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Which books did I buy in March?

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I hope you all had a great Easter! I had a very restful time on my holiday, and glad to be back to blogging now.

I’m enjoying looking back at my monthly purchases – it helps keep me honest, and it also makes each month either a Read More Than Bought or a Bought More Than Read month. And it’s good to know which is which. March is… Bought More Than Read! Which I’m going to count as a victory… though it was a pretty close-run thing. Here are the seven books I bought in March…

Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham
I popped into a charity shop on the way to a course, with only about two minutes to spare – and luckily that two minutes included spying a Cunningham novel I don’t yet have. I’ve only read four of his books, but I really love his writing – this one will be great one day.

A Book of Book Lists
Impulse buy! Well done, Waterstones and whoever stocks the piles near your till. This is all sorts of lists of books – from those that are most likely to be left unfinished, to the books Scott took on his trip. I can’t resist this sort of thing.

None Like Him by Jen Wilkin
My small group at church is reading this one, and I’d better get a move on because they’ve read two chapters and I’ve read… none.

Trespasses by Paul Bailey
We popped into Bakewell on my holiday – I’ve just been away for a week in the Peak District with dozens of others – and came upon a little bookshop. Somebody else got the signed Debo Devonshire book before I could get to it (it’s ok – he’s a big Debo fan too, so I let it slide) but I grabbed this Paul Bailey, after loving At the Jerusalem.

Love, Courtship, and Marriage by Thomas Herne
I’m already kinda incensed because this guide to marriage and sex from the 1920s would have been PERFECT for chapter 3 of my DPhil thesis. Oh well. I’ll still enjoy reading it – I find these sorts of books completely fascinating. Also from the Bakewell bookshop!

Albert and the Dragonettes by Rosemary Weir
Albert’s World Tour by Rosemary Weir
I’m going to write about Albert the Dragon properly one of these days. But I realised I didn’t have the whole series, and should rectify that…

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

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My book group read Vile Bodies (1930) by Evelyn Waugh – his second novel, and the fifth one I’ve read by him. I have a mixed history with Waugh, and this one hasn’t helped clear things up much.

The novel focuses upon a young man called Adam – a journalist who is engaged to Nina – who is trying to make his way in the world, and to gather together the money to afford a wedding. Around him there are an astonishing number of characters, most of whom are aboard a sea voyage in the opening, confusing pages of the novel. There is Mrs Melrose Ape and her gaggle of ‘angels’ with wings, called Chastity, Charity, and the like. There’s a Jesuit priest we don’t hear much from afterwards. There is Agatha Runcible, a bizarre and mildly hysterical character. There’s all manner of other people who come and go, without much certainty.

Adam is an outsider in the world he tries to enter – sometimes as a gossip columnist, sometimes as a gentleman. His attempts to get money go disastrously wrong, miraculously right, and back again, over and over – with a drunken Major playing a significant role in all these moments. And the people Adam is observing are the Bright Young Things of the 1920s – ‘Bright Young Things’ was the original title of the novel, and the title of the film adaptation, and Waugh has good fun mocking their insouciance and inconsequentiality.

But inconsequence is a hallmark of Waugh’s novels in general, and it’s my sticking point with them. Actions never have moral consequences. People routinely ruin each other’s lives for no reason, and don’t give it a second thought – which is one of my least favourite things in fiction. I don’t mind dark humour, and if people’s hubris or sheer accident mean disaster happens, I can chuckle at it. But those who selfishly destroy other lives without reason – well, I don’t find it funny even when it’s satire, and that rather spoils the joke for me. One gets the sense that Waugh isn’t a terribly nice person.

Having said that, there are other moments I found very amusing (hence the conflict!) The on-again-off-again wedding was dealt with enjoyably. Nina’s father – Colonel Blount – never recognises Adam, and is always saying how much better his prospective son-in-law is than the other suitors he’s met (all of whom are Adam). And Waugh has a brilliant way with a turn of phrase – such as:

She wore a frock such as only duchesses can obtain for their elder daughters, a garment curiously puckered and puffed up and enriched with old lace at improbable places, from which her pale beauty emerged as though from a clumsily tied parcel.

Waugh’s style is recognisably his, but there is also a heck of a lot of Ronald Firbank in here. (I felt rather chuffed that I thought this, as I learned in the afterword that Waugh also thought this – though the sycophantic editor of my edition, Richard Jacobs, disputes it.) Firbank had jumpy narratives, lots of dialogue, and a lack of clarity about what was going on – and all this appears in Vile Bodies.

