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For Flute and Piccolo by E.H. Lomer

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One of the loveliest parts of being Series Consultant for the British Library Women Writers series is getting to speak to the relatives of authors we’re republishing. When the extraordinarily good The Spring Begins by Katherine Dunning was brought back to life, I got to have a phone call with Dunning’s great niece. Did I know, she asked, that Dunning’s sister also wrote books? Then, so kindly, she sent me not only a pile of Dunning’s novels – but one by Dunning’s sister (her grandmother): For Flute and Piccolo (1955) by E.H. Lomer.

At the centre of the novel are Alice and her adult (or almost adult) children – Harold, Stephen, Jenny. Alice is a widow who is not as well-off as she once was, and she borrows money from a dear, long-standing friend, Mark. The first conflict in the novel is the dispute this occasions between Mark (and Alice) and Harold. He is staid, fiercely respectable, abiding by rules that he believes must be stringently enforced upon others, whatever the cost – though these rules derive as much from pride as decency. And other rules, as we shall learn in the novel, are not rigorously followed.

“So you wish to repay what you consider your mother has borrowed from me – is that it?” he asked.

“Precisely,” said Harold, but he was on his guard.

“Can you afford it?” said Mark, hitting below the belt.

Harold’s face grew pink and offended and a different note entered his voice. Now that he was no longer sparring with Mark but stated his case in a way that carried conviction.

“What I certainly cannot afford is to have it said that I cannot support my own mother – that she must turn to someone else for money on which to live.”

Alice moved uneasily. “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” she admitted, and threw a look of apology towards Mark.

“Neither had I,” said Mark, but without apology.

I love the small moments that mark Lomer out as a thoughtful stylist. She often does those little twists – like ‘but without apology’ – that do so much to elevate the writing, and to give an arch wit to depictions of the dynamics between characters. It’s that sort of sharp writing that really sets apart books like For Flute and Piccolo from the many other novels that look at the conflicts of domestic life in small communities.

The dynamic of Alice and Mark is also interesting. I wished the novel had a little more of Alice, and a little more of her psychology, for she plays the role of so many older woman in novels of the period (and in life) – considered chiefly in the light of mother and wife, and undervalued or disregarded for any other personality or autonomy that she might have. But – and I enjoyed this choice by Lomer – Mark also plays the role often played by women in novels. Throughout the anxieties and disagreements of the central family, Mark is the calm bystander – wise, listening, keeping his views concealed until they are asked for. He is perhaps the emotional heart of the novel, but also the most reticent.

Harold is the opposite of reticent. He is a very successful villain – because he is so frustratingly believable. Like so many naturalistic villains, he is able to twist anybody else’s words and actions into a slight against himself, meanwhile never considering or caring how his words and actions impact anybody else. He reminded me of the mother in E.F. Benson’s Mr Teddy. Here he is with his longsuffering (but not contentedly) wife, May:

“I really wouldn’t have liked to start my tea without you, Harold.”

“I can’t see why not.”

“But I always wait for you,” she said, her voice rising.

“Well, there’s really no necessity,” said Harold, getting impatient. He looked around the table, waiting for his tea, and because there was nothing else to do, May poured it out for him. She poured herself a cup, too, and the silence gathered. No one would talk now until Harold was satisfied, and whether May herself had anything to eat or not would be unnoticed by him. Perversely she ate nothing, hoping he would notice, knowing he wouldn’t, feeling aggrieved.

Isn’t that final sentence perfect – about the petty points that are disregarded by the one they’re aimed at, and the resentment that is tangled up in the useless action? Lomer is very good on the simmering fury of small feuds.

She is equally enjoyable on the possibility of happiness on a similarly small scale. The title comes from a scene in the novel between Mark and Lanty, the latter being enamoured with Jenny (and I believe Jenny and Lanty are depicted on the novel’s cover.) Lanty explains what he is hoping for:

“So that’s your idea of comfort?”

“What’s yours, Lanty?”

Mark asked the question smiling, but Lanty took him seriously.

“A home of my own,” he said after a moment, “and someone waiting for me. The kettle singing on the hearth and a wide arm-chair. Bright fires in winter, open windows in summer – ordinary things, Mr Hillary.”

“I see,” said Mark.

“Just ordinary things,” said Lanty again. “Everyday lives. A tune for flute and piccolo, if you get my meaning. No big drums.”

I’m never sure this sort of title works well – something that needs explaining, or a quote that doesn’t make sense out of context (I am famed for my dislike for Barbara Pym’s titles The Sweet Dove Died and Some Tame Gazelle). Perhaps Lomer gets away with it because the title somehow conveys the tone of the novel, even if you don’t know quite what she’s referring to.

