All

This year has been one of lengthy absences in the world of Stuck-in-a-Book, and for that I once more apologise. Moving to a Real Grown Up House comes with such things as having to set up Real Grown Up Internet, and Virgin are currently reluctant to provide this with any agility. Thus I am currently at my desk, with little to do, and free to fill you in on the week’s events!

I have spent my week in, around and under these buildings – most of the ones through the centre of the picture are in fact linked by underground passages. Most of my days have been in the Stack, which is the name for the books stored underground, and it has been a largely enjoyable activity. Though fetching books and returning them isn’t on par with neurophysics (is that a thing?) for brain stimulation, the fact that I am dealing with beautiful books, by and large, adds such a lot to the process. And now I am going to make you green with envy. Wait for it.

On Thursday I held a letter written by Jane Austen. Let’s put that in caps – JANE AUSTEN. Perhaps bold? Jane Austen. So exciting – it was her actual handwriting, and she had held that piece of paper… Alongside this, did the same for letters by CS Lewis, Hitler’s wedding certificate, Kenneth Grahame’s handwritten version of The Wind in the Willows, a letter by Robert Burns apologising for being drunk, and asking to avert a duel… all sorts down there. Had the less considerable pleasure of sorting journals such as ‘Insurance and Short Wars’.

Will hopefully be back blogging properly by the 18th, but until then will be rather sporadic at best. Will just end by noting another important day – Clare Wigfall’s excellent collection of short stories, The Loudest Sound and Nothing, is now available in the UK, and apparently Amazon are doing a deal on it. I blogged about it here, and now you can buy it – go do so!

I’ve never used Flickr before, but I thought today was momentous enough to warrant it. In case the above pictures prove to subtle, this is post no.100 on Stuck-in-a-Book. It was rather a rash decision, to start a blog and enter the book blogging community while in the middle of revision for finals, but it didn’t prove too great a distraction. Plus, there were even more people to cheer me along through the exams – and to wish me well, I hope, as I leave home… for now… (hope the parentals don’t read that bit). This will be the last blog entry before I go back to Oxford, and you must forgive me if I’m away for a few days, as it might take a while to sort out the internet connection in Regent Street, Oxford.

Today’s trip to Bristol was nice – The Carbon Copy’s new abode is an enormous house, shared with a fair few others, and very beautiful, if a little dusty – but sadly Our Vicar’s Wife and I were unable to locate the Bookbarn on the way back. The lack of any precise knowledge as to its whereabouts, alongside my complete inability to read a map, and OVW’s… actually, she can’t really be held to blame for any of it. But don’t tell her I said so. Anyway, this leaves me with rather more money and rather fewer books than intended.

Have sidelined Deceived With Kindness for now, and reading a 1933 play called The Brontes (give or take an accent). Guess what it’s about. Will report back later, but rather anticipate my review being somewhat scathing…

So, cracking open the champagne to 100 posts; here’s to 100 more. And then some.

Shan’t be collecting any awards for my title originality today, but it does exactly what it says on the tin. Though, for many of you, it may be Thursday by the time you read this. If it is indeed Thursday, then you’re reading Stuck-in-a-Book on the day that The Carbon Copy leaves home for good, off to Bristol to be a/work in actuary. One of these days I’ll discover what sort of noun ‘actuary’ is, but not any day soon. It beats the first time I heard the word, when I believed it was something to do with morgues.

Sorry that there has been nothing particularly bookish recently, it’s largely because I haven’t read much of late. Started Angelica Garnett’s earlier this week, but haven’t got very far, owing to packing and a cold. Does anyone else suffer this? As soon as the faintest tinge of illness comes near me, my eyes pack in and go on holiday, and merely glancing at the back of a cereal packet gives me a headache. Always seemed a cruel irony that, when I had a day of school with nothing to do, indulging in reading was impossible. Anyway, back to Garnett’s book – she is Virginia Woolf’s niece (daughter of Vanessa Bell) who married a man who had previously had an affair with her father. Oh, that man was the one who wrote Lady Into Fox, one of my 50 Books… (see the side column). Weren’t they a normal bunch. So far, Deceived With Kindness seems like a less scholarly version of Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf, and I mean that in the very best way for Garnett. Lee’s book, while interesting and very, very erudite, was exhaustive in more than one way.

