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It’s been a while since I reviewed an actual book on here, hasn’t it? It’s partly because I’ve been busy doing lots of other things, like painting the bathroom and organising all my books, and partly because there are only so many posts I can write about Mapp and Lucia. So I shall turn to that inferior medium, the television.

We sat down, en famille, to watch the BBC’s latest costume drama – Tess of the D’Urbervilles. For a genre which had been declared dead by TV executives until Colin Firth et al blasted that theory out of the lake, they certainly push as many as possible onto our screens at the moment. Over the past couple years we’ve had Cranford, Lark Rise to Candleford, Sense and Sensibility, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Room With A View… I’ve probably missed some, but you get the gist.

Every time, we get columnists and bloggers and everyone talking about the pros and cons of costume drama – is it lazy scheduling or is it intelligently using a world of potential stories and well-loved characters? It’s very simple, to my mind. If the programme would work equally well without costumes and history, then it’s a success. Cranford, probably the best thing I’ve seen on television in years, would have phenomenal in any era and if Dame Judi was in jeans. So, the jeans-test for Tess…

Erm. Shall we say a strong maybe? The actors are great – Gemma Arterton will soon be everywhere, including Lizzie B in Lost in Austen, and was fantastic in Capturing Mary with Maggie Smith last year, and Ruth Jones is an inspired, funny casting as Tess’s Mum. The shooting is beautiful. But they still rely so heavily on wearing peasant costumes and waistcoats and having horses and saying “didn’t ought to” and speaking in a West Country, that it be, that if it were transferred to 2008, they’d spend hours staring at a wall. Somehow the relationships between the characters don’t feel *quite* real, they’re more textbook period drama and a little thoughtless – Alec, for instance, is obviously a cad from the second he sidles up smoking a cigar and smirking lasciviously. On the other hand, of course, we have the wonderful Anna Massey as his mother, who can do no wrong.

Perhaps I’ve been a little harsh. It is a very good programme and I’ll certainly watch the rest, just… once you’ve seen Cranford, you realise there are new heights which could be met.

Just a quick post tonight to point you over to Elaine’s response to the Pride and Prejudice Musical – click here. Lots of suggestions for appropriate songs, and is bound to make you chuckle!

From the ridiculous to the sublime, I spent the evening at a rather different concert – no, not the last night of the Proms, but in Chiselborough church listening to Urban Voices, a choir from London. They were absolutely brilliant – all sorts of influences, from gospel to soul to rock to pop to R&B, and singing praises to God, alongside other pieces. A fun, friendly group providing an amazing evening.

Lyn from dovegreybooks Yahoo Group (not to be confused with Lynne from dovegreyreader blog) sent me another little piece of information today – I hope she won’t mind if I quote her email:

Well. Gosh. Of course, it does seem rather as though one can’t have anything on the stage without a song and dance accompanying nowadays, and it’s a miracle that Austenmania hasn’t led to this before. Bad as the 2005 film was in so many ways, at least it didn’t have Keira doing the can-can singing ‘It is a TRUTH uni-ver-salllllly ackNOWledged!’

But am I too quick to judge? Obviously I would go and see this, even if I expected it to be dire, and I imagine there are enough Pride and Prejudice addicts to make this sell out whatever the quality – but perhaps, just perhaps, it would actually be good? Stranger things have happened. And what if they took a selection of extant songs… how would that go… Lizzie could sing I Don’t Know How To Love Him then Learning To Love Him and finally Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man. Lydia could get I Could Have Danced All Night, and Sixteen Going On Seventeen, while Kitty would have to settle for You Can’t Get A Man With A Gun. And for Mr. Bennet, howsabout If I Were A Rich Man?

More suggestions in a similarly irreverent tone, please!

A Murder Is Announced was the first Agatha Christie novel I read, probably in 1998 or thereabouts, just as I entered my teenage years. It led to a brief passion for Christie (more particularly Miss Marple) which has rather subsided over the years, but only because I got steered onto other paths. I’m no Christie snob, and certainly rank her as the best plot-creator I’ve read (see Harriet’s recent post on Endless Night and a defence of Christie in style not just structure). I must return to her soon – The Carbon Copy is quite a Christie aficionado (spelt it correctly this time!) though more of a Poirot man.