Of the five Waugh novels I’ve read (Put Out More Flags, The Loved One, Scoop, Decline and Fall, and Vile Bodies) I really like The Loved One, and very much enjoyed Scoop. And I really disliked Decline and Fall and Put Out More Flags, for their intense spitefulness. Vile Bodies is the Waugh novel that falls most in the middle of my spectrum – I relished the bits I found amusing, recoiled from those I didn’t, and spent most of the first 50 pages not having a clue what was going on.

Which books did I buy in February?

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I’m planning to do this list for every month, as a way of showing myself what’s finding its way to my overflowing shelves – and to see if I read more than I bought in any month. Which is a pretty low ambition, one would have thought, but also not very achievable… though I think I did it in February! This round-up is coming a bit late, but that’s nothing compared to how late my round up of 2017 reading is. One day it will come, I (sort of) promise.

(Granted, I did get quite a few review copies… and I’ve included some gifts in this post, just because I wanted to mention them.)

Here they are, with a silently judging Hargreaves:

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

I have a handful of Waugh books I’ve not read, but I bought this one because my book group is reading it this month. I’m halfway through. In the past I have been conflicted about Waugh’s moral compass… with Vile Bodies I’m largely just confused about what’s going on.

My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes

I can’t resist a cheap NYRB Classic, even if I’m amassing them and not reading all that many.

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

I liked The Fault in Our Stars, and I’ve been watching John Green’s vlogs for many years, so I’m happy to put another of his books on my shelves. I’m not often in the mood for reading teenage fiction, but it’ll be good when I want a quick, doubtless heartbreaking, read.

From the Heart by Susan Hill

Susan Hill writes a book about every five minutes, in many genres, but I very much appreciate her ‘short literary novella’ genre – The Beacon, A Kind Man, Black Sheep – and hadn’t heard of this recent one until I stumbled across it.

Reading Allowed by Chris Paling

I visited Mostly Books in Abingdon for the first time in ages – and I always try to buy a book when visiting an independent bookseller, to support them. It was rather sad to see how few books were on the shelves – it’s a small shop, but there were still big gaps on the shelves. I was wondering if I’d have to read empty-handed, but this comic memoir of working in a library looked fun.

The Proper Place by O. Douglas
Ann and Her Mother by O. Douglas
Penny Plain by O. Douglas
Farewell to Priorsford by O. Douglas

These were a very kind gift from my friend’s mum (hi Mrs S!) who sometimes reads the blog and knows that I like O Douglas (also known as Anna Buchan – John Buchan’s sister). I had to be strong and not accept all the novels on offer – there were quite a few – but asked for a selection. I’m excited to see what I think of these!

Since the last four are gifts, I only actually bought five books in February. Very restrained, no??

Bill the Conqueror by P.G. Wodehouse

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Somewhat surprisingly, given that it was all about children’s books, Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm had me heading straight to the bookshelf for a P.G. Wodehouse. She wrote a very convincing comparison of Richmal Crompton’s WIlliam books and P.G. Wodehouse’s novels – if you like one, you’ll almost certainly like the other – and I went to my many unread PWGs. The only one that fit an unclaimed ACOB year, though, was Bill the Conqueror (1924).

I don’t think this is one of Wodehouse’s better-known novels – it’s not part of the Jeeves and Wooster series, or the Blandings series, though apparently some of the characters in it do pop up in other books. And what a dizzying number of characters it has, spread over both sides of the Atlantic. It’s apparently a matter of comparative ease to pop from one side to the other, and I got rather confused about who was where. But let me give a try at working out who is who and what is what…

In England, Flick is engaged to Roderick, the weak son of a newspaper magnate, but she is still in love with Bill (who lives in the US, and once saved her life). He’s besotted with his friend Judson’s sister (Alice), and also has a brainwave to start earning his own living – which happens just as his uncle disinherits the family, as he’s just adopted an uninspiring child. Bill and Judson sail off to London so Bill can work for the family pulping firm, which is in the midst of fraud. I feel like there are other subplots too, but I can’t remember all of them – even for Wodehouse, there’s a lot going on. Potentially a bit too much. Usually he winds everything together brilliantly at the end – here, there was nothing left unresolved, but some of it felt a bit extraneous.

I don’t think anybody reads Wodehouse because they’re desperate for a couple to find love. Indeed, there is quite a contrast between Bertie Wooster (who is forever getting engaged by accident, and then trying to extricate himself) and the heroes of PGW’s stand-alone novels, who are usually starry-eyed lovers who’ve fallen in love at first sight. And, yes, I didn’t really care which woman’s heart Bill conquered – I’m here for Wodehouse’s hilarious writing.

