Stuck in a Book

Do you ever just go and look along your bookshelves, reminding yourself of the exciting and interesting books you’ve been meaning to read?  It generally fills me half with joy that they’re there, and despair that I don’t have time to read them immediately.  But it’s also fun to pull things off the shelf, re-read the blurb, remember where you bought, ponder on how good they might end up being…

Today I did that with an author I’ve intended to read more of for ages – Janet Frame. I read a collection of her short stories four years ago, and have bought a fair few over the years.  One of the most intriguing was The Adaptable Man, with this blurb:

Electricity is coming to Little Burgelstatham, cottages are being modernised and the Overspill from London is starting to encroach on the village.  While some would rather live in the past, Muriel Baldry welcomes the coming of electricity, as she can now hang her Venini Chandelier and organise a dinner party to celebrate it.  But does adapting to the twentieth century demand darker deeds?

This is a vividly portrayed and poetic novel with a beautifully balanced sense of the ridiculous.
That sounds wonderfully up my street – odd and quirky, but still domestic and parochial.  I moved it to my ‘must read soonish’ pile. In fact, I think I’ll read it for Kim’s ANZ Reading Week (extended to include New Zealand this year.)  And then I spotted this…

Well, that was a nice surprise!

I haven’t been on a good bookshop trawl for months.  There’s very little I love more in life than discovering a secondhand bookshop I’ve not been to before, and falling joyfully upon its shelves.  If the books happen to be reasonably priced and plentiful, then my joy is complete.  This was how I felt in bookshop after bookshop in the US, but I don’t think I’ve been to any since then.  Shameful.

So I’m probably going to treat myself with a day out to one before too long.  And I wondered if you had any recommendations – preferably for bookshops in towns which are near enough to Oxford to permit a day trip there and back.  On a trainline.

Yes, very picky, I know.

If they’re in London, that’s ok – but I’d prefer them to be in the countryside, or vaguely countrysidish.

Over to you!

(If you don’t live in the UK, please feel free to tell me about your favourite bookshops… but try not to make them sound too appealing.)

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the Slightly Foxed Editions – I’m always so charmed and intrigued by the memoirs they publish.  And now, to celebrate the 10th birthday of Slightly Foxed, they have published a fun-sounding book called Slightly Famous People’s Foxes.

It’s a gallery of fox sketches by the great and the good (including Diana Athill, Quentin Blake, Helen Mirren, Michael Palin, Libby Purves, Alexander McCall Smith, and many more – read the full list here) with descriptions introducing them all.  Clicking on that link will take you to a sample, which is more than promising…

Even better, it’s only £5 in the UK (also available internationally), and all profits go to The Children’s Hospital School at Great Ormond Street.  A great-sounding book for a definitely great cause!  And a very happy birthday to the wonderful Slightly Foxed.

Ten points if you can say where you’ve seen this picture before…

Firstly, I should say – I haven’t written a book and my thesis isn’t being published (not yet, anyway), so those guesses to my cryptic post the other day have made me think it’ll be a bit of an anticlimax when it’s revealed!  Well, it’s different anyway.

Secondly – I’m having a bit of a lucky streak with my reading at the moment.  Some gems I’ll be talking about in a while, including the Tove Jansson biography I mentioned recently.  What an interesting and creative woman!  I’m also loving the reissued Shirley Jackson novels (thanks Penguin) and a novel published in 2014 (gasp) by one of the few modern authors whose work interests me a lot.

Do you find that it’s famine or feast with reading?  Earlier in the year, I had about eight books on the go and wasn’t hugely enjoying any of them – none were bad enough to give up, but none were exciting me.  At the moment, I’m haring to get back to most of the books I’m reading.  Is it a coincidence?  Am I sometimes simply more receptive to the good qualities lurking in books – or does one good book lead to another?

Sometimes I’m asked (by people who read one book at a time) how I manage to read several at once.  Well, I usually want to combine many types of book (and will confess to confusion recently, when reading two novels with introspective teenage girl heroines) – and at the moment I’m definitely feeling the absence of a 1930s domestic novel in the mix.  So I’m going to grab one off the shelf, and add it to the modern novel, the 1950s Shirley Jackson, the biography…

And I think it might be Elizabeth Cambridge’s Susan and Joanna.  I’ll have to see if that fills a gap in A Century of Books…

Dear blog readers,

I haven’t finished a book in a while, and I have run out (for the moment) of the incidental games and suchlike that I wanted to get people involved with – can I say how impressed I am with your titles-with-the-last-letter-missing?  So I was going to leave the blog blank for another day.  Then I remembered that some kind soul (I forget who) said that they enjoyed it when bloggers just gave a quick update about their lives.  So I thought I’d write you a little letter.

I’ve always given you something of a look behind-the-books into my life, but usually only the momentous bits.  Nothing particularly of note has happened to me recently, but I thought I’d write a little post anyway.

There is one thing I want to tell you about – a bookish thing, no less – but the time has not yet come.  It will help explain why I’m going to be a tiny bit quieter on here for the next few weeks, but it will be more than compensated for – and I hope you’ll be excited.  Oh, Simon.  What a tease.

