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The Book Thief

StuckinaBook All , 6 Comments

Thanks for all your feedback on covers yesterday – I find this sort of thing really interesting, the thought and research which must go into cover design.

Onto the contents. I had to read The Book Thief very quickly, for my book group, but I hope that didn’t affect my enjoyment of it too much. Enjoyment perhaps a strange word for a book about Nazi Germany narrated by death (I’m going to assume everyone is familiar with the plot, as I seem to be the last person in the world to read the book, but if not then the Wikipedia article gives a brief summary).

There were lots of interesting ideas in the novel – the perspective of Death; the (adoptive) family dynamics in times of great stress; how the public could accept atrocities and how they covertly battled against them. These could all form a blog post, especially Death as a character (which I thought had moments of being very moving, as when he said he always carried the dead children up in his arms) but my favourite thing about The Book Thief was the role of books. It’s evident from the title that books are significant – throughout the novel she steals six books, I think. Just over one for every hundred pages. They form the centre of her world – she learns to read with The Gravedigger’s Handbook and this sets the tone for the fairly arbitrary nature of her spoils – but her understanding of their importance is something we can all adhere to, I’m sure.

More than anything, I love her response to seeing the mayor’s wife’s room full of books. Having only held a few in her life, she suddenly sees shelves and shelves of them:

[…]She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see the paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the grey, the every-coloured books. It was one of the most beautiful thins Liesel Meminger had ever seen.

With wonder, she smiled.

That such a room existed!

Even when she tried to wipe the smile away with her forearm, she realised instantly that it was a pointless exercise[…]

Markus Zusak (as well as being the first author beginning with ‘Z’ whom I’m read) is a talented story-teller, and The Book Thief is an impressive novel. I didn’t love it abundantly, perhaps because some of the themes weren’t fully realised and a little too much time was spent on the establishing of relationships between Liesel and her friends and family for my liking – but these qualms aside, I did like the novel very much. Anything this affectionate about books can’t be bad.

Time and Thievery

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Too tired to write it tonight, but just a heads up on the fact that tomorrow I’ll be talking about Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. I did a quick Google image search, and discovered quite an astonishing variety of covers which the book has had. Before I start chatting about what I thought of the contents, let’s look at some covers? The bottom left one is the one on my copy, but I love the dominoes edition. Which strikes you most?

book thief

Book Groups

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Whilst I’m asking questions (get ready for a few links) Karen at Cornflower recently posted this entry about Jenny Hartley’s excellent Reading Groups (which I wrote about here), and she also linked to this article about the potential terror of book groups.

Phew. Links over, promise.

I’m in two face-to-face, or terrestrial, book groups and one online book group – I love ’em. I asked people back in August 2007 whether or not they had joined, and what they thought of them, but time to ask the question again! But this post was mostly to flag up a)the interesting article (personally I’m delighted not to be in a book group with the woman desperate to discuss politics), and b)remind everyone what a great book Reading Groups is, and how they should go and get a copy now.

Juggling Books

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I’m enjoying hearing all about people’s rationales behind their reading choices, especially since so many have the opposite to me. Do keep commenting. This post is to open up the question – Evie asked whether we read one book at a time, or many? This was a Booking Through Thursday question which I did on Stuck-in-a-Book, but looking at it the post was in August 2007 (can’t believe it was so long ago!) and a lot of people have started reading the blog since then, so thanks Evie, I’ll ask it again!

One book? Lots of books but from different genres? Hundreds at once?
Back in August 2007 I said I could only read one novel at a time, but I have changed my mind – usually a few on the go, as well as a volume or two of letters, a Christian book, something else to dip into… at the moment I am reading:
Straw Without Bricks: I Visit Soviet Russia – EM Delafield
Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy – Rebecca West
Love Letters: Letters of Leonard Woolf and Trekkie Ritchie Parsons
Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford
You Can Change: Tim Chester

Yes, that’s right… I finished The Book Thief last night. More on’t soon.


Now for my answer to The Long or Short of It. Like lots of us, I’ll read some long books and some short books, but I am always, always drawn to short books. Chris’ comment amused me – saying her/his books tends to fall in between short and long, at around 450 pages – I quote Julie’s comment, “anything over 400 pages makes me feel nervours” ! In fact, for me, anything over 300 pages. Thinking about it – and in some ways this is hideously superficial, but there we are – my ideal book length is about 225 pages.

