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Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Well, after promising my return yesterday, I was out late last night at my church small group, and somehow slumping in front of a soap opera took precedence over writing a proper book review. Apologies… And for those keeping tabs on the state of all things technological chez Stuck-in-a-Book, the current score is Laptop: 1, iPod: 0. Yes, in a fit of pique, my iPod won’t turn on, and none of the usual methods of fixing it seem to work. It did this a while ago and just started working again after a while, so fingers crossed… or I might have to go without new shoes for a while.

For those who know things about computers, unlike me, I opted for a Compaq CQ61-427SA. Goodness knows what that means, but it’s nice and shiny.

Right. Enough of that – as we all know, computers are just a means to an end, and that end is books. So let’s get on with the book, the blog post, the link…

1.) The book – is Stephen Benatar’s Wish Her Safe At Home, which my friend’s family gave me (yes, I did *choose* it, but that doesn’t count as me *buying* it). I read an article about this novel in The Week magazine, which was reprinting this article from The Times, I believe. As well as sounding irresistible from this description – ‘a gripping and haunting story about a middle-aged, genteel woman called Rachel Waring who inherits a Georgian house in Bristol and slowly goes mad’ – I was also impressed by Benatar’s tireless and heartfelt promotion of the novel. And, let’s face it, I was won over by the ever-beautiful NYRB Classics editions. I’m not on their payroll, but I should be…

2.) The blog post – isn’t especially new now, but I was sans laptop for over a week, and in the blogosphere a week is a long time. So cast your minds back to the 5th May, those heady days before the election, and wander over to Polly (aka Novel Insights) and this post on forgotten authors. More specifically – and even more up my street – Polly has collected suggestions of novels by authors more famous for their work for children. That’s a bit of a mouthful, but I hope you know what I mean. Novels by authors known for their children’s writing. Not writing by their children, but… oh, I’m sure we’re on the same page now. It’s no secret that I love non-children’s work by A.A. Milne and Richmal Crompton, but there are plenty of others. In fact, I wrote A Level coursework on the topic, now I think of it… ahh, memories.

3.) The link – is the one for which I can never think of anything… but this YouTube video is quite funny. Oh, they seem to have removed the import-videos-into-Blogger function, but you can see it if you click here. It’s David Mitchell (the comedian, not the novelist) on the topic of Punctuation. Thanks Mel for showing it to me!

New laptop!

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Just to let you know that I am the proud owner of a new laptop, so hopefully will be back to regular posting soon. Hurrah! They said it would come between 9-5, and of course it came about 3.45pm, after I’d been anxiously waiting all day…

Lots and lots of books waiting for me to write about them, so hopefully there will be a lot of reviews going up soon (before, as usual, I forget every last thing about them).

Off to play with my new toy…

Come on, Comyns

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Very few authors mentioned here elicit such an enthused response as Barbara Comyns. Usually posts attract comments in the 48 hours after they’re posted, and that’s that – but posts about Comyns continue to get fans popping up for months and years afterwards, waving the flag for Bidford-on-Avon’s finest.

I’ve read five novels by Comyns now, and have a few waiting – on Saturday, both Polly and Claire got hold of copies of The Vet’s Daughter (Polly got it in the book exchange, from me!) and we thought it would be fun to do a read-along. Quite short notice, but we’ll be kicking off at the beginning of June. If you can get yourself a copy before then, do join us. It’s nice and short, and I’ve yet to read a dud Comyns! Start posting reviews around the second week of June, although it’s all quite relaxed.

There should be quite a few copies around, both sides of the Atlantic. It was a Virago back in the 1980s, and has recently been reprinted in a beautiful NYRB Classics edition – which is the one I’ll be reading. Do let us know if you’re planning on reading along…

Bloggers Galore!

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My laptop is still not working, although there is hope on the horizon, but I’m managing to sneak onto the internet for a few minutes to give you a little round-up of bookish things from the past few days.

First things first, Saturday saw the first UK Book Bloggers’ Meet-Up – hopefully the first of many. Although numbers dwindled steadily, due to all sorts of unfortunate reasons, there were still 18 of us who met up. Some started at the Persephone Books shop (where I resisted temptation manfully, partly aided by the fact that I have twenty-three unread Persephones at home – and partly be sublimating my desire to buy into an over-zealous desire to recommend) and then we moved onto The Lamb, a very nice pub with an elegant function room. We talked books, and exchanged ones we’d brought wrapped up (picture below, courtesy of Marcia). I did well – receiving Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier, and also Nightrunners of Bengal by John Masters: David Nolan had won this on Gaskella’s blog, but very kindly asked Annabel (Gaskella) to pass it onto me – thank you David, and thank you Annabel!