Tonight Our Vicar’s Wife and I went to see A Murder Is Announced performed at the Swan Theatre in Yeovil – I’d spotted a banner advertising it when we drove past the other day, and we thought it sounded like a fun evening. Sadly Our Vicar couldn’t make it, and The Carbon Copy isn’t coming down until next weekend, so it was just the two of us – and, horror of horrors, when we got there we found it was sold out! Nothing daunted, we asked whether we could have standing tickets, and the lovely people said we could, so long as we didn’t block any fire exits. So we stood.

What fun. Nothing like a good murder mystery, even if I did know whodunnit already. Actually, that’s what astounded me – I could remember the plot almost perfectly, nearly a decade after reading A Murder Is Announced. Not only did I know who’d dunnit, but I also noticed all the places where the play differed from the novel (quite a few, quite substantial, including one murder) – no great feat, perhaps, but there are books I’ve read recently about which I remember absolutely nothing. Not a thing. No names, plots, endings. Usually I’ve forgotten most details of a novel within a fortnight of finishing it, however much I enjoyed it – which has made re-reading Mapp and Lucia series immensely fun. Yet old Agatha’s work is crystalised in my mind – perhaps because it was one of the first Real Books I read, rather than Teen Fiction? Perhaps because it was my first detective novel? Perhaps Christie is just talented in this way?

Answers on a postcard… and any closet Christie fans, do spill. Favourite novel of hers, which should I read to reawaken my Christie passion, and, most importantly: Marple or Poirot?

My friend Lyn emailed me an interesting link earlier this week – here it is – to an article about the Man Booker Prize. They managed to get a judge from each of the 40 years to talk about the process, the books, and the winners. Fascinating, and shows how utterly arbitrary the procedure actually is – in so many cases the judges simply picked a compromise. We all know how it is when we champion a book and no-one will understand our praise, or conversely, listening to someone eulogise about a novel we privately think excreable. Imagine those discussions when the world is waiting for your decision… and imagine having to read over a hundred books in a few weeks beforehand. Sounds fun, but reading to a deadline takes quite a lot of the fun out of things, and trying to power through that lot… the article certainly made me feel sympathy for them.

Second snippet of news is the new Penelope Fitzgerald website. PenelopeFitzgerald.com, succinctly enough. They spotted that I’d been reading The Bookshop, a gift from Lynne Hatwell, and have posted my review over on their affectionate and intelligent website. ‘All things pertaining to Penelope’, that’s their mantra, and a very intriguing collection of items it is. Articles, especially to do with Letters; newspaper mentions; Penelope Fitzgerald’s visual art – looks like an excellent site to bookmark and pop back to. In the same line as Blogging Woolf, also always worth a visit.

There is a place of wonderment in Somerset, it is called The Bookbarn. We stumbled across it by accident about four years ago, just saw a sign saying ‘Used Books This Way’ and, naturally, went that way… wow. The biggest secondhand bookshop in England, a barn filled with literally millions of books. Literally millions. www.bookbarn.co.uk.

They’ve since gone a little techy (see the website) and large amounts of them are now on a database, and only accessible physically to staff – but there are still hundreds of thousands which you can browse. And that’s what we did today. I always feel a little panicky when I leave the Bookbarn, because there is never enough time to look at all the books, obviously. What gems could I be walking away from? I tend to take some letters of the alphabet, and look at those shelves (fiction is loosely alphabetical, but not within the letter, e.g. all the authors beginning with ‘A’ are together, but not organised within ‘A’). Today I looked through C, P and B. Dad covered the plays, with my reading list for British Drama Post-1945, and I tried to gather up some Literature and Empire books… and got distracted, of course.

Well, here they are. Astute readers will spot quite a lot of overlap with yesterday’s list.

Under Western Eyes – Joseph Conrad; not on the list, but should be handy

Youth and other stories – Joseph Conrad; ‘other stories’ happens to include a little tale called Heart of Darkness

In The South Seas – R.L. Stevenson; any Stevenson fans able to tell me whether this corresponds to the Stevenson South Sea books on the list from yesterday’s post? We assumed it did.

