Literary Taste (how to form it) by Arnold Bennett

StuckinaBook All , , 23 Comments

I love that this sort of book was once published – and not only published but, as my copy suggests, owned by the 23rd Hartlepools Troop of Scouts. I do hope they enjoyed it. Who knows what journey it then went on before I picked it up in Edinburgh?

Literary Taste

Literary Taste: how to form it was published in 1909, though there was later a revised edition by Frank Swinnerton in the 1930s, according to Wikipedia. My copy is undated but is evidently from around 1909 – because it doesn’t have the extra section Swinnerton added (more on that later), and, well, because the book is obviously from that period. One of my specialist talents now is being able to date an early 20th-century hardback to within a few years. It doesn’t come in handy all that often.

Bennett had only been publishing novels for about a decade when this book came out, but they included big-hitters and his name was already at the forefront of literary reputation – though it would take a tumble later, when he became more or less synonymous with the stale Edwardians (thanks partly to Virginia Woolf’s influential essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’). I’ve yet to read any of his fiction, though my book group is doing The Old Wive’s Tale next month, but I’ve read quite a bit of his reviewing and journalism. He’s certainly got a passion for books, and the sort of determined I’m-just-like-you persona that is rivalled only by Jennifer Lawrence.

This book is addressed to the person who enjoys reading and wants to be well-read, but doesn’t quite know where to start. Bennett is almost absurdly precise in where you should start (it is, apparently, the essays of Charles Lamb), but before this he says things about literature that echo down the decades to get a rousing ‘amen!’ from all of us.

Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living. I am extremely anxious to avoid rhetorical exaggerations. I do not think I am guilty of one in asserting that he who has not been ‘presented the freedom’ of literature has not wakened up out of his prenatal sleep. He is merely not born. He can’t see; he can’t hear; he can’t feel, in any full sense. He can only eat his dinner.

Love it.

The aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours of leisure; it is to awake oneself, it i to be alive, to intensify one’s capacity for pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension. It is not to affect one hour, but twenty-four hours. It is to change utterly one’s relations with the world.

Preach, Bennett!

Well, having said that, I think it can also just be to amuse the hours of leisure. I don’t think Bennett would think much of me, literature-wise. For one thing, he’s no big fan of the academic study of literature. For another, he’s not very impressed by people who don’t start with 16th-century literature – and, I’ll be honest, it’s been quite a while since I grabbed a copy of anything from before the first world war. Well, except Literary Taste, of course.

Bennett writes very interestingly about why a classic is a classic, who decides it, and how choices in reading can make or break one’s literary education. All of it feels fresh today, and are debates that still rage. But Bennett isn’t just talking hypotheticals: he wants to get down to brass tacks about actual books to read. Not only Charles Lamb (though emphatically him) – Bennett compiles a list of essential books, and prices them out as well. It’s nice that he is aware of financial limitations, and deliberately omits some authors whose works are not available in good, reasonable editions in 1909. It’s also so unexpected to see these sorts of balance sheets in a popular literary text.

This was apparently pretty influential. Wikipedia has kindly put them all in a list, which you can examine closely; it also includes books from the post-1909 period of literature that Swinnerton added in his 1937 revision. I am more comfortable ground in this years, of course, and it’s nice to see people like A.A. Milne included – and unexpected to see Stella Benson’s The Little World, which I haven’t heard of despite being (I suspect) one of relatively few people today to have read more than one book by Stella Benson. And there’s a Compton Mackenzie recommendation to follow up after my recent review of Poor Relations.

I’ll admit, Bennett’s choices leave me feeling like I have very little literary taste – and also wondering how he’d time to read all these authors and books by the time he was 42. As he concludes the list (which includes brilliantly sassy moments like ‘Names such as those of Charlotte Yonge and Dinah Craik are omitted intentionally’):

When you have read, wholly or in part, a majority of these three hundred and thirty-five volumes, with enjoyment, you may begin to whisper to yourself that your literary taste is formed; and you may pronounce judgment on modern works which come before the bar of your opinion in the calm assurance that, though to err is human, you do at any rate know what you are talking about.

Well, not yet, Arnold. And probably never. Somehow I find it more fascinating to read books from 1909 about how people formed literary taste – and this was certainly a great, interesting, unusual read.

