
– Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl – Jenny Wren
– Rereadings – ed. Anne Fadiman
– Beowulf on the Beach – Jack Murnighan

Pillars of the Earth DVD Competition

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Another quick post tonight – tomorrow you will hear about my London exploits, if you haven’t already spotted them on other blogs, but for today there is a competition to win one of two DVDs of Pillars of the Earth, originally a novel by Ken Follett. It’s got Ian McShane, Donald Sutherland, and Rufus Sewell in it. I haven’t actually been watching the series, since my television watching seems to be taken up by Emmerdale and Neighbours, but I know some of you are definitely interested. You can watch a trailer here – and, if you’re in Region 2 area (Europe, I assume?) feel free to enter the draw for a copy – courtesy of Momentum Worldwide.

To enter, just write in the comments which book you’d most like to see adapted…