I’ve had a couple of days in London, seeing (count ’em) fourteen different people, in six different groupings – including Sakura (Chasing Bawa) today for a blitz of Notting Hill Book & Comic Exchange. I’ll share my spoils with you another time – for now let’s have a Sunday Song, shall we? This week it’s ‘Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us’ from Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, on their quirky duet album Raising Sand.
For all previous Sunday Songs, click here.
Sorry posts have been brief this week, will try and write some proper reviews soon – my reading this month has mostly been re-reading, as I have re-read some of the central novels for my research. And more books with titles like Unmarried But Happy and The Bachelor Woman and Her Problems – interesting books from the first half of the 20th century about ‘surplus women’. In the name of research, but I can’t help enjoying reading those lovely old hardbacks, whatever might be inside them.
But I have also been reading for book group – and I thought I’d confirm to you all that (as a few of you guessed) A Confederacy of Dunces is the book I’m currently reading (as well as Great Expectations, Wise Children, The Element of Lavishness, A Reader on Reading, Singled Out, A Town in Bloom… yes, I do multitask when it comes to reading!)
Will report back on Confederacy of Dunces as soon as I can, since it’ll be due back at the library soon. Have a lovely Friday – I’m off to London to see some friends, and now just have to decide which to take of the seven books I’m reading…
So, to fill the gap where my inspiration is not (and because it’s always a fascinating question) – what are you reading at the moment?
After all that cerebral activity, I thought I’d just put up a painting today – I love a lot of Stanley Spencer’s work, including this: Swan Upping at Cookham (1915-9) which is in the Tate (more info here).
Hope you’re having a good week! I’m finding reading a bit slow, but today read (as well as some interesting books about childlessness from the 1920s – did you know that a lack of commonsense could be to blame?[!]) two-thirds of a bizarre, funny, grotesque American novel published in 1980, but written in the 1960s by an author who killed himself in 1969. Any guesses?
Thank you for all your entries to the Male/Female quiz – I hope you all enjoyed it! Here are the answers, quickly – I’ve copied them down to the bottom with the quotations, in case you want to compare. Intriguingly, Dwarf’s Blood by Edith Olivier seemed to attract the most interest from you all – and now I feel a bit guilty, since it’s pretty scarce. From my own perspective, numbers 1 and 3 appealed to me most.
1.) Told By An Idiot – Rose Macaulay
2.) The Present and the Past – Ivy Compton-Burnett
3.) Time Will Darken It – William Maxwell
4.) Nothing is Safe – E.M. Delafield
5.) Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
6.) Before I Go Hence – Frank Baker
7.) The Harvest – Christopher Hart
8.) The To-Let House – Daisy Hasan
9.) Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsun
10.) Dwarf’s Blood – Edith Olivier
So… nobody got everything right. The lowest score was 4 (Sakura, Sue, and Laura!) and the highest score was 8 – a title shared between June, Colin, Karen K, Gill, Cynica, Deb, Claire, and Ruth. Well done, guys!
Here’s an interesting fact – every author’s was correctly identified more than incorrectly, except for Frank Baker – 16 out of 24 of you thought he was a woman.
Here’s a little table of the answers – I don’t know whether you can make it big enough to read by clicking on it, but it’s worth a shot…
Here are those quotations again, with the titles.
Told By An Idiot – Rose Macaulay
1.) One evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our forefathers, being young, possessed the earth, – in brief, in the year 1879, – Mrs. Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr. Garden’s study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, “Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again.”
The Present and the Past – Ivy Compton-Burnett
2.) “Oh, dear, oh, dear!” said Henry Clare.
His sister glanced in his direction.
“They are pecking the sick one. They are angry because it is ill.”
“Perhaps it is because they are anxious,” said Megan, looking at the hens in the hope of discerning this feeling.
Time Will Darken It – William Maxwell
3.) In order to pay off an old debt that someone else had contracted, Austin King had said yes when he knew that he ought to have said no, and now at five o’clock of a July afternoon he saw the grinning face of trouble everywhere he turned. The house was full of strangers from Mississippi; within an hour the friends and neighbors he had invited to an evening party would begin ringing the doorbell; and his wife (whom he loved) was not speaking to him.
Nothing Is Safe – E.M. Delafield
4.) Even in what Julia now thought of as “the old days” – a year ago, and more – Terry had always minded things.
Whenever anything went even a little bit wrong he was almost certain to be fearfully upset. Sometimes he cried, even at twelve years old.
Daddy said Terry was a neurotic little ass.
Mummie said he was highly-strung, and that she’d been the same herself as a child.
5.) Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
Click!… Here it was again! He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again… Click!…
Or would the word ‘snap’ or ‘crack’ describe it better?
Before I Go Hence – Frank Baker
6.) “You’d like you tea up here, father?”
There was a moment before the old man replied. Then he turned in his chair by the open window and stared bewilderedly at his daughter. She stood in the low doorway to the small study which overlooked the orchard, a thin, black-haired woman whose ringed hands were red and coarse from years of housework. Fenner’s thoughts had wandered very far and he could not immediately relate the woman to his own life. It seemed to him that she was not his daughter, only one other individual in a haphazard dream world of unrelated human beings.
