Would you believe that there’s still one of my reviews from Issue 1 of Shiny New Books that I haven’t shared with you? It’s of David Sedaris’ Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls – a terrible title but a good book of funny and moving essays. With some misfires along the way. Intrigued? Read the whole review over at Shiny New Books…
In 2009 I read a fun book called Modern Delight, in which various authors and others talked about the things that most bring them delight. I mentioned it in a Weekend Miscellany, but don’t think I ever got around to a proper post about it. It was enjoyable and fun, and for a good cause. Also published at that point was a reprint of the book that inspired it – Delight (1949) by J.B. Priestley.
Somehow I didn’t get a copy of it then, but when I was in Malvern recently I stumbled across an original edition of Delight and couldn’t resist it – it became my dipping-in-and-out-of book. And (yes, this mini-review writes itself), it was a delight!
I haven’t read any of Priestley’s novels, although I’ve read one play and seen another – and read a fair bit of his journalism as part of my DPhil research. Delight shows quite a different side to him. Basically, it is short pieces on 114 things which delight him. Why this number, I don’t know.
Priestley claims to be an old grumbler (he was actually only in his mid-50s, and would live ’til a month shy of 90) and this was his way of making up to those around him. And the things that delight him are truly delightful – covering the silly (charades, playing with small children, fantastic theories), the moving (coming home), the scholarly (Shakespeare re-discovered, discovering Vermeer), and the bizarre (mineral water in bedrooms of foreign hotels). Above all, they are wonderfully engaging, often very amusing, and show a writer who knew how to put together a book that is at once utterly unnecessary and wholly (yes, again) a delight. Here’s an excerpt from Delight no.1, about fountains:
And I believe my delight in these magical jets of water, the invention of which does credit to our whole species, is shared by ninety-nine persons out of every hundred. But where are they, these fountains we love? We hunger for them and are not fed. A definite issue could be made out of this, beginning with letters to the Times, continuing with meetings and unanimous resolutions and deputations to Downing Street, and ending if necessary with processions and mass demonstrations and some rather ugly scenes. What is the use of our being told that we live in a democracy if we want fountains and have no fountains?
Well – as someone who once traipsed around Torquay trying to find the precise fountain that my friend had seen in her youth, I can empathise. But you need not worry about wanting Delight and not finding a copy – there are plenty around, particularly the 2009 reprint. I can think of a few dozen bloggers and blog readers who would love this… it’s just the sort of gem that deserves to be on a reader’s shelves.
Do you know of Bello Books? They are an offshoot of Macmillan, I believe, and do print on demand paperbacks and ebooks, reprinting lost voices. And, oh, their catalogue is divine! They seem to be browsing my bookshelves – and my wishlist – to come up with some of their titles. Reprints will be coming soon from Christopher Milne, Ann Thwaite, Edith Olivier, Pamela Hansford Johnson, and…
Vita Sackville-West (thanks for sending these, Bello!) You can see their latest catalogue here, and investigate the site more generally here. General hurrahs for Bello!
Oh dear, have I really not blogged since last Wednesday? I’m sorry, I’m being very negligent – and I can’t even think of a reason why, as it hasn’t been an especially busy week. Perhaps it’s my general reading slump at the moment – and, if you’ve been around for any of my previous reading slumps, you’ll probably know what my solution has been. Dame Agatha Christie. If you hate spoilers of any variety (and I’ll only talking about the death which happens in the first few pages) then skim read this post…
Yes, that’s right, I’ve ignored the hundreds of unread books in my house – and the few that I’m reading at the moment – and taken myself to Oxford Central Library to borrow some Agathas. Almost all of mine are at home, and the ones I have here don’t fall into blank years in A Century of Books – and, if I’m reading Agatha, I may as well kill two birds with one stone. Still, with the criteria of being (a) not read read, (b) filling blank years, and (c) currently in library stock, I managed to come away with two books – Hallowe’en Party and The Seven Dials Mystery, and whipped through the first in a couple of days.