Packing *almost* done, and has been performed with the accompaniment of Dame Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer, or rather Jean and Lionel Hardcastle, in one of my DVDs of As Time Goes By. One of these days I’ll devote a post to this fine series, which seems to be popular among many of my fellow bloggers. I know Elaine over at Random Jottings loves them.

To make up for lack of bookish musings lately, here is a nice picture of some of my many overcrowded bookshelves. Spot the Persephone Books mug. And tomorrow I’m hopefully going to the enormous Book Barn, so look out for Simon’s Shopping Basket…

Hello again, and apologies for my absence over the weekend – while I’m on that, did you know that someone recognises a man as unsuitable for marriage, in a Nancy Mitford novel, because he uses the term ‘weekend’? I think I’m right. And also clearly ineligible. Anyway, this apres-vendredi we had non-stop shindigging and jollities. People gathered from far and wide (mistyped ‘fathered from far and wide’, which gives an altogether misleading image of the party) to celebrate 25 years of marriage between OVW and OV. We barn danced – being the untalented version of a ceilidh – and had two days of people popping in and out. All very fun, and some literary conversations to boot.

Sadly, though, months spent in the West Country have obviously made me vulnerable to illnesses from the Real World, and I am now beset with an irritating cold. Hope and pray that this will have disappeared by the time I start work next week, as am rather wishing to impress my new employers with the impression that I am quick-witted and competent, not half-dead and bleary-eyed by half past eleven. I tend to be lethargic between 2.00-4.00 as it is (coincidentally, the time at which all my tutorials were scheduled in first year, leading my tutor to comment “Simon’s essays are good, but when he has to speak about them, it appears to be a fluke”. Thank goodness for morning exams.)

Today I began the packing process, by piling books onto a rug, and realising that I currently have nothing into which to pack them. The thousands of boxes we had when moving to Somerset two years ago appear to have risen to the Box Heaven in the Sky, and The Carbon Copy (who is moving to Bristol on Thursday) has commandeered the only one thus far discovered. And, despite the fact that I have carefully selected nigh on a hundred books to accompany me next year, they have left no discernible space on my bookshelves. Like gas, they fill the space available. That is right, isn’t it? If my hazy recollections of drawing atoms is correct, gas fills whatever space it’s in, accompanied by little ‘whush’ lines in pencil.

All in all, it’s been rather a hectic time in the Rectory of late, and it is beginning to dawn that I am to enter the World of Work with great imminence (and very little eminence) and that’s a leetle bit scary. Hope you’ll all be there to hold my hand…

P.s. Apologies for dearth of sketches at the moment… they will be back…

Hope you’ll excuse my blatant breaking of copyright today, but I didn’t feel like sketching all of the Brady Bunch. I’ll be honest, I’ve never actually seen/heard/read the Brady Bunch, and so can only use them as a proverbial happy-smiley-friendly family, to help illustrate this week’s Booking Through Thursday.

When growing up did your family share your love of books? If so, did one person get you into reading? And, do you have any family-oriented memories with books and reading? (Family trips to bookstore, reading the same book as a sibling or parent, etc.)
I was very blessed to grow up in a family which treasured books, and had them all over the place. Oddly enough, given my voracious reading now, and my English degree and whatnot, I actually found learning to read initially quite tricky. That’s my memory of it, anyway – having secret reading sessions with Our Vicar’s Wife. Secret from The Carbon Copy, you understand (though with my competence for being discreet, this didn’t remain secret for long) – being one of twins is brilliant most of the time, but during childhood we were very sensitive to which was making progress faster.