And the writing is very good in Bill the Conqueror. It has Wodehouse’s usual winning combination of litotes and hyperbole – I particularly like it when he makes an unnecessary and over-the-top reference to Greek myth, making ordinary situations jolt into the extremely dramatic, but only for the span of a sentence. But there weren’t any so-amazingly-funny-I-have-to-write-them-down moments. And his humour was a bit more intermittent than when he’s on his finest form.

It was lovely to go back to Wodehouse after too long a break, and this was an engaging, funny delight. If it had been by any other author, I’d be shouting my discovery from the rooftops. But Wodehouse is SO brilliant that I think it’s worth starting somewhere else – probably one of the Jeeves books. And it’s good to know that there are any number of books where Wodehouse will provide reliable fun – plenty of them still on my shelves.

Some books for International Women’s Day

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It’s International Women’s Day, and a good opportunity to celebrate women’s achievements around the world, as well as highlighting the areas where women still face disproportionate risk, disadvantage, or discrimination. If I were a better reader, I’d be able to suggest lots of books on those themes [EDITED TO ADD: Claire has basically made that list] – but, to be honest, my reading is so Anglocentric and from-the-past that I can’t pull together that list. Nor is there really any significant point in me highlighting women authors, since most of the books I read are by women and I wouldn’t know where to start.

So – instead, I’ve put together a list of great books by women that have a woman’s name as the title. No other words – just the name. It’s a way of commemorating the day, I suppose, though I also encourage everyone to sign petitions, go on marches, donate to charities, challenge discrimination, and so forth! This list are mostly the ones that came to me first, so I’ll certainly have missed many great ones – which would you suggest, with these criteria?

I’ve tried to avoid the most obvious ones – so, yes, I love Emma, Rebecca, and Mrs Dalloway – but here are some you might not be as familiar with.

Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp

Cluny is a wonderful character – a girl who is plain but has Presence, and disconcerts her Uncle Arn to the extent that he bundles her away from London, off to Devon to be a maid. She then gets embroiled in the household there. Sharp is quite unlike any other writer I’ve read, and Cluny is a frenetic joy. (I wrote about it here.)

Miss Mole by E.H. Young

Another joy of a character – a talkative, inquisitive woman who is a burden to her snobbish relatives. She heads off to be a housekeeper (if memory serves) and, yes, also gets embroiled in various other people’s lives. Also surprising pathos in the novel.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

I often talk about how much I love Gilead, but the whole trilogy is brilliant. The third book (though they can be read in any order) shows us Lila’s life – giving greater depth to the woman we have previously seen as wife and mother, seeing her as an disadvantaged child and as the young, desperate, quiet, confused woman she first was.

Mrs Harter by E.M. Delafield

Being honest, I remember very little about the novel – which I read about 15 years ago. But I always think of it as being rather like seeing heaps of crispy leaves on the ground in autumn. Make of that what you will.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Technically the character is called Laura, but some people call her Lolly, so I’m counting it. She is a neglected and burdened aunt, living in her brother’s house – but decides to escape and move to village isolation. It’s a truly excellent domestic novel – and then turns into something much stranger.

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

Quite unlike any of Taylor’s other novels, this shows the ruthlessly selfish and egotistical Angel from girlhood to her huge success as a Marie-Corelli-esque novelist: terrible, but unaware of it, and selling in her thousands. It’s a very brave portrait for a novelist to create, and flawlessly carried out.

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

OK, this one is pretty well known – but I have to mention it, as it’s often neglected in comparison to the other Bronte sisters’ works. Agnes is a quiet, moral woman who gets a job as a governess with some terrible children – and then falls in love. It’s a simple but perfectly structured masterpiece.

Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers

If you’ve not read the book, please do. Travers’ character doesn’t have a lot in common with rosy-cheeked Julie Andrews. In the books, she is snippy, lies quite a lot, and stands no nonsense. And it’s all the better for it.

Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther

Speaking of characters who aren’t like the film – this Mrs Miniver is the quintessential British housewife of the 1930s, but the war hasn’t begun by the time the book ends. Light, observant, and a delight.

Comments and spam

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Just a quick note that I’m having some issues with comments and spam – I’ve just changed the anti-spam plugin I use, that will hopefully fix the problem. Please bear with me! I appreciate your comments SO much, and I’d hate for technical jibber-jabber to get in the way of that.