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar

StuckinaBook All , , 23 Comments

Guys, I love Virginia Woolf. That ain’t no secret around these parts. And now I’ve read four novelisations of her life… or at least where she features. Those are The Hours by Michael Cunningham, Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan by Maggie Gee, and now Vanessa and Her Sister (2014) by Priya Parmar.

Vanessa and Her Sister

The Cunningham novel remains my favourite, but all of them have been good in their different ways – and Parmar takes the different angle of framing this as the diary of Vanessa Bell, which opens thus:

Thursday 23 February 1905 – 46 Gordon Square
Bloomsbury, London (early)

I opened the great sash window onto the morning pink of the square and made a decision.

Yes. Today.

Last Thursday evening I sat in the corner like a sprouted potato, but this Thursday, I will speak up. I will speak out. Long ago, Virginia decreed, in the way that Virginia decrees, that I was the painter and she the writer. “You do not like words, Nessa,” she said. “They are not your creative nest.” Or maybe it orb? Or oeuf? My sister always describes me in rounded domestic hatching words. And invariably, I believe her. So, not a writer, I have run away from words like a child escaping a darkening wood, leaving my sharp burning sister in sole possession of the enchanted forest. But Virginia should not always be listened to. 

Alongside these ongoing entries there is a collage-style selection of letters from various members of the Bloomsbury Group – most amusingly between Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf, the former trying to persuade the latter to marry Virginia Stephen. Spoilers: he does.

That does bring about one big factor in reading this novel, or any book about real people. The reading experience will depend a lot upon how much you know about the people in question. I read Vanessa and Her Sister for my book group, and some people there said they were forever flicking to the list of people at the beginning, and trying to work out how everybody was connected: I was in the lucky position that I already knew who everybody was, and what would happen to them, and even some nicknames (‘Goat’ for Virginia, for instance). I have rather immersed myself in Virginia and her circle, of course – as have many of you – and so I wasn’t surprised when Thoby died (for instance) and none of the novel held tension for me, per se.

This also meant that I had to read the book with parallel sets of people: the real individuals, and the characters that Parmar has created. She is keen to emphasise in her afterword that the novel and people are fictional – but, of course, one can’t help thinking constantly of the actual lives these people lived, and real events are constantly being referred to.

The focus of the novel, as both the title and the excerpt above suggest, is the relationship between sisters Vanessa and Virginia Stephen. The novel, indeed, ends before Virginia’s first novel is published – so we see them as sisters learning their craft as painter and writer respectively, without their later reputations clouding the scene. And most prominent in Parmar’s handling is the possessiveness Virginia feels over Vanessa.

Much happens in Vanessa and Her Sister that would probably have been cut from a complete fiction, as distracting from the main narrative – the Dreadnaught Hoax, for instance – but it is Vanessa’s marriage to Clive Bell and Virginia’s resentment of this that occupy most of the book. Virginia and Clive begin an affair of the mind, and Vanessa tries to deal with the fragility of Virginia’s mental health alongside the indignity of Clive’s other affairs, and this betrayal.

Tbh, Virginia comes off terribly in this book. We don’t see her talent, and we certainly don’t see her humour – which is always evident in her writing, particularly her non-fiction and letters. She is chiefly a clingy, selfish, extremely weak person in this narrative. But, then, who is ever charmed by their own siblings? Love them, yes, deeply – but we see our nearest and dearest in clear ways that nobody else would, and speak of and to them in ways that nobody else could. The angle is perhaps realistic?

Oh, and Parmar certainly writes well and very engagingly. We can’t know how Vanessa would have written her diary, because she did not. What worked less well, to my mind, were letters between people who did write letters to each other. When we can read the letters Virginia, Roger Fry, or Lytton Strachey wrote, why would we want to read versions that Parmar has made up? (Incidentally, Roger Fry is easily the novel’s nicest character. I don’t know much about him, and have yet to read the biography of him that Virginia Woolf wrote.)

My most pressing question throughout was: had Parmar read Susan Sellers’ novel? So much of it seems to be inspired by the same things, though Sellers wrote in a much more Modernist way, that worked very well.