So I can’t really single anyone out in the family as encouraging my young reading, though Our Vicar’s Wife was wonderful at helping us ‘play out’ the books, making over the house to be a Famous Five adventure, and so forth. But my transition from teenage-reading to adult-reading (in a strictly innocent sense, of course) was aided by my Aunt Jacq, and by dovegreybooks@yahoogroups.co.uk, who come in for their fair share of mention on here.

Some of my book-related memories involve the first time the roles reversed, and I got Our Vicar’s Wife excited in books I’d recommended, particularly Richmal Crompton’s novels. Convincing Our Vicar to read Pride and Prejudice was another victory – he’s not particularly a novel reader, and commented afterwards that he’d ‘known the plot already’.

Mostly, I delight in having a literate family who have always encouraged me in reading – though all of them think I spend a little too much on books, they’ve given in trying to stop me. Sensible folk.

What were you doing on 23rd August 1982?

Before you start flicking through old journals, I’ll tell you why that day was rather special. Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife, when they were but Our Curate and Our Curate’s Fiancee, got married.

Now they can chalk up 25 years of marriage, and I’m sure you’d like to join me in wishing them a very happy Silver Anniversary, and commend them on their rather wonderful sons… chortle…

Congratulations Mum and Dad!

One of my first posts on this blog was about twins in literature, and sparked off quite a little frenzy of puzzling. Well, looks like Vintage have had the same idea, though perhaps a little bit differently.

A few other bloggers have mentioned this, but none of them are twins (so far as I know) and thus I have the upper hand on discussing it. Possibly.

In publishing a series of classics, somebody in the Vintage offices had the alarmingly good idea to print these alongside Modern Classics – or, for those who don’t like an ovymoron before breakfast, modern books which they anticipate will become classics of literature. What a great idea! And hats off to whoever was in charge of cover designs, as they have done rather a brilliant job. Each pairing has a very identifiable ‘look’, so that they are obviously connected, whilst retaining something intrinsic to the individual novel. As Susan Hill says on her blog, when buying a classic, I’m going to make my purchase decision based on cover – it’s not as though Middlemarch were, to use the parlance of football sticker collecting, a rare one.

Here’s a confession to make. Out of their ten pairings (Crime, Fantasy, Fear, Lies, Love, Lust, Monsters, Satire, Sin, Youth) there is none for which I have read both the Classic and the Modern. Shocking. What’s perhaps even more surprising, for regular readers of my blog, is that I’ve read a fairly even split of Modern and Classic.

This is a great marketing plan, but also tackles both ruts which avid readers sometimes fall into – either a diet of solely pre-1950s literature (my own personal menu), or only reading that which hits the shelves this minute, and preferably a few hours before the rest of the world does. Vintage Twins will mean we can all broaden out reading, while making connections within the ongoing canon.

It’s all been a bit literary round these parts of late, and I’ve even been lured into the twenty-first century, so it’s time to mention something a bit more quotidian and old-fashioned.

I do like Scrabble. When board games are concerned, it’s always the simplest which are the best – when you don’t have to be rifling through the rulebook every few minutes, or remembering that you can’t take contraband substances onto blue squares when travelling back to the moon (points for anyone outside The Clan who recognises that game?) We had a game called Investor once, and each go took about ten minutes of mathematical calculations. Our family isn’t adverse to maths (two of ’em have degrees in it) but…

Sometimes we play Scrabble because it’s the only board game Our Vicar isn’t guaranteed to win. In the dozens of times we’ve played Trivial Pursuit, for instance, I can remember him only twice not winning. Sometimes Our Vicar’s Wife, The Carbon Copy and I team up against him; we still lose.

When playing Scrabble, I tend to go for words which are nice, or form pleasant cubes of words on the board. I become increasingly irascible as the Carbon Copy places ‘words’ like ‘yep’, ‘hi’, ‘oh’, ‘qi’, ‘mo’… he’ll probably try to defend his actions in the comments, but I maintain that Scrabble should be played for the beauty of the language, not to use lots of two-letter-words which would be employed in no other context. The difference between an English student and a Mathematician, I suppose…

Any more aficionados out there?