Just what the doctor ordered

StuckinaBook All , 11 Comments

I’m am back in the land of the living! Sorry to abandon you for so long – I did mean to at least put up some photographs, but post-flu exhaustion left me feeling more or less dead in the evenings, which is when I usually do my blogging. But now I am fighting fit (relatively speaking) with only an annoying cough which seems disinclined to go away.


As I mentioned in the previous post, any sign of illness and I stop being able to read. Hugely irksome, as you can imagine. But I did manage to read one book last week – the font was sufficiently big, and the story adequately undemanding, while yet being rather wonderful – it was Joyce Dennys’ Repeated Doses. As the title suggests, it is not the first in the series. And, using my last months of spontaneous book-buying, I scurried away to buy Mrs. Dose the Doctor’s Wife and The Over-Dose. These are, respectively, the first and third books in the series, published between 1930 and 1933.


I say series. These books are divided into various sections – not really short stories, but more like episodes in various lives. Like Henrietta in Joyce Dennys’ now much-beloved Henrietta’s War (wrote about it here), and Dennys herself, all the heroines are doctors’ wives. Or rather, all the stories are about doctors and their families – usually with an instrumental wife. Though they all have different names, they have a shared characteristic running through (I believe) all three books – that of ‘false nosery’, in Dennys’ words. Let me explain, by quoting the first book:

All Doctors’ Wives wear False Noses. This fact is not generally known, except to Doctors and their Wives themselves. Even their children hardly ever realize, until they grow up and possibly become Doctors or Doctors’ Wives, that their mother went through her married life with a False Nose firmly fixed to her face. There have been cases when even the Doctor himself has forgotten that the Nose he sees as breakfast is not the Nose he wooed. But these are exceptional cases, for Doctors are, as a rule, discerning and disillusioned people.

A Doctor’s Wife must wear a False Nose to disguise herself, and thus persuade her husband’s patients, and even more, the people who are not her husband’s patients, but who might be, that she is like Caesar’s Wife, above suspicion.

She must, if possible, however dark her thoughts and evil her intentions, persuade people that she is a model of wifely devotion, motherly love and womanly yearnings.
If she meets the Vicar being carried in at her front door with his throat cut, as she goes out to a Bridge party, she must not divulge this spicy bit of gossip to her friends, and if during the afternoon somebody comes rushing in to say that the Vicar has been hanged, she is denied the exquisite pleasure of saying, and it is at such times that the False Nose hangs most heavy, “Excuse me, but his throat was cut, I saw it; your deal, I think.”

And so it goes. These are stories about the diplomacy of doctors’ wives, the peculiarities of the medical profession, and the length to which the wives will go to secure patients for their husbands. (That sounds more macabre than I intended…) In many ways, I think being in a doctor’s family must be quite similar to being in a vicar’s family – certainly in terms of diplomacy, presenting the Public Face of the Profession, and keeping schtum on all sorts of topics.

Dennys’ stories in Repeated Doses exaggerate a bit – a woman seeking treatment for a wart ends up in a Rest Home; a name mix up causes an international incident; baskets of fruit become the front line for deceit and intrigue. All great fun.


And, which is half the pleasure with Dennys’ books, they are illustrated by Dennys too. I’ve scattered some of those illustrations throughout this post, and they might prove irresistible to you… They make a lovely set of books – really thick, chunky books, with thick paper, and a feel of luxury quite unexpected for the early-thirties. Obviously they got printed just before printers started economising… I’m so grateful to have heard of Joyce Dennys, and these are real treats to enjoy, return to, and treasure.

Casting pearls before…

StuckinaBook All 19 Comments

I’m afraid I’ve had swine flu. Or at least flu of some variety, but since it’s passing more quickly than normal flu, the consensus is that it’s of the swine persuasion. So posts might not be forthcoming for a bit – I feel a lot better than I did yesterday (I was only awake for a few scattered hours throughout the day) but my brain resists doing much thinking. And, annoyingly, I don’t seem able to read books… always the way when I get ill: hours in bed, and not able to use the time to lessen the tbr pile. Doh.

