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Have any of you seen the first part of Emma, the BBC’s latest costume drama? And last for a while, if reports are to be believed. There hasn’t been a big production of Emma for over a decade, so Romola Garai has rooted through the bonnet cupboard, and a four part series started last weekend.

I’ve watched the first episode, and I enjoyed it a lot, though am still more or less straddling the fence. I love Romola Garai in everything she does – mostly I Capture the Castle, but also Amazing Grace, Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel, and Atonement. She makes a feisty, self-confident Emma, and could turn out to be rather great.

Michael Gambon is a wonderful hypochondriac as Mr. Woodhouse, wrapped in scarves and uncertainty. Tamsin Greig wasn’t quite as funny as I know she can be, but perhaps her Miss Bates is played more for pathos than humour.

My issues? Their Mr. Knightley (Johnny Lee Miller) was young and handsome and everything a modern film hero should be, but not remotely like Mr. Knightley is. Miller is much too young, and the match is much too suitable… on the page, I found it a little creepy, since they are much more brother and sister than anything else… Still, Miller may do for Knightley was Alan Rickman appears to have done for Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, and made a rather bizarre, unromantic match seem like a dream come true.

And the other thing… the language was so often too modern. I found myself muttering to the television, ‘is there no historical advisor?’ When the credits rolled, I saw that there was… and he is my tutor at Magdalen! Well, there you go.

All in all, fun and fresh way to ‘do’ Emma, and only slight misgivings. I’ll certainly be watching the rest. (Any UK readers who missed it, the programme is available through BBC i-Player.)

Some would say that I don’t absolutely, definitely, incontrovertibly *need* any more books, especially after my recent haul in Edinburgh, but going through two of the cheapest bookshops in London left me with quite a few, then a trip to Charing Cross Road revealed a couple of gems which it would have been foolish to leave behind… I’m going to start with them, in fact.

Like a lot of us, I loved Henrietta’s War by Joyce Dennys, recently republished in the much-beloved Bloomsbury Group series. When in Henry Pordes Books, on Charing Cross Road, I spotted the name ‘Joyce Dennys’… only true book-lovers will recognise that leap in your stomach you get, when you spot a book you never expected to find. And there were two of ’em… Repeated Doses (a sequel to a book I don’t have, Mrs. Dose the Doctor’s Wife) and the sublimely titled Economy Must Be Our Watchword. They were both *quite* pricey, but – in an unprecedented act of technological capability – I crept into a corner of the bookshop and used my mobile ‘phone to check whether or not Amazon and Abebooks had cheaper copies. They didn’t – in fact Economy Must Be Our Watchword doesn’t seem even to be available anywhere – and these beautiful 1930s books, complete with Dennys’ quirky illustrations, were quickly mine.

Less exciting, but still great, were my other finds:

In the Springtime of the Year – Susan Hill
A Bit of Singing and Dancing – Susan Hill
– I will write about Howards End is on the Landing soon, promise, but it’s already sent me away to find more of her work. The first of these is one I really want to read.

Saraband – Eliot Bliss
Cousin Rosamund – Rebecca West
Beyond the Glass – Antonia White
– Three Virago Modern Classics which I couldn’t leave behind. Never heard of the Eliot Bliss or her/his book, but it charts the emotional life of a girl in the 1930s, so the blurb says. The other two are sequels to books I haven’t read, so might be on the back burner for a while… but were found in the wonderful Book & Comic Exchange in Notting Hill Gate, which has a large three-room basement of books for 50p each.

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
– a friend recommended this to me, but now several others have told me not to bother… what do you think?

The Lottery and other stories – Shirley Jackson
– this beautiful new edition, already secondhand! You’ll have realised by now that I think Jackson is great – looking forward to delving into these. I have read ‘The Lottery’ online, and it is beyond chilling… you can do the same, here.

The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
– I struggled with The Last September a while ago, and took great encouragement from your similar tales of woe. But Susan Hill says this is her best, and at 40p for a rather nice paperback, I thought I could give Lizzie another shot…

Family and Friends – Anita Brookner
– Susan Hill has a lot to answer for. HEioTL has sent me off in Anita B’s direction…

And I also came away with three lovely gifts, celebrating our fifth birthday:

Hostages to Fortune – Elizabeth Cambridge
– my second favourite Persephone book, after Richmal Crompton’s, but somehow I didn’t own a copy… thank you Nichola!

Virginia Woolf: An Illustrated Anthology
– everything Woolf is good in my book – thanks Barbara!

The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac – Eugene Field
– a late-19th Century book with a rather apt title – many thanks Sherry!

