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Some books I’ve bought in 2020

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The new decade is still very young, but I’ve been busying myself with buying books…  These aren’t all from the same shop, but represent trips to a couple of old reliable shops and a couple of books I bought online. The reliables are the bookshop in Wantage and Notting Hill Book Exchange. They’re both shops I’ve been to time and again, and they always turn up affordable gems. But the first two came from the great wide internet…

Proud Citadel by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
When I wrote about the wonderful O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith, Sarah said that she’d read and loved Proud Citadel. And so I had to have it, didn’t I? Watch this space.

Another Year by R.C. Sherriff
Every Sherriff novel I’ve read has been amazing, and so obviously I need to track down as many as I can. Watch this space AGAIN. Just keep watching spaces.

Return Journey by Barbara Goolden
I’ve already read and reviewed this one, so you know what I think about it and why I bought it!

Sing For Your Supper by Pamela Frankau
I loved A Wreath For The Enemy so much, and have been stockpiling Frankau ever since – but have yet to read any of the others on my shelves (though did read one in the Bodleian). Let’s throw another on the pile. Anybody read this one?

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way by Nancy Spain
I’ve been keeping eyes out for this autobiography for a while because apparently it includes an account of meeting A.A. Milne. She was also a fascinating person for many reasons, so it’ll be fun to find out more about her from her own mouth.

Authenticity by Deirdre Madden
You know how much I loved Molly Fox’s Birthday, and I’ve now bought a couple of Madden novels to try next – the title is intriguing in a Milan Kundera sort of way.

Vestal Fire by Compton Mackenzie
I definitely said I wouldn’t be buying any more Mackenzie novels until I’d read some of the ones I own. When I saw this, I thought ”I won’t buy this unless it was published in the 1920s”. And I picked it off the shelf and saw it was from 1927. The decision was OUT OF MY HANDS.

The Brickfield by L.P. Hartley
I have so many unread Hartleys and I don’t know anything about this Hartley novel, but it was only a quid so why not.

Present Indicative by Noel Coward
I’ve seen this one around a few times, and finally succumbed. Will Coward be as funny in his autobiography as he is in his plays?

Embers by Sandor Marai
I don’t know anything about this but I’m trying to read more translated fiction, after my all-time record of eleven last year. And this one looked interesting.

The Shadow of a Sorcerer by Stella Gibbons
Continuing the theme of this post, I have so many Gibbons novels I haven’t read – but it felt like quite a coup to stumble across one I haven’t even heard of. And there’s surprisingly little info about it online…

Have you read any of these? Any that should race up my tbr pile?

 

Three super speedy reviews

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The pile of books to review has been getting very high and threatening to topple into my fireplace. Which has an electric heater in it, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world – but, nevertheless, here are my quick thoughts about three books I read last year. All non-fiction, in fact. [Pun intended]

Shakespeare’s Library (2018) by Stuart Kells

Image result for shakespeare's library stuart kellsI got this as a review copy, for which many thanks to Text Publishing. As witnessed by Paul Collins’ The Book of William being my favourite read of last year, I love reading about William Shakespeare. More particularly, I love reading about his cultural reception. And so I did enjoy reading Kells’ book, however flawed it might be.

The main issue about a book called Shakespeare’s Library is that this isn’t really about Shakespeare’s library. Supposedly it’s about the hunt for any books Shakespeare used to own, and this comes up every now and then, but it gets rather muddled with more metaphorical interpretations of the word ‘library’ and a baffling amount of anti-Stratfordian theories. I.e. the idea that somebody else wrote Shakespeare’s plays. This seems to be given more credence than necessary here, and Kells quotes books like James Shapiro’s Contested Will without addressing all the pro-Stratfordian arguments that Shapiro neatly condenses.

There is a fair amount of overview of the reception of Shakespeare, and the authorial question, over the years – but, to be honest, nothing you can’t find done better elsewhere. It was a nice idea for a book but I don’t think it really worked.

