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All Book Reviews

StuckinaBook All August 1, 2009June 26, 2025 1 Comment

Reviews by Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

StuckinaBook All July 31, 2009April 26, 2015Weekend Miscellany 12 Comments

It was fun last week, so let’s try it again. I had meant to write about a few books I’ve recently finished, but somehow it hasn’t happened. Next week, I promise.

1) This video is hilarious. I subscribe to communitychannel’s videos on YouTube, and though her humour is unfortunately sometimes what Our Vicar’s Wife would call “near the knuckle” (does anyone else use this expression?) her sketches are usually very amusing. Just watch the sketch at the beginning – I think you’ll enjoy it.

2) Do go and see a lovely review of Joyce Dennys’ Henrietta’s War on the very wonderful blog Paperback Reader. This should even please my brother Colin (who says he reads my blog but ‘skips the booky bits’) since the blog title is adapted from the Beatles song ‘Paperback Writer’. The review takes the form of a letter from Henrietta, and picks out one of my favourite moments in the book, concerning offal…

3) How have I lived this long without buying any of the gorgeous New York Review of Books Classics titles? Possibly because that’s such a mouthful. But incentive, if incentive were needed, has arrived – they currently have a 20% off sale. Actually, I had to go to Amazon because I don’t have a credit card, and so I don’t know what postage costs to the UK are. But any American readers should head that way immediately… I bought Barbara Comyns’ The Vet’s Daughter, because it’s one of hers which I don’t have yet and I hate the new Virago cover for it. But they also do all sorts of Stuck-in-a-Book favourites and would-be-favourites including to-die-for editions of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book; Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes; Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, and Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant. All of those should be pictured below, and if I’ve done things correctly, clicking on the image will take you to the NYRB page in question. My friend Erika says “They really are lovely editions–the paper is good quality and bright, the binding is tight, and it just has a good feel to it in your hands!” They should put me on commission…

I knew I loved the Scots for a reason…

StuckinaBook All July 29, 2009July 24, 2018 4 Comments

I did so enjoy all your thoughts on the Booker prize, both for and against. It does inspire very strong opinions to both sides, and so it’s nice to see some moderate ones expressed here.

This article has been doing the rounds of blogs – I saw it first on Kirsty’s Other Stories. Well, to be completely honest I saw it on her Facebook wall, but that sounds worse. This woman is my new heroine. (Though it doesn’t mention that she’s actually read any of ’em…)

In unrelated news, the most perspicacious amongst you will notice that I changed my world map provider last week. This one keeps the data for more than a few days – indefinitely, I think – and I can see that in the last week people visited Stuck-in-a-Book from 51 different countries. That’s quite humbling, since I’d probably be hard pushed to name 51 countries off the top of my head. I’m sure that quite a few came by accident, but nevertheless it’s quite a bizarre statistic to contemplate from my little room in Oxford. So, welcome denizens of Guam, Mauritius, Romania. Hello to Cyprus, Ukraine and Vietnam. And special greetings to those two readers who came all the way from that little known country ‘Europe’.

Booker

StuckinaBook All July 28, 2009July 24, 2018 14 Comments

So, the Booker longlist is out. It doesn’t seem ten minutes since the last one. Lots of places you can find out who’s on it, but I’ll copy and paste a list too… stole this from dovegreyreader, who has quite a few Booker-related posts for you to peruse, including her predictions before the longlist was announced.

Byatt, AS The Children’s BookCoetzee, J M SummertimeFoulds, Adam The Quickening MazeHall, Sarah How to paint a dead manHarvey, Samantha The WildernessLever, James Me CheetaMantel, Hilary Wolf HallMawer, Simon The Glass RoomO’Loughlin, Ed Not Untrue & Not UnkindScudamore, James HeliopolisToibin, Colm BrooklynTrevor, William Love and Summer
Waters, Sarah The Little Stranger

Quelle surprise, I have read none of ’em. In fact, the only ones I’ve been at all tempted by are the AS Byatt (very tempted) and Sarah Waters (slightly tempted), both of whom must have known they’d be on the longlist from the moment they signed the publishing deal. At least it’s a year free of new books from Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, both of whom are also guaranteed Booker spots, whatever they write.