As always, any comments and thoughts on my new arrivals? Thanks everyone!

Ok, have you got your copies of Manservant and Maidservant by Ivy Compton-Burnett? Or perhaps you have it under the original American title, Bullivant and the Lambs. Either way, there is still sometime to get prepared, even though I’m shouting GO! at the top of my voice. Because I don’t think we can all agree to read the novel in the same week, I’m decreeing the whole of October as your time limit…. I AM excited!

So, over October, secure your copy, and get reading. The beautiful New York Review of Books Classics edition is available in the US, but also from some bookshops in England – I spotted two copies in the Kensington Persephone Bookshop, for example. Otherwise, plenty of secondhand editions to find. It was first published in 1947, but has been reprinted a fair number of times.

And, in the first week of November, I’ll encourage everyone involved to post on their experiences with the novel – either in comments on my blog, or – of course – on your own blogs. You’re welcome to post before then, obviously you can do as you like, but it might be fun to all write about Manservant and Maidservant at the same time.

This experience might well be giving up on page two, or it might be sheer delight and ordering all of her novels – or, of course, something in between. I’ve not read it yet, I don’t know how I’ll react. But it will be exciting to know that we’re all reading ICB together – I’ll remind everyone about halfway through October, and see how you’re going…

Feel free to comment now, to reassure me that I’m not reading all on my own, and let the festivities begin!

I’ll be adding another book to my 50 Books You Must Read… list soon, but I’m re-reading it at the moment. But I wanted to share the cover image with you, just to drop a hint, and get you in the right frame of mind. It’s a photograph by Lisa Johansson, with Millennium Images. I’m probably not allowed to reproduce it, but it is for promotional purposes, so perhaps they won’t mind…

The book itself only uses part of this image, and oddly I had the impression the girl was facing away from me, in the detail used. Hmm. To see a collection of Lisa Johansson’s photographs, which are all similarly haunting and evocative, you can register at the Millennium Images website, and do a search for her.

Any ideas about the book?? A further clue – it was first published in 1962. Don’t cheat now…

I recently finished the extraordinarily good Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill, which I’ll write about soon, but it has inspired a few quick posts. A book full of short chapters about Hill’s books, reading, books in general, it provides lots of fascinating ideas for blog posts…

Towards the end of the book, Susan Hill decides to compile a list of forty books she’d choose, should she only be able to read those for the rest of her life. Not taking the get-out of Desert Island Discs, the Bible and Shakespeare’s Complete Works are not givens – not, in fact, is she allowed to count all of Shakespeare’s plays as one book. And so she tries to choose one…

Which led me to thinking: if I could only choose one Shakespeare play to read for the rest of my life, which would it be? Like Hill, I made a shortlist. Unlike Hill, I haven’t read them all (though I have read 24 of them, so quite a few to choose from… and that number includes no history plays). Here is my shortlist:

Much Ado About Nothing
The Taming of the Shrew
Hamlet
All’s Well That Ends Well
Cymbeline
Othello

Some I love (like Twelfth Night) I know I would get tired of. Some I admire (i.e. The Tempest) but cannot much like. Some (The Comedy of Errors; As You Like It; Titus Adronicus…) were never in with a chance.

Which to keep. Much Ado About Nothing is my favourite Shakespeare play, but… if I had to read Beatrice and Benedict’s exchanges over and over again for the rest of my life, would I still find them funny, or simply infuriating? Would Hero’s silence and Claudio’s willingness to marry penitently someone who looks a bit like Hero not become more ridiculous each time? Cymbeline… I love the final scene, but that’s not enough to keep it. Hamlet. Hamlet, Hamlet, Hamlet. So much there, but… I still just want to shake him, and tell him to stop being a silly little boy.

In the end, I was surprised. The one to keep is not my favourite, but I have chosen… The Taming of the Shrew. Because I am continually fascinated by the question: was Katharine complicit? How should it be interpreted? So much that can be done, so many different readings, and often quite funny, to boot. Who’d have thought? I expect my choice will change in years to come. It’ll be interesting to keep track.

And now, of course, over to you. Shortlists, please, and the one play you’d keep…

I had a lovely time in the Lake District and Edinburgh – absolutely falling in love with that city, after spending more or less three whole days tramping its streets. I met Karen from Cornflower, which was an absolute joy. We *had* met previously, when I’d only been blogging for only a fortnight… now that we e-know each other quite well, we were able to have a really nice, bookish chat, and delicious lunch. And I was nosey and asked to look at her bookshelves… lots to approve of, and talk about, and generally all very nice!

