Stuck in a Book

In the comments for my last post, author (and friend) Linda Gillard mentioned that she’d like to take part but doesn’t have a blog – so, of course, I said I’d be more than happy to host her selection here. Over to you, Linda…

I’ve moved house a lot, often to a smaller property, so I’ve had to downsize my book collection. I performed another cull when I was recovering from cancer and decided to get rid of all the books I knew I’d never read. So what I have now is a modest but meaningful collection of books, all of which I’ve read and wish to keep or I intend to read.

So here’s my 10 book “biography”…

The oldest book I own is The Christmas Carol illustrated by Ronald Searle. I bought this on holiday in Margate in the 1960s at The Albion Bookshop. I think I was about 12. It cost 21/- (£1.05) which must have cleared me out of pocket money. This is also my most read book because for many years I read it every Christmas. If there’s a better opening paragraph in the whole of English fiction, I don’t know what it is.

I started collecting children’s books for my grandchildren before they were even conceived. I now have a grandson who will inherit some magnificent Folio editions of children’s classics. He’ll also get this 50^th anniversary edition of Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. My first encounter with this book was at primary school. A beloved teacher called Mrs Sharp used to read it to us at the end of the day, perched on her desk. I remember the bell going for end of school and asking her if we could please stay and hear a bit more before going home. She didn’t oblige. I expect she wanted to get home.

I’m on to my second copy of Mary Berry’s Fast Cakes. The first one fell to pieces. The second copy is going the same way and its pages are stained and a bit sticky. I was a fan of Mary’s long before she was a TV celebrity. My waistline will attest to the fact that these cakes are fast, easy and delicious.

I have a complete set of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin historical novels that I’ve collected in second hand editions. I’ve read 15 of the 20-book series. I discovered him many years ago, travelling on the ferry from Skye to North Uist, one of the Western Isles. My fellow passengers included a family of two adults and two teenagers, all of whom were engrossed in a different O’Brian novel. This was an impressive advert for the books. I was also very taken with the atmospheric cover artwork by Geoff Hunt. This is a series I might have collected just for the covers, but the books are superbly written and the characters just jump off the page.

I have an almost complete collection of Georgette Heyer’s historical fiction which I’ve read and re-read for over 50 years. I bought Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester, but haven’t read it yet. I was put off by some reviews which said Heyer came across as rather unpleasant – rude, snobbish and casually racist as people so often were in those days. I can’t decide whether to read the book or if I’d rather preserve my fantasy that if we’d ever met, she and I would have got on famously.

I’ve acquired a lot of books for research purposes on subjects that have featured in my novels. Some topics I’ve re-visited so I tend to keep all research books in case I need them again. I have a motley selection of books on ghosts and the paranormal, including The Stately Ghosts of England by Diana Norman, an account of the tour she made with a psychic round the “haunted” stately homes of England.

I’ve never seen a ghost myself and remain a sceptic, but the real-life stories fascinate me. I’m not sure why I became interested in writing ghost stories, but it could be connected to my father’s death. He died in 2005 but I still struggle to accept his absence. I might have turned to writing ghost stories because I can’t accept that the dead are gone for good.

Someone said, “Grief is love that has nowhere to go”, an idea that has comforted me.

I own all the romantic  suspense fiction of Mary Stewart which I’ve read and re-read since my teens. Two of her novels are set on Scottish islands but they aren’t among her best. Stormy Petrel earns its place on my shelves for its gorgeous wrap-around dust jacket. The story is predictable but Stewart’s writing about landscape and wildlife is unsurpassed. I suspect this is where her real interest lay in this book.

I’ve lived on the islands of Skye, Harris and Arran. If someone asked me what it’s like to live on a Hebridean island, I’d suggest they read Stormy Petrel, but with low expectations of the plot.

Another island cover… Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. I believe I bought this because Simon and some other bloggers raved about it. It’s about an elderly artist and her 6-year old grand-daughter spending a summer on a Finnish island. I haven’t read this one yet, but I really should as I’m now a grandmother myself and love anything set on islands.

Will I ever read Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots? I’ve dipped in many times but I haven’t made much headway with its 700+ pages.  The seven basic plots are Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Re-birth. Booker believes the success of Lord of the Rings can be attributed to the fact that Tolkien’s tale included all seven plot elements.

I have a small collection of art books. Victoria Crowe: Painted Insights is one I acquired as an impulse buy. In 2001 I was taken by a quilting friend to an exhibition in Inverness of Victoria Crowe’s paintings. She’s a well-known Scottish artist but I didn’t know her work. I was stunned by the beauty of her paintings and felt I had to own some, so I forked out £20 for a signed hardback book on the spot. I never regretted my extravagance.

Don’t you find, it’s never the books you buy that you regret, it’s the ones that got away.

Linda Gillard lives in Ayrshire, Scotland. She’s the author of eight novels, including Star Gazing, short-listed in 2009 for Romantic Novel of the Year and the Robin Jenkins Literary Award. Her Kindle bestseller House of Silence was selected for Amazon UK’s Top Ten “Best of 2011” in the Indie Author category.

