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My Top Ten Books of 2019

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I love the end of the year because I get to read everyone’s Best Books list – and I get to make my own. I’ve usually got a good idea what will be at the top of the list, but it’s only when going back through my reading that I decide which will make the full top ten.

This year, I think the top four could have been in any order. They were all a delight. But you know me – I don’t like the ‘in no particular order’ sort of list. Be brave and rank things, people! So here is my top ten, with the usual rules I give myself – no re-reads and no author can appear twice.

10. Miss Carter and the Ifrit (1945) by Susan Alice Kerby

The Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press is my favourite thing from the past few years in publishing – and this book was more or less made for me. A spinster is surprised when an enthusiastic and slightly chaotic ifrit – a sort of genie – turns up to do her bidding. A very funny clash of worlds.

9. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) by Brian Moore

This had been on my shelves for seven years, and I’m so glad I finally read it. In a claustrophobic boarding house, Judith Hearne arrives with a picture of Jesus to hang above the bed, and a world of loneliness and frustrated hope. It’s a melancholy, perfectly observed novel with a subdued humour below the surface.

8. Turn Back The Leaves (1930) by E.M. Delafield

I read this for the 1930 Club and found it one of EMD’s most enjoyable novels. It has none of the humour that laces most of her work, but is rather about the clashes of a Catholic family when various members fall in love outside The Church.

7. Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) by Deirdre Madden

A beautifully written novel about a single day in the life of a director house-sitting for her famous actress friend – though largely made up of flashbacks and recollections.

6. The Wells of St Mary’s (1962) by R.C. Sherriff

I can’t get enough of R.C. Sherriff – having read all the ones Persephone have republished, I got this one about a small village where a neglected well proves to have miraculous healing properties – and how this leads to murder…

5. Notes Made While Falling (2019) by Jenn Ashworth

This memoir-in-essays starts with a traumatic birth and the psychological damage it caused, and ranges over topics as various as Mormonism, Agatha Christie, Freud, and Virginia Woolf. The whole thing is united by brilliant, insightful writing.

4. The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (1982) by Charles Osborne

What fun I had reading this one! Osborne goes through each of Christie’s works in turn, giving the context from her life and the initial reception, as well as his critical opinion of the book. Even better, there are no spoilers.

3. All The Lives We Ever Lived (2019) by Katharine Smyth

This books explores Smyth’s grief at her father’s death through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. She writes about Woolf extremely well, and about her own family with honesty. I think you probably have to love Woolf to love this – but I do and I did.

2. O, The Brave Music (1943) by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

I read this novel twice this year, and I’m sure I’ll read it many times more. It’s a coming-of-age story that feels like it comes from the same world as I Capture the Castle, with the same freedom and uncertainty and love.

1. The Book of William (2009) by Paul Collins

I wasn’t expecting to love this book so much when I picked it up – prompted by Project Names. And yet, once I started, I fell completely in love. Collins traces the history of Shakespeare’s First Folio from its first printing to its rising and falling popularity over the centuries. Fascinating and often funny, I’d heartily recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest in the Bard of bibliophilia.

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So, there we go! Seven different decades represented and, more surprisingly for me, two books that were published this year. Another year where non-fiction comes out on top, which seems to have become a habit for my end of the year lists – though six novels in the top ten.

Full stats for my year’s reading will be coming soon – I’m still hoping to finish at least one more before the year is over!

 

Looking back on #ProjectNames

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It’s the final days of 2019, so I thought I’d take a look back at the major reading project of my year – Project Names. It hasn’t been one that I’ve done with a huge number of people, but it’s been lovely having Rosemary do it at the same time – and you can read her thoughts in the second half of this blog post. Thanks for sharing them with us, Rosemary!

In case you haven’t picked it up along the way this year, Project Names was a year-long project to read books with names in the title. It didn’t come with a target, and I certainly didn’t read these books exclusively – rather, when I was choosing the next books to pick off my shelves, it was a useful way to help decide from among the many options.

What counts as a name? I only looked at people’s names, rather than places – first name, surname, both, whatever. I let The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark in on a technicality, and counted God as a name in God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew. I was surprised to discover that Less by Andrew Sean Greer would count after I started it – because Less is the surname of the main character. For the most part, though, I was intentionally picking them off the shelf. And then reading something else if I wanted to.

There’s still a couple of days left in the year, and I have a handful of contenders on the go (as well as some still to review), but at the time of writing I’ve read 72 books with names in the title this year. I haven’t counted up my total books read in 2019, but I’m confident that’s more than half of the books I read. By contrast, only 32 of the 152 books I read in 2018 had names in the title.

And what did I learn? Well, it was a super fun way to structure my reading without limiting myself to a particular period, genre, geography, or anything like that. It was really fun to see if there were any commonalities between books with names in the title – and I’m always interested in how the title of a novel shapes how a reader experiences it. Obviously, it brings the character or characters mentioned to the fore.