On the one hand, I’ve been very lucky since I submitted my DPhil thesis – apart from holidays in the US and for Christmas, I have worked solidly.  All of my previous bosses in Oxford approached me and asked me to freelance with them (at various departments of the Bodleian, and at OUP), and that was both very flattering and great fun.  I’m still doing it now, working mornings at OUP and afternoons for the Rare Books department of the Bodleian – now on Twitter, incidentally, in the hands of one of my besties, Lucy.

So, that’s all lovely.  On the other hand, I would like to have a permanent full-time job, unsurprisingly… I’ve spent the past three years explaining to folk that, although I was doing a DPhil, I didn’t want to work in academia (which is still the case) and now I’m hunting for jobs in publishing and similar companies.  Well, I haven’t applied for a lot – I’m still being fussy, and only applying for jobs I really want – and I’m waiting to see what happens.  I’ll report back when there is something to report… but I’m confident that there is a lovely team of people out there just waiting for me to join them!  (Truth be told, I wish I could stay with my current lovely OUP team, but sadly there isn’t a permanent role there.)

And what’s on the immediate horizon?  Well, this weekend I’m going to visit Colin – and while I’m there, Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife will be visiting.  Sadly I shan’t get to see Sherpa or the countryside, but the rest of us will be together, and I am never happier than when I am with my family.  I’m excited about the quiz we have lined up…

At the New Year, we decided to write a quiz between us.  We each made up suggestions for two rounds and put them in a hat, and then drew out two rounds – and had to write on those topics.  Throw in a picture round (or similar) a-piece, and we had 12 quiz rounds to have fun with.  Indeed, it was so fun that we’ve decided to do it again.  I put in relatively restrained topics – art (nice and broad) and Virginia Woolf (just because I was so intrigued to see what questions would be written).  It turns out my crazy family isn’t quite so restrained.  Here are the rounds we have been allocated…

Simon – Peru
Simon – woodwork
Colin – Virginia Woolf
Colin – 1953
Dad – art
Dad – goldfish
Mum – knitting
Mum – defenestrations and other unusual exits

It could be an interesting night!  I have gone a bit wackier with my picture round, but I shan’t reveal anything yet, because my family might well read this…

That’ll do for news for now – but soon(ish) I will stop teasing and unveil the exciting bookish thing.  And I might even get around to posting a book review, you never know.

Hope you’re all having lovely weeks.  And, if you’re not, remember that spring is on its way.  I can’t wait.

Take care,
Simon

We’re not like this, you and me.  But some people in bookshops are…

Bookshopping: a sonnet


Excuse me, if you wouldn’t mind
I’m looking for a certain book.
A famous one – you know the kind –
The sort to own (in case folks look).
The author’s name I can’t advise –
I’m pretty sure that he was male.
I think perhaps it won a prize,
Or featured in your half-price sale?
My favourite blogger thought it fine;
She gave it eight stars out of ten
(She said she would have given nine,
But doesn’t like to flatter men).
You can’t help? Even with such
Description? Well, thanks VERY much.

I’ve recently got into Cabin Pressure, the Radio 4 drama set in a tiny airline – my lovely boss Malie has been casually mentioning it for a year, and I capitulated a few weeks ago, and am already halfway through series 3, eking out the remaining episodes.  It’s very funny, and cleverly scripted.

There is a bookish connection.  Because in one of the episodes they try to come up with book titles which are amusing (and still make sense) with the last letter removed.  Their examples include Of Mice and Me, Three Men in a Boa etc.  And of course, I wanted to think of some of my own…

It’s harder than it sounds.  I’ve only come up Five Children and I (E. Nesbit) and Injury Tim (Beryl Bainbridge).  And The Winds of Heave (Monica Dickens), which isn’t very pretty.

Over to you!  Try to think of them without simply scrolling through a list of books, for maximum mental torment.  Let me know your answers in the comment section…

Probably the best thing that has happened to me while working at the Bodleian Library – besides meeting some very good friends – happened in my first week.  I got to hold a letter written by Jane Austen.  WRITTEN BY HER HAND AND HELD BY HER HAND AND MAYBE BY BOTH HER HANDS. Ahem.

Well, now the Bodleian have published a book which isn’t too far away from that.  I imagine many of you are familiar with Jane Austen’s Volume the First – one of the books in which she transcribed her juvenilia, which she wrote between the ages of twelve and fifteen.  It contains all sorts of playlets, verse, and stories which (along with the two other volumes of her juvenilia) reveal an author who was self-confident and accomplished at an astonishingly early age.

I don’t think her juvenilia has all too obvious a connection with the style and genre of her novels (I don’t know whether experts agree with that) – Volume the First etc. have rather more verve and excitable, surreal silliness than you’ll find elsewhere.  In that way, it is perhaps closer to the books she was reading at the time than the form she made her own.

Even if you’ve already read the juvenilia, though, you won’t have anything like this edition on your shelves.  This is a facsimile edition – which means I can flip through and see Jane Austen’s handwriting.  It isn’t her teenage handwriting (those manuscripts were lost or destroyed) but it’s the pieces she transcribed later.  And it’s her flipping handwriting.  It’s a very exciting thing to have on my bookcase. Perhaps it’s just for Austen fanatics – but I suspect there are a few of those among you.

More info here…