Writing about animosity and petty resentment is perhaps easier than writing about infatuation, and there are occasional moments in the romantic storyline that land a bit falsely (e.g. ‘”I love the very ground you walk on,” said Lanty, carried away’) – though ‘carried away’ at least makes a nod to the jarring tone. But Lomer is overall so successful at her depiction of the emotional highs and lows of unambitious lives. On a grand scale, the disagreements of the family make no difference – but, to the people involved, they are everything. She conveys that beautifully.

As I’ve written above, what makes a small-scale domestic novel stand out is the writing – and I think the sharp precision of Lomer’s turns of phrase that make For Flute and Piccolo stand out. And this, of course, in turn gives the characters greater reality and distinction.

In a battle of the sisters, Katherine Dunning’s The Spring Begins is still the greater book, in my eyes – but I consider it a masterpiece. For Flute and Piccolo might not be quite a masterpiece, but it is extremely good. The sort of sharply written, keenly plotted novel with memorable, individual characters that you could easily imagine being a modern classic – and yet, because of the vagaries of publishing, has been nearly forgotten. I’m so glad that I had the chance to read it – and should you ever stumble across it, I think you’d enjoy doing so too.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Man, this hay fever is wiping me out. I’m so tired with it! And that’s even without taking the antihistamines that make me super drowsy (I’m taking the less drowsy ones). This is all small fry, but it’s my poor excuse for why I haven’t blogged much recently. There are some very enjoyable books I want to tell you about. Soon. But for now, it’s book, blog post, link time. Happy weekend, y’all.

1.) The blog post – Brad at Neglected Books has done a fascinating round up of lesser-known novels that take place in a day. He calls them circadian novels. By the nature of such a list, you might find they’re not very easy to track down – but I really enjoyed reading about them nonetheless.

Autocorrect: Amazon.co.uk: Keret, Etgar, Cohen, Jessica, Silverston, Sondra: 9781803510668: Books

2.) The book – I absolutely loved the bizarre, compelling stories in Suddenly, A Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret, but haven’t yet read any more of his fiction. But I’m still excited to learn that a new collection of his short stories has just come out – Autocorrect. Fingers crossed I’ll get my hands on it!

3.) The link – self-indulgently, it’s to my new podcast! My friend Lizzie and I now co-host an irreverent podcast about the soap opera Emmerdale called Dingle All The Way. The crossover audience with Stuck in a Book might be slim, but I thought I’d mention just in case… find it on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Robert Sugden has chemistry with anyone (Emmerdale 16-27 June 2025)

Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel by Mark Hussey

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Following on from my thoughts on Recommended! by Nicola Wilson, here’s another book so up my street that it feels like a personal favour. Foolishly, I have delayed writing my review for months – I finished it at the beginning of March – but hopefully I remember enough to help you understand why I loved it so much. Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel (2025) came as a review copy, and I read it as soon as it landed.

As the title suggests, this explores Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. I certainly wouldn’t recommend you read Hussey’s book if you haven’t already read Woolf’s, though you don’t need to have a photographic memory for everything in the original to enjoy this. What I do recommend, actually, is listening to Kristin Scott Thomas’s excellent audiobook of Mrs Dalloway alongside Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel. You’ll definitely want to revisit Mrs D one way or another.

The book starts with the background to Mrs Dalloway – starting with a quick overview of the writing and response to her previous novel, Jacob’s Room, which is often seen as a turning point in her development as a writer. For a woman who wrote so much, with almost every scrap of paper being published, it’s surprising how often the same things are used and reused in any book about Woolf. The ‘life is a luminous halo’ quote; the discovery of ‘how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice’. Mrs Dalloway: Biography for a Novel would feel incomplete without them – but they are thankfully only the starting point.

We see how Woolf’s notes and intentions came together in various early drafts of Mrs Dalloway. I was particularly interested in what Hussey notes about the characters Mr and Mrs Dalloway in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out – since I’d always assumed she lifted them from there. As he points out, they are not really the same characters: exploring how she can re-use characters, but also transform them, does take some dealing with – some acceptance of literary slipperiness that doesn’t come easily. But it is definitely worth exploring.