Some of my reads were disappointing. Looking For Enid by Duncan McLaren, about Enid Blyton, was pretty terrible and went to a charity shop as soon as I’d finished it. Noah’s Ark is apparently widely considered one of Barbara Trapido’s worst novels. The Progress of Julius by Daphne du Maurier was so anti-Semitic that I felt bad even giving it to a charity shop, but that’s where it went. On the other hand, some of my best reads this year would have stayed unread if it weren’t for this project – The Book of William by Paul Collins had been neglected;  for ages; The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore is one I assumed I’d love, and did, but might have waited still longer to be picked up; Mr Emmanuel by Louis Golding has striking scenes that will stay with me for years.

I’m quite excited about having no reading structure at all next year, but this was the perfect way to follow on from A Century of Books without feeling panic at the multitude of options on my shelves. So, 2020 will be a largely anything-goes reading year, but I’d love to try something similar to Project Names the year after, if I come up with anything that works similarly.

If you’re tempted to give this a go, I definitely recommend it. Even if you don’t read all that many Project Names books, maybe bear it in mind when you’re deciding what to pick up next?

Over to Rosemary for her thoughts!

My reading was distinctly in the doldrums at the end of 2018. Having been a complete bookworm since my mother first started taking me to the local library at the age of three, I was reading less and less and missing it more and more. Other things – work, family, the dreaded social media – had crowded in, so when I saw Simon’s #projectnames idea, I knew it was just what I needed.  I spent an enjoyable hour searching my shelves for suitable titles, assembled them all in one place, and began what has become one of my most rewarding years of reading for decades.

My first book was DE Stevenson’s Bel Lamington; Stevenson was born here in Edinburgh, and having once been to a wonderful Persephone Books tea at which her granddaughter shared childhood memories of this amazing woman, I like to think of her, prone on her chaise longue, a cigarette (in an ornate holder, of course) in her hand, dictating her books to her secretary. She wrote many ‘light romantic’ novels, but this description does her a disservice, as all of them have sharp observations and wonderful characters. Later in the year I returned to Dorothy (who had a handy tendency to use her heroine’s name as the title) for Charlotte Fairlie. Both of these novels had been languishing on my bookshelves – I bought them in a job lot in Michael Moon’s famous Whitehaven shop years ago when visiting my in-laws; #projectnames led me to read them, and I am so glad that it did.

The focus on names meant my reading this year was far wider in scope than it had been of late. Sara Hunt of the estimable Saraband Books sent me Iain Maitland’s Mr Todd’s Reckoning, something I’d never normally have opened – but the title fitted, so in I plunged, and what a book it was. The twisted, self-justifying mind of a psychopath is brilliantly revealed, bit by tiny bit, as the temperature rises in a run-down suburb of Ipswich. Mr Todd could be your neighbour; he could be mine. Terrifying, and definitely one of my books of the year. I’d also never read any Henry James, always thinking he’d be hard work, but Daisy Miller was a name, so read it I did; I loved it and still think of Daisy often – surely the mark of a great novel.

I decided also to re-read some Amanda Cross. Cross, aka Professor Carolyn Heilbrun, was one of my very favourite authors in my student years, and I did wonder how her books would stand up after all this time; although they are all murder mysteries, they are very much rooted in the radical feminism of my youth, and I feared they might now seem dated. Well, maybe it’s because I am also now somewhat dated, but it was pure joy to return to The Question of Max, and especially to No Word From Winifred, the first Cross I ever bought from Heffers bookshop. Would readers who weren’t around then like them? I don’t know (I feel the same way about Posy Simmonds’ Wendy Weber cartoons – if you weren’t there in the 80s, would you get it?) but I thank #projectnames for leading me back to them. 

Reading more widely did, of course, mean that I came across a few duds as well. I was disappointed with Sandi Toksvig’s Gladys Reunited, and with Nella Last’s War (sorry Simon!), and Don’t Tell Alfred was certainly not one of Nancy Mitford’s best, but I’m still glad I read  all three. And I discovered some real gems too; I’d probably never have picked up Patrick Dennis’s eccentric Auntie Mame or Mavis Cheek’s Country Life, but both got four stars from me. I’m finishing the year with AJ Pearce’s Dear Mrs Bird.

So thank you so much Simon for reinvigorating my reading life, and I look forward to 2020’s theme, whatever it may be, with great anticipation. 

Books I got for Christmas!

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Hope you all had a really lovely Christmas! It was a new and different Christmas for the Thomas family, as it’s the first one since my dad retired as a vicar – Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife will have to change their nicknames! I’ve been in a vicarage for every Christmas of my life until now, and it’s very odd to have it as a quiet time when we can all stay in the house together, rather than madly going to a dozen carol services and never having all four of us in a room for many hours at a time. I missed some things, but it was lovely – Colin hosted, and we had a Christmas BBQ. I made roast potatoes in the kitchen, because even a BBQ needs added roast potatoes at Christmas.