Why? Partly because I like to make lists of my books, and I like them to be long… In a more literary manner, I admire authors immensely who can write something powerful in a short medium, where I remember all the characters and bring something extraordinary out of a book in a matter of 200 or so pages. Long novels weary me, unless they’re very, very good.

The Long and Short of It

StuckinaBook All 21 Comments

Inspiration fails me once more, and I have 400 pages of The Book Thief to read before Tuesday, so I shall put forward another brief poll. Maybe I should make a post which collects these together… so far we’ve discovered that Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens are neck-and-neck; everybody except me would choose music over art; Jane Eyre pips Wuthering Heights to the post. Something a little less specific today:

Long books or short books?

Obviously we all read some of each, but which draws you in? An enormous novel you can lose yourself in for weeks, or a novella you can get through in an afternoon? Gigantic biographies or Very Brief Lives? Perhaps you don’t have any preference at all, but most people I’ve spoken to lean one way or the author. Get voting…

Enchanting

StuckinaBook All , 8 Comments

Following on from my recent post on the new Winnie the Pooh, I had a couple of other things to mention. Firstly, thanks very much to the two people who pointed me in the direction of this Radio 4 programme (accessible UK readers only, I’m afraid) about Winnie the Pooh in Russian (Vinni Pukh, apparently) – its popularity and the changes they made. I haven’t listened to it yet, but what a fascinating idea. I’m going to be big and ignore the fact that the blurb says EE Shepherd instead of EH Shepard…

The other item related to the world of Winnie is no.25 on my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About. That’s right, we’re half way. Let’s go into big font for that, actually.

25. The Enchanted Places
by Christopher Milne

Well, I say The Enchanted Places but I’d actually like to put forward three titles, Christopher Milne’s autobiographical trilogy. The Enchanted Places is the first one, and the most widely available; the second is The Path Through The Trees and the third is The Hollow on the Hill. They all have rather different characters, but should all be read…

Christopher Milne, to start at the beginning, is Christopher Robin, AA Milne’s son and the only human allowed into the Hundred Acre Wood. The Enchanted Places is mostly centred around the Pooh books and characters, and what it was like to grow up as the child millions of children wished and pretended to be. At the same time it is a memoir of his father, honest but affectionate – and, a brief snapshot of what Christopher Robin grew up to be. To quote the introduction, ‘I am making a double appearance, first as the boy I am describing and secondly as the adult through whose eyes I am seeing him’.

There’s a danger that, to the cynical heart, this all sounds mawkish and sentimental, but those are two words I should never apply to Christopher Milne. He writes about meeting journalists, being the star at a pageant, preferring Euclid to a sponge cake – but all with a dry and sensible hat on. Nor, contrary to some widespread belief, does he loathe everything connected with his father – I believe there were some years when he wanted to distance himself, but by the time he wrote The Enchanted Places, he’d changed his mind. For anyone even remotely interested in Winnie the Pooh, I do encourage you to find this memoir – it’s currently out of print, I think, but lots around secondhand. Parts of sad, much will feel nostalgic, all reveals writing talent to run in the Milne family.

I suspect some will have already heard of The Enchanted Places, but it’s less likely that you’ll have read the sequels. I’ll only mention them, but they’re definitely worth finding and buying and loving.

The Path Through The Trees – actually my favourite of the three, this volume looks at Christopher Milne’s time in the army, his marriage, and running a bookshop. I loved the chapters on the different ventures the bookshop made, the decision over whether or not to stock the Pooh books, the customers he got – it would be fascinating if written by any bookshop owner, but Milne’s account is even more interesting.