Hussey sets Woolf’s approach in its context – in her own development as a writer, but also in the contemporary literary context. He avoids some of the simplistic received wisdom about James Joyce, and gives a much more nuanced reading:

Woolf and Joyce have often been set up as antagonists, the surface similarities between Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway – both taking place on a single June day in a capital city – offered as evidence of Joyce’s ‘influence’ or even of Woolf’s plagiarism. Such views invariably rely on the casually nasty remarks Woolf made in her diary, that Joyce’s book called to mind ‘a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’, or that it was evidently the production of a ‘self-taught working man’. But Woolf’s discomfort at the ‘indecency’ in Ulysses was not the primness of a late-Victorian woman (who, after all, enjoyed Lytton Strachey’s lewd poems very much). Her objection was baed on the suspicion that it was a ‘dodge’ to convince readers that here was something unprecedented: ‘Must get out of the way of thinking that indecency is more real than anything else’ was another of her reading notes.

Amen, Virginia! Hussey takes us, of course, through the content of Mrs Dalloway – the inspirations that could have helped compose Mrs Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, putting them thoughtfully in the context of contemporary conversations about mental health, the long-term impact of war, and the place of women – and different types of women – in the 1920s. Some of this is necessarily based a little on conjecture and on broader themes – but Hussey is brilliant at detail too. There is a satisfyingly in-depth look at slight variants between editions – something perhaps most exciting to the Woolf nerd like me, even while it undermines the idea of literary stability.

The proofs Woolf sent to Harcourt Brace in New York were marked differently by Woolf than those she subsequently sent back to her printer for the Hogarth Press edition. Owing to these difference, together with the American compositor failing to indicate where space breaks fell at the foot of a page, the Harcourt edition appeared with only eight sections. When a second English edition appeared as part of the ‘Uniform Edition’ of Woolf’s works in 1929, a break was missed between sections seven and eight, resulting in a version with eleven sections. Various editors have made decisions over the ensuing years that have resulted in a kind of free-for-all, with some versions of Mrs Dalloway having ten, others eight, others eleven sections, and so on.

The initial reception to Mrs Dalloway – from critics and from the public – feeds my appetite for this sort of literary gossip. Woolf also documented her response to this response, and I found it all fascinating. And it continues! The latter sections look at the continuing legacy of the novel – how critics have assessed it over time, and the works it has influenced. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours gets substantial space, of course, and it’s instructive to see what this did to a revitalising of Woolf’s readership – but there are also enjoyably unexpected legacies. Did you expect this book to mention Miley Cyrus? Or to show Mrs Dalloway with scar, sword, and eye patch?

Hussey is also merciless in his delving into particularly stupid reviews. I was rather shocked by what Philip Hensher wrote in 2003 about Woolf being better known for her life than her novels which were (Hensher wrote) “inept, ugly, fatuous, badly written and revoltingly self-indulgent”. Hussey lets critics like this expose their own ignorance, giving them enough rope to hang themselves with. But it certainly helps explain why I found the only Hensher novel I read to be pretty unsuccessful.

Having said that, though, Hussey doesn’t always keep himself in the background – and I appreciated when his own voice comes through. There were some excellent turns of phrase – Wyndham Lewis is described as ‘One of the arch-enemies of Bloomsbury was that talented precursor of today’s laddish critics’ – and sections that feel more personal than academic. I enjoyed the mix.

Literary criticism might be imagined as a sprawling conversation among professionals about reading. The conversation moves on or lingers, repeats itself or brings to light somethiong new, confuses or clarifies, and at times can be difficult even for insiders to follow. At its heart, though, when all the theories and specialised terminology, the trends and assumptions, are put aside, literary criticism consists of people saying ‘I thought this when I read that’. How we are ‘supposed’ to feel about Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh or Doris Kilman is the wrong quetion. More interesting is to ask how do you feel, and why?

Speaking of Doris Kilman, I think the only section of Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel that felt less successful to me was an extended reading of Doris Kilman – broadly whether she is an empathetic character or not, and what Woolf might be trying to achieve with the character. It was very interesting, but didn’t feel quite like it fit into the structure of the book – more like a discussion from an undergraduate seminar that he wanted to use but couldn’t quite work out where. My only other quibble with the book was the absence of an index, but that might just be in my advance proof copy – I haven’t checked the final published version.

Minute quibbles for a brilliant achievement. You might be surprised, after seeing all that Hussey has included in this book, to learn that it’s only 180 pages, plus notes, references etc. It’s amazing how comprehensive he can be in a relatively short space. Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel does two things marvellously: give a huge amount of relevant, fascinating, detailed information in a distinct and enjoyable way, and remind me why I love Woolf’s novel so much. Now, of course, I am impatient for Hussey to give the same treatment to all the rest of Woolf’s oeuvre.