Bookworm by Lucy Mangan

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I heard about Bookworm (2018) by Lucy Mangan on Twitter, I think, or perhaps another blog – but as soon as I’d heard the subtitle (‘a memoir of childhood reading’) I knew that I had to read it. I think it was in a Weekend Miscellany. Thankfully Square Peg sent me a copy, and I wolfed it down – it’s very hard to imagine any bibliophile not loving this book. Though I also said that about Howards End is on the Landing, and look what happened there. No matter; I’m going to maintain full confidence with this one.

Mangan was a very bookish child – in the way that only those of us who were also very bookish children will understand. Books were her sanctuary, her new worlds, her adventure, her heartbreak. This total immersion, and self-definition as a bibliophile, is the keynote of Bookworm, and it will make every avid childhood reader thrill with recognition. We feel her pain when reading is socially unacceptable in the playground, and when her parents restrict her reading to certain rooms, to encourage her to be more sociable. (Yes, reading at the dinner table was – is? – banned in my home. And yes, like Lucy I turned to cereal packets or anything else I could read, when desperation hit.)

Through the chapters, Mangan takes us from her earliest reading memories until the end of childhood. To be honest, the tales of picture books interested but did not beguile me. I don’t remember which picture books I read – except the Mr Men, and I don’t think they got a single mention in Bookworm. Was Mangan born slightly too early for them? But once we got onto other books – well, firstly it was a nice surprise to discover that I have read more classic children’s literature than I’d supposed – but mostly, it’s wonderful to read how well Mangan describes the all-encompassing experiences these books were.

Enid Blyton gets a section (hurrah!) – without a doubt the defining author of my childhood. Narnia gets a section, as do Little Women, Roald Dahl, Richmal Crompton’s William books, and both books that Rachel and I are discussing in the next episode of the podcast – The Secret Garden and Tom’s Midnight Garden. Even Sweet Valley High, with which I was obsessed for a couple of years. Even if you haven’t read these books, the enthusiasm with which she remembers them is a delight, and mixes frothy enthusiasm with plenty of reflection and contemplation. Occasionally the tone becomes a little too self-consciously Caitlin Moranesque, and the odd sentence reads a little awkwardly – the bookish kid trying to fit in with the cool gang – but most of the time she isn’t trying stylistic tics; she’s just revelling in the absolute joy that books can be. (There are also one or two tedious moments against Christian faith, and one truly shocking anti-Catholic moment that should certainly have been cut, but I’ll tidy those under the rug for now.)

Along the way (because it is a memoir of sorts, after all) we learn about her character, her friends, her family. I loved the way her father would occasionally suggest a book, with a subtle gleam that acknowledges that this is a book he loved in his childhood. I loved the depiction of a slightly anxiously moralistic child, who definitely didn’t want to read anything anarchistic or rule-breaking in books (no thank you Fantastic Mr Fox). It reminded me of my own fastidiousness as a child, that made me unable to enjoy The Twits (the idea of the food in the beard still makes me gag).

And mostly I just loved with a wonderful nostalgic journey this. I love any book about reading, but one about the world-opening potential of reading to a child is rather lovely. And it’ll certainly lead you heading straight for the children’s section of the library, to relive all the classics that filled your world and expanded your imagination however many years ago.

Publishers are sneaky (or: my book group read The Reader on the 6.27)

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My book group recently read The Reader on the 6.27 (2014) by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz. The novella (which the publishing house has made look more like a normal-length novel, with a huge font and not many words on each page – though that is not why they’re sneaky) is about Guylain Vignolles who pulps paper for a living. Every day on the 6.27 train, he reads one of the pages he has saved aloud to the passengers – who, somewhat surprisingly, largely seem to respond positively.

The novella went by so fast that it was hard to know whether or not I liked it, and it turned into rather an add romance – all while having the surreal tone of a dystopia, despite not really being one. I can’t quite see why it was such a bestseller, but it’s nice that more translated fiction is getting bestseller status. To be honest, I don’t have a lot to say about it – the writing was pretty good; it was all very engaging but not life-changing – but what I wanted to write about was the cover. Half the book group had this one:

While I (along with the other half of the group) had this one:

Spot the difference?

Yes – for some reason, half of us had snow and reindeer, and a gold font. And when I say ‘some reason’ I mean, of course, Christmas. Is there snow in the novella? No. Are there reindeer? If so, they keep very quiet about it. It’s a completely shameless attempt to make the book seem like an ideal Christmas present, despite the fact that the story isn’t even set in winter (with apologies to any readers in the southern hemisphere).