Every year the list generates discussion about the Booker – do you follow it? Does it influence your reading? Is it a waste of time or a great part of contemporary literature? Well, I think a list is always fun, and there’s no harm in it. It will line the pockets of a few rich authors, and bring some new ones to notice. Yes, it’s a bit silly to stratify literature to the extent of calling one the best of the year, and this fascinating article (with interviews with 40 judges from 40 years of Booker prizes) is very revealing about the compromises and third-horse winners the prize entails.

For me, the fact that a book has won a Booker prize is more likely to put me off than not. I’m interested in an outsider’s sort of way, but since I read so little contemporary fiction, especially not the sort of fare which attracts Booker nominations, I just know I’d fail with most of these. When I do read modern fiction, I like it to be quirky and surreal, or studying the minutiae of human life – Booker nominations tend to be gritty and all about ‘real life’, or edgy (not the same as quirky!), or about enormous events. I prefer the James Tait Memorial Prize (which I wrote about here) based on their back list of winners.

Huge generalisations? Should I give them more leeway? Well, I know I don’t have time to read all the longlist, or even the shortlist, but perhaps one of my book groups will read the winner. And, at the moment, having read none of them, I predict that will be… The Glass Room by Simon Mawer. I don’t know anything about it, but the popular authors never win, and I like that title, and his name is Simon. I wonder if that will reasoning enough to sway the Booker panel…

Thoughts, please! What do you think of the Booker in general? And the longlist in particular? I’d love to hear.

Winners!

StuckinaBook All July 27, 2009July 24, 2018 5 Comments

I’ve done the draw for the children’s books/magazines, and the winners are as follows:

Swati wins the Story Box

Ann P. wins the Adventure Box

Gill wins the Discovery Box

Congratulations one and all! (And sorry Mum… that picture is adorable.) If you could email your addresses to simondavidthomas@yahoo.co.uk, I’ll get your books/magazines in the post as soon as I’m near a post office which is open…

A Family Affair

StuckinaBook All July 26, 2009July 24, 2018 5 Comments

I spent this evening at the Oxford Playhouse with Becca from Oxford Reader, and her mother, watching Prunella Scales, Tim West, and Sam West in A Family Affair. The show took the form of a revue, with various excerpts from plays representing the different facets of family. How nice to have a show-business couple who have been married for 45 years, and even better to have a son happy to act with them – and all three are prodigiously talented.

Through the evening we were treated to sections from:

The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
It’s All Right If I Do It – Terence Frisby
When We Were Married – J.B. Priestly
The Birthday Party – Harold Pinter
A Number – Caryl Churchill
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf – Edward Albee
‘Father William’ – Lewis Carroll

And Harold Pinter’s Family Voices in its entirety.

The event was apparently rather thrown together, since all three have been appearing in plays up and down the country, all performing yesterday and travelling to Oxford today – but that made the event more endearing. They read from a folder, but never did reading seem more like fully rehearsed acting. No, what made it endearing was the odd slip, where both Prunella and Tim called Sam “Sam” when he was playing Stan in The Birthday Party; Sam pointed out Prunella’s place in her script when she lost it, and pointed her in the right direction when she was sat on the wrong chair. All very easy-going and, indeed, familial.

A simply wonderful evening – and has made me want to investigate some of these plays further. When We Were Married and It’s All Right If I Do It were especially good – very, very funny. They’d chosen comedic sections, for the most part, and the audience roared with laughter. It’s my first time seeing Prunella Scales or Tim West on stage, though I have seen Sam West in TS Eliot’s Family Reunion. I certainly hope it’s not the last time I see any of them, separately or together – a brilliant night out.

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

StuckinaBook All July 25, 2009April 26, 2015Weekend Miscellany 11 Comments

Something new I thought I’d kick off here – at the weekend I’ll pick three or four things I’ve noticed in the week beforehand, and point you in their direction. It’ll usually be other bloggers or blog posts which I’ve enjoyed, but will also include books I’ve spotted or snippets of information I’ve been emailed.