Recommended! by Nicola Wilson

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Sometimes there comes along a book you never even hoped you’d get to read – something so totally up your street that it feels almost like a personal kindness that the author was willing to write. Such is Recommend! (2025) by Nicola Wilson – subtitled ‘the influencers who influenced how we read’. It is a history of the Book Society, which began in 1929 as one of the UK’s first book-of-the-month clubs, and went on for many more decades.

The idea was simple: notable authors of the day would read advance copies of books and pick a choice for their growing number of subscribers. If they didn’t want that, there would be alternatives they could substitute in. Each book would come with the Book Society News, including reviews and articles. The everyday, normal reader could have what highbrow literary groups had had for generations. They even had a ‘literary club’ in London that any subscribers were welcome to visit and use, though who knows how many did. Forgive a long quote, but I enjoyed this aspirational look at what a dinner between five literary minds could and would turn into:

For as the red wine was served out, followed by whiskey and cigars for the men, cigarettes for the ladies, the writers’ plans began to take shape: month by month, book by book, they’d change how people thought about reading. As judges their tastes would be broad and eclectic, embracing popular genres and literary fiction, as well as history, travel writing, and memoir. They would not take themselves too seriously; books should be enjoyable and for everyone. By supporting new authors and encouraging a habit of book-buying, they’d break the back of the private subscription library market, enabling ordinary, busy people to build their own collections of first editions. They would help those without nearby bookshops to keep up with new writing and ideas, creating a wide Anglophone reading community. Their selections and recommendations will be bestsellers, making publishers, agents, and booksellers take note. They’d shake up the staid book world with their expert advice, allowing wider audiences, with a growing appetite for books, better access to a world from which many felt actively excluded

Along the way, they would gain enemies. Personal attacks and jibes about their integrity would haunt them, threatening to topple their careers. They would be accused of dumbing down, mocked as ‘middlemen’ for ‘conferring authority on a taste for the second-rate’. Not all five would stick it out. But the Book Society they began that night would serve tens of thousands of readers worldwide for the next forty years, steering a course through the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and the devastation of World War II. Hundreds of what we now think of as twentieth-century classics would first reach readers wrapped in ‘Book Society Choice’ yellow bands.

The initial group included names still known today. The head of the selection committee was Hugh Walpole; alongside him was J.B. Priestley and Rose Macaulay, though the latter dropped out before the first novel was published. Replacing her was Clemence Dane (pseudonym of Winifred Ashton), and the others on that initial committee are perhaps less remembered – writer and reviewer Sylvia Lynd and academic George Gordon, lending the group some critical respectability. Later judges who get a lot of space in the book include Cecil Day-Lewis and Edmund Blunden.

Wilson takes us through the set up of the group, its advertising and some initial pushback, and how the first books were chosen – which seems not to have been plain sailing. ‘For Hugh, the club’s first choice was a mess’, she writes. His father died in the midst of the decision making, and so he had to leave it to others – who were debating between Helen Beauclerk’s The Love of the Foolish Angel and Joan Lowell’s non-fiction The Cradle of the Deep. The former was chosen – which turned out to be a relief, as Lowell’s book was exposed as a hoax.

The book is structured chronologically, but with different judges taking centre stage at different times. I was a little sceptical about this at first – after all, if we delve into Hugh Walpole’s life (for instance) only for the initial chapter, then how would Wilson deal with significant things happening to him later? How would it work to only learn depths about Sylvia Lynd in chapter four? Well, and not for the last time, I’m very impressed by Wilson’s handling of her material. Somehow, it works. She expertly manages to assess when we really need to learn more about a judge’s personal life – whether that be affairs and divorce, substance abuse, or merely the shifting literary fortunes that gave them more or less time to devote to the Book Society. It works brilliantly, and Recommended! becomes rather a page-turner.

I’m skimming the surface of the details in here (you’ll just have to read it!) but, to be honest, I’d have been captivated if Recommended! were only an account of the mechanics of starting and running a book-of-the-month club. And it’s so much more. Wilson doesn’t tell us about every single choice at length, there are plenty of satisfyingly detailed sections exploring why books were chosen, what that did to their reputation, who squabbled with whom, etc. And the choice of titles is certainly varied. While book-of-the-month clubs now tend towards popular, pacey fiction, the Book Society were unafraid to recommend hefty history books – and, indeed, many of the leading highbrow writers of the day.