I thought I’d share the pile of books I got among my presents. A few aren’t shown in the photo, because a couple were Secret Santa presents opened earlier, and one was packed somewhere else, but I’ve listed them all.

Told in Winter by Jon Godden
Also published as Winter’s Tale, this is by Rumer Godden’s sister – real name Winsome!! The top four books in the pile were all from a Secret Santa in the Virago Modern Classics group on LibraryThing. This Secret Santa always ends up bringing me such interesting things.

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
This one was on my wishlist – the subtitle is ‘adventures with Russian books and the people who read them’, and doesn’t that sound amazing?

The House in Norham Gardens by Penelope Lively
I love a bit of Lively – and, fun fact, Norham Gardens is where I started my driving lessons. The widest roads in Oxford, so it’s where you’re taken to learn a turn in the road!

Twelve Poems by Sylvia Townsend Warner
I love Warner and thought I had more or less everything she’d written, but somehow hadn’t heard of this one. Fab!

A Little Original Sin by Millicent Dillon
This is a biography of Jane Bowles, who wrote the brilliant novel Two Serious Ladies – it’ll be fun to find out more about her. [Or potentially not fun… I have a vague memory that her life wasn’t great… but interesting!]

Grandmothers by Salley Vickers
My friend Lorna got this for me – you might have heard her on the latest episode of Tea or Books? – and it’s not only a very pretty book but signed too!

The House Party by Adrian Tinniswood
Another one where the subtitle tells you how perfect this is for me – ‘A short history of leisure, pleasure and the country house weekend’.

Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham
This and the book above were from my friends Paul and Kirsty, and they’ve been keen for me to read this – not least so I can talk about sci-fi more authoritatively on the podcast in future!

Albert the Dragon and the Centaur by Rosemary Weir
I loved Albert the Dragon as a child and I haven’t read all of them – this was among the presents Colin got me, which is lovely.

Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading by Maureen Corrigan
I mean, the title says it all, doesn’t it? Thanks Mum and Dad for recognising the limits of my sociability!

The Bride of Northanger by Diana Birchall
A sequel to Northanger Abbey by my friend Diana – who wrote a brilliant sequel to Pride and Prejudice called Mrs Darcy’s Dilemma – and another great choice by Colin.

Stanley Spencer by Kenneth Pople
Mum and Dad got me a biography of my favourite painter – not pictured is a lovely book that functions as a catalogue of an exhibition from the 80s.

And, not pictured, a couple of books I got at book group Secret Santas – Inventing Love by Jose Ovejero and Lanterns Across the Snow by Susan Hill.

What a great bunch of books! Hope you also got lots under the tree, and have some nice time off to read.

My favourite books of the decade

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I messaged my book group about us doing ‘the last meeting of the decade’, and everyone had a panicked meltdown. It feels quite a big deal that NONE of us are ready for, right?? Not least because the current state of politics in the West doesn’t exactly make one feel optimistic about the next decade… but we can only hope and pray.

Anyway, I thought it would be a good opportunity to share my books of the decade – or, rather, the nine books that I chose as my Book of the Year from 2010-2018. 2019’s to be added when I’ve decided it!

Some of those years were better reading years than others, so my ultimate books of the decade might not exactly these. But it’s intriguing to see what rose to the top each year – follow the links for the full lists each time :)

2010: Nella Last’s War

What I wrote: “An early read in 2010, but my lasting favourite – a very talented writer who, but for Mass Observation, would never have had courage to put pen to paper. I’m looking forward to reading her later diaries in 2011.”

2011: The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

What I wrote: “From the first page onwards, Hamilton’s writing was so good that it left me actually astonished. How could an author be this talented? He is the 1940s missing link between writers as disparate as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. A shy woman bullied in a boarding house is an unlikely topic for great literature, but this is one of the best novels I’ve ever read – and Hamilton one of the most exceptional writers.”

2012: Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton

What I wrote: “I was only a couple of pages into this heavenly book when I knew it would be my book of the year. Morgan narrates the bizarre life of her isolated family of sisters. It certainly owes a debt to I Capture the Castle, but is perhaps even better – the most charming, lively, lovable, and eccentric family imaginable, I couldn’t believe how good it was, while I was reading. Others have been quite lukewarm, but causing a mini-revival for this glorious novel has been one of my proudest blogging moments.”

2013: London War Notes 1939-1945 by Mollie Panter-Downes

What I wrote: I was so lucky to track down an affordable copy, after borrowing from the library, and I know that it isn’t available easily – but I can think of no more accomplished, humane, and plain useful record of the wartime home front from a contemporary’s viewpoint. It changed the way I think about the day-by-day events of the second world war, and (like Guard Your Daughters at the top of 2012’s list) I think it is scandalous that it’s out of print. [2019 Simon adds: and now they’re both Persephones!!]