Book Girl (2018) by Sarah Clarkson

Image result for book girl sarah clarksonClarkson is one of the few authors I’ve mentioned whom I’ve seen – and seen quite often, as she used to walk her pram near my office quite often. I would have said I was enjoying her book, but once I started reading it I never saw her again, and now I work somewhere else.

Anyway, Book Girl is one of those books about the joys of reading that I can never resist. A couple of people had recommended it – Elizabeth was one of them, I think, so thanks – and my parents got it for me last Christmas. It’s aimed at girls and women, as the title suggests, but I’ve never been one for respecting gender divides when it comes to reading – and I’m glad I read this, as it’s a lot of fun.

Clarkson is a Christian, so a lot of what she writes includes that perspective. And, indeed, a lot of Book Girl consists of lists of books and why you should read them – which I’m certainly not going to complain about. So there’s ‘Books about Imagination: why you’re never too old for Narnia’, ‘Novels that kindled my delight in existence’, ‘Novels that helped me cope with a broken world’, etc. etc. There’s a lot of faith-based suggestions and a lot that aren’t, and I certainly made a little list – even if Clarkson’s taste runs more to fantasy than mine does.

My only issue with Book Girl is that Clarkson is obviously a much nicer person than I am. I often feel similarly when podcasting with Rachel. Clarkson, like Rachel, talks a lot about how reading can enrich you, can teach you, can help you appreciate the world. There’s not any space in Book Girl for reading that is snarky or savage or dry. The sort of book that lets you laugh at how absurd and sometimes unpleasant the people around you might be. I sense that she’d read Austen and see the benefits of self-growth rather than the take-down of pomposity. Both are there, of course, but I think I lean towards the latter.

Margaret Rutherford: Dreadnought with Good Manners (2009) by Andy Merriman

Image result for merriman margaret rutherford coverWho doesn’t love Margaret Rutherford? What a wonderful performer she was, and how amazing it would have been to get to see her on stage. Thank goodness she put a fair few performances on screen.

Wanting to find out more about her life, I tracked down Merriman’s biography. I’m usually a bit bored by the childhood stories of famous authors and actors, and just want to get to the bit they’re best known for – but even I was a bit dazed when Rutherford was 40 by page 40. We see some tragic childhood experiences – or tragic experiences that impacted her childhood, because she didn’t learn the truth of her father for some time – and the we rush into her career.

This is a great book for giving a thorough overview of all of Rutherford’s plays and films, though it’s pretty apparent which films Merriman has seen and which he hasn’t. I’ve come away with a long list of films to track down, and can recommend ‘Castle in the Air’ [which you can find on YouTube]. And naturally I loved reading about Rutherford’s THREE portrayals of Miss Hargreaves – on radio, TV, and stage. How I wish I could see/hear any of those.

But somehow the whole thing felt a bit like an extended magazine article. I’m not sure quite what was missing, I just know that someone like Claire Tomalin or Ann Thwaite would have written something deeper, somehow. An invaluable resource, but perhaps in the way that a Wikipedia article is, rather than a work of art.

 

Return Journey by Barbara Goolden

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I love taking a trip to the secondhand bookshop in Wantage, which is less than half an hour from my house. It’s a real treasure trove, and I never come away empty-handed or anything like it. Among my recent haul was Return Journey (1954) by Barbara Goolden, and I was so taken by the premise that I started it immediately. But before I looked to see what it was about, I was drawn in by those stunning cover. Isn’t it a beauty?

It reminds me a lot of a village called Lower Slaughter that isn’t a million miles from me, and where I once accidentally gatecrashed a fete.

“You do not feel,” said the Assessor gently, “that you are altogether satisfied with your Record?”

“Most dissatisfied,” confessed the New Arrival. “I have the feeling, you see, that I am a complete failure.”

The Assessor take up a file. “You were, I think, an English spinster of the upper middle-class, living in the country?”

