Jen Campbell and The Bookshop Book

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We all loved Weird Things People Say in Bookshops (if you haven’t looked through a copy – it’s hilarious), and now Jen Campbell is back with The Bookshop Book, which features contributions from the likes of Bill Bryson, Jacqueline Wilson, Tracey Chevalier, and many more.

Since there will be another series of My Life in Books here at Stuck-in-a-Book very soon, I thought it would be fun to ask Jen to answer the questions – with a bit of a bookshop twist. Over to you, Jen!

1.) Did you grow up in a book-loving household, and did your parents read to you?  Pick a favourite book and a favourite bookshop from your childhood, and tell me about it.
 
My mum reads a lot, and my dad used to read to me before bed every night. I actually spent a lot of time in hospital as a child, and books were a form of escape for me. A way to slip into other worlds unnoticed and have adventures in my head. I grew up in the north east of England, and there aren’t many bookshops there but we’d go to a place called Hill’s in Sunderland and get lost among the shelves. A childhood favourite is Green Smoke by Rosemary Manning, about a dragon who lives in a cave in Cornwall, and a girl called Susan who goes to visit him, taking him doughnuts in exchange for stories about King Arthur.

2.) What was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books that you really enjoyed?  What was going on in your life at this point? 
Probably The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood… or if we’re talking teenage grown-up books then probably Just As Long As We’re Together by Judy Blume… ah, Judy. I read the latter on a beach in Portugal during the Easter holidays and remember loudly asking my mother about periods in front of lots of other people, much to her embarrassment. The Handmaid’s Tale I read many years later, and completely fell in love. It was my portal to dystopian literature. 
 
3.) Pick a favourite book that you read in your 20s – especially if it’s one which helped set you off in a certain direction in life – and what were your favourite bookshops at  this time?
 
Perhaps discovering Ali Smith in my early 20s (I’m 27 now). The way she writes astounds me – especially her short stories, and her play ‘The Seer.’ She’s got a way of unravelling the world, and it’s beautiful. She’s had a big influence on my writing. 
My favourite bookshops when I was 20 was The Edinburgh Bookshop (where I got my first job as a bookseller) and Till’s. Till’s is a secondhand bookshop, also in Edinburgh, that smells of dust and vanilla and really good books. Now I work at Ripping Yarns, an antiquarian bookshop in north London that looks like the Burrow from Harry Potter – as in it looks as though it’s held up by magic, and one day I’m going to pull the wrong book off the shelf and the whole place will come tumbling down. I love it. 
4.) What’s one of your favourite books that you’ve found in the last year or two? 
Can I pick a few? The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki and The Girl with all the Gifts by MR Carey. (If you’d like to know more, I chat about books that I love over on my Youtube channel :)
 
5.) Finally – a guilty pleasure, or a favourite that might surprise people! And the most delightful bookshop you’ve ever come across.
Well, I reread His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman every winter… though that might not surprise people. I also like to relisten to Harry Potter audio books on long train journeys… though that might not surprise people, either! Hmmm. I have a secret love for the circus, and the history of freak shows. Probably to do with the fact that I have EEC Syndrome, and if I’d been born 100 years ago, I might have found myself in one. So, I have quite a collection of books on those subjects, and a large number of books on fairy tales from different parts of the world. The history of fairy tales fascinates me!
Picking a favourite bookshop is no easy task. Especially when my new book The Bookshop Book looks at over 300 around the world. Hmmm. There’s The Book Barge, run by Sarah Henshaw – one woman’s quest to prove that books were worth something, by travelling around the UK in a bookshop boat, bartering books for food; Wigtown Book Town in Scotland, home to one of the best bookshop love stories, and a bookshop that performs weddings. A bookshop shaped like a cat in Japan; a bookshop that also sells cows in Kenya; a secret bookshop without an address in New York City; and a bookshop on the back of a donkey in Colombia… but perhaps one of my very favourites is Librairie Papillon in Mongolia, run by a guy from France called Sebastien, who bought the bookshop for his wife as a wedding present. They not only sell books to residents in Ulaanbaatar, but they also sell books to herders of the Altai mountains and Gobi desert. Stories that keep them company in elemental conditions, hundreds of miles away from the nearest city. I think that’s pretty special. 

A busy weekend

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What a busy little time I’ve had! I have, I’m afraid, been neglecting you all again – but when you hear what I’ve been up to, you will not be surprised.