The bloggers present were, apart from me:

Annabel (Gaskella)
Boof (The Book Whisperer)
Claire (Paperback Reader)
David (Follow the Thread)
Guy (Pursewarden)
Hayley (Desperate Reader)
Jackie (Farm Lane Books)
Katy (5th Estate)
Kim (Reading Matters)
Kirsty (Other Stories)
Lizzy/Marcia (Lizzy’s Literary Life)
Naomi (Bloomsbury Bell)
Polly (Novel Insights)
Rachel (Book Snob)
Sakura (Chasing Bawa)
Simon (Savidge Reads)
Verity (The B Files / Verity’s Virago Venture)

Do go and see them, they’re all wonderful. And fear not if you weren’t able to make this meet-up – we’re already talking about the next one, which will hopefully be in Oxford in the summer. The prize for furthest-distance-travelled went to Marcia this time, all the way from Glasgow to London – who will win the prize next time? Although it’s got ‘UK’ in the title, anybody fancying getting on a ‘plane is very welcome…

In other news… I’ve been meaning to mention Nymeth’s 1930s Mini-Challenge – basically the idea is to read at least one novel from the 1930s before July 18th. The challenge actually started about a month ago, but I forgot to post it in a Weekend Miscellany – better late than never! Now, it’s no hardship for me to read something from the 1930s. It’s probably the decade from which I read most, although review copies etc. now slant things towards modern-day as well. But I thought I’d pick a novel in particular to represent this challenge. It was recommended by my (non-blogging) friend Clare, and is Images in a Mirror by Sigrid Undset. I don’t know much about it, but Clare says it is right up my street, and she knows my tastes pretty well by now. I’ll be writing about it before too long – and to sign up for Nymeth’s challenge, pop along here.

Little Boy Lost

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Well, I’m still heading back to healthiness (though still not eating much – could be a cheap day out tomorrow!) and have managed to finish another Persephone. This is the one which lots of people raved about last year, and which made it to the top of my Persephone Must Read List. Oh, and it’s short. Step forward Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski.


Like Miss Ranskill Comes Home, this novel is from the late-1940s – but while Todd’s novel offers an unusual perspective on the war, Laski turns her eye to the chaos of the post-war world. Hilary – whose wife Lisa was killed by the Gestapo – is visited by another underground activist and told that his (Hilary’s) son is missing. Hilary has only seen his son once, the day after he was born. The rest of the novel follows Hilary to Paris as he tries to track down his son, and work out whether or not the boy he finds (Jean) is indeed his son.

Hilary is fairly taciturn, self-absorbed, and not particularly alert to the feelings of others – but he is someone still a very sympathetic character; even for someone like me who doesn’t have children and can’t tap into the desperation of his search. It doesn’t hurt, on the sympathy front, that Hilary is described as:

a fast reader and dreaded nothing more than to be stranded without print. He would read anything sooner than nothing, fragments of sporting news torn up in a lavatory, a motor journal on a hotel table, an out-of-date evening paper picked up in a bus. He would covetously eye the books held by strangers in trains, forcing them into conversation until he could offer his own read book in exchange for something new. But if, by ill-luck, he was reduced to reading nothing but haphazard chance finds that offered his mind only the bare fact of being print, he would become dreary, unhappy, uneasy, like a gourmet who suffers from indigestion after eating bad food.

That description could make me forgive Hilary a lot – even, almost, when he starts criticising Winnie-the-Pooh as unreadable. I can only assume Laski hadn’t read it of late, otherwise my opinion of her has gone down a lot….

Although the plot is fairly simple, its handling is beautifully subtle, especially as the novel progresses. Some of the earlier scenes are closer to thriller than ‘literary fiction’, for want of a better word – in that they seem to be about plot rather than character. But once Hilary has found Jean, their parallel emotional journeys are drawn brilliantly well. Hilary is reluctant to become attached to a child who might not be his; Jean is unused to any special attention, but is wary of accepting it with its unpredictability. It’s all done quite beautifully.

With all this subtlety, it is such a shame that Laski crams in a ridiculous last-minute character and accompanying quandary. I shan’t reveal too much, but it comes down to Hilary having to decide between lust and love, but the lust aspect is insultingly unconvincing and the character representing it seems the afterthought to an afterthought.

Putting this aside (and the novel would have been so much better without it) Little Boy Lost is an exceptional novel, and I’m very grateful to all those who waved flags for it last year. Now, should I go and add another tick to the poll?