I don’t know how they landed on this one. Perhaps it was bubbling under as a very good seller, but could go the extra mile with a bit of marketing. Now, I’m certainly not against marketing – I work in it, after all. I don’t think PR is a bad thing (I have witnessed somebody call the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year campaign “a moronic piece of PR gimmickery”, unaware that I had worked on the campaign – which was, of course, PR and light fun. What did they expect? That a word had actually won some sort of real life battle?)  But I think there should be a bit more grounding than “we’d like to flog a few copies of this”.

So, yes. I love it when British Library Crime Classics get the Christmassy titles out, or even when there’s yet another edition of A Christmas Carol published. But why on earth did this novella get the treatment? And how many people were disappointed when they settled down on Boxing Day for some festive fun?

Oh, and here’s a translation quandary. The fact that Guylain Vignolles is a spoonerism for vilain guignol isn’t an immediate win in English.

Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon

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During the Persephone Readathon, I chose to read Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon – which is rather an anomaly for Persephone, in that it was published in 1981. AND the author is still alive! I can only think of a couple other Persephone authors in that category. So, why did Persephone Books step so far from their usual territory of interwar literature to a novel about the kidnap of a child?

For that is what Still Missing is about – it was later adapted into the film Without a Trace. And yet it’s worlds away from the sort of book that might be conjured up in your mind. There certainly seems to be a trend in modern crime fiction for depicting the worst possible things that can happen to children or women. Whether the authors are doing that gratuitously or to expose a troubling trend in the real world, they’re not books I want to read. Whereas Still Missing is far more about the psychology of a mother going through this appalling predicament, day by day by day.

That is the power of the novel. Nothing is rushed. We agonise alongside Susan, feeling as though we are deep in her mind, even though the novel is in the third person. As for her son, Alex, all we see is him leaving for school – and not getting there. He disappears from the novel as suddenly as he disappears from the neighbourhood.

It may be that one loss helps to prepare you for the next, at least in developing a certain rueful sense of humour about things you’re too old to cry about. There’s plenty of blather, some of it true, about turning pain into growth, using one blow to teach you resilience and to make you ready for the shock of the next one. But the greater truth is that life is not something you can go into training for. There was nothing in life that Susan Selky could have done to prepare for the breathtaking impact of losing her son.

I don’t know what would actually happen when a young boy goes missing, nor (more to the point) what would have happened in 1981 – but I’m willing to believe it would be rather what Gutcheon depicts. There is the initial flurry of media interest and police action – questioning her estranged husband, getting statements from everybody in the area, putting everybody at their disposal. Her friends are either too horrified to talk to her, too awkward to know how to help, or (a select few) an essential support. Gutcheon shows people’s reactions perfectly, and dryly explains how and why people react as they do.

“Are you sure there’s nothing… funny about her?” his wife asked.

“What do you mean?”

“She was so cool,” said Pat. Uh-huh, though Menetti. Now it starts. It can’t happen to me. It happened to her, she lost her kid, but if there’s something funny about her, then there’s a reason it could happen to her but it couldn’t happen to me. Now starts the drawing away, the pulling aside, the setting the Selkys apart.

Chief among the policemen is Menetti, in that conversation above. One of the reasons the novel is in the third person (I suspect) is so that we can jump into Menetti’s mind instead – he is an intensely sympathetic character, trying to help Susan as much as possible while also maintaining procedure. She begs him not to waste time following the lead of her ex-husband – she is adamant that it has nothing to do with him – but Menetti must follow the (fruitless) most likely option. And we see him when he goes home too, anxious and resigned, the impact on his own family life all too unavoidable.

Still Missing is very gripping, but not because it is full of event. It is full of tension, but it is mostly the tension of nothing happening – of friends and journalists gradually losing interest; of the leads drying up. And of Susan’s agony remaining just as painful and stark throughout – of her own measures to find Alex growing increasingly desperate. Gutcheon judges the pacing brilliantly almost all the time – I say ‘almost’ because there are a few clunky bits, thrown in for plot and red herrings, that don’t sit well with the rhythm of the rest of the narrative.

I’m still not sure it quite fits as a Persephone, and the 1980s still lies between nostalgia and modern in a slightly off-colour, dated interim state – but it’s certainly an involving and beautifully judged read. The premise has become worn through re-use, but Gutcheon takes it back to essentials, and the novel is the more powerful and personal because of it.