Last Friday was my birthday (I turned 29, since you ask) and also my graduation. I graduated from three degrees during the ceremony – my MSt, MA, and DPhil – but it wasn’t quite as busy as that sounds, as I was supposedly ‘in absentia’ for two of them, despite being in the room. But I did get to graduate from my doctorate – yet another stage in the very protracted process between handing in the thesis and having everything done and dusted. A very nice stage, I should add, and certainly the dressiest.

I entered in a richly embroidered gown, with green and white hood, and after a bit I got to head into the centre of the room with the doctors from New College and Magdalen College (or Novum and Magdalena as they were known in this exclusively Latin ceremony – at least they are two of the more identifiable colleges in Latin). We bowed in lots of directions, and then agreed (in Latin) to do something (in Latin) without knowing what it was. Outside for a quick costume change into billowing red and purple, and we came back in to rapturous applause, a handshake with the Vice Chancellor, and sitting on extremely uncomfortable seats for another hour or so while lots of other people did variants of the above.

Outside for pictures in the rain…

…and away to Somerset! For the birthday festivities were certainly not yet over. Our Vicar’s Wife had arranged for us to go donkey walking in Dorset! If this sounds a bit mad, it probably is, but donkeys are my second favourite animal (after cats, obvs) and it was really lovely. Our donkeys were called Hector and Paris (apparently the woman who originally owned them names all her donkeys after whatever DVD she has recently watched – in this case, Troy) – and by the end of a few hours walking through fields and streets, I had certainly bonded with Paris. He was a real sweetie, albeit one who frequently decided he didn’t fancy moving, thankyouverymuch. I learned about how to stare down donkeys.

But the day was not over – we went on to North Petherton Carnival!  Our Vicar had attended it in his childhood, and had long hoped to take his children there – but until now we hadn’t been in Somerset at the right time. Well, I had tempered expectations – it’s a tiny place – but the carnival was really amazing. Lots of floats going by, with some solo efforts, all the way to enormous floats with hundreds of lights, moving parts, choreography, and the like. Some really extraordinary things, and great fun to watch.

And now I’m feeling rather shattered after an action-packed weekend!

Marrying Out – Harold Carlton

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You know that I love Slightly Foxed Editions – I don’t shut up about it – and the latest one I read is up there with my favourites now. I pretty much read it all in one setting. It’s Marrying Out (2001) by Harold Carlton, originally published as The Most Handsome Sons in the World!, a memoir about the fall-out in a Jewish family when one of the sons wants to ‘marry out’.

More in the Shiny New Books review…

NaNoWriMo

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As I’m sure you all know, November is NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. They encourage people to write a 50,000 word novel (or start to a novel) over the course of the month, which means writing an average of 1.667 words a day, or thereabouts.

This has always been something I’ve vaguely thought about joining in. Not with any idea that it would result in a perfectly-formed work of art, but in order to make myself actually get on and write something.

Well… it’s November 2nd and I haven’t written anything. That’s partly because I sent 9.30am-7.30pm yesterday baking for a party I was holding yesterday (which was super fun) but also because my enthusiasm had already waned, when I realised I hadn’t planned anything properly. I did buy a beautiful new notebook, so…

Have you ever done NaNoWriMo? Would you? And did you know that Water for Elephants and The Night Circus began as NaNoWriMo projects, along with a whole bunch of other published novels?

Not spooky at all

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I really don’t like Halloween, for quite a few reasons. I don’t like the whole celebration-of-evil root that the day has [I think I may be wrong about this part – see Hayley’s useful comment!], and I don’t like the idea that children should be able to demand goods with menaces in people’s homes. I don’t like the fact that many old or vulnerable people will probably spend their evenings scared in their homes. I don’t like that vicarages get targeted by egg-throwing youths. (‘Pranks’ in general seem pretty unkind to me.) Most of all, I don’t like that the creatures I’m scared of are put in decorations all over town.

SO, enough curmudgeonliness from me. I want to ask for your anti-Halloween book recommendations. Nothing scary, nothing murdery, nothing set in October. Basically, the kindest, nicest, funniest, loveliest book you can think of… any ideas?

(At the moment I’m re-reading Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns, which I love, but which doesn’t quite fit that bill.)

Love Insurance by Earl Derr Biggers

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Time for another link to a Shiny New Books review. And this one is an absolute joy – any fans of P.G. Wodehouse or early Hollywood will love this one. It’s the 1914 novel Love Insurance by Earl Derr Biggers.