1) First off, Libby Cone’s novel War on the Margins was published on Thursday by Duckworth. She sent me a copy ages ago, but sadly I’ve not got to it – but it’s definitely the right territory for Stuck-in-a-Book, based as it is in wartime Guernsey. All of us loved Mary Ann Shaffer’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, didn’t we? Lynne at dovegreyreader wrote about War on the Margins here, in its self-published incarnation. Isn’t it great when a self-publisher manages to get published in the conventional way as well? Libby sent me a very sweet email asking me to mention that the book was now out, suggesting I say the following: “She’s barmy! She’s driving me nuts! I haven’t been able to read it; read it for yourselves, for goodness’ sake, so she’ll leave me alone!” But I will read it one day, Libby, I will… see if you can beat me to it.

2) There are quite a few things that readers of Siab agree on, more or less – two of them are that reading is great, and that Virago Modern Classics are wonderful, when they appear in their dark-green covers. Witness the Virago collage I made a while ago:

Well, Verity (of The B Files, see left-hand column) has set up a subsidiary blog, Verity’s Virago Venture, documenting her attempt to read as many of the VMCs as possible. I can’t remember how many there are, but it’s A LOT. Go along and see her progress – authors/books already covered include Barbara Comyn’s Sisters By A River (which I wrote about in April) and the works of Antonia White.

3) I’m a little in love with Lisa’s blog A Bloomsbury Life, which has (I quote) “sporadic posts about style, travel, food, literature, gardens, eccentrics and their foibles.” It’s a quirky riot of colour, very stylishly so, and is a simply beautiful place to be. Most adored post recently is this one, in which Lisa compares the photographs taken on her travels with objects and designs around her home – how the one has influenced the other. For example, below – she has drawn connections between the beautiful saris she saw, and the way she shelves her books… beautiful. Do go and read the whole post, with lots of great photographs.

Bayard Books 2

StuckinaBook All July 23, 2009April 26, 2015 12 Comments

As promised, the giveaway! I’ll be sending off these magazines to three winners – each getting two copies of either Story Box, Adventure Box or Discovery Box.

If you have children or grandchildren, or children at your church or wherever – anybody who’d be interested – do pop your name in the comments, or email me at simondavidthomas@yahoo.co.uk . Oh, and include which of the three Boxes you’d be interested in, please. Story Box is for 3-6 yrs.; Adventure Box for 6-9 yrs.; Discovery Box for 9-12 yrs. Of course the reading age of the child in question may be out of their actual age bracket…

Taking a bit of a risk here, as it’s not the usual kind of thing I write about on Stuck-in-a-Book, so please do pop your name in, even if you’ve not commented before!

Bayard Books

StuckinaBook All July 22, 2009April 26, 2015Various 0 Comment

Before I start – all the books/magazines mentioned today will form a giveaway competition tomorrow – so do come back for that!

I’ve had a little selection from Bayard Books for quite a while, so apologies for not writing about them sooner. I don’t have children, of course, and my own childhood was spent immersed in a diet of Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton and more or less nothing else – so I don’t posit myself as a children’s books expert. But these look really good quality, well put together, and good fun. Not usual fare for Stuck-in-a-Book, but perhaps of interest…

First off, I must alter my semantics. These aren’t actually classified as books, but rather as magazines – they come with issue numbers – but there’s so much in them, and they’re so durable, that the word magazine doesn’t seem to do them justice. At £3.95 each, they’re more or less magazine price, but book value. (Gosh, I sound like a marketing wizard…)

Bayard Books sell these magazines for three separate ages ranges.
Story Box: 3-6 yrs. (www.storyboxbooks.com)
Adventure Box: 6-9 yrs. (www.adventureboxbooks.com)
Discovery Box: 9-12 yrs. (www.discoveryboxbooks.com)

Each magazine comes with an astonishing amount of stuff in it, and a great variety. Let’s have a little look through one of each of those three categories…

Story Box
-Issue 131 kicks off with a rather adorable story about ‘Taffy’s bag of secrets’, with some really charming illustrations.

-Then onto ‘How Are Babies Made?’ – gosh, do they really tell 3-6 year olds this now? A sciency section is regular throughout the issues – another has How Do Bones Grow. Given my rather dreadful biological knowledge, I can probably pick up a thing or two.
-SamSam ‘the smallest of the big heroes’ seems to be an ongoing cartoon – in this issue he deals with cloning, as you do.
-Alligators! Some fun cartoons and facts about them.