The Harvest – Christopher Hart
7.) The sun shone down on a beautiful morning, edging the beech trunks copper and the beech leaves gold. The paddock lay like virgin land, the thin frost lay on it unbroken by human footfall, the grass only darkened here and there by delicate hoofprints where the deer had passed by when the mist still lay sorrelhigh, their sandy bellies brushing drops of dew from thistles, and had passed on and left the paddock still and silent as before in deep dreaming sleep.
The To-Let House – Daisy Hasan
8.) Kulay, a fair, skinny, whip-wielding boy with grey, stony eyes, guards the border between a Shillong mansion, once home to a British tea planter, and its drab tenants’ quarters. A forget-me-not hedge separates the drab houses from the magnificent mansion.
He is twelve and is wearing a red polo-neck sweater. He dances in circles like a ribbon of stony sunlight.
Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsun
9.) The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest – who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here. There was no path before he came. Afterward, some beast or other, following the faint tracks over marsh and moorland, wearing them deeper; after these again some Lapp gained scent of the path, and took that way from field to field, looking to his reindeer. Thus was made the track through the great Almenning – the common tracts without an owner; no-man’s land.
Dwarf’s Blood – Edith Olivier
10.) Sir Henry Roxerby was dead. As far as Brokeyates was concerned, he might well have died years earlier, for the place had begun to go to rack and ruin long before he took to his bed. During those last five years, the main drive had never been used. Sir Henry had no visitors, and the butcher and the baker preferred to reach the house by the stable entrance, near the churchyard. It was thus possible almost to avoid the Park altogether, and none of the village people cared about going further into that than was absolutely necessary. It had a haunted look.
Apparently people are having trouble leaving comments on any Blogger blog at the moment… fun. So, if you want to enter the (possibly be-prized) Male/Female author competition, but can’t leave a comment, just email your answers to simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk
So far nobody has got everything right, and at least two people have got 8/10 (I haven’t checked thoroughly, but I think that’s right.) V.S. Naipaul has yet to pop by.
I’m going to give you another day to keep guessing on the male/female authors – I wonder if a guess for both genders has been made for every quotation? I might get making a spreadsheet…
Also, just thought I’d mention that there is now a link to the My Life in Books series I ran on here in March/April – click on the icon in the right-hand column to see 14 bloggers and blog-readers talk about their favourite books through their lives. It made me remember how great all the participants were, and ponder on a second series…
V.S. Naipaul hit headlines recently for claiming that all female writers were inferior to him, and “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.” Well, Naipaul, put your money where your mouth is – and, on the offchance that you don’t read my blog, some of you others can have a go.
Here are the openings of ten novels – five of them are by men, five of them are by women. I’m hoping you won’t know what they are… they’ve been picked more or less at random off my shelves.
Pop your guesses in the comments box! There might be a prize… but I’m rather hoping that we can prove Naipaul wrong, and that nobody gets them all right. But bonus points if you can guess the authors… and also let me know which makes you most keen to read the book!
1.) One evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our forefathers, being young, possessed the earth, – in brief, in the year 1879, – Mrs. Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr. Garden’s study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, “Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again.”
2.) “Oh, dear, oh, dear!” said Henry Clare.
His sister glanced in his direction.
“They are pecking the sick one. They are angry because it is ill.”
“Perhaps it is because they are anxious,” said Megan, looking at the hens in the hope of discerning this feeling.
3.) In order to pay off an old debt that someone else had contracted, Austin King had said yes when he knew that he ought to have said no, and now at five o’clock of a July afternoon he saw the grinning face of trouble everywhere he turned. The house was full of strangers from Mississippi; within an hour the friends and neighbors he had invited to an evening party would begin ringing the doorbell; and his wife (whom he loved) was not speaking to him.
4.) Even in what Julia now thought of as “the old days” – a year ago, and more – Terry had always minded things.
Whenever anything went even a little bit wrong he was almost certain to be fearfully upset. Sometimes he cried, even at twelve years old.
Daddy said Terry was a neurotic little ass.
Mummie said he was highly-strung, and that she’d been the same herself as a child.
5.) Click!… Here it was again! He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again… Click!…
Or would the word ‘snap’ or ‘crack’ describe it better?
6.) “You’d like you tea up here, father?”
There was a moment before the old man replied. Then he turned in his chair by the open window and stared bewilderedly at his daughter. She stood in the low doorway to the small study which overlooked the orchard, a thin, black-haired woman whose ringed hands were red and coarse from years of housework. Fenner’s thoughts had wandered very far and he could not immediately relate the woman to his own life. It seemed to him that she was not his daughter, only one other individual in a haphazard dream world of unrelated human beings.
