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7 Books You Will Have Heard About And Have Probably Read (Most Of)

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Never let it be said that I am out of touch with the populus. In a year where I’ve read more Middle English than your average preteen, I’ve also just finished a book nearly all of ’em will have read. Yup, having reached page 766, have completed my third read of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The film’s coming out soon, and I wanted to refresh my memory…

In the early days, when JK Rowling was producing one of the series a year, Harry Potter was the same age as me. I’ve had the opportunity to overtake him now, but even so, I wasn’t there from the outset. The first time our paths crossed was when I helped out on the school’s Carnegie Prize Panel (which didn’t have any effect on the actual procedure, but was rather fun) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter III) was one of the choices. This was when Harry was big, but not huge. And I was hooked – part of me wanted to loath the book, but… no, I was hooked. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has read any of the series, and still dislikes it.

So what is it about JKR’s writing? Well, if I knew that, I’d probably be a millionaire by now. But we did have a lecture on Harry Potter at Oxford once, in the first week that I was at university, and the lecturer pointed out that JKR rarely used descriptive language, or anything which veered from the action-action-action. This, said Dr. Purkiss (herself, with her son Michael, an author under the pseudonym Tobias Druitt), was either incredibly clever writing, or incredibly bad writing. True, take any chunk of prose and Virginia Woolf it ain’t – but Rowling’s ability to make you read on is unparalleled. Who would have thought children would willingly read 700+ pages? And I read it over a single weekend, so that I wouldn’t have the ending spoilt by friends at school on Monday. Perhaps I’m not the best example of someone who needed persuasion to read, but you get the idea.

So. Where do my musings point? Nowhere, to be honest, except to demonstrate myself not quite the literary snob I might seem, and to hope lots of others hold up their hands in solidarity. No reason why one can’t enjoy Woolf and wizards; Shakespeare and Sirius Black; Austen and Aurors… you get the picture. Speaking of pictures, there must be a thousand sketches I could have done to accompany a post on Harry Potter. But I’m tired… so I’ve copied this one, which is hopefully the way things are heading for the next generation. Fingers crossed.

50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About

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Thank you for all your comments yesterday, much appreciated! We’re still all very chuffed here – oh, and do keep contributing your name to the BAFAB draw until the end of the week. Will probably do the draw on Sunday.

It’s been quite a while since I added another book to the ’50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About’, which are listed down the left-hand column of this page – so today I’m going to add the eleventh. This one was a cert from the offset.

Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman. This was the first book I ever bought new on impulse. That sounds like I have admirable restraint in book purchasing, but I think you know me well enough to despute that allegation – rather, my impulse-purchases are almost always secondhand books. But this one I couldn’t leave on the shelf.

The book is quite small, in length and height – a pocket book, if you will. The subtitle is ‘Confessions of a Common Reader’, and anyone who has manoeuvred themselves to a website with the words ‘Stuck’, ‘in’, ‘a’, and ‘Book’ in the title will be entranced. In bitesize chapters, just perfect for one-a-night-before-bed, Fadiman explores the foibles and activites of the book obsessed. You’ll recognise the lot.

My favourite section is ‘Never Do That To A Book’:

‘When I was elevn and my brother was thirteen, our parents took us to Europe. At the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen, as he had done virtually every night of his literate life, Kim left a book facedown on the bedside table. The next afternoon, he returned to find the book closed, a piece of paper inserted to mark the page, and the following note, signed by the chambermaid, resting on its cover:

SIR, YOU MUST NEVER DO THAT TO A BOOK’

Don’t know about you, but I’m cheering on the chambermaid. The chapter divides readers into ‘Courtly Lovers’ and ‘Carnal Lovers’; the latter are happy to use their books as table-wedges, tennis rackets or surf-boards, the former wouldn’t let a biro within ten metres. I’m definitely Courtly… how about you?

Ex Libris is a witty, warm collection of essay-anecdotes, a perfect gift for something bookish, but equally a perfect gift to yourself. Find out about The Odd Shelf, Literary Gluttony, and the Joy of Sesquipedalians, and scream in recognition at every page.

Winners all round

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A couple of exciting things today to share with you. The first is that BAFAB has come to Stuck-in-a-Book. I entered the blogging world just after the previous BAFAB week, not by design of course, and so this is my first. For those not familiar with the concept, Buy A Friend A Book does exactly what it says on the tin – just leave a comment on this entry, and one lucky entrant will be posted a book. Haven’t decided which one yet, but I’ll try and make sure that it’s one you’ll enjoy. Also haven’t decided upon the selection procedure (our cat Bundle sadly died a year ago, otherwise she’d have happily played the role at which dovegreyreader’s cats excel)… but you’re job is just to comment; leave the rest to me.