“Hampshire,” prompted the New Arrival, “the Surrey side, very convenient for London. Not that I myself liked town life, the traffic always confused me. I was killed, you recollect, by a tram. So bewildering. I thought it was going, when, in fact, it was coming.”

The ‘New Arrival’ is Veryan Meadows, and the place she has newly arrived is the Pearly Gates. Before her record is read, though, she is given the option of returning to Earth for any year of her life. And she can choose whether to have a change of heart, a change of mind, or a change of physical appearance. She chooses to go back to her youth, and to be beautiful.

Isn’t that a brilliant premise? Well, it swept me away, certainly.

As it happens, it was the most brilliant thing about Return Journey. I enjoyed reading the novel, but I feel that Goolden could have made more of the idea.

When she is sent back on her terrestrial way, the celestial powers that be decide to give her an added attribute, along with her beauty – the ability to express her opinions. She has always been rather shy and unsure of herself – which, coupled with plainness, led to an unhappy life as ‘an English spinster of the upper middle-class’. So here she finds herself again, the daughter of a minister in a small village. She is unused to having any male attention, and doesn’t quite know what to do with the sudden attentions of, among others, the curate. Any young gentleman is bewitched by her looks; any older man or woman seems to think she is unnecessarily odd. And you can sort of see their point. While the Assessor gave the ability to express her opinions, she does seem to be [a] pretty stupid and [b] bizarrely literal. Any turn of phrase is taken at face value, and her repeated questions madden quite a few people.

It’s unclear whether she remembers her heavenly adventure, or realises that she’s having a second lease of life. And that’s the major drawback of the novel for me. If we had Veryan reflecting on the differences this time around, or cynically thinking about how beauty has altered perceptions of her, it would be rather intriguing. What a lot to explain. Instead, it’s an enjoyable small-town novel where the heroine is unusually pretty and unusually dim. It’s good fun, but it rather wastes the initial premise.

Goolden is neither dim not literal, and she is rather good at one of my favourite authorial tricks – showing when characters are inadvertently revealing their true nature, or using quick narrative asides to send up the characters. Return Journey ended up being one of those novels that slightly frustrated me, because it could obviously have been better than it was – if Veryan had had an ounce of the wit and intelligence that Goolden has, it would have been much improved. More fun than seeing a virtuous innocent be virtuously innocent.

So, this has ended up one of those confusing reviews where I might sound more negative than I feel. Return Journey is fun and diverting. It’s only that I think it could have been truly brilliant. Maybe next time around?

Ghosting by Jennie Erdal

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The first book I started this year was one I bought for a treat in Woodstock’s independent bookshop – Ghosting (2004) by Jennie Erdal. I’ve been lucky enough to have quite a few review copies from Slightly Foxed, but hadn’t had this one – so it was a nice one to reward myself for… well, something last July. Who knows what.

All I knew about the memoir was that it was about ghostwriting, and that Slightly Foxed Editions pretty much never put a foot wrong. And Ghosting turns out to be no exception – what an extraordinary book.

Erdal was the ghostwriter for ‘Tiger’, a man who is not named in the book but who was apparently Naim Attallah. That name means nothing to me, but he is certainly a character and not in a particularly positive way. More on that later. And when I say that Erdal was a ghostwriter, it seems that she wrote more or less anything that Tiger needed to claim as his own – whether letters, newspaper columns, or full-length novels.

She got the job by having done some Russian translation – Tiger asked her to come on board at his publishing house, in charge of the Russian list. She doesn’t go into his backstory, so I don’t know how somebody as supremely unqualified as Tiger came to own a publishing house – but, dizzied, she does accept this role. She’s allowed to work from her home in Scotland, only occasionally coming down to London for meetings. When her role expands into writing up and editing interviews Tiger does with hundreds of women for a ‘book about women’, she finds that she has morphed into a ghostwriter.