We popped into a nearby bookshop, where Karen bought one book on my recommendation/insistence (Provincial Daughter by RM Dashwood, a sequel to EM Delafield’s Provincial Lady books, and by EMD’s daughter, ‘Vicky’ herself). I bought, um, five… and in the five days I was away, bought seventeen books. Cough. Well, you KNEW this about me when we became friends, you can’t judge me now…

Here they are!

1. Everyday Quotations from Shakespeare
Goes through the plays one by one, showing where ‘quotations from Shakespeare in everyday use’ originated. Amusing to see which quotations were apparently in everyday use in the 1920s.

2. Elizabeth and Her German Garden – Elizabeth von Arnim
I already have the Virago copy, but this lovely little edition from 1905ish was too nice to leave, at a £1

3. The Gate of Angels – Penelope Fitzgerald
Bought on the encouragement of Karen (Cornflower blog). I loved The Bookshop by PF last year.

4. The Moving Toyshop – Edmund Crispin
Again, at least five people have told me to read this. And it came looking like one of the old-fashioned green Penguin Crimes, so I was smitten.

5. To the Is-land – Janet Frame
Volume One of her autobiography. More on Frame below…

6. Nightingale Wood – Stella Gibbons
General view is that this is sub-Cold Comfort Farm, but it was in a charity shop, so I thought why not…

7. The Other Side of the Bridge – Mary Lawson
I was very impressed by Crow Lake (wrote about here) and still get a fair few people coming to S-i-a-b through Google searches for it.

8. Manservant and Maidservant – Ivy Compton-Burnett
I’ve got my copy!

9. Robert and Helen – Elizabeth Jenkins
Since I was enjoying The Tortoise and the Hare…

10. Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
Been meaning to read this New Zealand author for ages, and I love novels about madness. I think I first saw her name on dovegreyreader’s blog?

11. Singled Out – Virginia Nicholson
Why don’t I already own this? Already been talked about lots across the blogosphere, I wanted a book by which to remember the great little independent shop in Grasmere – chose this one. The shop, Sam Read’s, had only one copy of each book, but they’d been wisely and lovingly chosen. And included Miss Hargreaves…

12. Three Fantasies – John C. Powys
Looks like it might be useful for my research… apparently he uses everyday situations to explore the fantastic.

13. Adeline Mowbray – Amelia Opie
1804 novel based on the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Need to read more from this period, and having appreciated Janet Todd’s non-fiction Death and the Maidens about the Shelley/Wollstonecraft circle, this could be a winner.

14. Drawn From Life – EH Shepard
The second volume of Shepard’s illustrated autobiography – I remember the first being charming, the writing as well as EHS’s superlative drawings.

15. The Jasmine Farm – Elizabeth von Arnim
Another nice old edition of an E von A..

16. The Egg and I – Betty Macdonald
Heard good things about this, and it had a lovely cover…

17. The Rebecca Notebooks – Daphne du Maurier
I’ve had my eye on this for ages… every step I take with DdM seems to go downhill after Rebecca, so hopefully this will redress the balance.

A few months ago I wrote about Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Parents and Children, and a few of you said you hadn’t read the great lady before, but would be interested… I’m looking at you, farmlanebooks, Simon S, Paperback Reader, and Pamela Terry! I recently read Robert Liddell’s Elizabeth and Ivy, about the friendship between Elizabeth Taylor and Ivy C-B, after seeing the book mentioned in Nicola Beauman’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor (reviewed here). It’s an interesting book, mostly because Liddell had the (possibly unique) advantage of being friends with both writers, but it’s also rather clumsy at times. He quotes a lot of the letters, and Taylor had a disconcerting habit of transcribing lengthy conversations in her letters… quoting layers of quoting gets rather confusing. Still, a good resource.

But that’s not what I’m writing about – since some of you expressed interest in ICB, I wondered if you’d got any further, and whether or not people would be interested in doing a group read of one of her novels? You’ll either love or hate, and you’ll know by about page 10. I’ll do this quite informally, but I’d like to know who’d be interested – we could read, say, Manservant and Maidservant alongside each other, comparing notes, and it will act as a first step into the world of Ivy. And, quite possibly, a last step – but I definitely think you should test the water. For my money, Ivy C-B is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. And trust the prophet not to be appreciated in her own land – scandalously, none of her books are in print in the UK, though the New York Review of Books Classics does a rather beautiful edition of Manservant and Maidservant, pictured. (It was originally published in the US as Bullivant and the Lambs, but has been reprinted under the original, English title).

Let me know if you’re interested, and hopefully we’ll get something going before long!