You’re spoiled for choice if you want to read novelisations of the Bloomsbury Group. I’d still always recommend The Hours as a first choice, and would probably choose a biography before a novelisation anyway, but Parmar has tackled a difficult topic and approach very capably. This is certainly an enjoyable read, but perhaps for people who already know the figures well, rather than those hoping to learn about the individuals involved.

Fair Stood the Wind for France by H.E. Bates

StuckinaBook All , , 18 Comments

H.E. Bates was first introduced to me as the author of The Darling Buds of May, which I used to love on the TV, but I have never actually read anything by him. Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944) has been on my shelf for almost five years – indeed, I bought it one week after reading Lyn’s review at I Prefer Reading. Indeed, you can see my comment saying that I intended to keep an eye out for it.

Fair Stood

It joined those books I took to Edinburgh with me – and, in fact, I think I read all of this one on the train journey. It certainly begins dramatically. John Franklin is forced to crash-land while in a bomber plane over France, along with his fellow pilots. That happens in the first few pages, and was my introduction to the excellence of Bates’ writing:

The ground was too soft and the moon for a few seconds jolted wildly about the sky. The Wellington did a group loop, about three-quarters circle, and Franklin could not hold it. He was aware of being thrown violently forward and of his sickness knotting in his stomach and then rising and bursting and breaking acidly, with the smell of fuel and oil, in his mouth. He was aware of all the sound of the world smashing forward towards him, exploding his brain, and of his arms striking violently upward, free of the controls. For a moment he seemed to black-out entirely and then the moon, hurling towards him, full force smashed itself against his eyes and woke him brutally to a moment of crazy terror. In that moment he put up his hands. He felt his left arm strike something sharp, with sickening force, and then the moon break again in his face with bloody and glassy splinters in a moment beyond which there was no remembering.

Now, I usually prefer the crux of a novel to be about somebody forgetting to return a library book (for instance), but I thought that was really rather good – and the domestic reader is not ostracised at any point by war jargon or jingoism.

For some reason they are very keen to be in Occupied France rather than Unoccupied France. I couldn’t work out why that was (anybody?) – being around Nazis seems like a bad idea to me, but I’m sure there are reasons.

This all sets up the main section of the novel. Franklin is badly injured, but they have no choice but to get away from the wreck of their aircraft. Warily, he approaches a woman at a farmhouse. At the first one, she is terrified but asks him to leave. At the second, the woman is completely calm, and welcomes him and the others in for food and somewhere to rest. She and her family selflessly offer them somewhere to stay for as long as is needed – though it would mean they would certainly all be killed if it were discovered.

‘Calm’ is the word that is used over and over to describe Francoise, and it is very fitting. She is softly-spoken, unflappable, and sensible. Even when she and Franklin travel into the nearest town because his arm badly needs the attention of a doctor, Francoise refuses to panic or even (it seems) worry. She has a wisdom that can only be gained by implacably facing the unfaceable. (And a good line in simple bribery: ‘She smiled. “With a chicken you can do most things,” she said.”With two chickens you can do anything.”‘)

Lyn uses the word ‘understated’ in her review to describe Fair Stood the Wind For France, and it is very apt – and Francoise sets the tone. Her manner seeps into the novel. Terrifying and terrible things are happening, but Bates does not inject the novel with undue drama; instead, we witness these events in a kind of a quiet horror and share the simple humanity of the characters. Because, of course, Francoise and Franklin begin to fall in love. And they do that in a very understated way too. There are no overblown statements, but simply a meeting of minds and a shared understanding.

It’s a lovely novel, which combines the simple and the extraordinary beautifully. Thank you, Lyn, for bringing it to my attention – and this proves that books can wait a while on the shelf before they’re finally enjoyed!

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

StuckinaBook All , , 18 Comments

Seize the DayOne of the books I bought in the US in 2013 (in Alexandria, Virginia to be precise) was Seize the Day by Saul Bellow. I daresay I could have found a copy in England, but it felt right to buy one of the Big American Writers while in the US of A. And eventually I read it, and then there was quite a gap before I got around to writing this…

I went in with some trepidation. There are all sorts of those Big American Writers whom I’ve still not read. Faulkner, Hemingway… well, those are the only two I can think of right now that I’d put in the same intimidating category as Saul Bellow. But now I’m not quite sure why I put him into that category at all – Seize the Day was really good, and not at all off-putting or difficult or testosterone-filled in the way that I imagine those other two are. (Am I wrong about them too?)