I’d always steered clear of it, because of my distaste for Hallowe’en, but it’s pretty incidental to the plot. And, as plot is so important in Christie novels, I’m not going to tell you much beyond the initial murder – which is of a young girl at a Hallowe’en party, who is drowned in an apple bobbing bucket. Shortly before this, she has begun to tell people that she once witnessed a murder, only she didn’t realise it was a murder until much later. They won’t listen – but it seems that perhaps someone present has taken her comment seriously… Hercule Poirot, naturally, comes to sort things out, called there by Ariadne Oliver. I have five main things I want to say about this novel:
1.) I love Christie plots about misinterpretation – where a witness sees someone looking shocked that something is there, when in fact they’re shocked that something isn’t there; when a look of horror is about a memory rather than a current event – all those sorts of things, for some reason, are wonderful to me. So I loved that element of Hallowe’en Party.
2.) I’ve never read an Ariadne Oliver novel before, and I love her. And Agatha Christie obviously had a lot of fun creating her (she is a detective novelist, with a Finnish detective hero, and Christie uses her as a bit of a mouthpiece…)
3.) This is Christie’s child-killing novel… it’s interesting for the number of times (and this isn’t a spoiler) she talks about leniency for mentally imbalanced killers or those who’ve been through care, or whatever extenuating circumstances, and how Poirot doesn’t think justice should be considered less important than mercy.
4.) It was published in 1969 – so nearly 50 years after Poirot’s first case and Christie’s first novel. Amazing that she could still be on such good form after all that time.
5.) And it is a very good novel. I found the conclusion a little unsatisfying, mostly because I’d already guessed the solution, or at least most of it, and I much prefer being surprised by the end of a detective novel.
So, there you go. Onto The Seven Dials Mystery…
A quick post today, with two exciting things!
Shiny New Update – we’ve launched the ‘inbetweeny’ for Shiny New Books! Issue 2 will be out in early July, but to keep you busy til then we’ve added a handful of new reviews and features to every – find out more on the site.
Limerick competition – at OxfordWords, the blog I help out with at OUP, we’ve launched a limerick competition where you can win an iPad (slightly higher class prizes there than at Stuck-in-a-Book!) All details here.
I’ve been quite the culture vulture of late, and have seen three plays – and somehow haven’t managed to write about any of them. So I’m going to whip through all thee of them quickly in one post… I have more to say about the first than the others, but they were all great in different ways.
Good People at Hampstead Theatre
My friend Andrea and I took a trip off to Hampstead (where I saw a very good play about Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence, On The Rocks by Amy Rosenthal a few years ago) and we saw Good People by David Lindsay-Abaire. It’s since transferred to the Noel Coward, where it will be ’til 14 June, so I don’t feel guilty about recommending what would have been the last performance.
Truth be told, we went because Imelda Staunton was in it – and I knew essentially nothing else about it. To me, Imelda will always be the Provincial Lady (a role she took in a Radio 4 dramatisation) but I also love her in Vera Drake, Another Year, and all sorts of other things. She was on my bucket list of actors to see, and this was a brilliant play to see her in.
Basically it’s about being poor in America. Imelda has a strong Boston accent from the first scene, where her character Margaret is fired from her job at a checkout for being consistently tardy – which is because of her disabled daughter. We next see her with her friends Jean (Lorraine Ashbourne) and Dottie (June Watson) – both of whom are loud and animated, and especially while playing bingo (which is where they head next). There is plenty of talk about how to cope without income and without prospects – when Margaret learns that her old schoolfriend Mike is back in town. And she wonders if he’ll perhaps give her a job…
Mike (Lloyd Owen) is a big success – a doctor – but he has become what Margaret calls ‘lace curtains’. He’s offended; he thinks he’s still Southy at heart. But he won’t give her a job; he doesn’t need a new receptionist. This escalates into a perfectly balanced argument about whether or not he has stayed true to his roots – never quite a shouting match, but never far from it – and he invites her to a party he’s having with his young and beautiful wife Kate (Angel Coulby, whom I know from underrated teen drama As If). Neither of them think she’ll go, and he phones to say it is cancelled… angrily she goes. And then the already brilliant play gets even more brilliant.