And the other news… my exam results came in a day earlier than anticipated… turns out I’m the Carbon Copy this time, as I followed my brother into getting a first! Very delighted and quite surprised, but the true heroes are unsung. And here they are…


By the way, any congratulatory messages will be taken as entrants to BAFAB… sneaky, huh?!

Making Humans

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I don’t read Science Fiction, but I think it’s true to say that a lot of it is about making humans. Or creating beings as near as possible to humans – whether robots, or anthropomorphised objects and animals, and so forth. Even games companies are intent on making dolls as much like humans as possible. Don’t they realise that literature is several steps ahead?

I’ve just finished reading Claire Tomalin’s Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, which has been languishing on my shelves for a few years. Having blogged about short stories the other day, I thought I’d go back and read about the woman behind some of my favourites – and while doing it, I started pondering the whole sphere of biographies. They’re a strange commodity, aren’t they? A writer is given three hundred pages to package up an entire life… what a feat. And what a liberty. Tomalin can be on safe ground when listing the dates of publications, names of relatives etc. etc., but then you get something like this:
“Although Katherine and Murry often presented their relationship as the most important element in both their lives – and it did absorb a huge amount of their energy – there is a sense in which neither sought true understanding of the other. For each of them, the other became a symbolic figure very early on: she the good, suffering, spontaneous genius, he the ideally beautiful scholar-lover without whom neither life nor death could be properly contemplated.”
Sorry, a bit of a long quotation there, potentially breaking all sorts of copyright laws. It was reading this section that made me think “hold up, what?” Tomalin is a very good, sensible writer, on the whole, but strident sentences like this one seem so difficult to justify. How do we know? Even with letters and diaries and the memories of friends, this sort of confessional psychoanalysis could only ring remotely true if it were in the mouth of Mansfield or Murray. And yet it is routine for biographies to depict relationships and mindsets in detail which must be subjective and conjectural.

I don’t have a problem with this sort of biography-writing – there doesn’t seem to be any other sort – but it did make me think, and I thought I’d share my ponderings, and see what people think. With scientists trying to make life, are biographers doing it better, or simply wishing they were?

And onto Tomalin’s Katherine Mansfield, more specifically. As I said, Tomalin is a very competent writer – but I felt the book was quite hollow, in the end. Not in the sense of vacuous, but that Mansfield continually avoided the spotlight. I finished the book without really getting to grips with Mansfield’s personality, though the opinions of all around her were quite vivid, and the biography is perfectly readable. She didn’t seem particularly pleasant, which was sad, but… even so, the big gap in the biography was often the subject herself. Mansfield remained elusive. Which kind of negates everything I wrote above… but surely not Tomalin’s aim?

One final note. You might remember my wish to get the ‘right’ postcard bookmark for each book – for this one, I chose Edward Hopper’s ‘Hotel Room’ (1931)

 

Holiday Reading Round-up

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I never quite finished telling you all about the other two books I read in Cornwall… well, let’s do a little round-up, for those dying with suspense. You already know the two which were 50-Books-Author-Repeats, if you get my meaning, One Pair of Feet by Monica Dickens and A Winter Book by Tove Jansson. Well, the other two were banned from the list for other reasons…

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford was deemed too well known to make the list, and its renown is well deserved. Narrated by Fanny, this comic novel documents the exploits of the, erm, something-family. I can’t remember their names… will give some blog reader a chance to look well-read(!) Linda’s love adventures form the central focus, and as she dashes around Europe, making unsuitable matches, the reader is enthralled and amused in equal amounts. Uncle Wotsit is a brilliant creation, though a loathsome man, and if the novel is stuffed with upper-class references no longer relevant, Mitford at least shows that they’re on the way out, and treats them with fondness. The family might seem hyperbolically strange… if it weren’t for the strangeness of Mitford’s own family.

And Elizabeth Myers’ A Well Full Of Leaves doesn’t make the ’50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About’ because any life could be lived quite contentedly without reading a page of this novel. Shame. Myers’ letters were my favourite read last year, but my chief impression of this novel, published in 1942, is that it could have done with some heavy editing. Almost everything that anyone says is accompanied by an exclamation mark, however mundane, and the whole novel is simply too earnest for me, especially coming straight after Monica Dickens. Nothing wrong with earnestness, per se, but not to this extent.
The narrator is quite like Fanny in Mitford’s novel, inasmuch as she alone is left unaffected by a whirlwind of melodrama – in A Well Full Of Leaves, the effects of a loveless mother are seen on a family of working class children. Before her time, perhaps, since Waterstones now seems to sell little other than ‘Tragic Life Stories’. I can see why people write these things, cathartic and so forth (though Myers makes no pretence that hers is based on fact), but why on earth do people want to read them?