Screens Against the Sky – Elleke Boehmer; not on the list, but Elleke Boehmer is the tutor for the course, so might prove interesting

Untouchable – Mulk Raj Anand; another one on the list…

The House of Dolls – Barbara Comyns; this is where I *might* just have wandered from the reading list… having loved some Comyns last year, and very much liked some others, I felt I needed to stock up

Sisters by a River – Barbara Comyns; did someone mentioned Barbara Comyns?

Bloomsbury Pie – Regina Marler; now we’re back on Masters territory – this was recommended when I asked for a good guide to the Bloomsbury Group, and looks fascinating

Kim – Rudyard Kipling; only read a couple of short stories by Kipling, and Kim has always been at the back of my mind…

Our Country’s Good – Timberlake Werternbaker
Arcadia – Tom Stoppard
A Taste of Honey – Delaney
All building towards my British Drama Post-1945 module, which I’ll share more about in due course. Won’t be until January that I actually start it.

The Familiar Faces – David Garnett, non-fiction work by the author of Lady Into Fox (see 50 Books… on the left) this will, again, hopefully provide more Bloomsbury background.

All in all, a good day’s searching – and we got to see The Carbon Copy!

I think one of the Booking Through Thursday topics in the past has been about re-reading books, but my current re-read of the Mapp and Lucia books by EF Benson has made me think about it again… I always thought I wasn’t much of a re-reader. So many books, so little time was my mantra – but… it appears to have all changed this year. Since January began, I’ve re-read the following:

Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day – Winifred Watson
Year In, Year Out – A.A. Milne
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Speaking of Love – Angela Young
The Love Child – Edith Oliver
The L-Shaped Room – Lynne Reid Banks
The Twins at St. Clare’s – Enid Blyton
The O’Sullivan Twins – Enid Blyton
Summer Term at St. Clare’s – Enid Blyton
Second Form at St. Clare’s – Enid Blyton
The Provincial Lady Goes Further – E.M. Delafield
Queen Lucia – E.F. Benson
Miss Mapp – E.F. Benson
Lucia in London – E.F. Benson

Gosh. Last year, as I found out whilst doing this meme, I only re-read six books; this year I’m on sixteen already. I wonder why…

Partly it’s because I don’t have books to read for university (or haven’t, until this point), but on the other hand I have lots of books to review for Stuck-in-a-Book which are neglected whilst I re-read. Perhaps I’ve come to the point in my reading life, which only really started properly in 2000, where I want to dip back into the past. Maybe I just want a guaranteed good read – but partly it’s because I’ve realised just how subjective an experience with a book can be, and how short. I read a book in, say, four days. It might – like quite a few on the list above – be one of my favourite books. How odd that it should be on a favourites list for years, and have only occupied that amount of time in my life… so a re-read is to test the waters and see if they still make for pleasant paddling.

So much has been said about re-reading; I must get around to reading Anne Fadiman’s book on the topic. I don’t really know where to throw in my tuppence worthy, other than to say that re-reading this year has brought me more pleasure than almost anything else I’ve read – but I can’t *quite* shake the idea that I should be reading something new. What do you think?

An interesting day today… as this afternoon I dropped the metal base of a table-umbrella-stand on my foot, and had to go to A&E. Eeps. Turns out no breakages, just lots of bruising and blood – I’m as squeamish as they come, and was rather relieved that it all worked out ok, praise the Lord. But some considerable pain for a while… and has called a halt to driving practice for a day or two, at least.

So! I don’t think I’ve shared the reading list for my module next term on Literature and Empire 1880-1930. Truth be told, the choice hasn’t been confirmed – but apparently nobody has been turned away from a module choice yet, so I’m confident. The range of books is quite exciting, and I’m especially excited about studying Katherine Mansfield again. A comparitive essay on Katherine Mansfield and Scouting for Boys… well, I wonder. Here’s the list; I’ve only read Mansfield so far, and that was a few years ago, so lots to explore. Any recommendations for first off the pile?

Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Thoughts on South Africa R. L. Stevenson, South Sea Tales, 1891, 1892 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) and ‘Youth’ (1902) Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901) Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (1908) J.M Barrie, Peter Pan and Wendy (1911) Katherine Mansfield, Collected Short Stories W.B. Yeats, Responsibilities (1914) E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924) Sol T. Plaatje, Mhudi (1930) Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (1935)

The Good News first – the lovely, lovely people at Magdalen decided to award me the Senior MacKinnon Scholarship, which will pay for fees and maintenance for my Masters. Hurrah! Thanks everyone for your prayers and best wishes. Being scrupulous, I must point out that, though a ‘scholarship’, I think my pecuniary situation was of greater import than my intellectual.

