My Life in Books: Karen and Bibi

This is My Life in Books, Series Six, Day Five! Today’s bloggers are:

Karen, who blogs at Books and Chocolate

Bibi, who blogs at Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

Qu. 1.) Did you grow up in a book-loving household, and did your parents read to you? Pick a favourite book from your childhood, and tell me about it. 

Karen: Growing up, most of the books in my house were kid’s books. I don’t remember my parents reading to me, but I know we had a lot of children’s books around so there was always something to read. And my parents paid extra for us to belong to the town library, which was better than the county library we were entitled to use. I remember my parents bringing large boxes to the library to carry all the books home.

One of my childhood favorites was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I desperately wanted to be like Claudia and run away from home and live in the Metropolitan Museum — in fact, many of my childhood favorites were set in New York, so it’s no wonder I always dreamed of living in a big city. 

Bibi: My parents didn’t read to me and the minute I learnt to read I was off on my own with books and didn’t want them read to me. My mother would make up brilliant bedtime stories off the top of her head (usually suspiciously related in circumstance to my own life with some sort of lesson involved – not as terrible as it sounds!) The house had a lot of books, but mainly my Dad’s non-fiction hardbacks, which I didn’t read much. He would take me to the library every Saturday and I’d get my books there. My mother adored books and poetry and I did read her beloved Virginia Woolf novels, but one of the great ironies of our family life is that it was giving birth to her bibliophile daughter that stopped her reading due to lack of time. Possibly why I’ve never had children, although friends assure me it is possible to combine the two!

Karen: The first grown-up book I remember reading was Gone With the Wind, in the sixth grade. I’m a fast reader and it didn’t take me very long, but it’s not a difficult novel, though I’m sure parts of it went over my head. I’d seen the movie on TV so I knew the basic plot, which helped. I don’t remember much about myself at that age other than I was really bookish, and there wasn’t much to do where I grew up. I was a library aide in middle school and I was always reading.

Bibi: I read Wuthering Heights when I was 12 and thought it was absolutely awful *ducks for cover* but a couple of years later I decided to broach the Brontes again and I tried Jane Eyre. So I think I was about 13-14 years old and definitely in the market for overwrought romance. Although I’ll never be a huge Bronte fan, Jane Eyre opened up the classics for me. It showed me they were something that could be read and enjoyed. You didn’t have to be super-clever to understand the language and they were great stories. So from there I went on to read a lot of the classics felt that part of literature open up to me. 

Qu. 3.) Pick a favourite book that you read in your 20s or early 30s – especially if it’s one which helped set you off in a certain direction in life.  

Karen: I didn’t do too much pleasure reading in my 20s and early 30s, and what I remember reading was mostly mysteries and thrillers. I was working as a pastry cook so most of what I read was food related. One of my all-time favorite food writers is Laurie Colwin, and her book Home Cooking food essays (with recipes) is one of my favorites — my kids love it also and I had to buy my youngest daughter her own copy. Colwin was also a wonderful fiction writer, and I’ve read all her novels and short stories as well. 

Bibi: This is the only question I’ve had to really ponder and its made me realise how much of my formative reading was in my younger years! Reading Jeanette Winterson as a teenager set me off down an experimental fiction path, reading Isabel Allende around the same time was what got me into translated fiction, these alongside Margaret Atwood when I was in sixth-form were strong feminist voices and saw the start of my collecting Virago Modern Classics – picking something from the years after that has proved much more tricky! 

Karen: I’ve really been enjoying the novels of Margery Sharp (which I found through your blog, Simon!) I started with Cluny Brown and have since read four more of her novels I’ve enjoyed all of them but I think Cluny Brown is my favorite so far, though I also loved The Flowering Thorn. And I’ve discovered you can read many of them online for free via Archive.org.

I started blogging nearly ten years ago. A friend from a book group had her own blog and I was an unemployed librarian with a lot to say about books, so I decided it would be a good outlet. My reading habits have changed mostly because of the books I’ve discovered through other bloggers I follow — it’s how I discovered Persephone Books, Viragos, and Furrowed Middlebrow. I really love mid-century women’s fiction and I don’t know if I would have discovered so many of these books because most of them are out of print and not always available in bookstores and many libraries — in fact, I hardly ever buy new books any more, nearly everything I want to read is used and out of print. But I still have far too many unread books on my shelves! 

Bibi: This year I read A Month in the Country and I thought it was just beautiful. My edition comes in at slightly over 80 pages and the fact that JL Carr can write about such immense themes with so much humanity and concision is just astonishing. 

Qu. 5.) Finally – a favourite that might surprise people!  

Karen: Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman – totally unlike my usual reads. I don’t really read a lot of fantasy, but I do sometimes enjoy low fantasy because I don’t have the patience for all the world-building in high fantasy. I prefer when weird and fantastic things happen to normal people. Anansi Boys is just brilliant, and the audio version by Lenny Henry is even better than reading the print copy. 

Bibi: I don’t know if this will surprise people as it fits with my love of concise writing (in fact, maybe my love of Middlemarch is more surprising!) but I always surprise myself with how much I love Ernest Hemingway. Although I’m not someone who has to like the artist to enjoy the art, I still find myself wishing I didn’t like Hemingway’s work. He was horrible to women, he really liked blood sports, these are not endearing qualities to me. But his writing blows me away. The Old Man and the Sea is one of the most perfect things I’ve ever read. And that description of Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast where he compares his talent to dust on a butterfly’s wing makes me cry every time.

What sort of reader do you think would choose these books? And which book would you recommend they read?

Karen on Bibi’s choices: Well, the first two books make me think this reader enjoys Victorian novels; from The Alchemist (which I’d never heard of) I’m guessing they enjoy satire. A Month in the Country is just beautifully written — perhaps they enjoy novels set between the wars? And Hemingway isn’t my favorite (more of a Steinbeck fan), but sometimes you just want writing that’s not flowery, straight and to the point.