2014: The Sundial by Shirley Jackson

What I wrote: “An extremely funny and surreal novel about an extended family who will survive the apocalypse by staying in the family home together. Brilliantly, they are all rather unconcerned about the impending fire-and-brimstone, and Jackson gives us their squabbles and passive aggression instead. A superlatively inventive, amusing, and bizarre book.”

2015: The Shelf by Phyllis Rose

What I wrote: “And, in at number one – this wonderful book about a reading challenge! Rose chooses to read all the books on a (more or less) random shelf from a New York library, and the various ventures it leads her on. A joy for any bibliophile.”

2016: The Lark by E. Nesbit

What I wrote: “Once I’d remembered that this was one of my first reads in 2016, how could anything else come top of my list? It’s rare to read a novel this funny, joyful, and charming – about two young women setting up a flower shop, and their witty adventures. Even better – it’s coming back into print from Scott and the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint at Dean Street Press!” [2019 Simon adds: and Penguin too! What riches.]

2017: Merry Hall by Beverley Nichols

What I wrote: “It truly has been the Year of Beverley. I’ve read quite a lot of books by him this year, but I had to pick the one which kicked off my Beverley love affair – I read Merry Hall for the 1951 Club, and never looked back. This (presumably heightened) account of buying a house and doing up the garden is hilarious, charming, and (praise be!) the beginning of a trilogy. Don’t wait as long as I did to read Beverley – if you haven’t yet, make 2018 the year you read him!”

2018: The Sweet and Twenties by Beverley Nichols

What I wrote: “For the second year in a row, my favourite book of the year was by Beverley Nichols! This time, it’s his retrospective of the 1920s that Karen and I discussed when she was a guest on ‘Tea or Books?’. From the Thompson/Bywaters case to the fashions of the period, it’s historically rich and fascinating, as well as being soaked in Nichols’ inimitable style. A total delight!”

Love Notes From Freddie by Eva Rice

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I got Love Notes From Freddie (2015) as a review copy, based on how much I’d enjoyed her novels The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets and The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp, so I don’t know why it took me quite so long to get to it. In fact, I did give it a go a couple of years ago and wasn’t in the right mood – but Project Names made me get it off the shelf again.

I suppose I should start by saying that I was under Miss Crewe’s spell from the moment she walked into the room, picked up a piece of chalk and scratched an isosceles triangle on the blackboard. She had that effect on people – made all the more remarkable by her absolute blindness to her own power.

Reading it this time, I can see why it was a tougher sell than the others. It starts off in a school in the late 1960s, and you get the feeling that it might all be about detentions and stern headmistresses and that sort of thing. Marnie Fitzpatrick is the focus – a goodie two-shoes who is excellent at maths and impresses her teacher Miss Crewe. But perhaps she doesn’t want to stay well-behaved and predictable all the time – one of the reasons that she gets drunk with her friend Rachel. But during school hours and in school uniform – and so she and Rachel are expelled. Marnie is off to a different school that doesn’t have the inspirational Miss Crewe.

The chapters are alternatively from the perspectives of Marnie and Miss Crewe – we learn that the latter was an excellent dancer in her youth, but an injury (and her natural brilliance at mathematics) led to a teaching career.

They’re both interesting characters, but I didn’t find the initial set-up particularly interesting. Thankfully, though, it is just a background to what follows. And what follows is (finally!) Freddie. The novel certainly gets a new lease of life when he arrives, and we breathe a sigh of relief that the novel won’t be about a maths prodigy’s education. (Unless you wanted to read that sort of novel, I suppose, then you’ll be disappointed – but it didn’t seem quite to fit.) Marnie comes across Freddie at the local factory, where he works as an electrician. But he also uses the space to dance. Marnie sees him at it, and decides to volunteer her old maths teacher as a possible dance teacher. Diffidently, Freddie agrees.

Describing dancing is a difficult task, but Rice manages to convey the freedom Freddie feels when he can dance – along with the uncertainty, the self-criticism, and the insecurity – all from the perspective of somebody watching the dance, because we never hear from Freddie himself. And the perspectives of Marnie and Miss Crewe, watching him dance in different chapters, are cleverly different. Marnie sees him with the adoring eyes of a girl falling in love for the first time. Miss Crewe sees him with more world-weariness – superimposing her own failed dancing career, and the short-lived romance from the same period.

From here, Rice’s excellent storytelling ability takes us through to the end of the novel. It was a slower start than the other two I’ve read, but perhaps a deeper emotional centre once we’ve got going. There is a joy to the novel, but it is offset with greater uncertainty. Marnie’s naivety clashes with Miss Crewe’s hard-lost hope, and Freddie is somewhere between the two. Rice is very good at young love and the exuberant anxiety of it – and she’s equally good at reining the novel in to something more nuanced and cautious than a straightforward romance.