The Hollow on the Hill – Milne’s first love, Nature, takes centre stage in this volume, writing about the Devon countryside and his garden. I don’t remember this one so well, to be honest, which makes me think I might try and re-read the whole trilogy this year…

Orlando Blooms

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One of the re-reads I’ve already read this year (and there are four) is Orlando by Virginia Woolf. The reason I re-read it is because Orlando forms a significant aspect of my dissertation for this year. Nicola asked a while ago what my dissertation would be on – I’ll probably elaborate at greater length another time, while I’m writing it no doubt, but I’ll mention it briefly. It’s called The Middlebrow Fantasy and The Fantastic Middlebrow – looking at the idea of the middlebrow in the interwar years, the use of the term and ethos in fiction, criticism and public arena, and how porous the boundaries between highbrow and middlebrow are. From this, I want to look at novels which I shall call the ‘domestic fantastic’ – not out-and-out fantasies like Lord of the Rings, but novels with an element of fantasy within a domestic setting or scenario. I think this use of genre and other worlds and consciousness of boundaries (temporal, spatial, mental) is interesting in relation to the middlebrow debate – how these two ideas feed into one another. Was that at all clear? I think I need to practise saying it to myself a few times before I try to explain it to anybody in person…

Anyway, back to Orlando. This is THE highbrow domestic fantastic text, as far as I’m concerned – for those not familiar with it, the novel is a sort of faux biography of Vita Sackville-West, only in the person of Orlando, a man who lives for hundreds of years and turns into a woman halfway through. This was the third time I’d read the novel – the second was when writing about Woolf and clothing, so that was my main focus. This time I made copious notes whenever Woolf mentioned boundaries or fantasy or class – in fact, those notes are waiting in a pile to be typed up properly, which I might achieve tomorrow. The constant scribbling made this re-read more of a struggle than the previous times, but I still think Orlando is a wonderful novel. Like all Woolf’s writing, there is something about her writing which is lyrical without being pretentious; beautiful without distracting from the heart of the novel. And funny. People forget that Woolf can be amusing. I liked this section, when Orlando is being ‘entertained’ by supposedly witty society, which is governed only by the illusion of wit:

She was still under the illusion that she was listening to the most brilliant epigrams in the world, though, as a matter of fact, old General C. was only saying, at some length, how the gout had left his left leg and gone to his right, while Mr. L. interrupted when any proper name was mentioned, ‘R.? Oh! I know Billy R. as well as I know myself. S.? My dearest friend. T.? Stayed with him a fortnight in Yorkshire’ – which, such is the force of illusion, sounded like the wittiest repartee, the most searching comment upon human life.

Is Woolf gently mocking the image people had, and still have, of the Bloomsbury Group? Mayhap… rather a lot of Orlando is tongue-in-cheek, and all the more fun for it. I don’t know if I’d recommend this as the first Woolf novel to read, but, if you’ve got one or two under your belt, this would be a great one to go onto. (And I must put in a good word for the beautiful new Oxford Worlds’ Classics editions. Once I’ve fiddled with my camera I’ll show you the ones I’ve bought – their choice of cover painting, by Charles Haslewood Shannon, is an exceptionally good choice – looks very much like (s)he could be either man or woman.)

Traditionally, when I mention Woolf here, the comments go rather silent… I’d be intrigued – what are your opinions on old Ginny? And have you read anything by her? I know some of her most vehement opponents haven’t got as far as reading her work, and then there are some who love her diaries and letters but hate her fiction. And then, of course, there is poor Our Vicar who started listening to a radio production of The Waves and now looks physically pained whenever Virginia is mentioned…

Fourth of the fourth

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Sorry, I come back and then disappear again… I’ve just been away for a few days with the Oxford University Christian Union, spending time learning more about Jesus and how to follow Him, which has been exciting and challenging and rather nostalgia-inducing, as I first went on this trip four years ago, and met my two closest friends.

I’ll be back with some recently read books soon, but a little too sleepy today. I was hoping to do a meme which Overdue tagged me for – post the fourth photograph in the fourth folder of my photo album. Sadly, since my laptop died and I have a new one, there are no photos on here yet. Instead, as with all good plans, I’m going to go to Facebook – and post the fourth photo from my fourth album on there.


This album is from my last weeks at Oxford as an undergraduate, when the Christan Union climbed to the top of Magdalen Tower (up the staircase, not scaling the walls) to pray and sing and wish the CU leavers well on their way. Obviously I came back… Left to right in this photo are Sarah, Liz, Claire (with her best smile), Maja and Dave. In the distance are the dreaming spires of Oxford.

Do feel free to try this meme yourself!

Red Books

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It’s a shame that I haven’t got my camera working on this laptop yet, as the two books I’m writing about today look rather fetching together. Alternatively, they clash. Who’s to say – what’s certain is that they’re both red. One was a present for Christmas, non-subtly asked for by myself and given by OV and OVW; the other was a present to myself.

Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford was urged on my by those who rose to Decca’s defence while I read The Mitfords (my review here, and it subsequently came top of my books of 2008). Jessica was easily my least favourite of the Mitfords, not because of her politics but because of the extent to which she cut herself off from her family and was entirely hostile to Diana, especially. To my, probably idealistic, mind politics should never get in the way of family. But, prepared to be proved wrong, I have started Decca… and, yes, she is starting to win me over, mostly because she confesses that her most vitriolic moments re:Diana were ‘stuffy and self-righteous’ and ‘not very sisterly’. I’ve been moved by her husband’s death in a way which almost passed me by in The Mitfords, mostly because she exchanged relatively few letters with her sisters in this period. And perhaps Decca will be most useful for those who consider the Mitford sisters all hardened snobs – whatever ones opinion of Communism, Jessica’s work for the Civil Rights Movement is wholly admirable.

The second red book is… The Paris Review Interviews vol.3 – the third in the series after those mentioned here – though I am still working my way through these, I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to add this to my collection. The interviews I’ve read so far are insightful, in depth and really deliciously writerly. Volume 3 includes interviews with Harold Pinter, Evelyn Waugh, Ted Hughes, Martin Amis, Jean Rhys, Salman Rushde, Joyce Carol Oats, William Carlos Williams, Jan Morris, Chinua Achebe… every home should have one.

An old friend returns

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I was going to leave Col’s review of Northanger Abbey up as the latest post for longer, to encourage more people to read and comment, but I heard some news today which I couldn’t ignore…

This may be old news, I don’t know, but I only heard about it today. Granted my only voluntary access to news is The Week, an excellent weekly summary of all major newspapers, and perhaps an article on this will appear in due course. But I am being deliberately elliptical – the news I’m talking about is the new Winnie the Pooh book. If, like me, you hadn’t heard, Yahoo’s summary is as good as any.

Those of you who pop in here regularly may well know my love of all things AA Milne, be it his plays, novels, poetry, autobiography, pacifist leaflets, sketches, essays and, indeed, children’s books. The first two books read in 2009 were re-reads of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, and very wonderful they were too. He was the first author I got excited about in my post-teenage reading, and still very close to my heart – the news that the Pooh canon is to be extended is one I receive with very mixed feelings.

Shall I propose the argument for the prosecution? My main issue, actually, is not so much that the new book will be inferior – of course it will – but that it will be written for the Disney generations. Most people reading this will be in the Disney generations, as they started churning out their dross in 1961. Whoops, I lost my journalistic objectivity a little there, didn’t I? Like most, I enjoyed the Disney cartoons when I was tiny, but when I discovered EH Shepard’s utterly brilliant illustrations, I was outraged – the amount of character and expression he gives with a few tiny pencil lines is astonishing. Disney lost all this subtlety and went for insane Rabbits and hyperactive Tiggers and Gopher (*shudder*)… and made everyone American. I’ve nothing against Americans, of course, but Winnie-the-Pooh is English! Christopher Robin is English! By all means make Gopher American, since we don’t have them in England, and consequently not the Hundred Acre Wood…

Sorry, this has veered right off message. My problem is – who will illustrate these stories? Will someone imitate Shepard in the way that someone is imitating Milne? Heaven forefend Disney illustrations…

Secondly, where is the room for a sequel? The final chapter of The House at Pooh Corner, unutterably sad, ends thus:

“Promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.” [said Christopher Robin]
Pooh thought for a little.
“How old shall I be then?”
“Ninety-nine.”
Pooh nodded.”I promise,” he said.
Still with his eyes on the world, Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh’s paw.
“Pooh,” said Christopher Robin earnestly, “if I–if I’m not quite” he stopped and tried again –“. Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you?”
“Understand what?”
“Oh, nothing.” He laughed and jumped to his feet. “Come on!”
“Where?” said Pooh.
“Anywhere,” said Christopher Robin.

So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

How can they continue after that? Not possible, surely…

Well, I confidently predict that there will be a brief flurry of media attention, quite a few sales (including, let’s face it, me) and it will be quietly forgotten in three or four years’ time.

What do you think? Excited, horrified, or wholly indifferent?