I said it on Tea or Books? when mentioning Recommended! and I’ll say it again – I was blown away by Wilson’s research. I wrote about the Book Society for my DPhil and spent quite a lot of time researching it – and I know how extremely difficult it was to find any information. It was a struggle even to find a list of the books they chose, and indeed I failed to find a complete list – but Wilson has found far, far more. The newsletters, the relevant correspondence, the detailed understanding of the judges’ lives throughout the decades – there is so much expert research presented in an engaging way, and it never feels like anything is missing. It is extremely impressive, and I doff my cap to Wilson.

While the Book Society continued until the 1960s, Wilson’s book takes us up to the end of the Second World War, with a postscript and some appendices covering the later years – which is rather a relief, to be honest, as we could stay in the heyday. The only thing missing from this exceptional book is a full list of titles as an appendix – they are listed at the ends of chapters, but that does require quite a lot of flicking about, and I’d have preferred to have a full list to consult.

The Book Society may never have numbered millions of subscribers, but it truly changed the way that society – or a certain section of society, at least – chose and read their books. It could have been a curio of literary history, left to explore in the shadows by students like me. I’m so glad that Wilson has rescued The Book Society from that fate with this captivating, fascinating book that garlands its incredible research with an approachable chattiness. In conclusion: Recommended! is heartily recommended.

Mr Teddy by E.F. Benson

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Mr Teddy

I have a teetering pile of E.F. Benson novels I’ve not read – he was so prolific, and some of his books aren’t that easy to come across, so I always snap up any that I find in the wild. Most of the time, I love reading the results of this foraging – occasionally, some of his earlier novels haven’t worked as well for me. But mostly he has a witty view of small-town communities that revels in their competitiveness and bitchiness and interdependence, and I lap it all up.

Mr Teddy (1917)  – published in the US as The Tortoise – falls somewhere in the middle of his writing career. On the first page, ‘Mr Teddy’ – Edward Heaton – is shaving in the mirror and reflecting on the fact that he has just turned 40 years old. That felt apposite, as I am a few months away from the milestone myself. He is a decent, kind man who has enough wealth to make decency and kindness fairly easy on the whole, though he struggles to achieve his potential – his potential being artistic. He has made plenty of very good, half-finished portraits… and nothing more. The morning of his 40th birthday is a time for reflection on such incomplete achievements.

One area of his life where kindness is very much evident is in dealing with the true monster of the book – his mother, Mrs Heaton. I say ‘monster’. She is also the novel’s greatest delight, for me. In her, Benson has created an exceptional portrait of long-suffering, where the suffering is entirely confected and the complaints about it weary everyone around her. She is constantly saying that nobody must consider her feelings, that they clearly don’t care about her opinions or her anguish, all the while refusing to allow anybody to help her and deliberately misinterpreting anything as a personal barb.

“I know I have have no say in the matter,” said his mother, instantly proceeding to have a pretty good ‘say’,”because you are master of this house, and I am your pensioner. Whether that was or was not a kind and considerate way of your father to leave his money, so that I was necessarily dependent on you for the ordinary comforts of life, I hope I have too great a loyalty to his memory to say. Nothing shall induce me to open my lips on that subject. You will perhaps tell me when you have decided what room to give Robin; and if you settle to give him my bedroom, I’m sure I will sleep wherever you choose to put me without a murmur – not that I sleep much at the best of times.”

Benson is so adept at this sort of character, and Mrs Heaton is both consistent and infuriating. Edward puts up with her in a manner befitting a saint, only occasionally allowing impatience to creep into his voice (and being made to pay for it). Perhaps a little more impatience would have made him a little more realistic. Certainly, I found myself deeply frustrated by Mrs Heaton – in a way that I loved reading about.

Teddy’s dearest friend is a younger woman called Daisy, in and out of their house constantly in the manner of villagers who have known each other forever, and who belong to the very select upper class of the community. (The lower classes may as well not exist except as servants, in Mr Teddy, and there is no indictation of their experience of village life.) While notably younger than Teddy, she has reached an age where she considers herself on the shelf – somewhat south of 30. But if Teddy were to ask her…

A fun side plot is Daisy’s sister’s career as an author. Her novels appear in instalments in the parish magazine, and from thence are published under a pseudonym and pretty popular with the wider public. As publishing approaches go, I suspect that was always unusual. Marion takes her writing career extremely seriously, not least as the moral compass of her readers. She considers it both shocking and an enormous responsibility when one of her characters loses her Christian faith (though she will resume it after a decent interval). Benson – and Marion’s readers – take her career rather less seriously.

Now in late October the era of ‘winter dessert’ had begun, and while Daisy ate a small green apple, which quite resisted the cutting edge of a silver knife, Marion chose a hard ginger-nut which was nearly as intractable to the teeth. She announced about this period the news of the impending salvation of Mrs Anstruther.