So, if you give this one a go, power through the maths at the beginning and get to something with Rice’s special touch. Or loiter in the maths and the school scenes, if that’s your jam.

My favourite novel of the year? (O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith)

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I don’t do a huge amount of re-reading, and I almost never read the same book twice within a year. Hopefully that’s a mark of how I loved O, The Brave Music (1943) by Dorothy Evelyn Smith. I read it back in March, and didn’t write about it for ages because I wanted to do it justice – and I re-read it recently to see if it was as good as I’d remembered. Oh, and it was.

I first heard of Dorothy Evelyn Smith when I was lent a copy of Miss Plum and Miss Penny, which was quite good. For some reason that I can’t quite remember, it didn’t live up to its promise (though Scott had nicer things to say). But I thought I still might as well buy O, The Brave Music when I came across it in a wonderful little bookshop in St. David’s. I was a little put off by the stupid title, which is one of those quotations-as-titles that only make sense if you know the context – and, even then, doesn’t make much sense in this case.

This is a coming of age novel in the mould of I Capture the Castle and Guard Your Daughters. Though published in the 1940s, the childhood being looked back upon takes place in the late nineteenth century (exact date rather vague). Ruan is the seven-year-old daughter a non-Conformist minister. Her sister is widely considered more beautiful and well-behaved than she, and her bold imagination and love for the moors that surround them are not thought advantages by the society her family moves in. But that family is far from a unified front. We see them through the seven-year-old eyes and the older-and-wiser eyes of the adult Ruan simultaneously. The child can only half understand how poorly matched her parents are – her conservative, absent-minded father and her beautiful, unhappily tamed mother – and can’t really comprehend the dislike her mother feels towards her. Ruan is not daunted by her surroundings. She is confident, thoughtful, determined. She feels much older than her seven years.

Ruan has another sibling – two-year-old Clem. Here’s a passage about him that is indicative of the way Smith writes:

At the back of our house was a long, narrow strip of garden, very much overgrown with weeds, because Father did not care for gardening and had no money for professional help. But it was a garden, at least, and, the weather turning very hot and dry, I was allowed to wheel Clem up and down the weedy path, or sit on the rank lawn and play with him. I had always loved my baby brother dearly, and in those long, quiet June days my love became more articulate and, alas, more sharp of vision. I began to watch Clem more closely; to think and worry and make comparisons; but it was Annie Briggs who finally tore the scales from my eyes, and gave me my first, salt knowledge of the sorrowful thing love can be…

Those final words are so beautifully pitched. In these years, Ruan gains plenty of that ‘salt knowledge’ – but this is far from an unhappy book. She is equally keenly aware of the things that bring her joy. That includes nature, freedom – and David.

David is the son of the local factory owner – a rich man who came from a working-class background. He is five years older than Ruan but sees a kindred spirit in her, calling her Tinribs and treating her without any of the awkward deference she experiences from almost everyone else. In him she sees a new sort of family, and loves him.

The novel covers about eight years, during which Ruan has to go to school – and then later to an enormous, mostly closed-up house, Cobbetts, belonging to a relative. Wherever she is, Smith is brilliant at giving the feeling of the place – whether that’s the dirty claustrophobia of the school or the cold, reassuring Cobbetts – and how it affects Ruan and her personality.

Like all the best coming-of-age novels, the strength of O, The Brave Music is in the empathetic central character and how deeply immersed the reader feels in her life. As Ruan sees and experiences and understands new things, adding them to the catalogue of her impressions of the world, we half feel that we are seeing them for the first time too – and half want to protect this child against the bad and good and overwhelming that life will bring. But whenever it has become too overwhelming – there are the moors, or there is Cobbetts, or there is David – and joy is back.

David is kind, stubborn, generous, and believable – becoming a little more strained as he grows older and goes to school, and they meet less frequently, but warming up and still being the David that Ruan needs him to be. Being children, this is not a romance – but my only criticism of the novel is that the five-year age gap does get rather unsettling when he becomes an adult and she is still a child, and still devoted to him. Considering how she always seems older than she is, I don’t know why Smith didn’t make it only one or two years between them. But I can reassure you now that nothing untoward or icky happens!

I was confident early in O, The Brave Music that is was something special – and a re-read confirms it. It’s going to be my favourite novel of the year, I feel sure – and one I’ll be revisiting often.

Six Degrees of Separation: Sanditon

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I’m joining in the Six Degrees of Separation monthly meme from Books Are My Favorite And Best – each month, everyone starts with the same book. And then each bloggers heads off in different directions with their own subjective or objective associations. I’ve been waiting for one that started with a book I’ve read – and I recently read Sanditon, so we’re good to go!