But this post is more to explain my absence (or at least the absence of any particularly well-thought-out posts for a bit) than for sympathy, so I shall leave you with a picture from my trip to the Lake District and Edinburgh… more of these soon, I think my brain’s up to that. This is from Grasmere, home of Wordsworth and my friend Phoebe.

24: The Challenge

StuckinaBook All 28 Comments


The effects of Howards End is on the Landing continue apace… For the past couple years I’ve been on a book buying ban during Lent. I have hundreds of unread books, a limited budget, and love of a challenge… and so I’m rolling out a year-long restriction.

Restriction, not ban, I hasten to add. I toyed with a ban on book buying, but realised that going cold turkey would send me smashing the windows of Waterstones at 3am on January 3rd, grabbing handfuls of books, and collapsing in tears.

Or something like that.

So, instead, I thought I’d buy 24 books next year. Two a month. If I’m good one month, I can get more the next – on the other hand, if I go on a book-buying splurge, then I’ll have to stay away from bookshops for a few weeks.

Let’s put this into perspective. Two books a month coming into the house is probably rather more than your average person buys – but I would be surprised if I’ve bought fewer than 240 this year. I’m decimating my book buying, and then only keeping the bit that I’ve got rid of…

I should give you an idea of the response my friends have had to this, on Facebook and my online reading group:

‘GOOD LUCK, Simon! I wonder how many days you’ll last? ;-)”Is that IN 2010 or AT 20:10? I think the latter is more likely.’
‘Hilarious. I’ll watch and laugh.’
‘I simply could not possibly do this. And I seriously wonder if you can.”Madness!”WOW. I look forward to seeing how this pans out…..”I’m still speechless at Simon’s decision to curtail book-buying, and if the resolution were made by anyone less sincere, I would suspect a Publicity Stunt! I can hardly imagine not buying books when you live in *England,* the *home* of books'(and perhaps my favourite…) ‘what evs!’So you can see the faith my friends have in me. But I quote them in amusement, and shan’t be insulted – far from it – if you happen to agree with them. I should add, to be just, that I’m not going to stop getting review copies, so more than 24 books will enter the house…

I think it’ll lend a nice slant to the blog – as I unveil each of my acquisitions over the year, and at the end of the year can see which twenty-four made the grade… unless, of course, my friends are right and I crack mid-March…

How To Save A Life

StuckinaBook All , 2 Comments

There is a pile of books by one of my bookcases – actually, there are many piles of books by most of my bookcases – but there is one in particular which holds all the books I’ve recently read, but haven’t yet blogged about. They go in that pile, waiting for me to exert myself enough to write a proper review, and I promptly forget nearly everything about them. Not an auspicious way to start a review, I know, but I like it when bloggers give little insights into the geography of their books…

I think Oxford University Press’s A Very Short Introduction series is a great idea, though I must say it’s not one I’ve investigated closely. They have these books, about A6 size, covering more or less every topic conceivable – Autism to Particle Physics; topics as wide as History and as specific as The Dead Sea Scrolls; Animal Rights, Machiavelli, Free Speech, Emotion… even, intriguingly, one called Nothing. You get the picture. I must admit, my only previous dalliance with this series was Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory, much bought by panicking finalists – and it wasn’t particularly good. Too fuzzy, and asked a lot of questions rather than giving much of use. I suppose it depends how you interpret ‘Introduction’ – it should send you off to find out more, but I feel it should also give you an understanding of key terms and central ideas.

Which is pretty much what A Very Short Introduction to Biography by Hermione Lee does, thankfully. In 140pp (plus thirty odd of notes and index) Lee gives a whistle-stop tour of biography’s vogues, peaks, ideas, and stars. She kicks off by looking at various metaphors for biography, trying to understand the impulse for telling the stories of lives, and the ethics of it. Then by going through ‘ten rules for biography’ (The story should be true, the biographer should be objective, etc. etc.) she demonstrates how often the rules are broken, and ends the list with no concrete definition at all. Which is perhaps to be expected.