-And then, of course, the wonderful old standards of dot-to-dot and mazes, secret codes, colouring spots and picture puzzles. Since this is a magazine, there’s even space to send in your own drawings.

Adventure Books

-Cats! The story in Adventure Books is much longer, with more words and smaller pictures, appropriate for the age group. And it’s about cats, at least in issue 133, which has instantly won me over.
-CraftBox section – I’m so glad that children still make things, not just play them on computers. Nintendo and suchlike (I would be behind the times, but I never knew anything about computer consoles, we never had one) can’t live up to making something from an old plastic bottle, in my opinion. In this case, a cow money box. Economical and ecological – perfect at the moment.

-The rest of the magazine is filled with puzzles and a cartoon. I don’t think Adventure Box offers quite the same scope as Story Box, but by the time children are 6-9 this sort of product is read alongside other things (like Enid Blyton! Do it!) rather than forming the majority of their reading.

Discovery Box
And finally…
-Issue 133 looks at volcanoes, with plenty of great illustrations, including a fold-out. There’s an interview with a volcanologist, an experiment to try, and so forth.
-Then onto albatrosses!
-And jeans! The range of topics covered by these magazines is phenomenal, and very impressive. Not to mention thorough – the section on jeans, for example, is far more interesting than I’d have thought the topic could be.
-And then the ‘World’ section. If there’s something I’m worse at than biology, it’s geography – I didn’t even know where Tanzania was, now I can tell you its capital (Dodoma), the fact that it has 126 different languages (eek!) and, most excitingly for me, it has flamingos. I do love flamingos.
-Oh, I’ve always loved these – a Choose Your Own Adventure style story, where your choices navigate you through the story (in this case, of an Egyptian Pharaoh).

Well.
I hope that’s been thorough enough an overview for you! I didn’t think I could do justice to the depth and breadth of Bayard Books without doing something like this. While I don’t think these magazines (especially the ones for older children) should in any way replace traditional book reading, they are a brilliant way of adding extra reading. Especially if the child in question has a scientific bent – and I definitely got the impression that Discovery Box would appeal to the types of boys and girls attracted by explosions and machines and so forth, which isn’t for everyone, perhaps.

If you have children or grandchildren in those age brackets, why not buy an issue or two, and see what they think? Even better, come back tomorrow for the chance to win two magazines. I’ll be giving them away in three sets – 2 x Story Box; 2 x Adventure Box; 2 x Discovery Box. See you then.

Fabiola

StuckinaBook All July 21, 2009April 26, 2015 7 Comments

I know I promised more posts about children’s books this week – and for a taster, see Karen’s post today on Cornflower Books, which might well spill over here later – but I realised that I still hadn’t written about the Fabiola exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. It’s open until 20th September, so if you’re in London and have any chance to get to it, I really recommend that you do.

I saw this advertised in The Week magazine, and was hooked by the idea. The artist, Francis Alys, has collected homemade images of the 4th-century Saint Fabiola (patron saint of abused women, I believe) from around the world. They are from flea markets, antique shops, and private collections – and are all of the same image. The original painting – which portrays Fabiola’s head and headwear, facing left, in profile – was a nineteenth century work, and has been lost. The image is replicated in all of the 300+ pieces in this exhibition – paintings, embroideries, miniatures, jewellery, even one crafted from seeds.

But, of course, this is not replication. Each version is unique – varying in period, style, talent, resources. It is simply stunning, seeing this image in all the works, but different in each. You can see disparate visions of what beauty is, or what sainthood should look like. It is, quite simply, the best, most affecting, and most striking exhibition I’ve ever seen. Unforgettable. And think of all the time Alys must have spent on this – and the triumph and excitement she must have felt when coming across another find in a flea market! Read more about it here, and do beg, steal or borrow to get to London to see it. Oh, and it’s free!

Has anyone else seen this exhibition? It’s been in a few places around the world, before the National Portrait Gallery. I don’t know if all the sites for it have used the same turquoise colour on the walls, but it was a stroke of brilliance to do so – the contrast with the orangey-reds of the works is the final touch to a fascinating exhibition.