Image result for sanditon cover

While Sanditon starts in the countryside, the town of the title is very much by the sea – and the Parkers are hoping it will become THE place to go for sea-lovers. Who knows whether or not it would have been, if she had finished the novel. But it got me thinking about other novels set by the sea – and you couldn’t find a nicer one that The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff. It’s been republished by Persephone, and it’s a simple tale of a family going to their usual holiday destination – though getting older, and wondering if they have changed too much to still enjoy it.

Image result for fortnight in september sherriff

Months in book titles is my next link, and which will get us away from the sea – and to Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl, translated by Anne Born. It’s about the breakdown of a marriage, and the middle-aged male narrator isn’t the most sympathetic character – though whether or not he’s meant to be, I’m unsure. What gets it into this list is Grøndahl’s beautiful writing. When I was in the right mood, I adored it.

Image result for silence in october jens christian grondahl

The narrator of Silence in October isn’t given a name. There are lots of novels with unnamed narrators, and I always wonder if the conceit is worth the frustration it must cause to the writer. Anyway, I could have chosen any number of them – but I’m going with The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer. The narrator has a large number of children – we are never told exactly how many – and is an eccentric with a matter-of-fact voice. Her husband is building a large glass tower in the middle of nowhere, for some reason. It’s bizarre and brilliant.

I spent a long time getting Penelope Mortimer, Penelope Lively, and Penelope Fitzgerald confused. Now that I’ve read at least one book by each of them, they are easy to distinguish – with not much in common besides their names. But At Freddie’s, perhaps my favourite Fitzgerald novel, does have a central female character of equal eccentricity, albeit manifested differently. Freddie is the doyenne of a children’s acting school. The novel is witty and odd and very like Muriel Spark, which can only be a good thing.

Image result for at freddie's penelope fitzgerald

I love novels connected with theatrical acting, and so my next choice is the only Ngaio Marsh novel I’ve read: Opening Night. It’s set in the rehearsals for a play, with a wonderfully realised and funny cast of characters. I did begin to wonder if the murder was ever going to come – but, fear not, it does…

Image result for opening night ngaio marsh

Let’s finish with Marsh’s fellow New Zealander, the incomparable Katherine Mansfield. She’s my favourite short story writer and one of my favourite writers of any variety. She’s at her best in very brief pieces, and everything in the collection The Garden Party is extraordinary – particularly the title story.

Image result for the garden party katherine mansfield

That was fun! Let me know if you have a go yourself – or why not try your six degrees of separation in the comment section of this post?

Mrs Ames by E.F. Benson

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Mrs Ames (1912) by E.F. Benson has been on my shelves since 2010 – indeed, it is the final book from the two batches of Bloomsbury Group reprints that I had to read. These reprints are renowned round these parts for including Miss Hargreaves (and me quoted on the back!) and they were the best thing to happen in publishing for ages. But I guess they didn’t sell as well as had been hoped, so we only got two batches and ten books in total. All of ’em wonderful!

And I’m happy to add Mrs Ames to that number now. I’ve read quite a few Benson novels including, of course, the Mapp and Lucia series, and the setting will come as no surprise to those who like him. Yep, it’s upper-middle-class people squabbling in a small community. Doubtless said community (Riseborough) has various people who aren’t upper crust, but we don’t care about them. We care about Mrs Ames and Mrs Evans, and (to a lesser extent) their male relatives. And we are introduced to the community through Mr and Mrs Altham, who are keen gossips, though they wouldn’t use the word. I did enjoy that this married couple seem to delight equally in observing and talking about their neighbours – even if they have to cover it with a veneer of pretending they discover things by accident.

Mrs Ames is the accepted leader of the village. She sets the trends for the community, whether that be her outfits, her dinner parties, or her printed menu cards (little do the others know that she found them ready printed, and has been ordering food to match). She has an earnest son at Oxford who is keen to tell everyone that he’s an atheist, and a husband who is ten years her junior. The husband and the son have something in common – they’re both attracted to Mrs Evans. She is a recent addition to the village, with a charming husband and a willingness to accept the flirtations of others. She is also casually angling to be top dog of Riseborough… can Mrs Ames defend her position and her marriage?

Benson is in usual witty form as he documents the rivalries in the village, and we spend much of the novel not taking these would-be adulterers particularly seriously. Or, rather, there are other things that are more important – like new age treatments, how to one-up each other at dinner, and which Shakespearean character they can appropriately dress as for a costume ball. Here’s a fun bit on Mrs Ames addressing her advancing years:

Mrs Ames might or might not have been run down when she left Riseborough the following week, but nothing can be more certain than that she was considerably braced up seven days. The delicious freshness of winds off the North Sea, tempering the heat of brilliant summer suns, may have had something to do with it, and she certainly had more colour in her face than was usual with her, which was the legitimate effect of the felicitous weather. There was more colour in her hair also, and though that, no doubt, was a perfectly legitimate effect too, being produced by purely natural means, as the label on the bottle stated, the sun and wind were not accountable for this embellishment.