Seize the Day (1956), for anybody else in my position of Bellow ignorance, is apparently considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century and was Bellow’s fourth novel. It’s also super short, which is a criterion that meant more to me than those other things – my copy weighs in at only 118 pages.

The hero – though he is far from that – is Wilhelm Adler, a failed actor who is in a mire of frustration. He is estranged from his wife and children and a disappointment to his elderly father – as his father is not reluctant to let him know. Wilhelm has moved into his father’s hotel, and is trying to reconnect with him, though it is not made easy. The focus of Seize the Day is a single, ordinary day: Wilhelm is going to have breakfast and an argument with his father, and is musing on the various failures of his life. We go in and out of his mind, reliving the past, seeing how everything went wrong by increments. Here, for example, is an overview of his dashed hopes of becoming a filmstar, after he was invited to a screen test:

But when Venice saw the results of the screen test he did a quick about-face. In those days Wilhelm had had a speech difficulty. It was not a true stammer, it was a thickness of speech which the sound track exaggerated. The film showed that he had many peculiarities, otherwise unnoticeable. When he shrugged, his hands drew up within his sleeves. The vault of his chest was huge, but he really didn’t look strong under the lights. Though he called himself a hippopotamus, he more nearly resembled a bear. His walk was bearlike, quick and rather soft, toes turned inward, as though his shoes were an impediment. About one thing Venice had been right. Wilhelm was photogenic, and his wavy blond hair (now graying) came out well, but after the test Venice refused to encourage him. He tried to get rid of him. He couldn’t afford to take a chance on him, he had made too many mistakes already and lived in fear of his powerful relatives.

More recently, he has lost much of his savings in an ill-fated financial dalliance with Dr Tamkin, a self-professed psychologist who is really fraudulently preying upon Wilhelm’s weak character. Yet even here, there are shades of grey. We aren’t seeing the conniving nemesis manipulating the vulnerable hero – it is more nuanced than that.

Most nuanced, and the section I most admired, is the conversation between Wilhelm and his father. If Wilhelm embodies the death of a certain sort of American dream more broadly, these exchanges look more closely at the universal desire to make one’s parents proud. Dr Adler is fairly harsh in his refusal to excuse his son, and is clearly disappointed in him, but Bellow manages to make us see that this is one conversation in a long line of similar conversations. Wilhelm is asking for pity where his father can only feel disgust at his self-pity. Each line of dialogue is believable while being a blow to the heart.

It’s hardly revelatory to say that I think Saul Bellow is a very good writer, but I had expected bravado and grandiose writing, rather than the subtlety and even delicacy – yet somehow a forthright delicacy – that he puts on the page. I’m last to the party, but I can certainly see myself returning to Bellow when in that sort of frame of mind.

Next stop, Faulkner?

Poor Relations by Compton Mackenzie

StuckinaBook All , , 14 Comments

(To kick off: everybody in the UK, and around the world, is thinking about Brexit at the moment. I don’t think I have the heart to talk about it myself here, because it has broken my heart a little and – combined with our last general election – I no longer feel like I recognise or understand my own country. Victoria has written about it all brilliantly. And now I’m going to seek solace in books.)

Poor Relations

One of the books I read while I was in Edinburgh was by the appropriately-Scottish Compton Mackenzie. Like most people, I think all I knew about him was that he’d written Whisky Galore (which I haven’t read, though I’ve seen a bit of the film) and that his first name wasn’t Crompton (he often comes up when I’m looking for Richmal Crompton books by people who’ve made that error). It actually wasn’t Compton either, it was Edward, but let’s move on.

Well, according to the good people of Hutchinson’s “Pocket” Library – perhaps they put that in inverted commas because nobody has pockets big enough to fit this paperback – Poor Relations is a ‘famous novel’, and according to the Evening Standard, quoted on the cover, it is “Very witty and very amusing”. BOTH those things AT ONCE, people. (They aren’t wrong.)