Room With A View

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A while ago I posted a photo of the view from my room in Magdalen College. Well, now that I’m at home in Somerset, you get to see a different view. Rather different, and the thing I like best about our house. Sadly only one of the bedrooms has a view as nice as this – thankfully, it’s mine! When we moved here, the Carbon Copy was allowed to choose the room… and I helped him, by making it clear that I wanted this one. I’ve always liked him….


While we’re talking about The Carbon Copy, please join me in congratulating him – today he received the news that he got a FIRST in his Maths degree at Warwick. Champagne all round, or would be, if he drank.

Stuck-in-a-Book’s results next week…

Footprints

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The general consensus is that Feet is better than Hands – so JB Priestley announces on the blurb of my edition; so Elaine mentioned in comments on this blog a while ago. Sorry guys, going to have to disagree. I loved Feet, but just not as much as Hands – and this is almost entirely because I find the world of domestic service more interesting than that of nursing. Not more worthy or impressive – few people impress me more than nurses, not least because it’s right up there on the lists of jobs I couldn’t last a day at if my life depended on it – just even more fascinating. And, in Hands, Dickens went through lots of households, giving variety in character and situation; in Feet she could only change wards. Whichever of them is better, though, they are both excellent and laugh-out-loud funny. Oh dear, I’m becoming the worst sort of reviewer here… soon I’ll be proclaiming “I laughed til I cried!” or “If you read one book this fall, make sure it’s this one!” Will have to start counting – and limiting – the number of exclamation marks… but this quotation warrants one. ! There you go. It’s a little mean on Dickens’ part, but also rather funny:

“She looked like one of those potatoes that people photograph and send to the papers because it bears a curious resemblance to a human face.”

You’re a better person than I if you didn’t laugh a little bit…

Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny…

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Yesterday’s post has made me ponder, and we’re going to take a little sojourn away from my holiday reading, to discuss… the short story. (When will they invent the internet equivalent of jazz hands? Surely appropriate for such announcements.)

There aren’t many literary media more divisive than the short story – strangely, people’s opinions of any particular collection seem to be decided almost before they’ve opened the book. You know where this is leading – I’m going to ask your opinion. Here’s a challenge, which I always fail – try saying you like short stories without using the word “gems”, or try saying you don’t like them without using the words “nothing to get your teeth into”. Tricky, isn’t it?

Never let it be said that I open a debate without doing a little research. Now that I am reunited with all my books (hurray!), I can look through all my shelves, and make a huge pile for a photograph. So this evening I went to see how many short story collections I had – and was rather surprised. I knew that Katherine Mansfield was one of my favourite writers, and certainly my favourite short story writer, but didn’t realise I had so many other authors competing for my attention. Yup, I’m one of those who enthuses about ‘gems’, usually regardless of the nature of the stories – I find something so rewarding, so enticing, about short stories. Having written a thesis on Victorian Short Stories, doncha know, I tried a bit of investigation into the nature of the short story – don’t think I used the word ‘gem’ once, but I can’t dispel it from my mind. One of my tutors insists upon calling Ulysses ‘the longest short story ever written’. As someone who has read it, I resent the word ‘short’ being used in the same sentence… But, in general, their brevity and structure mean a short story can hang on a single moment, issue or point – a novel would be quite weak if it tried the same thing – so it’s much more sink or swim. When they succeed, like Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’, for instance, they really succeed. When they fail… well, at least you haven’t spent weeks to be disappointed.

So which do I have? Prepare yourselves for a bit of a list. And a nice picture to accompany. I’ve put a cross by the ones I’ve read – anyone want to recommend any of the remaining? More importantly – to short story or not to short story? Let me know.