In early-to-mid Benson, he often throws in the serious among the trivial. Rather late in the day, the novel becomes (albeit briefly) about women’s suffrage, and there are sections of impassioned writing about women’s rights that are entirely straight-faced. (And, of course, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be – but it’s tonally a bit jarring.) He also aims for some emotional heights that he hasn’t quite earned, given the enjoyable triviality of the rest of the novel. I always think Benson found his firmest ground when he stopped trying to have emotionally climactic moments. Mrs Ames and Mrs Evans are good rivals, but they are only a foretaste of what he would achieve with Mapp and Lucia.

I have yet to read a Benson that was a dud, nor one that was a particular outlier in terms of the society, style, and content. Mrs Ames is every bit as enjoyable as the bulk of the others and, if it isn’t quite Benson at his absolute peak, it’s very good. Vale, Bloomsbury Group reprints!

 

Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden

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I’ll be honest, I could happily have gone my whole life without visiting Bradford. With apologies to anybody who lives there, it’s not exactly on a ‘must see’ tourist list of the UK. But it did have the nearest football team to our holiday cottage when my brother and I recently stayed in Yorkshire, and apparently going and seeing twenty-two men try to get a sphere from one place to another place is a vital part of a holiday. Naturally I wouldn’t dream of going to a football match, so that left me with a couple of hours to kill in Bradford.

I did pop into the beautiful (but not especially well-stocked) Waterstones, but most of my time was spent with a book in Caffe Nero – specifically the novel Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) by Deirdre Madden. It was published in 2008, I bought it in 2009 – and finally, after ten years sitting on my shelves, I read it! And it’s a great argument against those people who suggest you should get rid of books that have been on your shelves unread for years – because it’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year.

The action of the ‘present day’ is pretty sparse. The narrator – unnamed, I only now realise – has borrowed the Dublin home of her friend Molly Fox, and spends the day reminiscing and trying to get on with her new play. For she is a successful playwright, who came to fame after turning an awkward moment as a housekeeper into a narrative about class and friendship. Only her most recent play has not been such a success, and she is starting to doubt herself. Molly Fox, on the other hand, is recognised as one of the foremost stage actors of her generation. Their mutual friend Andrew, an art historian who is doing well on television, completes something of a love triangle, albeit one that has settled into some sort of quiet inaction. And he turns up at the house during the day – which is, of course, Molly Fox’s birthday. Though she doesn’t like to celebrate it.

About the most eventful thing that happens in the present day is the narrator breaking a drug, but the whole novel shifts back and forth in time through memory and reflection. We see Andrew and the narrator meeting as undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin – and her shock when the Andrew she meets again in England has reinvented himself, changing accent and appearance to distance himself from his upbringing. We see Molly and the narrator first meeting, when Molly acts in a play the narrator has written – and the narrator proceeds to fall in love with the other person in the play. Touches of their friendship over the year build together into a natural, organic sense of their relationship – without saying too much, there is an enormous depth here. We sense the narrator’s love of Molly, mingled with jealousy, uncertainty, protectiveness. The attempts at objectivity that can only be subjective.

When the public fails to recognise her in her daily life it is not just because they see her face only infrequently on the cinema or television screen. It is because she has a knack of not allowing herself to be recognised when she doesn’t want to be. I have no idea how she does this, I find it difficult even to describe. It is a kind of geisha containment, a shutteredness, a withdrawal and negation. It is as if she is capable of sensing when people are on the point of knowing who she is and she sends them a subliminal denial. I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. It isn’t me. I’m somebody else. Don’t even bother to ask. And they almost never do. What gives her away every time is her voice. So often have I seen her most banal utterances, requests for drinks or directions, have a remarkable effect on people. ‘A woman with such a voice is born perhaps once in a hundred years,’ one critic remarked. ‘If heaven really exists,’ wrote another ‘as a place of sublime perfection, then surely everyone in it speaks like Molly Fox.’

What I most enjoyed, I think, is the way Madden writes about the theatre – how the plays develop from the perspective of the writer, but also the atmosphere of backstage life, and how the creative process of writing and the public process of reception can clash. I do wonder whether many playwrights are permitted as much intrusion and control as the narrator gets, and it is slightly coincidental that almost every important figure in the narrator’s life becomes publicly notable, but we can forgive those things.

And Madden’s extraordinary strength is captivating the reader through writing about people and their shifting feelings about one another. The writerly voice is careful never to judge anyone, even when the narrator does – if that makes sense. There are no heroes and villains, but fully-formed and complex people. What’s particularly impressive is that this extends to Molly Fox – because she is an enigma even to her friend, and we see her in such fragments. Through the eyes of the narrator, through Andrew’s eyes to an extent, and from the perspective of the avid fan who turns up at the door, disappointed to meet the narrator instead of her hero – though thank goodness she did, as she came bearing a peacock feather, which Molly Fox has a deep-set superstition about.