The novel was Mackenzie’s seventh, published in 1919, and he went on to publish dozens of other novels before his death in 1972, including (I discover, on reading his Wikipedia article) one which is a sequel to Poor Relations. I also learn from Wikipedia that he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, as I did (floreat Magdalena!), and co-founded the SNP, as I did not.

I shall certainly look out for more by Mackenzie, as I loved Poor Relations. I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t something as funny as this – his turn of phrase reminded me a lot of Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington, and the whole novel has the sort of levity that characterises the best of early-20th-century insouciant fiction.

John did possess another cap, one that just before he left England he had bought about dusk in the Burlington Arcade, one that in the velvety bloom of a July evening had seemed worthy of summer skies and seas, but that in the glare of the following day had seemed more like the shreds of barbaric attire that are brought back by travellers from exotic lands to be taken out of a glass case and shown to visitors when the conversation is flagging on Sunday afternoons in the home counties.

The main character is a John Touchwood. He is – as the narrative often reminds us – a ‘successful romantic playwright and unsuccessful realistic novelist’, and has made something of a fortune at plays which the public love and the intelligentsia rather despise. That intelligentsia include his brother and his brother-in-law, one of whom is a critic who makes no bones about his own infinite literary superiority, the other of whom was recently a vicar but has decided to leave that life in order to become, himself, a playwright. Both are insufferably pompous and rude to longsuffering John, and both are hilarious to read about.

In every direction, Touchwood is besieged by ‘poor relations’ – and they are more than willing to impose. Whether it is that ex-vicar moving into his country house and (without permission) erecting a garden room in which to write, or his other in-laws ditching their children with him a refusing to panic when they are lost in a zoo, John’s patience is repeatedly tried.

The novel is quite episodic. There is something of a romance storyline thrown in, with an admirably unflappable woman whom he hires as his secretary and who insists on behaving professionally until… well, you can probably imagine that there is a happy conclusion. Before that, we move from relative to relative, often returning to the same ones again, but without much evolution in the way they treat John. Which makes sense – how many of us have sharply changing relationships with our nearest and dearest?

John himself is very likeable. He is put-upon but not weak, and he gives as could as he gets in determined ripostes and eloquent rebuttals – while still putting his hand in his pocket most of the time, despite the lack of gratitude he gets from all sides. He reminds me of characters that A.A. Milne might have created in his Punch stories, albeit perhaps slightly steelier when needed.

After reading Poor Relations, I kept coming across Mackenzie novels in secondhand bookshops – but I didn’t really know where to start, especially since he wrote so many. They were all chunky hardbacks, so I left them there rather than weigh down my luggage – but if anybody has any suggestions for others they’ve enjoyed, that would be very welcome. And I heartily recommend tracking down a copy of Poor Relations!

 

Agatha Christie, Panthers, and other graphic novels

StuckinaBook All , 13 Comments

Look guys, I’m not saying I’m a graphic novels expert, per se. And that would be because I’m not. But I have been reading more than you might expect over the past months, and I thought I’d bring them all together into one post – not least because it’s graphic novels week over at Vulpes Libris, and today I’ve taken up a lot to talk about Panther by Brecht Evens

Panther

Evens is certainly my first and firmest love in the world of graphic novels (even given my reservations about Panther), and you can see my thoughts on a couple other Evens books – The Making Of and The Wrong Place under my Evens tag. Discovering him made me realise that graphic novels weren’t all superhero cartoon style – which doesn’t attract me at all – and his use of watercolours really drew me in.

But it’s slim pickings, I’ve found, in looking for artists that I really like. I went through the graphic novel section of Oxford’s library and came away with only one that looked me-friendly (Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel, which was enjoyable if infuriating at times, and non-fiction rather than a novel); I went through almost every book in the graphic novel shop Gosh! and found nothing at all that appealed to me. But I did find the lovely Ethel & Ernest by Raymond Briggs in a little shop in Ludlow, and wrote about it here.

I seem to have better luck with graphic non-fiction, actually. I recently bought and very much enjoyed Agatha: the real life of Agatha Christie by Anne Martinetti, Guillaume Lebeau, and Alexandre Franc (and, incidentally, have borrowed a few graphic novelisations of Christie’s books from my friend Fiona, so we’ll see how I get on with those). This one is also actually in translation, from French, and translated by Edward Gauvin.