Author website: www.lindagillard.co.uk

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LindaGillardAuthor

I happened to stumble across one of my old blog posts the other day, while searching for something else, and I thought it would be fun to resurrect a meme I made up in 2010. I love the idea of getting to know people by looking at their bookshelves – and this meme was a microcosm of that, picking 10 books to tell about a reader.

Here are the rules I set out last time…

1.) Go to your bookshelves…
2.) Close your eyes. If you’re feeling really committed, blindfold yourself.
3.) Select ten books at random. Use more than one bookcase, if you have them, or piles by the bed, or… basically, wherever you keep books.
4.) Use these books to tell us about yourself – where and when you got them, who got them for you, what the book says about you, etc. etc…..
5.) Have fun! Be imaginative. Doesn’t matter if you’ve read them or not – be creative. It might not seem easy to start off with, and the links might be a little tenuous, but I think this is a fun way to do this sort of meme.
6.) Feel free to cheat a bit, if you need to…

I decided to do it a bit differently this time – in order to include all the books I have in Somerset, I used my LibraryThing catalogue and a random number generator to come up with ten of my books – here they are, in the order they came out.

Please do have a go at this meme! I won’t tag anybody this time – but I’d love to see which ten books other people come up with. You can write much less or much more than I have – basically, make this meme fit whatever you’d like to do.

1. Good Wives? by Margaret Forster

I haven’t read this, or anything by Forster, but this book is testament to my willingness to stock my shelves with recommendations that I hear about from dovegreybooks, the Yahoo Group I’ve been in since I was 18, and which has helped shape my literary taste so much.

2. The Aloe by Katherine Mansfield

This is working out roughly chronologically so far, as I first discovered Mansfield while attending lecture days run by Oxford University, when I was about 17 or 18. Most of the people there were retired or heading that way; I was an eager young man who knew very little about literature, had never heard of Mansfield, and was struck by the astonishing writing I’d stumbled upon. I have read this one, though rather later.

3. Lettice Delmer by Susan Miles

Oh, Persephone Books! How you have also shaped me as a reader. I found out about them through their reprint of Richmal Crompton – and they led me to dovegreybooks. I can’t imagine a time when I shan’t have my Persephone books on proud display – and I have read this verse novel, which I really liked.

4. About Alice by Calvin Trillin

I’m trying to use these selections to tell you a bit about myself, where relevant, and About Alice is testament to my outsider’s fascination with grief. It is such a fundamental human emotion but, having never lost anybody close to me, it is one I don’t really understand. I found Trillin’s beautiful book about his late wife remarkable.

5. A Genius for Living by Janet Byrne

This is a biography of Frieda Lawrence (D.H. Lawrence’s wife) that turned up in my LibraryThing, though I have an inkling that I’ve actually sent it, unread, to a charity shop… which (super tangentially!) can be the link to my first sort-of job, which was volunteering for Oxfam. I sorted and priced clothes, and was grateful not to have to do anything with books – because throwing them away was too horrible a thought.

6. The Country Housewife’s Book by Lucy H Yates

I haven’t read this Persephone Book yet – indeed, it’s more of a dip-in then I read-all-the-way-through. So I’m going to use this pick to tell you about my irrational loathing of authors who use their middle initial. Actually, it’s not quite irrational. It’s because every American literary critic seems to do it, and I did NOT have that sort of wordcount to spare in my doctoral thesis. Scarred, that’s what I am.

7. Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne

I’m delighted this one came up! A.A. Milne was my first love, in developing my own taste for obscure and out of print literature, and an abiding one. Winnie the Pooh isn’t obscure, of course, so this can also stand for my love of woodland, which I’ve had all my life. And in about 2003 I was lucky enough to go to the Hundred Acre Wood (which, psst, is not really 100 acres).

8. When I Was Otherwise by Stephen Benatar

I don’t recall where I bought many of the books on this list – but this one I do (I think!). It was one of the books I picked up at Barter Books in Alnwick, in 2012, though I haven’t read it yet. That trip was a weird time. I was giving a conference paper at Newcastle University, and then travelling down to Worcester to go to my best friend’s wedding. It was also a time that I was terrified, waiting for an examination to rule out cancer (which was very much ruled out!) that was taking ages to arrive. So the little haul of books comes with a real medley of memories.

9. Making Love by Jean Toussaint

I haven’t read this, and I can’t remember quite where I bought it, but it is part of my usually-failing attempt to find books I like translated from French. I’ve enjoyed a handful (including, yes Peter, Colette) but there’s still something of a barrier there. Maybe one to take when I go to France this summer? As for a fact about myself associated with this book – France is my most-visited country by far, outside of the UK: I’ve been there five times. My French is still beyond abysmal.

10. One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens

Lovely to finish with a hilarious memoir, on my list of 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About. I don’t remember where I picked this up, but it was one of the few recreational books I managed to read during my (intense!) undergraduate English Literature degree. And, well, I love baking – but this book reinforces that I tend towards the tried-and-tested when it comes to cooking. Read this and you’ll want to do the same…

Over to you! Put a link in the comments if you do (a version of) this meme yourself.

Tift Merritt came up in my Spotify recommends for if-you-like-Kathryn-Williams (and I love Kathryn Williams), and ‘Traveling Alone’ is a nice song to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon with.