The scene is so well written, and so well acted. The audience don’t know precisely what the truth is about the history between Margaret and Mike; neither does his wife. And no emotion is straightforward in this scene (or, indeed, this play). Margaret – and this is Imelda’s play, she is extraordinary – is angry, hopeful, regretful, proud, witty, even a bit forgiving. It’s a spectacular character, so complex, and needs an actress as astonishingly talented as Imelda Staunton to fill it. So much power comes from such a tiny woman! Having said that, it is more of an ensemble production than I’d imagined from the advertising – the whole cast is brilliant, and it’s probably in the top three plays I’ve ever seen. Very emotional, also very funny. Do go and see it if you have a chance.
OH, and we waited around in the foyer afterwards, and spotted Imelda Staunton’s husband (Jim Carter, aka Mr Carson in Downton Abbey) – AND we braved going and asking for her signature. She was very sweet, and we were buzzing all the way back to the coach home.
The Play That Goes Wrong by the Mischief Theatre Company
From the emotional and poignant to the unashamedly hilarious. I took a day trip to Malvern, in my old stamping ground of Worcestershire, and saw the touring production of The Play That Goes Wrong (go and see if they’re touring anywhere near you). It’s essentially a spoof of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap in the tradition of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (so I’m lead to believe, having not seen it.)
An amateur dramatic society is putting on a murder mystery play. It goes wrong in every conceivable way, from even before the play begins, as the stagehands are trying to keep a mantelpiece in place (aided by a lucky member of the audience).
The actors forget their lines, they accidentally repeat them, mispronounce them, or they make no sense because of bad staging or props (I particularly loved “Is that your father’s portrait?” collapsing into despair, as the actor realises that the portrait is actually of a dog in a deerstalker.) An actress is knocked out, and replaced by a reluctant – but increasingly enthusiastic – stagehand. But what I most loved was the way in which the stage fell apart. It just kept collapsing, more and more, including the supporting pillar for a mezzanine level, which falls to a steeper incline at intervals throughout the rest of the play – which means a couple of very talented and very agile actors have to keep furniture from falling to the ground, while still delivering their lines.
It’s all very silly, but impressively done. Some of the actors are more able than others at convincingly being actors (if you see what I mean) but it’s not exactly a play which requires staunch realism. But the biggest applause should go to the set designer and set builder – its deconstruction is like choreography. I laughed hard all night, as did the good people of Malvern – they were definitely ready to be amused. (One sidenote: any accident can be masked as deliberate in this sort of play, which did lead to some audience confusion when one of our number was led out, and the ‘lights guy’ – an actor too – was involved. Turns out she was just ill.
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
This one probably doesn’t need any introduction. Some colleagues from OUP and I went to the Oxford Playhouse to see Alastair McGowan (also Worcestershire’s finest, fyi) play Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady without the songs. Just in case you don’t know the premise, Higgins has a bet with a friend that he can pass off a Cockney flower girl as a Duchess in the space of a few months, simply by training her in manners and voice. It basically works, but Higgins is an unobservant cad and doesn’t realise the emotional effect the process is having on Eliza Doolittle.
It was an amusing production of an amusing play. I also discovered that Shaw was a lot less progressive than he thought – or, rather, he was ahead of his time in terms of sexism and classism, but very much behind our time. Oh, but he does LOVE to labour a point – the final scene hit us over the head with his point so many times that he’d make Ibsen seem subtle. But that’s all par for the course – it was a great production, and my only real complaint was that it didn’t have any songs. (Ahem.)
It’s been over a month since I started my 7th birthday prize draw, but fear not, I have not forgotten it!
I also got a lovely email recently from a blog reader called Vicki, and she mentioned that she liked seeing Patch helping with prize draws in the past. I realised I hadn’t called on his services for some time, and he was more than willing to oblige… (as you see, there are two colours of paper – but we closed our eyes when picking a winner.)
The prize wasn’t revealed before – other than the warning that it’ll be a bit tatty – but I can now reveal that it will be two books by authors I love dearly: The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns and The Ridleys by Richmal Crompton.