“Well, that’s a great relief to me,” said Daisy. “I have often felt quite depressed in thinking of her. I wondered if you would find you could touch her heart.”

“Yes, but I think she must die,” said Marion.

Speaking of dying – a spoiler for about a third of the way through the novel – Mrs Heaton’s self-pity for once is justified, and she dies. Her behaviour is, indeed, rather more tolerable during this trying period. Like so many self-obsessed nuisances, she deals better with crises than with everyday inconveniences. Sadly for Mr Teddy, I think this is where the novel loses a lot of its momentum. In the remaining two-thirds of the novel, new neighbours arrive and Edward’s possible romantic life becomes more significant. I enjoyed Mr Teddy right through to the end – but it had lost its main spectacle.

We are often told that conflict is necessary for action in a novel, and I think that is only true if ‘conflict’ is considered in the loosest possible manner. It’s perfectly possible to write an excellent novel without anybody as dislikable as Mrs Heaton. But her selfishness is not only an exceptionally good, funny portrait – it also, somehow, gave the novel its momentum. If only to see which character might finally snap and murder her. With Mrs Heaton off the page, it became a pleasant, witty comedy of manners – but without any obvious driving force.

Such plot as there is seems to come in rather a rush at the end, and Benson does rather try to have his cake and eat it with some genuinely poignant moments – perhaps falling a little too near the writings by Marion that he is teasing about. I think Mr Teddy would have been more successful if he had kept his antagonist alive – and resisted a little self-indulgent bathos. But E.F. Benson is E.F. Benson, and I really enjoyed my time in this novel even with those quibbles. And there are plenty more on the Benson tower to enjoy next.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Hope you’re having a good weekend! I have a jam-packed one, seeing lots of friends (and also the musical Titanique, which I’m very excited about). Along the way, I’ll be having my first ever Peruvian meal, or at least what London thinks is Peruvian food. Not to mention, of course, a handful of books along the way – a couple of train journeys will helpfully contribute there. I also have a pile of books I finished before May still waiting to be reviewed, as they were neglected for A Book A Day In May.

Whatever you’re up to, here are a book, a link, and a blog post to help you feeling weekendish.

1.) The link – ok, niche audience maybe, but my friend Lizzie and I have started a podcast about the soap opera Emmerdale! It’s called Dingle All The Way, after the Dingle family, and you can find it on Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

2.) The blog post – I’m not going to lie, I was hoping to see more blog reviews of The Spring Begins by Katherine Dunning, especially as Scott (Furrowed Middlebrow) and I have both made it our top books of the year. It is now available, so please do go and read it! It’s marvellous! What are you waiting for! Don’t just take my word and Scott’s word for it – Caro has written a wonderful review too now.

A Crumpled Swan: Fifty essays about Abigail Parry's 'In the dream of the cold restaurant'

3.) The book – yes, this book grabbed my attention because I misread the subtitle and thought it was 50 essays about Abigail’s Party, and wouldn’t that be wonderful? But, having corrected myself, I’m still intrigued by David Collard’s A Crumpled Swan: Fifty essays about Abigail Parry’s ‘In the dream of the cold restaurant’, which looks to be far more wide-ranging than the title suggests – looking at wider issues of writing and reading, using a single poem as a basis. It could be fantastic or it could be extremely self-indulgent, and I’ll need to read it to find out.

Project 24 update (books 6-14)

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I haven’t updated you on my Project 24 buying for a good while – and please know that that is absolutely not because I’ve been behaving on that front. In fact, I’m getting ahead of where I should be.

Let’s go in the order I bought them, which is unhelpfully not the order that they’re pictured above.

An Avenue of Stone by Pamela Hansford Johnson
I was in a bookshop in Stirling, Scotland, a month or two ago, and didn’t want to leave it empty-handed. There were quite a few rare-ish books that I loved, but already owned. It felt like the kind of shop where I should be able to find something special – and in the end I plumped for An Avenue of Stone by Pamela Hansford Johnson, having recently loved her novel Catherine Carter. I was a little hesitant, because it is apparently the middle of a trilogy, but I figured I could start accumulating…

Adventures of an Ordinary Mind by Lesley Conger
Lesley Conger wasn’t a name I knew, but when Brad/Neglected Books posted on BlueSky, I immediately ordered a copy across the Atlantic. I love books about reading, and apparently this is one the earliest examples that Brad has come across. It’s not your stereotypical ‘busy wife and mother’ reading – she seems to lean towards the Greek classics – but I’m looking forward to delving in.