I was ready to be fascinated by her account of ghostwriting and was a bit annoyed when she started talking about her upbringing. But, my goodness, she’s very good at it. Hers was a family where appearances mattered more than anything, and the abiding horrors of her parents were (a) shaming themselves before their neighbours and (b) Catholicism.

In our house it was usually easy to work out what was good and what was bad. Some things were regarded as good in themselves: for example, eating slowly, Formica, curly hair, secrecy, patterned carpets, straight legs, Scotch broth, bananas, going to the toilet before leaving the house, not crying whatever the circumstances – the goodness of these things was not open to challenge. Thus a child with curly hair who liked bananas and never cried was praised to the skies. By the same token, eating fast, straight hair, plain carpets and so on were bad things and, where possible, not allowed. If it was not possible to ban them, they were simply frowned upon. All this was clear-cut and easy to follow. However, in the way we spoke and the words we used, it was much harder to know good from bad, right from wrong. The rules seemed not to be fixed. Working out what was allowed, or when it might not be, was something of a leap in the dark.

Erdal doesn’t treat the memoir chronologically, covering childhood before moving onto adulthood, but rather draws links between her background and what’s going on with Tiger. It’s all done very elegantly and impressively – though in the second half of the memoir, it’s just about Tiger and working for him.

Tiger. Good grief. What an appalling man. Erdal is never vituperative, and seems to have been under the spell of his apparent charm – but beneath this, the reader can see what a monstrous man he is. Tiger is completely selfish, expecting everyone to bend to his will. He is devoted to ‘beautiful women’, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered about their minds or personalities, or even what they think of him in return. The portrait of Erdal working with him isn’t far off an abusive relationship, particularly when she starts to want to change the arrangement.

And yet she treats it lightly, and Ghosting is often funny. Tiger is as ridiculous as he is awful. And Erdal focuses on the ridiculous when she starts writing a novel ‘with’ him. He seems to believe he has come up with the idea of it – because he says it should involve a passionate affair. That’s it; that’s the plot. It’s left to Erdal to craft something from that premise – and her description of the editing process is funny, frustrating, and bizarre. What’s so impressive is that she doesn’t give up trying to do well, and she writes brilliantly in Ghosting about the process of trying to satisfy Tiger’s whims while also satisfying her artistic nature.

The fact that I was writing as someone else – with a mask on, as it were – inevitably added yet another layer of complexity. I did and did not feel responsible for the words on the page, I did and did not feel that they belonged to me; I did and did not feel that I could defend them in my heart.

Erdal writes so well about her inner philosophy – and, in the same volume, writing movingly about her childhood and her divorce, as well as drawing a portrait of the outlandish, absurd, and appalling Tiger. And she even finds pity for him.

Ghosting holds together many disparate elements brilliantly and it’s another success for the Slightly Foxed Editions series. A great start to the reading year.

Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather

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Willa Cather has definitely been on my list of authors I’m stockpiling rather than reading – so I decided to rectify that a little. I picked up one with a name in it, mais naturallement, but it also turned out to be her first novel – Alexander’s Bridge from 1912. She apparently disowned it later in life, but I thought it was rather good.

The Alexander of the title is Bartley Alexander, an engineer who has specialised in bridges and secured a great deal of money and renown with his ambitious designs. We first see him through the eyes of a man who has known him since he was a boy, Professor Wilson, and is now visiting Alexander and his wife in their Boston home. Mrs Alexander is intelligent, warm and conscious of having made the choice to live in her husband’s shadow. I found Mrs Alexander the most intriguing character in the novel, and would have loved to spend more time with her. Cather is so good at memory and a feeling that is not quite regret, but wondering how life could have been different. But with a romanticism that has not been dimmed by this:

“The bridges into the future—I often say that to myself. Bartley’s bridges always seem to me like that. Have you ever seen his first suspension bridge in Canada, the one he was doing when I first knew him? I hope you will see it sometime. We were married as soon as it was finished, and you will laugh when I tell you that it always has a rather bridal look to me. It is over the wildest river, with mists and clouds always battling about it, and it is as delicate as a cobweb hanging in the sky. It really was a bridge into the future. You have only to look at it to feel that it meant the beginning of a great career. But I have a photograph of it here.” She drew a portfolio from behind a bookcase. “And there, you see, on the hill, is my aunt’s house.”

