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The Family That Reads Together…

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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.

Congratulations!

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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!

Twins

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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.

 

Surely it’s a Sport?

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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?

Beg Pardon?

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Thanks Lynne for bringing The Loudest Sound And Nothing to my attention, and thanks Faber (or should that be Faber and Faber?) for sending me a copy to review, on my request.

You may well know about my recent penchant for short stories – and I couldn’t resist reading a collection with such a great cover. Very simple-but-effective, which is the perfect recipe for a short story.

Very difficult to know what to say about Clare Wigfall’s collection of stories. What The Loudest Sound And Nothing has made me realise is that, though many collections of short stories contain a lot of variety, they always have some identifiable style or wording or topic which is unmistakably consistent. Not so Ms. Wigfall. She covers so many periods, personas, styles, situations, nationalities and (though I haven’t counted) no great imbalane in gender of narrator too. If they do share a common trait, it is the focus upon the unspoken. That’s rather a truism of all literature post-1950, but rarely have I read it done without being irritating or merely included for effect. Wigfall’s stories allow glimpses into lives, and wherever the image hinges on an untold aspect of these lives, it is the surrounding existence which grabs out attention. Sure, we don’t know, say, what it is the barman tells the girl in ‘Free’; we don’t know what Mr. Turbridge’s crime is in ‘Night after Night’ (though one can perhaps guess); we don’t know what’s going on in ‘Safe’, the most enigmatic story of them all. But in each of these cases, and throughout the collection, the portraits are complete enough to leave you satisfied. Not every story has an omission to illuminate the rest – in ‘On Pale Green Walls’, for example, understanding what’s happening, when the narrator doesn’t, is the crux.

Whichever way the story is structured, they all involve the reader in a way which I hope Wigfall can bottle and sell to potential writers. Because they’re such a varied bunch, each must stand on its own merits – and I found that all but one of them did. Within sentences, Wigfall creates a miniature landscape of narrative, and even stories which last a few pages feel like complete entities. This is how the modern short story should be written.

Reading Groups

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I re-read Jenny Hartley’s Reading Groups today, which looks very like the picture here, except I couldn’t find an illustration without Amazon’s chirpy ‘Search Inside!’ addition. Since the sentiment is admirable, I’ll let it stand.

Apparently there is an updated version available, but my 2001 edition is fascinating nonetheless. Hartley (et al, I daresay) sent out questionnaires to reading groups, and this guide is based on the 350 responses they received. If you’re like me, this information is enough to make you immediately order a copy of the book – I love book club, I do. Of course the internet equivalents are wonderful, and I think the blogging community can be pushed into this category, but this is nothing to beat a face-to-face reading group. I haven’t attended one for a couple of years, since university and moving house separated me from the one I spent a year at in Eckington. The other day, though, I discovered an Oxford book group in its initial stages, sent off an email, and shall be joining them from September – I daresay you’ll be hearing about that in due course.

Where was I? Hartley’s book, oh yes. As well as basic information about the number, location and gender of book clubs (statistically, apparently, the most common one is a rural, all-female group of 6-10) Reading Groups frequently cites questionnaires on all reading-group-related-topics. We hear why Beryl Bainbridge doesn’t find much favour, about Bristol’s four continuing book groups which were around in the early nineteenth-century, and the various reasons why men are considered miscreants in the world of collective reading. Hearing about the rituals and practices of all-male book clubs (one group sits in order of seniority, clockwise, and must consume no more and no less than two pints of ale per meeting) I’m not surprised that my gender is looked upon with some suspicion. Shame.

I could cite all the examples, but you should instead pop along to Amazon and pay the £0.01 + p&p required to own one yourself. Well, since you asked, here is another titbit: “One woman rarely reads the assignment but gives great excuses: for Camus’s The Plague she read one page only and said she does not like books about rats.”

Anyone reading this is self-evidently a peruser of blogs, and most of you will write your own – but what about your ‘terrestrial’ reading groups? Are you in one, two, twenty? And how do they compare to the blogosphere?

Honour and Obey

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Wonders will never cease; I am Booking Through Thursday on a THURSDAY. True, there are only 35 minutes left on Thursday, this side of the Pond anyway, but the principle stands. A round of applause, if you will.

One book at a time? Or more than one? If more, are they different types/genres? Or similar? (We’re talking recreational reading, here—books for work or school don’t really count since they’re not optional.)
A fine question. One of the things I like best about finishing my degree (and it is certainly a mixed blessing) is that I can read more than book at once, purely because I don’t have deadlines for reading, and it doesn’t matter whether it takes me a day or a month to read a book. I like to have a few reads at the same time, but generally not more than one novel. So perhaps a novel, a factual book, a selection of letters, the diaries collection I have The Assassin’s Cloak… but if I were reading two novels at the same time, it would be too confusing.