From here we look at the various vogues biography has experienced – exemplary lives, from the Bible and before, through increasingly ‘honest’ (read: critical) biographies, to the type we expect today. Freud’s influence is examined – even the most anti-Freudian is likely now to use his language of childhood trauma, dreams, and so forth. More or less every aspect of biography is touched upon – the attempts of the Dictionary of National Biography and others to collate biographical information; the aesthetic arguments against even attempting biography; even the ways in which Marilyn Monroe has been treated.

It’s all there, then, or at least it’s introduced. It is, if you like, a biography of biography. So why did the book not really work? No, I need to phrase myself better, because the book did *work* to a large extent – why didn’t I love it? What prevented all these fascinating facts and angles from making a captivating ‘life’? I think, mostly, because it is quite dry. The style is teacher-y; the occasional verbal tricks felt like they’d work in a lecture, but perhaps not in a book. I wasn’t counting, but I think ‘V.S. Pritchett’s fine short Life of Turgenev’ might have been the only evaluative comment made. And Lee only elliptically mentions her own life as a biographer, which would surely have been of interest – it is after all, one presumes, the reason she was asked to write this. She states, for example, ‘Biographers are often asked what effect the superseding of letters by email and texting will have on their work’ – an interesting question, which I don’t think she ever attempts to answer. A hundred other times I’d have loved to hear what *she* experienced as a biographer… but maybe that would be a very different sort of book, and most of her audience might have resented it.

Perhaps the problem is the comparison with what I was hoping for. If I had set out to get a pocket outline of the history of biography, then I’d be happy. Lee’s research is vast, her selection of angles intelligent. What is missing (what can so often accidentally slip out of a biography, whatever the number of facts and stories) is humanity. A Very Short Introduction to Biography is a very good resource, an excellent introduction, but you won’t find yourself curling up in bed with it.

Something Old, Something New…

StuckinaBook All 21 Comments

The Paper House got me thinking… I know that Stuck-in-a-Book readers buy a lot of books, that’s a given (yes Mum, Dad, Colin, Dark Puss – you are the exceptions!) but what sort of books do we buy? I’m considering everything about a book except its contents… so, not which authors or genres you buy, but how old are they and (if I may make so bold) how valuable?

In The Paper House, Carlos Brauer is very excited about all sorts of books, but particularly old, valuable ones – and the word ‘incunable‘ seems to be nothing more nor less than magical for him. And, outside of this novel, there seems to be an unwritten rule that to be a book collector, one must seek valuable books – first editions, rare editions, old editions.

Well. I would class myself as a book collector, because I have a collection of books… and I love having my scattered library, and think of the collection as being some sort of whole. It’s unlikely that any other individual has owned the exact same books that I do – even the Bodleian doesn’t have all the books I have, cos I had to buy one or two of them when they weren’t available there. If I weren’t a book collector, then surely I wouldn’t think of my books with such affection, or be such a completist or completionist or whatever word means I want everything an author wrote to be on my shelves….

But I don’t like fancy editions. They scare me a bit. Even though I never scribble in my books, and feel actual physical pain if I see someone using a biro in a book, I still don’t like the idea of having a book which will loose an enormous amount of value if it falls in the sink. The average value of each of my books is, say, £3… not such an investment issue if I accidentally leave one on a bus.

This all struck me when I was visiting the bookshops in and around Charing Cross Road the other day. Henry Pordes Books was lovely, as was Any Amount of Books – but there are those tiny ones which are hugely imposing to enter. I popped into the ones which looked like they might have books under a grand, and felt like I was being hounded out by the bookseller’s eyes… One of the shops had an entire wall dedicated to expensive editions of PG Wodehouse. Now, if any author would have scorned and mocked the rare book business, it is our Pelham Grenville.