Agatha graphic novel

I was a bit cautious at first, because it starts off with Agatha Christie’s ‘disappearance’ – a part of her life that is so often returned to that I am completely sick of the whole thing. I was worried that the whole book would take place during those eleven days – but thankfully it does not, and there is even a fun twist at that point: Poirot turns up as her confidante. If that sounds hopelessly twee, don’t worry – it’s done in a fun and irreverent way.

The rest of the book is very episodic, and often jumps back and forth. It’s more a series of snapshots of Agatha’s life, from childhood to death, including various trips around the world. My favourite bit is when, on the Orient Express, she has the idea to set a murder there – and is immediately besieged by Poirot, Miss Marple, and Tommy and Tuppence, all of whom are keen to be the lead. Poirot’s jealousy of Marple in the book is an especial joy.

Borrowed from here.
Borrowed from here.

Obviously this is not the best place to learn all about every facet of Christie’s life, but there is still plenty here – and I liked the slightly stark line drawings and interesting use of colour. Lots of jewel tones. The scenes of a sunset in Egypt make the book worth it all by themselves. Do hunt it out.

What else have I read? Ages ago I got a review copy of The Bind by William Goldsmith from Jonathan Cape, and even read it, but didn’t get around to writing about it here.

the bind cover

I was tempted in by the fact that it’s set in a book binding shop. It’s a ghost story, no less, and a battle between rival brothers. The story was good fun – and it was more about the plot than any of the other graphic books I’ve read so far. I also really enjoyed Goldsmith’s subtle palette. It’s quite a contrast to Evens or the Agatha book, both of which I also like for the way they used colour; Goldsmith did everything in shades of umber and grey. It fits the tone of the book beautifully.

the bind

It seems that I am chiefly drawn to graphic books because of the colours and artistic style – even if those can vary quite substantively from book to book. I don’t only like bold colours, or natural colours, or sharp lines, or watercolours – but (in those age-old words) I know what I like and what I don’t like. And the look of a graphic novel takes precedent for me over the story. Which surprises me, rather, given my love of good writing. (Graphic book fans – where do you fall down on this scale?)

But I have my limits, it seems. I tried White Cube by Brecht Vandenbroucke, which is about pink twins (?) who have a destructive interest in art. It’s a series of individual pieces, rather than an ongoing narrative, and in it they basically approve or disapprove of artworks – and, when they disapprove, are likely to destroy. The humour in it is quite dark and violent – and often a bit obvious, though there are moments of wit that I did enjoy. Overall, it had something of the psychotic about it that was doubtless the intention, but left me rather cold.

White Cube

So, there’s my history of graphic books to date. I can’t think of any others that I’ve read, actually, so I’m certainly not the most experienced at this medium – but it’s something I’d like to explore more, and had hoped to stumble across a new favourite when I visited Gosh! – but it was not to be, that time at least.

Are you enamoured with the world of graphic novels and graphic books, or have you steered clear? And what would you recommend?

 

Tea or Books? #20: first vs third person and Cider With Rosie vs My Family and Other Animals

StuckinaBook Tea or Books? , , 11 Comments


 
Tea or Books logoHappy birthday us! We actually passed our birthday by a couple of weeks, but this is the first podcast after the big day. Can you believe it’s been a whole year? And it might be our longest episode yet.

In episode 20 we tackle first person vs third person (with, spoilers, some confusion and no research at all) and two wonderful childhood memoirs – Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee and My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. It’s a tricky decision, guys (and, of course, the correct decision is to read both).

Check out our iTunes page (rate! review! I’m sick of the ‘not enough ratings to show’ text) or listen via your podcast app of choice. And don’t forget that my brother has a movies podcast that you might enjoy too.