7.) The sun shone down on a beautiful morning, edging the beech trunks copper and the beech leaves gold. The paddock lay like virgin land, the thin frost lay on it unbroken by human footfall, the grass only darkened here and there by delicate hoofprints where the deer had passed by when the mist still lay sorrelhigh, their sandy bellies brushing drops of dew from thistles, and had passed on and left the paddock still and silent as before in deep dreaming sleep.
8.) Kulay, a fair, skinny, whip-wielding boy with grey, stony eyes, guards the border between a Shillong mansion, once home to a British tea planter, and its drab tenants’ quarters. A forget-me-not hedge separates the drab houses from the magnificent mansion.
He is twelve and is wearing a red polo-neck sweater. He dances in circles like a ribbon of stony sunlight.
9.) The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest – who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here. There was no path before he came. Afterward, some beast or other, following the faint tracks over marsh and moorland, wearing them deeper; after these again some Lapp gained scent of the path, and took that way from field to field, looking to his reindeer. Thus was made the track through the great Almenning – the common tracts without an owner; no-man’s land.
10.) Sir Henry Roxerby was dead. As far as Brokeyates was concerned, he might well have died years earlier, for the place had begun to go to rack and ruin long before he took to his bed. During those last five years, the main drive had never been used. Sir Henry had no visitors, and the butcher and the baker preferred to reach the house by the stable entrance, near the churchyard. It was thus possible almost to avoid the Park altogether, and none of the village people cared about going further into that than was absolutely necessary. It had a haunted look.
This week, an inspiring song by my favourite Christian singer-songwriter Jennifer Knapp – my favourite song of hers because it uses my favourite Bible verse as its inspiration. The song is called ‘His Grace is Sufficient’; the Bible verse is 2 Corinthians 12:9 – But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
Click here for all previous Sunday Songs.
This isn’t quite a Weekend Miscellany, since it’s more a cheer of joy that this week is over! For this week, on consecutive days, I gave my first lecture and my first conference paper. Both went well, and the Oxford University English Graduate Conference was actually surprisingly fun – very relaxed and friendly; not scary and full of career-driven people as I’d feared it might be. And it came with a keynote speech from Penelope Lively about reading and writing and memory etc. It was deliciously wonderful – a bit like Howards End is on the Landing turned into a talk, albeit from a different author – and I’m keen to rectify my lack of Lively reading.
Oh, in case you were wondering – my lecture was on genre and reception theory, for first-year undergraduates; my conference paper was entitled ‘”If it were less, it would be gossip – if it were more, it would be genius”: Placing the Middlebrow and the Middlebrow Place 1918-1939’ – people seemed appreciative, and there were lots of fascinating talks given during the day.
So, since a week’s worth of nervous energy has left me exhausted (some people take these things in their stride, I’m sure, but I am not one of them) I am retiring to bed – and will just give you three links to reviews which have come up on other blogs this week, since they’re all wonderful thoughts about some of my favourite books.
– Thomas (My Porch) reads his first Tove Jansson short story collection, Travelling Light
– Daniel (Hiberian Homme) finally reads the wonderful Diary of a Provincial Lady
– Claire (Captive Reader) experiences the bookish joy that is Howards End is on the Landing
Hope you’re having a good weekend – I’ll be spending a lot of mine asleep!
Mrs. B at The Literary Stew has come up with a great idea for a little meme about abandoned books, and I’m delighted to be joining in. Pop over to her blog post (on the link above) to see the Nancy Pearl quotation which set her off thinking – and here are my answers to her questions:
1.) What would cause you to stop reading a book?
I used never to give up on books, but in recent years I have done so more often – there are two, very different reasons. Some I am hating, and know I shan’t get any pleasure or edification from, and so give up. I don’t admit defeat easily, but it happens sometimes (hello, Tarr by Wyndham Lewis, the most recent culprit). Others simply get sidelined, and although I don’t deliberately choose to stop reading them, I realise months later that they’ve been neglected. It’s because I read so many books at once, I think.
2.) Name a book you’ve abandoned in the past that you ended up loving later on.
I can only think of one – Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. That was one I stopped because I was reading it for a first-year class and simply ran out of time – when I returned to it last year, I loved it. Aside from that, you could count Pride and Prejudice, which I tried when I was ten, but couldn’t cope with – now, of course, I love it.
3.) Name a book you’ve abandoned in the past that you hope to finish one day.
The Chateau by William Maxwell. I can’t really believe I’ve only read one novel by him – I loved They Came Like Swallows so much that I bought lots of others, but somehow put The Chateau aside after a hundred pages. Just wasn’t in the mood, perhaps – but I’m pretty confident I’ll love it when I return to it. Now I just have to decide whether to carry on from p.101, or start again at p.1.
Oh, and the first Eye of the World book, which my brother lent me, er, quite a long time ago… I read 550pp over one weekend, in March 2010, and have only read fifty pages or so since… but I definitely will finish that one. I didn’t put in all that effort for nothing…
Thanks Mrs. B for the meme! Do have a go on your own blogs, and link back to Mrs. B’s original post when you do, so she knows who’s picked up the baton.