What do you think? Is a love of fine, rare, old books part and parcel of loving books (and I’m missing the point) – or is it an entirely different kettle of fish? And howsabout you – new books, old books, raggedy books, pristine books? Or all of the above, with a side helping of books?

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

StuckinaBook All 10 Comments

It’s that time of the week again – it’s so nice to have a little place on my blog to mention things which wouldn’t fit in elsewhere, or books which are going to be read gradually, so that you don’t have to wait months to hear about them. I’m getting rather fond of my weekly miscellany, and I hope you are too.

You find me in a house of sickness. I’m not ill (yet) but my housemates are suffering from colds in various stages of heaviness… but today I made a coconut cake to cheer everyone up. I indulge in coconut cakes quite a lot now, since Our Vicar and Colin are both firmly anti-coconut, and thus it would be unfair to make them at home. Mmm… coconut cake… This isn’t it, but it is a nice picture I stole from Google Image Search…

Sorry, distracted there. I *should* be telling you about the link, book, and blog post which have hoved onto my horizon this month…

1) The book(s) – I’ve been meaning to read George Orwell’s essays for a while, or at least dip into them, and when I spotted that Harvill Secker had just published two collections in rather fetching paperbacks (cover illustration a very good job by John Spencer) I wrote an email wondering whether they’d like to send copies to Oxford… which they did, hurrah! They are companion volumes – Narrative Essays and Critical Essays. The former has things like ‘Bookshop Memories’, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, and ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’ – though also ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ which, if his excellent Homage to Catalonia is anything to go on, probably isn’t very cosy. Critical Essays, as might be expected, investigates individual authors – T.S. Eliot, Rudyard Kipling – and literary topics, like ‘Good Bad Books’, which sounds fascinating. I’m looking forward to dipping into these, and might well report back later – but I think they’re a safe bet for books worth having on the shelves, and there is no author who makes great writing seem more effortless than Orwell does.

2) The link – a while ago I reviewed Michael Greenberg’s Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life (which I thought captivating and very well-written, despite being out of my reading comfort zone). Do check out his website, michaelgreenberg.org, which is intended to be an interactive site meant to recreate the spirit and experience of the book visually. And do get hold of the book if you can, it‘s quite a find.

Another link? Oh, why not – Picador emailed to say that they’ll be giving away a box set of the excellent Paris Review Interviews vols.1-4 – follow them on Twitter to find out more. (Incidentally, do many of you use Twitter? It baffles me. I do have an account, but have yet to use it properly…)

3) The blog post – well, there’s been so much buzz about Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing, why not pop along to Bloomsbury Bell’s blog and see what she has to say about the book which inspired the title, EM Forster’s Howards End? I haven’t read this novel yet, though I bought it a couple of months ago, and Bloomsbury Bell’s thoughtful review has intrigued me afresh. You can read it here.

That’s all for this weekend, I’ll see you on the other side…

A quick reminder…

StuckinaBook All 10 Comments

It’s too late for me to sort out the post I was *going* to write, so instead I’m going – as promised – to remind everyone that we’re halfway through October, and thus halfway to Manservant and Maidservant posting time! I must confess, this reminder is for me as well as you, as I haven’t started it yet… but I’m hoping Ivy Compton-Burnett is working her magic with some of you. I’m delighted that quite a few of you have got hold of a copy… let’s do the next thing and read it. I will start it properly this weekend, I think…

And, just to bulk out this post a bit, I thought you might be interested to see what my book group are reading over the next few months. We usually decide a couple in advance, but this time we really got excited, and have planned months and months… It’s a lovely, friendly, small book group – which, I’m delighted to say, Harriet of Harriet Devine’s Blog joined yesterday – and we just put down whichever books people suggest, a nice mixture of new and old.

November: Impassioned Clay – Stevie Davies
December: Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
January: Immortality – Milan Kundera
February: An Equal Music – Vikram Seth
March: Miss Mole – EH Young
April: A Long, Long Way – Sebastian Barry
May: Miss Ranskill Comes Home – Barbara Euphan Todd
June: The Debt to Pleasure – John Lanchester

As always, comments?