Back on track…

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Thank you for all your messages of sympathy – I am feeling very drained, but much better. But – to add insult to injury – my laptop chose yesterday to die. Few people understand computers less than I do, so I shall be begging my friend to ‘have a look at it’ (somehow I feel a stern glance from someone who Knows What He’s Doing will cause the computer to work). My housemate has kindly lent me her laptop, but it’s got the world’s teeniest tiniest keyboard. That’s all right for her, because she is herself teeny and tiny, but it will lead to me making all manner of typos, methinks…

I have not been entirely inactive during Persephone Reading Week. I’m not, perhaps, quite as far as I’d hoped to be – but I have managed to re-read Miss Ranskill Comes Home (1946) by Barbara Euphan Todd. I know, I know, re-reading when there are so many Persephones I’ve yet to read – but my book group are discussing the novel this month (and I didn’t even suggest it!) and I felt like revisiting.


Miss Ranskill Comes Home was the third Persephone book I read, after Family Roundabout and Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day and it’s just over six years since I read it. Is it as good as I remember? In a word: yes.

Miss Nona Ranskill is returning to England after four years on a desert island. If that sounds far-fetched, then run with it anyway – somehow Todd is able to make you accept the situation and see what happens. She had fallen overboard, whilst trying to rescue a hat (which she didn’t much like anyway) and was washed up on the island – where ‘the Carpenter’, also known as Reid, had been for some time already. The novel opens with Miss Ranskill having a makeshift funeral for the Carpenter, so we never meet him firsthand, but his voice permeates Miss R’s mind and his kind and sympathetic voice recurs throughout the novel.

And so Miss Ranskill heads off in the boat the Carpenter had made, and is eventually rescued and brought back to England. The desert island idea, though interesting, is really just a way of having Miss Ranskill turn up at home in the middle of the Second World War without any idea that it is going on. For this is the main gist of the novel: how surreal and foreign the war seems to one not in the know.

The first person she re-encounters is a school-friend Marjorie, who seems never to have heard of Nona’s ‘death’, and is described as ‘her development being arrested midway through the last term in the sixth form’. She reminds me a little of the women in E.M. Delafield’s The War Workers, who are selfish in their ‘self-sacrifice’, although Marjorie is probably just caught up in the excitement of regulations and hierarchies – able to relive her school days through them. And of course, these are all mysterious to Miss Ranskill. She doesn’t understand rationing or black-out curtains; ‘prohibited area’ or air raid sirens. Having anticipated coming home for so long, she is disturbed to find home so very different.

And alongside all this, of course, Miss R is comparing everything to her island experience. I liked the odd unexpected touch Todd threw in, such as:

A flash of red in a draper’s window caught her eye and she stopped to look. The sight of a jersey-suit in soft vermilion made her realise how much she had missed all the red shades of the world and how tired she was of blue and grey.I think Miss Ranskill Comes Home was a very brave book to publish in 1946, in its unusual perspective on a very recent war: it refers to soldiers as ‘hired assassins’, for instance. And yet, the novel was apparently extremely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. And has it translated to the 21st century? Possibly it is even more appropriate now. For people like me, whose parents weren’t alive in the Second World War, our only knowledge of it can be second-hand. We experience some of Miss Ranskill’s confusion, as she encounters wartime England, and perhaps feel ourselves equally uncertain and alien. While Todd’s 1946 readership would have been amused by Miss Ranskill’s cluelessness, as the years continue the reader can empathise more and more with her uneasiness.

Miss Ranskill Comes Home was chosen for book group after a discussion between myself and another member as to whether or not any of the Persephone books were out-and-out funny. This seemed to me to be the biggest dividing line between Persephone and the Bloomsbury Group reprints – both are excellent, but the latter is, in general, much funnier. And I think that’s probably still true for me – Miss Ranskill has plenty of comedy, but it is comedy heavily dosed with pathos and even a tinge of the tragic. Certain scenes, such as that where Miss R tries and fails to give a speech to a local society on Life on a Desert Island, are painful to read in their awkward sadness. But the novel still manages to have plenty of light-hearted moments alongside – all the rush of emotion of encountering a ‘brave new world’, I suppose.

And, which is more important, there are some very cute kittens. Now, that’s the kind of hard-nosed reviewing you’ve come to expect, isn’t it?