As is my practice, I’ll give you the first paragraph of the review, and then send you over to Shiny New Books if you’d like to read more…

It’s fun occasionally to read a book that doesn’t take itself remotely seriously. And it would be impossible for Love Insurance (1914) by Earl Derr Biggers to take itself seriously for a moment – before a few dozen pages are finished, the reader has had to buy a number of extremely unlikely situations – but that all adds to the pleasure. It is unmistakably of its time (if A.A. Milne had written a novel in the 1910s, when he was still being guiltlessly insouciant, it might have been a lot like this) but that doesn’t mean it can’t still charm a century later.

The rest of the review is here…

Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford

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Apparently I bought Pigeon Pie (1940) by Nancy Mitford in Clun on 15th August 2011. I have no idea where Clun is and no recollection of having gone there, but I suppose I must have done! I read the novel quite a few months ago, so forgive any patchy memory (I’m linking to some great reviews at the end!)

For all my Mitfordmania, I have actually only read one Nancy Mitford novel (The Pursuit of Love); despite very much enjoying it, and having lots of others on hand, I still haven’t actually read any more. So I picked up this purchase from mysterious Clun, and started. The first thing I noticed was the author’s note:

I hope that anybody who is kind enough to read it in a second edition will remember that it was written before Christmas 1939. Published on 6 May 1940 it was an early and unimportant casualty of the real war which was then beginning – Nancy Mitford, Paris, 1951
Well! That’s quite the start, isn’t it? As Nancy warns, this novel is about the phoney war – that bit at the beginning of war where everyone prepared themselves for an onslaught, and not very much happened. And so she is able to be rather casual about the war, in a way that would look rather scandalous even by the time of publication. And the heroine of Pigeon Pie is nothing if not casual. Lady Sophia Garfield is a flippant socialite who has married for money, finds her husband a bore, and lives for the petty squabbles she has with the other doyennes of London society.

I do rather love this compact description of the phoney war:

Rather soon after the war had been declared, it became obvious that nobody intended it to begin. The belligerent countries were behaving like children in a round game, picking up sides, and until the sides had been picked up the game could not start.

England picked up France, Germany picked up Italy. England beckoned to Poland, Germany answered with Russia. Then Italy’s Nanny said she had fallen down and grazed her knee, running, and mustn’t play. England picked up Turkey, Germany picked up Spain, but Spain’s Nanny said she had internal troubles, and must sit this one out. England looked towards the Oslo group, but they had never played before, except like Belgium, who had hated it, and the others felt shy. America, of course, was too much of a baby for such a grown-up game, but she was just longing to see it played. And still it would not begin.
The things that do begin, in Pigeon Pie, are rather extraordinary. A much-loved singer is killed, and Sophia finds herself swept up in an unlikely espionage and kidnap plot. None of it is treated particularly seriously – it is definitely silly rather than tense, and a wry eye is never far from the narrative. The denouement is just as unlikely as all the rest, and treads an awkward line between satire and failure…

I love Mitford’s tone, and I love her observations about the in-fighting of the upper classes. In another novel, Sophia could have been great fun.  But I’m not sure that Pigeon Pie (for me) is ever more than quite good. And that isn’t particularly because of insensitivity (although that warning was perhaps more pertinent in 1951) but because Mitford is turning her hand to a genre at which she is not an expert.

Others who got Stuck into this book


“The tone is maybe a little uneven, but when the wit works it really does sparkle.” – Jane, Fleur Fisher in Her World


“It feels unreal and flippant; the language makes it seem a little like Enid Blyton for adults.” – Karyn, A Penguin A Week


“A very enjoyable tale, filled with the usual Mitford acerbic wit, ridiculous characters and finely observed minutiae of upper class inter war life.” – Rachel, Book Snob

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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I’ve been rather under the weather this week (those reviews were thankfully pre-scheduled!) so haven’t been around the blogs as much as I’d have liked… but I’m still going to rustle up a few links and whatnot for you.

1.) The Persephone Prize – have you entered? Are you going to? I suppose we should keep these things strictly confidential, so I shall just say that Mum and I have both entered (or are planning on entering) – the mother vs son competition starts right here!

2.) There are lots of Shiny New Books reviews of mine that I’ve not pointed to yet, but I’ll stick one in here that isn’t a date for A Century of Books (which I have officially given up finishing this year, but which will be finished eventually): Bed Manners, a spoof etiquette guide from the 1930s. It’s every bit as fun as that sounds.

3.) Early announcement that My Life in Books will be coming back soon(ish)! I’ve had most of the answers in, so I need to chase some people and match up some partners (which I usually do earlier, but… not this time.)