The Paper House

StuckinaBook All , 7 Comments

Wow, thanks everyone for your great comments on yesterday’s post – it’s such an interesting concept, the book that started the transition into a world where, as Hayley so wonderfully put it in the comments, classics were no longer ‘worthy books that I thought I should read rather than living things I wanted to read.’

A book like Howards End is on the Landing (yes, it’s becoming second only to Miss Hargreaves in how often I’ll mention it… everyone got their copies of Miss Hargreaves by the way, since she happened to come up?) – sorry, as I was saying, a book like Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill doesn’t just finish when you close it. Rather it sends you off in all other sorts of directions, and one of those was The Paper House by Carlos Maria Dominguez. (With some Argentinian accents which apparently aren’t compatible with Blogger’s HTML, sorry…) Hill wrote that it was ‘a charming novella about the perils and dangers of books and book owning […] about a man who has many thousands of books which not only take on personalities of their own but come to replace people in his life.’ And she also quoted this excerpt:

…it was unthinkable to put a book by Borges next to one by Garcia Lorca, whom the Argentine author once described as a ‘professional Andalusian’. And given the dreadful accusation of plaigarism between the two of them, he could not put something by Shakespeare next to a work by Marlowe, even though this meant not respecting the volume numbers of the sets in his collections. Nor, of course, could he place a book by Martin Amis next to one by Julian Barnes after the two friends had fallen out, or leave Vargas Llosa with Garcia Marquez.
Lazy blogging on my part, I realise, but I thought I should share something which made me leap to A Certain Website to buy The Paper House. If you can resist a description and a quotation like that, then you don’t have the same relationship with books that I have (does ‘relationship’ sound more or less healthy than ‘obsession’? Hard to say.) The novel follows the narrator as he tries to track down Carlos Brauer, a bibliophile who has mysteriously sent a cement-damaged copy of Conrad’s The Shadow-Line to one of the narrator’s colleagues, recently deceased. Hit by a car, in fact, whilst she was reading Emily Dickinson’s poems. The narrator sets off on a journey to find out who Brauer is, and why he’s sent the book…

But the plot is only half the book’s point: this is a novella for those who love the sight, feel, idea of books. (Incidentally, the illustrations by Peter Sis – which include the cover image, and the image reproduced below – are bizarre and yet fitting… certainly unique.)


I love reading bibliocentric books, because it makes me feel a lot more sane in my book addiction. Which of us won’t nod in empathy at the following sentences (except perhaps the bit about giving books away…):

Every year I give away at least fifty of [my books] to students, yet I still cannot avoid putting in another double row of shelves; the books are advancing silently, innocently through my house. There is no way I can stop them.

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us.[…] Nobody wants to mislay a book. We prefer to lose a ring, a watch, our umbrella, rather than a book whose pages we will never read again, but which retains, just in the sound of its title, remote and perhaps long-lost emotion.

To build up a library is to create a life. It’s never just a random collection of books.This is a very quick read, but a magically bookish one, which will make you feel a little saner about your own book collection. I’ll think I’ll revisit it over the years…. and anticipate quite a few of you doing the same?

Classics Revisited

StuckinaBook All 28 Comments

One of my book groups (yes, I’m in several, who’d have thought) has quite a democratic way of choosing the books we read. So do some of the others, but not quite so well organised. Every other month we pick a genre (and every other month we just go with general fiction) and then make a longlist… and then make a shortlist… and then vote on the title online… and finally we have a winner! By the time you read this, we’ll have discussed this month’s choice of Miss Hargreaves (now WHO do you think could have suggested this?) but I want to write about next month’s choice. The genre was ‘alternative worlds’ and the winning book is George Orwell’s 1984 – or, as I should say, Nineteen Eighty-four.