Congratulations to…
Well done Helen! I think I probably have your address somewhere, but I’ll email to confirm…
This post is written while the Eurovision Song Contest is on, so apologies if I accidentally launch into incoherent rambling about world peace. Otherwise, here are some things to amuse you for the rest of your weekend…
1.) Our Vicar’s Wife and the bookshop she runs from our garage on Saturdays now have a blog – Honey Pot Books! For those of you who like pictures of Sherpa (and which of us doesn’t?) there are plenty of those – especially since she just had her fourth birthday.
2.) Have you been to my brother’s blog recently? He wrote a short story after reading my The Museum, and you can see it if you go to the archive for May 2014 (I don’t think I can link directly to it.)
3.) Have you read about the Book Benches? Now’s your chance.
I’m sure there were lots of other things I was going to include in this. Sorry, publishers and publicists who have sent me things to mention, apparently my email filing has failed!
My stream of reading Muriel Spark doesn’t look likely to come to an end any time soon – so was just so wonderfully prolific – and the latest one I’ve read is Territorial Rights (1979), given to me by Virago in their nice new edition, and reviewed over on Shiny New Books. The copy I read, I will confess to you, was the copy given to me by Hayley after Muriel Spark Reading Week (and I gave the Virago copy to a deserving friend).
It’s not in the top two or three Spark novels – or maybe even top ten – but it’s still brilliant, with lots of recognisably Sparkian elements. Head on over to my Shiny New Books review to find out more…
I took my cold off to a beautiful cottage, aptly called Paradise, in Herefordshire – and lost my voice in the process – and I just have to share (a) how lovely the house was, and (b) the books I bought on a trip to Hay-on-Wye. You can see the proper pictures of the house on its webpage (I want to go into full PR mode for them; it’s so incredibly beautiful) but here are some I took. The first two are my bedroom. I didn’t manage to get very good (or friend-free) photos of the living room, dining room, or kitchen – but I had included one of the porch, which is in itself more beautiful than anywhere I will ever live.
And then we spent a day in Hay on Wye. Most of the group of friends weren’t all that bothered about buying books, so I strode off saying (or, voice gone, croaking) “I hunt alone” – and saw them later. I came away with 11 books in the end, and here they are…
Too Many Ghosts by Paul Gallico
I keep hoping to find another Gallico novel as brilliant as Love of Seven Dolls – but even if this one ends up not being, at least it has such a lovely cover.
Open the Door by Osbert Sitwell
Still haven’t read anything by any of the Sitwells. Maybe Osbert’s short stories?
Elizabeth Bowen by Patricia Craig
Biography of a woman novelist, you say?
Alfred and Guinevere by James Schuyler
If you think I can resist a cheap NYRB Classics edition, then this must be your first time to Stuck-in-a-Book – welcome!
Mr Emmanuel by Louis Golding
Here’s a pair of authors I get confused… Louis Golding and Louis Bromfield. Anyone read this Louis?
The Romany Stone by Christopher Morley
I love Christopher Morley’s essays, and this edition is beautiful – and signed! Annoyingly, Richard Booth’s Books have started sticking price stickers to the backs of their books, and this meant the back got damaged.
Accidents of Fortune by Andrew Devonshire
Mr. Debo Mitford’s autobiography
Beside the Pearly Water by Stella Gibbons
This was rather an exciting find – dustjacket and all, if you care about those sorts of things (I do, on entirely aesthetic grounds).
Picture by Lillian Ross
I’m sure I’ve heard about this somewhere – but a look at the cinema from the 1950s was irresistible.
Popcorn by Cornelia Otis Skinner
I never blogged about it, but Our Hearts Were Young and Gay was one of my favourite reads from a few years ago, and I’ve been hoping to stumble across more by one or other or both of the authors. There are plenty of cheap copies online, but it’s nice to stumble across them – and these light essays look great fun.
The Dolly Dialogues by Anthony Hope
I don’t remember where I heard about these, but a reprint of them has been on my Amazon wishlist for four years – nicer to find a copy while browsing, and even nicer to find a nice old edition!
So, not a bad haul – not huge quantity, but definite quality. Have you read any of them, or want to? As always, comments extremely welcome!