Agatha Christie’s Marple by Mark Aldridge
Agatha Christie’s Poirot by Mark Aldridge
I forgot to include these in the picture, but I found a couple of interesting looking books that trace Agatha Christie’s most famous detectives through their careers – including the genesis and reception of each book.

Crooked Cross by Sally Carson
Persephone have been trumpeting this reprint as a bestseller even before it was published – and, since it is a portrait of a selfish tyrant becoming a global leader, it is sadly all too relevant to today. I had a trip to Bath a couple of weeks ago and made sure to pick up a copy (as well as pressing Guard Your Daughters on a friend).

The Provincial Lady Goes Further by E.M. Delafield
The Provincial Lady in Wartime by E.M. Delafield
Women Are Like That by E.M. Delafield
The Babe, B.A. by E.F. Benson
On the way back from a church weekend away, I decided to stop at Canons Ashby National Trust. I just fancied a nice day out in the sunshine, and somewhere to finish that day’s book for A Book A Day In May. Well, what a nice surprise to discover they were doing a book fair in the old priory. And, oh gosh, I had the experience we all dream of in that situation.

I don’t have high hopes for this sort of thing, which is often piles of crime thrillers and paperbacks that were popular in 2005. But (as always) I headed for the ‘old and interesting’ table. And I couldn’t believe it when I spied Women Are Like That – one of the very few E.M. Delafield books I didn’t previously own, and which is only available very expensively online. And then I found an E.F. Benson stash too!

There were a few rare E.M. Delafields and E.F. Bensons that I already owned, so was happy to leave them there for another person like me to be overjoyed by. But I couldn’t leave behind these two lovely editions of Provincial Lady books – the one series that I allow myself to duplicate at whim. They are the most striking in the photo, and I am very glad to spend some of my Project 24 allowance on them. But it’s Women Are Like That which really excited me – to the point where I genuinely wondered if I were dreaming. I’ve had that found-a-book-I-really-want dream too many times!

So, yes, I officially can’t buy a book until August to keep on track, but (a) I’ve really happy with my choices so far, and (b) I actually ordered a book online this morning…

Finishing #ABookADayInMay

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I finished A Book A Day In May today with O Caledonia (1991) by Elspeth Baker. Rachel and I will be pitting it against The Sundial by Shirley Jackson in the next episode of Tea or Books?, so I won’t jump the gun by reviewing it today.

But hurrah for finishing A Book A Day In May – and in rather lovely circumstances, as I took O Caledonia to Blenheim Palace and read pretty much the whole thing in the sunshine, overlooking the lake. It’s only half an hour from my house and I have a year’s membership, meaning I can pop in without feeling I need to explore every corner each time.

I’ve done this reading project, or variants on it, for four or five years now – and it was really fun this year. Last year, with my eyes still quite bad many months after Covid, I did struggle on certain days – so I was really thankful to be able to do so much reading without any deleterious impact on my eyes, even during the peak of hay fever.

This May, it didn’t even feel like I was struggling to fit it in. Some judicious audiobooks and starting books ahead of schedule definitely helped. And, yes, there have been some duds along the way (which Madame Bibi seemed to avoid in her similar project – almost all seemed to be winners) but there were wonderful successes too.

In order of reading them, here are my favourites:

Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton
The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick
The Trouble With Sunbathers by Magnus Mills
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

The Snake Has All The Lines by Jean Kerr – #ABookADayInMay Day 30

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Back in 2012, I read Jean Kerr’s best-known book, apparently turned into a beloved film, Please Don’t Eat The Daisies. She followed it in 1960 with The Snake Has All The Lines – a curious title that apparently comes from her son being cast as Adam in a school play about Eden, but complaining that the snake has all the lines.

Like the previous collection, a lot of The Snake Has All The Lines covers the experience of being a put-upon wife and mother – and, like that collection, it is episodic. The separate comic essays don’t have any overarching narrative, which makes her writing perhaps a little less satisfying to curl up with than something like Raising Demons or Life Among The Savages by Shirley Jackson – but certainly very diverting to dip into. Or, if you’re doing A Book A Day In May, read in one rush.

Kerr is very pithy, and the lines she opens essays with are well-crafted – e.g. ‘I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.’ She is gifted at observational comedy about domestic life, and does it with a precision and rhythm to her sentences that is always enjoyable. What I will say, though, is that those observations have become truisms over the years. Even in 1960, I suspect it wasn’t the peak of freshness to say that children are a handful and given to chaos, or that husbands are absent-minded and a little bit useless – in the six or so decades since, most comic writers would choose to put a little bit more of a spin on it.