Which spawns two questions for you to answer. I read Nineteen Eighty-four when I was about 13, and it was the first ‘classic’ novel I read, excepting children’s classics. I don’t intend to launch into a discussion of what constitutes a classic, unless Frank Kermode is sitting in the back row, but I know that it felt different – like I’d entered a new world of reading. First question, then, is can you remember what the first ‘classic’ you read was? And what prompted you to choose this title?

Now, that was about a decade ago (and, if you’re doing the sums, yes – that means the supposedly futuristic-sounding Nineteen Eighty-four actually takes place a year before I was born). I haven’t re-read the book in that time, and I’m a little nervous… I thought, when I was 13, that the book was brilliant. Will I still think that? Having read a fair number of books since then (maybe around a thousand, which doesn’t seem like many at all, come to think of it) and having read quite a lot of classic novels, how will I react when I re-read my first? That’s the second question – have you re-read that first classic novel, and if so, what was the experience like?

I’m all ears – get commenting.

Hilly Region

StuckinaBook All , 15 Comments

As you’ll have read, I’m rather a fan of Howards End is on the Landing – and it sent me off in pursuit of other Susan Hill books. I had read The Battle for Gullywith, which was ok, but nothing to set my reading pulse into overdrive… but now I want more and more. Spotting that The Beacon was just coming into paperback, I gave Vintage Press an email… well, they didn’t reply, and I gave up the idea, but then the book arrived so somebody must have read the email… thank you Mysterious Lovely Person at Vintage Press.

I’d had my eye on The Beacon for a while, mostly because of the stunning cover (Susan Hill does have some good fortune with these, does she not?) and because the premise sounds interesting. Essentially, it’s a response to the vogue for childhood misery memoirs. Made famous by David Pelzer and his A Child Called It, the genre has seemingly thousands of titles, all with more or less the same cover – a white background with a sepia-child on it. Three were written by people from a family who grew up in my village, in fact. Frankly, I haven’t the smallest idea why anybody publishes or reads these. I completely understand why people write them – it must be a great catharsis – but my only experience, with Pelzer’s first book, left me feeling voyeuristic. Many of them have been written, but I think Susan Hill’s novelistic response is unusual, maybe even unique.

The Prime family live in a small North Country village, in an old farmhouse called The Beacon. The narrative moves between two time frames – we see Colin, May, Frank, and Berenice as they grow up – and we see May, still living at The Beacon years later, dealing with the death of their mother. As one strand follows the children’s gradual maturing, moving away from home to marriage or college or the city, the other strand shows the same family on the other side of a life-changing event. Not the death of their mother Bertha – that is simply the catalyst for the novel’s action – but the book Frank published about their childhood. The Cupboard Under The Stairs tells of his childhood or neglect, torture, and misery – at the hands of his parents, and even his siblings.

Except none of it is true… or is it? Though the other children – now grown-up – come together in horror and denial, yet the doubt which spreads throughout their community is also planted in all of their minds. A very faint doubt, but doubt nonetheless. But for the most part, when the doubt does not assail them, they cannot understand the motives their brother had:

How can you grow up with someone from birth and know nothing about them, she thought, share parents and brother and sister with them, share a house, rooms, a table, holidays, play, illnesses, games and not know them?
The Beacon is a very clever, subtle novella. Like many short books, it packs a more powerful punch than a longer book could have done. The emotions of the characters are never over the top, but understated and quietly devastating. Hill wisely doesn’t ruin the effect by dwelling on Frank’s imagined torture – it is not that kind of book. Instead it is a novella driven by characters’ relationships with one another, and how much in them is unvoiced and unvoiceable. Hill also has the power to make the final few pages of a book – indeed, final few words – make you gasp out loud, and want to start the book all over again. Though I don’t love this book in the way that I love Howards End is on the Landing, that is because The Beacon is a book to be admired and appreciated, rather than loved – I’m definitely pleased I revisited Susan Hill, as I feel there’s a lot more for me to discover. Next up is In the Springtime of the Year.

Suggestions for more, please?