But Alexander isn’t just hanging around in Boston. He works in London regularly, and there he meets again a woman he used to romance… and picks up where he left off.

I found Cather rather less convincing in this part of the novella, and it doesn’t help that I find tales of adultery rather dull on the whole. She is still an excellent writer, but there felt like there was less truth and sincerity in these sections. Maybe that was why she wanted to disown it later. They’re not terrible pages, but they contrast poorly with how good she is elsewhere.

The novella ends with a very effective climax, beautifully described – and based on a real event from the news, though I don’t think Cather drew the characters from life outside this moment. I really enjoyed reading it and it’s given me a keenness to return to Cather’s portraits of small-town American life again before too long. A Lost Lady is better, but there is enough here for me to relish.

The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis

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The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) was the final book I read in 2019, and I read it pretty much in one go – not all that difficult, as it is just under a hundred pages. I hadn’t heard about it until I was reading someone’s favourite books in The Week – I don’t remember whose, but they chose several lesser-known books that I loved so I thought I could probably trust them on this too.

One morning in January, 1539, a wedding was celebrated in the village of Artigues. That night the two children who had been espoused to one another lay in bed in the house of the groom’s father. They were Bertrande de Rols, aged eleven years, and Martin Guerre, who was no older, both offspring of rich peasant families as ancient, as feudal and as proud as any of the great seigniorial houses of Gascony.

So the novella opens. Bertrande has only been told about the wedding the day before, and she is a little bewildered by what has happened – a match between two families that has been long planned. The wedding ends with her new husband pulling her hair and hitting her, but they are equally unsure of themselves as they retire to their new marital bed. Don’t worry, nothing unpleasant happens there – they are married but not expected to act as grown ups just yet.

As we move forward quickly in time, we see them about a decade later. They have a young son and love one another, though Martin is not an overly affectionate man. Rather, he is ambitious and rebellious. He is the sort of man who will choose to go bear hunting despite being forbidden from doing so, and doesn’t feel much chagrin when his father hits him across the face for it. A couple of teeth are broken, but this is the discipline he uncomplainingly accepts. His father is the dominant and violent head of the family, and that’s that.

So, when Martin decides to plant fields of crops without his father’s permission, he knows he’ll be in trouble. He tells his wife that he will disappear for a week, to give his father time to calm down. And so he goes, not telling her where – so that she isn’t lying when she tells the patriarch that she is ignorant.

But, after a week, he hasn’t come back.

And weeks turn to years without him. In that time, both his parents die and Martin’s uncle installs himself as head of the family. Betrande finds her place in it, but never loses hope that the man she loves will come back.

And he does, almost a decade after he left! All is forgiven and he settles back into life with Bertrande, and they have another baby together. But she can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t her husband. He looks the same, he knows about their life together, he even has the same two broken teeth – but he is kind and loving where her husband was ruthless and dominant. Eventually she can’t keep quiet, and asks that a court decide whether or not this man is her husband.

I shan’t spoil the end, though this is based on a real story, oddly enough. I hadn’t heard of it, though it’s been used many times in fiction. It’s certainly an interesting premise, but what makes Lewis’s novella so good is how deeply she takes us into Bertrande’s feelings – her uncertainty and insecurity. She is a very human character, and the book never falls into the trap that usually puts me off historical fiction, of seeing everything in costume. It feels real and eternal, and there aren’t heaps of period details to show off the research, or dialogue that sounds strange to modern ears. I call it the ‘jeans test’ – would it be as interesting if all the characters were wearing jeans instead of their historical outfits? And the answer here is definitely yes.