Persephone Reading Week: on hold…

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I’ve been struck down with food poisoning or a bug or something, so I’m afraid Persephone Reading Week is going to be on hold here for a bit, until I feel human again… but do keep voting in the poll (or, rather, vote if you haven’t voted yet!) and I’ll concentrate on being healthy enough to attend the UK Book Bloggers’ Meet-Up on Saturday…

A Persephone Poll…

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I was intending to write my first Persephone review tonight, but have been distracted by various things today and thus not finished my first yet, not by a long chalk… so instead, I thought I’d experiment with a poll.

Here it is – let me know which Persephone Books you’ve read! You should be able to check as many as you like. I haven’t included cookery books, as they’re more for reference than read-all-the-way-through, and I haven’t included authors’ names – for reasons of space. Get ticking!

Which Persephone Books have you read?

Persephone Reading Week

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Happy Bank Holiday to those it affects – and Happy Persephone Reading Week, which is just kicking off! Thanks to Claire and Verity for organising it. For those not in the know, we’ll spend the week reading as many or as few Persephone Books as we can, posting reviews and thoughts and competitions etc. – all in praise of that very wonderful publisher. In the incredibly unlikely event that you don’t know who Persephone are, see more here.

So, this post is to see which Persephone Books you’re planning on reading? I was going to be all spontaneous, but got less so as I thought about it. I’m definitely re-reading Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd, because my book group are discussing it in a fortnight’s time. I’m keen to read Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski, and it’s getting ridiculous how often I’ve intended to read Saplings by Noel Streatfeild. What with Jude the Obscure on the go, that might be more than enough for the week… we’ll see.

Let me know if you’re joining in (those four of you who I already know won’t be, don’t worry about letting me know!) and which books you’re considering… or if you fancy a recommendation, I’ll do my best!

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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This week’s miscellany comes to you on a Saturday morning, because I was a dirty stop-up last night, and didn’t get back from London until about 2am. What *would* my mother say. Whilst in London, I had the very great pleasure of dinner with the lovely Claire (Paperback Reader) and the equally lovely Teresa (one half of Shelf Love – a pun it took me two years to get). Teresa was over visiting from the US of A – a brief discussion ensued which revealed my total lack of geographical knowledge about the US; thank goodness we didn’t start on the counties of England – and it was very nice to meet her, and see Claire again – thanks guys! When we left each other, we went to the extremes of the cultural spectrum. They went to see Macbeth at the Globe; I went with my friend Phil (also responsible for my blog feed appearing on Twitter, thanks Phil!) to see The Room: ‘The Best Worst Film Ever Made’. It’s written, directed, and starred in by Tommy Wiseau, a man without any discernible talent – unless unquashable self-belief is a talent. They hold screenings for people to mock it – and the cinema was sold out. Audience Participation includes:
Throwing plastic spoons at the screen whenever a framed picture of a spoon appears. Which they do. A lot. There were literally hundreds, probably thousands, of spoons.Shouting ‘Meanwhile, in San Francisco’ whenever another shot of San F appears.Shouting ‘Hello, Denny!’ and ‘Bye, Denny!’ whenever said character enters or leaves a room.Shouting ‘Who the heck are you?’ when a character is replaced half-way through the film by another actor, who looks nothing like the first guy.Mocking the film’s misogyny by shouting ‘because you’re a woman’ at the end of many and various lines of dialogue.One character says how much he likes ‘The candles, the music, and your sexy dress.’ None of these things are in the scene – so, naturally, it provokes the united audience reaction “What candles? What music? What sexy dress?”Joining in with this particular scene…etc. etc. etc.!
So, yes, lots of shouting. And not remotely literary. But one of the most fun evenings I’ve had for a while…

Oh dear, I’ve just got distracted by looking up The Room on Wikipedia, and then reading interviews and articles about it… when instead I should be telling you about a book, a blog post, and a link…

1.) The blog post – is over at Cornflower Books, where Karen is trying to create a profile for the ‘typical’ reader of her blog, by asking three questions… go and answer, it’s fun!

2.) The book – arrived yesterday, courtesy of Hayley at Desperate Reader, as I won it in a competition. Thanks Hayley! It’s Andrina and other stories by George Mackay Brown. I’m always on the look-out for more short stories, and keen to read more Scottish writers too, so I’m intrigued by this one. Despite my love of some short story writers, somehow I hardly ever get around to reading collections – I’ll make sure I do better with this one. Read what Hayley had to say about the book here.

3.) The link – I’m afraid I haven’t come across anything notable and bookish this week. So, on the off-chance that you’re still intrigued by The Room… click here.

And don’t forget that Persephone Reading Week kicks off on Monday… I just hope you haven’t been foolish and scheduled in Jude the Obscure for the same week…