How about you? Less easily confused than me?

Young Love

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You’ll forgive me if I start this post with a little bit of trepidation. I’ve never written a review of a book before with the knowledge that the author would peruse my musings. Takes me back to the first review I had printed in the Oxford Student newspaper, of Ian McEwan’s Saturday. As he was busy filling his pockets with money, it probably troubled him little that I found the novel ill-conceived, cliché-ridden and rather dull. Luckily for Angela Young – the first ‘Y’ in my Book Journal, for those keeping tabs – I didn’t find her debut novel Speaking of Love to be guilty of any of these crimes.

In fact, and Stuck-in-a-Book knows no higher accolade, it’s going straight into ’50 Books You Must Read But Might Not Have Heard About’. Not something I do lightly, you understand. As Mr. Bennet might say, read on.

Angela Young’s novel has similarities with a couple of other modern novels I’ve mentioned on here – Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, and Margaret Pelling’s Work For Four Hands. The main similarity is that one reads investigatively; there is a central mystery to be unfurled, which will help explain why the characters act as they do, respond (or, rather, don’t) to each other in the ways they do. Even without all the other reasons to read on, the need to discover how all the pieces fit together is enough to keep anybody hooked.

Speaking of Love is divided into three narrative strands, Iris’s Story; Vivie’s Story; Matthew’s Story. At first I thought this was overkill, and did get a little confused – surely we don’t need all three voices? How wrong I was. They are distinct personas, and Young cleverly presents Vivie in the third person, alongside Iris and Matthew in the first person, so little overlap occurs. No character has more than a few pages at any one time, and they always took up the narrative again at exactly the moment I was thinking “Hmm, we haven’t heard from Iris/Vivie/Matthew in a while, I hope they’re next”.

Iris is, appropriately enough, a storyteller – though one who has suffered destructive illness – and is heading towards a storytellers’ festival. Vivie, her daughter, hasn’t seen her for years, and is suffering her own personal crises. Matthew, Vivie’s childhood friend, is also off to the festival, with his father, to hear Iris. As these characters and their relationships are explored, so too are their shared and separate pasts – pieces of the puzzle are continually proferred, though never in such a way as they feel incongruous in the narrative. Nothing in Young’s novel is forced, and, given the often stark or emotional subject matter, she does amazingly well to avoid being either saccharine or maudlin. The tagline, as it were, is “Speaking of Love is a novel about what happens when people who love each other don’t say so.” While true, I hope that doesn’t undermine the depth of this novel, the beautiful character portraits and the true humanity which Young has depicted.

Thought I’d give you a little quotation. This makes the novel seem perhaps rather more enigmatic than it is, but it’s also a great, tantalising taster of Speaking of Love, which demonstrates the importance of its key themes; storytelling, relationships, the impact of the past.

‘If life was a story, Vivie,” said her mother, “I could retell it. But it isn’t and I can’t. I just wish that what happened to me never happened in front of you. I wish that you hadn’t had to do what you did and I wish that you hadn’t been so very frightened by it all. That’s what I wish.’

I don’t want to give too much away, but do go and look at the Amazon page for more information, or Angela’s blog, or the book’s website. Above all, read Speaking of Love.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered…

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What do these books have in common?

Give up?

Well, they have all been signed by their authors. A book presents such a complex relationship between the author and reader, which has been documented and investigated and debated by hosts of literary critics over the decades and centuries. This is all made more complicated and fun when the author’s own handwriting appears on the title page – how strange to think that the author has held the book before me! Well, not so strange for A Very Great Profession by Nicola Beauman, and the biography of Judi Dench, for I was present on both those occasions, but for the other three…

When We Were Very Young, I must admit, was not written by Christopher Milne – one of these days I hope to have an AA Milne signature, but alas, not yet – but he has a very close association with the lead character. This copy was sold to me by a man named Peter Guppy, who lived in my old village and did a small business in books, but since he sold it to me for £2, it was really more of a gift. Dorothy Whipple’s The Priory was bought at the Bookbarn in Somerset (or Heaven on Earth, as it may be re-labelled), but it was not until I got home that I realised it was signed. Very exciting! EM Delafield’s novel set me back the most, but as one of my favourite authors, I found the offer irresistible.

How about you? Any signed copies? It’s easy enough to find signed modern novels and biographies, Waterstones seems to stock little else, but what about older authors and treasured novels?