Let us know which you’d choose in each category! Here are the books and authors we mention today…

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar
Orphan Island by Rose Macaulay
The Rain Girl by Herbert Jenkins
A Cup of Tea for Mr Thorgill by Storm Jameson
A Favourite of the Gods by Sybille Bedford
Cazalet Chronicles series by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Poor Relations by Compton Mackenzie
Saki
Speaking of Love by Angela Young
Rebecca’s Tale by Sally Beauman
Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar
A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Emma by Jane Austen
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Art of the Novel ed. Nicholas Royle
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson
Raising Demons by Shirley Jackson
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Rose Macaulay
Beryl Bainbridge
Muriel Spark
Barbara Pym
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Richmal Crompton
Margaret Atwood
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
Impassioned Clay by Stevie Davies
The Great Gatsy by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
Laurence Durrell
William Shakespeare

50 Books: winner

StuckinaBook All 6 Comments

Thank you so much to everyone who entered the prize draw in celebration of the completed 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About – it was such fun seeing which ones people had read, and which you’d choose to win.

I’m delighted to announce that the winner (drawn at random from random.org; too many entrants for Patch to cope with this time) is… Lynaia, who chose Frost at Morning as a prize. An excellent choice – but, of course, I’d say that for all of them!

Lynaia – I’ll be in touch.

Back from Edinburgh

StuckinaBook All 18 Comments

Loving the comments on the 50 Books competition post – do keep ’em coming! I think I’ll do the prize draw on Monday.

The long train journey is over, and I am back from a fun, rainy, book-filled week in Edinburgh. Said train journey was slightly spoiled by a group of people blasting out music from their speakers for a solid two hours. So loud, so rude. We were all too British to say anything, but complained to each other once they’d left.

I had a lovely time – a highlight being seeing Karen/Cornflower. And I went to eight or nine bookshops while in Edinburgh, and bought 15 books. Two of them, I realised afterwards, were books I already owned (oops) so I passed them onto a friend I was staying with – and here are the 13 I brought back with me. Incidentally, the best bookshop I went to was Armchair Books – a great selection of reasonably-priced books, though the hardbacks were all on shelves that were unreachable without stools or a stepladder. I perched precariously on a stepladder at one point. But if there are Rose Macaulay books on a shelf I can’t see properly, I’m gonna get a stepladder.

Edinburgh books 2016

The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield ed. J. Middleton Murray
The Life of Katherine Mansfield by Ruth Mantz
I’ve seen these a few times, but never at a tempting price – so I was pleased to stumble across them in Till’s bookshop. Both are Constable hardbacks, and were part of JMM’s rather energetic series of Mansfield-related publications just after her death.

The Rain Girl by Herbert Jenkins
We all know that I loved Patricia Brent, Spinster, so it was great to find one of Jenkins’ other books in a lovely edition – this one was on a high-up shelf in Armchair Books.

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov
I could feel Kaggsy watching me when I picked this one up – a Pushkin and a Russian! It sounds so intriguing – about a man who reads a short story which describes a murder he had himself committed. What comes next…?

Orphan Island by Rose Macaulay
Armchair Books had loads of Macaulay books, though this was the only one I didn’t already own – and one that I have kept an eye out for for a long time. Hurrah! (Must read some more Macaulays. Have so many unread.)

Friends and Relations by Elizabeth Bowen
I need to read more Bowen, and I think she’ll come up on ‘Tea or Books?’ at some point – but which? Maybe this one?

Paul Kelver by Jerome K. Jerome
I keep buying JKJ books, don’t I? Hadn’t heard of this one before, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it sometime.

A Cup of Tea for Mr Thorgill by Storm Jameson
Another one of those authors I’ve been meaning to read for such a long time, and have only read some non-fic articles by her. This one, I’ll admit, I bought chiefly because I really love that cover.

Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Max Beerbohm
Who knew these gents wrote to each other? Well, probably loads of people. But not I! (My Max Beerbohm shelf is growing at a fast rate…)

Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist by Joan Bennett
I’m not the sort of guy who’ll leave behind a book about Virginia Woolf – particularly an early one.

All The Dogs of My Life by Elizabeth von Arnim
How did I not own this before? Being a cat person more than a dog person, I’m not sure this lens will work for me – but I’ll find out. (NB must enthuse more about Sheila Kaye-Smith’s All The Books of My Life, which is wonderful.)

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
More Cunningham for my Cunningham shelf – yes please.

A Sea-Grape Tree by Rosamond Lehmann
I think I might own all of Lehmann’s novels now, and have still only read one (Dusty Answer) – but now I have even more choice.