Here she is on married life:

When a man calls you from Tulsa, he invariably makes the mistake of calling either from a public bar or from his mother’s living-room. Neither setting is exactly conducive to a free exchange of ideas. There, within earshot of his fellow revellers or his mother, he can hardly say the one thing you want to hear, which is that he misses you terribly, it’s been a nightmare, a nightmare! and he’s never going to make a trip alone again. For that matter, you can’t tell him you miss him either, because the children are there with you and they become downright alarmed at any hint that their parents have preserved this degrading adolescent attachment so far into senility.

And here’s an example of her take on children:

I know that small children have a cetain animal magnetism. People kiss them a lot. But are they really in demand, socially? Are they sought after? Does anybody ever call on them on the telephone and invite them to spend the week-end on Long Island? Dot heir own grandmothers want them to spent the whole summer in Scranton? No. For one thing they bite, and then they keep trying to make forts with mashed potatoes.

It’s all very entertaining, if not the most original. But there is more variety in The Snake Has All The Lines than I remember there being in Please Don’t Eat The Daisies. As well as wife-and-mother scenarios, Kerr is writing as a successful author and playwright – so there is an essay about dealing with bad reviews, for instance, and one about travelling with a show you’ve written. Most unusually of all, she dramatises Lolita and Humbert Humbert at marriage counselling, which I daresay I’d have understood better had I read more than one and a half pages of Lolita.

Kerr isn’t writing great literature and she isn’t pretending to be. But this is an example of a genre I love – self-deprecating domestic memoirs with an exaggerated tone and a clippy pace – and a very enjoyable example at that.

A couple of underwhelming #ABookADayInMay choices – Days 28 + 29

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Coming towards the end of A Book A Day In May, I’ve read a couple of books that weren’t particularly bad, but left me pretty underwhelmed. So let’s race through them.

One Writer's Beginnings: Amazon.co.uk: Welty, Eudora: 9781982152109: Books

One Writer’s Beginnings (1984) by Eudora Welty

I’ve only read two of Eudora Welty’s novels – The Optimist’s Daughter, which I thought was brilliant, and Delta Wedding, which I didn’t. Years and years ago I started One Writer’s Beginnings but somehow never finished it – and, considering it’s 102 pages, I should have taken that as a red flag. Well, I started again and now I’ve read it, but it felt very meh.

One Writer’s Beginnings comes from three lectures that Welty gave at Harvard, and I wonder what they made of them there. Really, this is my fault though. I always find the childhood sections of autobiographies the least interesting sections – and One Writer’s Beginnings told me in the title that that’s what it would be. Welty’s three chapters are basically childhood anecdotes and family folklore, and only right at the end do we get anything hinting at her writing career (beyond the odd mention here and there, which presumably reminded Harvard that they’d invited her as a Pulitzer prizewinning author, rather than someone with a diverting childhood).

There’s nothing wrong with her stories, and some of the things her family experienced were heartrending (there is a poignant section where she accidentally learns about the brother who died, and even more poignant that she adds that her parents never mentioned him again). But I found that her novelist’s craft rather deserted her. Even anecdotes that should be interesting in fundamentals come across as curiously uninteresting. I recognise that I’ve not detailed what many of them are, and that’s because I’ve already forgotten almost all of them. I don’t know why One Writer’s Beginnings was so bland to me, but it was. Your mileage may vary.

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Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015) by Becky Albertalli

I listened to this young adult novel, having previously watched the film – adaptated under the more crowdpleasing title Love, Simon. It’s about a gay teenager (Simon) who has been emailing another gay teenager – both of them using pseudonyms. The novel is about this e-friendship, wondering who ‘Blue’ might be, and the wider group of Simon’s friends and family.

I’d enjoyed the film, but found the book a bit slow by comparison. I didn’t much care about any of Simon’s friends, and the subplots involving them were a bit of a slog. The book picked up towards the end – and, thank you fading memory, I had misremembered the identity of ‘Blue’ – so that revelation came as a surprise the second time around. I guess either I’m too old for this sort of book, or the makers of the film turned it into something a bit zippier. (As a sidenote, and I’ve found this a few times, listening to an audiobook with lots of emails in it is a mistake, cos you can skim over the email address / time stamp / subject line when you’re reading it, and it is tedious to hear all these read out over and over again in an audiobook.)

So, not the best couple of days, so let’s be optimistic for finishing off May well with my next two choices.