I’m glad it was so short. It was exactly right to focus solely on the abbreviated marriage and the dilemma that came afterwards. Anything extraneous would spoil it. So, thank you to whoever it was who recommended it in The Week!

2019: Some Reading Stats

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I love reading people’s Best Books lists, and I also love reading stats posts. Sometimes I forget that normal people don’t even keep a list of the books they read, let alone analyse them – but they are much the poorer for it. Here are some highlights and statistics from my reading year (and comparison’s with 2018’s stats)…

Number of books read
I read 133 books last year, which is significantly above my usual average of around 100 – but rather fewer than the 153 I read last year. I’m not sure why it dropped, since my commute has been cut by an hour in the second half of 2019 and I should have had more reading time. But I always read more in years when I do A Century of Books, so maybe that’s an impetus?

Male/female authors
I read 58 books by men and 74 books by women – i.e. about 55% by women, which is the same percentage I had in 2018. And I read one book that was co-written by a man and a woman.

Fiction/non-fiction
85 fiction books (54 by women, 30 by men, 1 by both) and 48 non-fiction (20 by women, 28 by men). So men win out in the non-fiction stakes, slightly surprisingly. 64% fiction, which is a very slightly lower percentage than 2018. I do read more and more non-fiction, but I seem to buy fiction at a speedier rate…

Books in translation
2019 is my all-time highest ever for reading in translation – the first time I’ve ever broken double figures! I read 11 books in translation – 9 novels and 2 biographies. They came from Portuguese (2), French (2), Italian (2), Japanese, Flemish, Finnish, Russian, and German. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a novel translated from an Asian language before.

Most-read author
Nobody came in with more than 2 books this year – quite a few tied on that number: Agatha Christie, R.C. Sherriff, Mollie Panter-Downes, May Sinclair, Paul Collins, Muriel Spark, and Adam Silvera. But clearly no author obsessed me in 2019.

Re-reads
I re-read seven books in 2019 – as usual, a few were for podcast or book group. And some were for a secret project that I’ll tell you about in the next couple of months…

New-to-me authors
In 2018 I broke my usual 50/50 approximation by only reading 39% new-to-me authors. And in 2019 it was 62 new-to-me authors, which 47% of the books I read and closer to where I expected.

Shortest book title
Appropriately enough, it was Less by Andrew Sean Greer – tied with Omar by Wilfird Blunt.

Books by friends
I’ve reached the stage of life where friends are getting books published, it seems. It’s not quite the first time – but it’s the first time it’s happened more than once. I was delighted to read the excellent non-fiction books This Golden Fleece by Esther Rutter and The Remarkable Life of the Skin by Monty Lyman, both of whom are friends. And I read another one that hasn’t been published – also excellent.

Persephones
I’m trying to read more from my Persephone bookcase, partly because there are some books that have been there for an age, but mostly because they’re reliably brilliant. In 2019 I read The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff, Mariana by Monica Dickens, and The Carlyles at Home by Thea Holme. Plenty more there, of course.

Most disappointing book
I don’t know if it counts, because I wasn’t super excited to read it, but The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho was pretty stupid. I also couldn’t stand Baltasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago, so it’s not been a good year for books translated from Portuguese…

Animals in book titles
Will there by any this year?? There always seem to be… but it’s quite low this year. Mrs Fox by Sarah Hall, Molly Fox‘s Birthday by Deirdre Madden, and The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov are the only ones that get in this year. Unless you count Albert and the Dragonettes.

Strange things that happened in books this year
A woman turned into a fox, a hyrax started speaking, a meteor hit the earth, a man grew wings, a dead girl’s hand appeared, a murderer tried to get other people to accuse her, a woman went missing in Israel, a woman went missing in Russia, a church meeting lasted for eternity, a bridge collapsed and killed its engineer, a flood enveloped a house, dozens of people died from dancing, and phone calls told people the day they’d die.

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.