Onto Lost in Austen – again, I’m afraid non-UK readers might have to avert their eyes, as I’m going to talk about an ITV programme. Fun reading, perhaps though, for the Janeites amongst us. Lost in Austen sees 21st Century gal (and Austen addict) Amanda Price accidentally change places with Elizabeth Bennet. Yes, that Elizabeth Bennet. And, as you may imagine, hilarity ensues. Episode One, after the exchange took place, focused on Amanda’s life with the Bennet sisters – explaining her modern clothing as ‘otter hunting gear’, trying to make sure Jane eyes up Bingley, and then kissing said 6000-a-year-man behind the dancehall.

It’s all rather silly and it’s all very fun. Plenty for Pride and Prejudice aficionados to get their teeth into – though by ‘aficionado’, I should say ‘anyone who’s seen the 1995 BBC version’. Indeed, Colin Firth even gets a mention. I’ve seen the latest Mr. Darcy (Elliot Cowan) described as rather dishy, but to me he looked permanently as though about to sneeze. Everyone else plays their role admirably, though they know that they’re supposed to be background.

Lost in Austen has a connection with my Enid Blyton post, actually – Amanda is played by Jemima Rooper, who was George in the Famous Five series I watched as a child, and it’s nice to know she’s on the up and up.

I tend to get my claws out for Austen adaptations, but this is a different sort of venture – it’s consciously fun and frivolous and full of in-jokes. Can’t wait til next time – or seeing what Lizzie will think of our 21st Century world.

It’s been a while since I did a Booking Through Thursday, which is largely because I haven’t blogged on a Thursday for a while. This Thursday also saw the first venture of Our Vicar and Stuck-in-a-Book in a car, L-plates and all… not a complete success. My confidence has taken a little dent, but the car has not, so we shall continue tomorrow. Just be thankful on Our Vicar’s nerves that I’d got this far before coming home to practise.

Anyway. Back to Booking Through Thursday:
I was looking through books yesterday at the shops and saw all the Twilight books, which I know basically nothing about. What I do know is that I’m beginning to feel like I’m the *only* person who knows nothing about them.Despite being almost broke and trying to save money, I almost bought the expensive book (Australian book prices are often completely nutty) just because I felt the need to be ‘up’ on what everyone else was reading.Have you ever felt pressured to read something because ‘everyone else’ was reading it? Have you ever given in and read the book(s) in question or do you resist? If you are a reviewer, etc, do you feel it’s your duty to keep up on current trends?Well, I haven’t the smallest idea what the Twilight books are so that makes at least two of us. Perhaps it’s an Australian phenomenon. And have I ever felt pressured to read something because ‘everyone else’ was reading it? Erm… not that I can think.

Regular readers of Stuck-in-a-Book will know that my reading tends to be off the beaten track, to the extent that I (to continue the metaphor) get lost in an overgrown meadow, wandering around without any idea where the beaten track is. Occasionally a book will be talked about on so many blogs that I feel I have to read it – Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontes Went To Woolworths springs to mind – but rarely have I succumbed to a modern book through this persuasion. I did buy Kate Morton’s The House at Riverton, but I still haven’t read it… every now and then I look at the pretty cover…

If someone directly recommends something to me, or a blogger I love mentions a book, that’s a different kettle of fish. That’s not pressure; that’s pleasure.

I suppose I might qualify as a reviewer, but I’ve never felt any real need to keep up with the trends – I’m realistic: blog-readers who want to know what the movers and shakers of the literary world are up to will glance at my tatty 1930s hardbacks and weathered Virago paperbacks and run for the hills. Stuck-in-a-Book, I hope, caters to the sort of people whose hearts leap with joy at the thought of those things! Of course, I do write about new books (dead authors rarely send review copies) and love some of them; my reading, however, will continue to meander over the past couple centuries or more. Oh, it’s much more fun that way!

As usual, the same question over to you…