Moments connected with the Northern Irish Troubles are perhaps tonally a little out of place, shattering the everyday surface of the rest of the novel and its eternal questions of friendship, love, loyalty, faith – but this is undoubtedly a beautiful, extraordinary novel. Any writing that conveys beauty and keeps you hooked, all without knowing quite what makes it so good, is writing worth hunting out. I’ve since bought another Madden novel, and I’m excited to find out more.

Have you read any Madden novels? What would you recommend?

The Overhaul #4

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It’s time for another Overhaul! For those who missed the first three in the series – it’s where I look back at haul posts from the past on my blog, and see if I actually read the books.

And this time we’re going with maybe my biggest haul ever.

The Overhaul #4

The original haul post is here.

Date of haul: April 2011

Location: Bookbarn, Somerset

Number of books bought: 29

TWENTY-NINE BOOKS. Buckle up, and let’s see how well I’ve done with them… [and click through to the original post if you want to know more about the books and why I bought them – for some reason I thought it was thirty-one then.]

  • Confessions of a Story-Teller: short stories by Paul Gallico
  • The Small Miracle by Paul Gallico
  • Ludmilla, and The Lonely by Paul Gallico
  • The Adventures of Hiram Holliday by Paul Gallico

I have read plenty of Paul Gallico since 2011, but I think the only one of these I’ve read is the shortest – The Small Miracle.

  • A Village in a Valley by Beverley Nichols

When I bought this, I wrote “I keep stockpiling Nichols books, and have still read none…” – well, readers of StuckinaBook probably know that the dam burst and I’ve read a lot of Nichols since then – including this one.

  • Four Years at the Old Vic 1929-1933 by Harcourt Williams

I’ll be honest, I forgot I had this. It sounds great! I wonder where it is…

  • The Theatre Since 1900 by J.C. Trewin

I have a better idea where this is, but I defo haven’t read a word of it since I bought it.

  • Nonsense Novels by Stephen Leacock

I think I read this before I bought it? COUNTING IT.

  • Countries of the Mind: Essays in Literary Criticism by J. Middleton Murry

I have no recollection of ever seeing this book before in my life. But I guess it’s here somewhere? This isn’t going well.

  • Dreams in War Time: A Faithful Record by E.M. Martin

Nope.

  • Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

I still haven’t this, but – fun fact – I did accidentally buy another copy later, because I liked the way it sounded when it closed. A very satisfying thud.

  • Letters to a Sister by Rose Macaulay

I’m not sure, but I’m going to say that I have read this. I’ve certainly read a lot of Macaulay letters, so why not this?

  • After the Stroke: a journal by May Sarton

I’ve read a couple Sarton novels since I bought this one, but… not this memoir. Yet.

  • Summer in February by Jonathan Smith

I did read this one! Though I have to say I didn’t love it. If you’re into that famous Cornish painting community that I can’t remember the name of, though, then you may well enjoy it.

  • The Dud Avacado by Elaine Dundy

This is one of those novels I’ve been meaning to read for my entire adult life. Have I? You already know the answer. And apparently I got rid of it at some point, as it’s no longer on my shelves…

  • Star Quality by Noel Coward

I can see this from my bed, and I often think ‘Hmm, should read that’. Does THAT count??

  • The New Immortality by J.W. Dunne

I really should have read this for my DPhil but, y’all, I did not.

  • Conversations in Ebury Street by George Moore

I read this for the very first ‘club’ year, the 1920 Club!

  • My American by Stella Gibbons

When I bought this, I’d only read one novel by Gibbons. I’ve now read three or four more, but this is not among them.

  • Her Book by Daisy Ashford

This is so short that I could have whipped through it, just to up my numbers here. But it’s a no.

  • The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson

I read this earlier in the year, as one of my 25 Books in 25 Days, and it was a really enjoyable character piece.

  • The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg by Louis Bromfield
  • Mrs. Parkington by Louis Bromfield

And I read The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg this year too! Imagine how badly I’d have done on this list last year. But haven’t read Mrs Parkington yet.

  • The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Another one I’d read before I bought it – as a library copy – and another sneak tick from this haul.

  • The Ginger Griffin by Ann Bridge

Why have I only read one Bridge novel? And it ain’t this one.

  • Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

As I wrote at the time, “You can never have too much Wodehouse: FACT.” But I haven’t read it.

  • Wonderful Clouds by Francoise Sagan

I thought Sunlight on Cold Water was so annoying that I got rid of almost all my other Sagan novels, including this one.

  • A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble

I have read The Garrick Year and The Millstone since buying this, but not actually this.

  • The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark

At least we finish on a success! This take on the Watergate scandal, transposed to a nunnery, is the sort of wonderful, odd novel that only Spark could have written.

Total bought: 29

Total still unread: 17

Total no longer owned: 2