1) Stories of the Strange and Sinister – Frank Baker
2) Thirty Stories – Elizabeth Myers
3) The Silver Birch – Richmal Crompton
x 4) Sugar and Spice – Richmal Crompton
x 5) Tea With Mr. Rochester – Frances Towers
6) The Casino – Margaret Bonham
7) Minnie’s Room – Mollie Panter-Downs
8) The Matisse Stories – AS Byatt (read a third of it…)
x 9) The Complete Shorter Fiction – Virginia Woolf
x 10) A Table Near The Band – AA Milne
x 11) Birthday Party – AA Milne
12) Fireworks – Angela Carter
13) The Little Disturbances of Man – Grace Paley
14) Enormous Changes at the Last Minute – Grace Paley
x 15) A Winter Book – Tove Jansson
x 16) A Quiver Full of Arrows – Jeffrey Archer (oh the ignominy)
x 17) Dubliners – James Joyce
18) Tell Me A Riddle – Tillie Olsen
19) Strangers – Antonia White
x 20) Cousin Phyllis and other stories – Elizabeth Gaskell
x 21) The Manchester Marriage and other stories – Elizabeth Gaskell
22) Tales of the Unexpected – Roald Dahl
x 23) Dream Days – Kenneth Grahame
x 24) The Golden Age – Kenneth Grahame
x 25) Portraits – Kate Chopin
26) Selected Tales – DH Lawrence
x 27) The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
x 28) Bliss – Katherine Mansfield
x 29) The Dove’s Nest – Katherine Mansfield
30) Something Childish – Katherine Mansfield
31) Complete Short Stories vol.1 – W. Somerset Maugham

Brrr…

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I was going to chat about all the books I read on holiday, but I’m too sleepy to do so. Have just come back from a village pub quiz, to which I went with my family. We managed to come first, and I contributed about eight answers, two of which were ‘Dolly Parton’. Worrying. And only one of which wasn’t already given by someone else on the team. No literature round, you see.

ANYWAY I’m supposed to be talking about books, aren’t I? So I’ll kick off with my favourite of the four, Tove Jansson’s A Winter Book. Cue picture.
As you may remember, The Summer Book was the first book to feature in my ’50 Books…’ (though that list isn’t in any particular order), and so I was merely exercising my civic/blogic duty when purchasing this publication from ‘Sort Of Books’ (an offshoot of Penguin, I believe). I worried a little that sunny beaches wouldn’t put me in the right frame of mind for a wintery book – but I needn’t have worried. The lack of sun was a dampener on parts of the holiday, but put me in completely the right position to read about chilly Finland. Finland? One of the Scandinavian countries, I can never remember which.

On the other hand, the contents belie the title anyway – this collection of stories, taken from various other collections, aren’t all wintery. Some of them are positively scorching – and Jansson is so brilliant at writing about temperature and weather, that you feel it. In fact, the term ‘evocative’ could have been invented for Jansson’s writing – perhaps because it’s a translation, but every word in this anthology has such depth, and feeling, and is quite unlike anything else I’ve ever read. Except for The Summer Book.

The stories are mostly from the perspective of Tove as a child, though some towards the end focus on old age. Each one is slight, with little of significance occuring – in ‘Jeremiah’, the child competes for the attentions of a foreigner collecting bits and pieces on the beach; ‘Snow’ describes moving house, and the consequent interpretations the child transfers onto the snowdrift; ‘The Iceberg’ concerns, surprisingly, an iceberg arriving at the coast, which the little girl can’t quite reach: “It lay there bumping against the rocks at the end of the point where it was deep. and there was deep black water and just the wring distance between us. If it had been shorter I should have jumped over; if it had been a little longer I could have thought: ‘What a pity, no one can manage to get over that’. Now I had to make up my mind. And that’s an awful thing to have to do.”

I get quite irritated by books which boast of how much you’ll learn about the nation, culture etc. When I read fiction, I don’t want a travel manual. But Jansson achieves something much better – the reader is immersed in the life of the child, country and all, and all sorts of local details flood in, without being obtrusive.

Perhaps it is underwhelming to end a review with simply “read it”. I’m sure Karen will do better when she reports back. But I’ve rarely had a more involving and beautiful reading experience than with Jansson’s short stories, and if I could have two books by the same author on my ’50 Books…’ list…

Second favourite short story writer. Can you guess the first?

Tan? This isn’t a tan, it’s rust…

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Hello again!
I do hope some of you are still lingering around the outskirts of Stuck-in-a-Book after my longest sojourn to date. It’s nice to be back in the ether, though I wouldn’t have missed the holiday – despite the almost constantly abysmal weather. And thus what you see above you is all that I managed to produce on the painting front – that, and another hastily begun painting, which I will attempt to complete from memory. The lighthouse above (hope you can work out which part of the painting is supposed to be a lighthouse) is no ordinary lighthouse, oh no. It is the lighthouse, of To The Lighthouse. Or so Our Vicar tells me, and I trust him. It was very exciting, standing with an easel and palette, and gives one the instant feeling of being an artist, whatever the canvas might suggest.

What else? Well, I got through four books, one for each of the authors in the previous post’s collage, and I’ll be reporting back on them as and when. None will be joining the 50 Books, even if the list is in no particular order. Two were banned on the rule that authors can’t be repeated; one I don’t consider obscure enough; the other didn’t make the grade. See if you can work out which is which…

Anyway, nice to be back. Put on a kettle, someone, would you?