50 Books: a prize draw!

StuckinaBook All 68 Comments

50

So, after 9 and a bit years, I have come to the end of my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About! That feels like cause for celebration – and I’ll celebrate by offering up (almost) any one of them as a prize! All you have to do comment with how many you’ve read, and which one you’d like to win.

The list – which is in no particular order, btw – can be seen down the right-hand column, or in a table at the bottom of this post. This competition is open to anybody and any country.

(For prize, reasons of scarcity/expense mean I wouldn’t be offering The Lark or Scar Tissue, I’m afraid. Oh, and copies of any title will probably be secondhand, as many/most of them aren’t in print!)

A bit of background: when I started up Stuck-in-a-Book, I wanted it to reflect my taste in literature – which has a heavy leaning towards the neglected and unjustly forgotten. And an ongoing list of books I thought especially deserved attention seemed like a great thread to keep going. Quite a few of them came in the first year of blogging (which is why quite a few of the blog reviews they link to are a bit embarrassing to me – none of us love our earliest reviews, do we?) and I’ve been eking it out for the whole time I’ve been blogging so far. The only rules were that I’d have one book per author, and it couldn’t be too well known – though some of these probably don’t quite fall into the obscure category.

I love me some stats. Here you are…

  • 34 books by women; 15 books by men; 1 book by a man and a woman.
  • 33 fiction; 17 non-fiction (though the fiction does include a few strongly autobiographical books).
  • 3 books in translation.
  • 13 living authors; 39 dead authors (52 authors in total because two of the books are volumes of letters between two people).
  • I was going to do something about average date, but that would require rather too much digging around. Evelina is the oldest and Speaking of Love the newest, though, I’d imagine.
  • It’s not the most diverse in terms of author nationality, but does include British, American, Canadian, New Zealander, French, Hungarian, and Finnish.
  • The list includes a father and son, a husband and wife, and somebody with my aunt’s name. Also three people I’ve met in real life.

Happy choosing!

50: The Lost Europeans – Emanuel Litvinoff 25. The Enchanted Places – Christopher Milne
49. The Lark – E. Nesbit 24. Deceived With Kindness – Angelica Garnett
48. Nuts in May – Cornelia Otis Skinner 23. White Cargo – Felicity Kendal
47. The Shelf – Phyllis Rose 22. The L-Shaped Room – Lynne Reid Banks
46. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends – Penelope Fitzgerald 21. The Long Afternoon – Giles Waterfield
45. Patricia Brent, Spinster – Herbert Jenkins 20. Frost at Morning – Richmal Crompton
44. Phantoms on the Bookshelves – Jacques Bonnet 19. As It Was and World Without End – Helen Thomas
43. Skylark – Dezső Kosztolányi 18. The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow – Jerome K. Jerome
42. Stet – Diana Athill 17. The Love-Child – Edith Olivier
41. Guard Your Daughters – Diana Tutton 16. The Haunted Woman – David Lindsay
40. More Women Than Men – Ivy Compton-Burnett 15. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead – Barbara Comyns
39. One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes 14. Speaking of Love – Angela Young
38. The Element of Lavishness – William Maxwell & Sylvia Townsend Warner 13. Lady Into Fox – David Garnett
37. Christopher and Columbus – Elizabeth von Arnim 12. Portraits – Kate Chopin
36. The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton 11. Ex Libris – Anne Fadiman
35. Love of Seven Dolls – Paul Gallico 10. Joyce & Ginnie – The Letters of Joyce Grenfell and Virginia Graham
34. William – E.H. Young 09. One Pair of Hands – Monica Dickens
33. The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck 08. Scar Tissue – Ruth Mary Hills
32. Loitering With Intent – Muriel Spark 07. Watching the English – Kate Fox
31. Being George Devine’s Daughter – Harriet Devine 06. Evelina – Frances Burney
30. Nella Last’s War – Nella Last 05. It’s Too Late Now – A.A. Milne
29. Howards End is on the Landing – Susan Hill 04. Miss Hargreaves – Frank Baker
28. We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson 03. The Piano Shop on the Left Bank – Thad Carhart
27. Selected Stories – Katherine Mansfield 02. The Provincial Lady – E.M. Delafield
26. Literary Lapses – Stephen Leacock 01. The Summer Book – Tove Jansson