Stuck in a Book

Ow. I have just performed the most exercise since… well, at least eight years. And it took much longer than I anticipated – which is why today’s post has slipped over into Sunday. Oops!

No, I haven’t run a marathon or won the rugby world cup (topical, no?) Yes, I have battled with the tester of mental and physical agility which Argos label a ‘bookcase’. It took about three hours. I have genuine blisters. But it got done. Some will suggest that giving up on screwing in screws, and lunging at them with a hammer instead, is a short-sighted and foolish measure. To these people may I repeat – blisters. And the bookcase hasn’t fallen down yet.

So here it is – looks simple, doesn’t it? At least the instructions were in English, unlike some Ikea bookcases I’ve purchased. And a tent I tried to put up a while ago appeared to have instructions in Polish or Dutch or something that was of minimal use to me – though doubtless swathes of Poles or Dutchmen have successfully put up enough to keep fields of campers dry. Oh, and the list is purely photographic-angle stuff, promise.

More importantly, on go the books. Only a small fraction of my books came with me to Oxford. Which brings me to the question of ordering – this can raise strong opinions from people. Harriet recently shelved some books in colour order – something which looks beautiful, but which I think is only practical in the home and should never be attemped by anyone trying to sell books; how am I to know where to look?! My friend Barbara-from-Ludlow arranges many of hers in subject/period/tone etc. in a very personal system which means everything is with companionable neighbours, as it were. What did I go for? Alphabetical, I’m afraid. The librarian in me coming through, isn’t it? There are slight twists – separate shelf for Persephone Books and one for my beautiful Jane Austens. Sorry the titles and spines aren’t very clear in the photo – I think it’s because it’s past midnight, and thus dark… and another day without a sketch, but I think the image of me putting this contraption together is quite amusing enough without further illustration. If you have read my post till here, then I would suggest you get some tools such as poulan pro chainsaw, Wagner flexio, and the Graco paint sprayer before buying any form of DIY projects for your home. These tools can help you simplify and complete the DIY project quicker.

BAFAB draw tomorrow – or, rather, later today – so very last chance to enter: here!

Our Vicar’s Wife was very touched to have lots of you pop over to visit her, so do keep saying hello! Carole asked me if Our Vicar would complete the family of bloggers… well, we can ask him, but I’m not sure he’ll take the bait. We’ll see.

I mentioned my Book Group the other day – well, our next meet-up is November 13th, and we nominated potential books for a poll. At the moment my suggestion, Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, is winning, with 7 votes to 2. Looking likely that it will prevail, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to extend the group to all readers of S-i-a-B as well. Fancy joining in?

I’ve not read Fair Play, but loved A Summer Book and The Winter Book by Jansson, also author of the Moomin books. Her writing is beautiful and evocative and did I mention beautiful? It;s about two woman growing old together on an island, I think… “philosophically calm – and discreetly radical” according to the blurb. Would be great if people fancied reading it before November 13th and sharing their views, so that I can take a barrage of opinions along to the book group! If you want to, then it’s here for Amazon UK, and currently in the buy-one-get-one-half-price in Borders… Sorry US-residents, you might have to take sneakier routes.

What fun!

ehonyaku, I don’t remember you posting before – would love to know which books you’ve bought from seeing them here, and what you thought of them!?

What with working, and my hectic social life (ahem), it is often night time before I get the chance to write on here, and consequently I am sometimes dead on my feet and not able to produce much in the way of literary chatter – nor sketches. I don’t know if anyone is missing them ardently (can one miss something ardently?) but they shall be back, fear not. Possibly if I ever get around to thinking ahead about my blog posts.

So this will be by way of a catch up, and a few bits and pieces. Not a lot to tax the mind.

First of all, blog news. You’ve heard about The Clan a fair amount – Our Vicar, Our Vicar’s Wife, The Carbon Copy and, of course, Stuck-in-a-Book. Until now only The Carbon Copy and I had blogs (his is under the pseudonym ‘Colin’ in my links). I discovered a few days ago that Our Vicar’s Wife had secretly started a blog over at Windows Live Spaces, which you should be able to find here. It may be one of those where you have to sign in, or something, but give it a whirl anyway – I’m sure she’d love you to pop by. I stole the picture from Flickr (that is legal, isn’t it?), but it seemed appropriate.

Secondly, my friend Maggie has resumed her blog Apprentice Book Counter – again, pop along to the links on the left hand side, and catch up with ABC. It’s been four months of hard work on her part, so I’m sure she’ll have plenty to share!

Today I got an email from Fiona Robyn, and thought I’d let you know about her book A Year of Question. It’s non-fiction, about recognising the truly valuable things in life, and… well, the website will describe it best. Not my usual reading fare, but thought I’d bring it to the attention of anyone likely to have their interest piqued.

What else? The Freshers have arrived in Oxford, and I spent the morning extolling the virutes of the library service to people in Freshers’ Fair. Bless them – glad not to be in their shoes again.

Back with proper news again at some point, promise. Right now I need to sleep for a hundred years – but I think my alarm clock has a different agenda.

I’m sure most of you have been in this situation: you want to tell someone a funny quotation you’ve read, only you can’t remember the book, author, page or even the quotation properly. You end up saying “and then it was something screamingly witty about chutney” and your friend fakes a smile, before changing the topic? Don’t lie, I know you’ve been there.

Well, books of quotations are all very well in their place, and indeed can be invaluable resources, but won’t have those quirky little gems you’ve found in a book few others will have read. That’s why I started this little fellow; a wee notebook of quotations jotted down when I come across them. Haven’t used it much for the past few years, but popped one in from The Go-Between today: “I was in love with the exceptional, and ready to sacrifice all normal happenings to it”. What a good description of excitable delirium.

Some other favourites from there – some famous, some not so:

“People always live for ever when there is any annuity to be paid them”
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

“I could not say I like music, Mr. Huntley. Music is air to me. Without it, I could not live”
“H’m. I feel just the same about food, so we’ve something in common”.
Miss Hargreaves – Frank Baker

“You can’t expect a cat to know manners like a Christian”
Agnes Grey – Anne Bronte

‘Most smiles express either benevolence or gaiety; but Mr. Boswell’s did neither. It was a mere extension of the mouth.’
Discipline – Mary Brunton

‘Simon was at the age when he imagined that everyone around him took an intense and generally malevolent interest in his doings.’
The Gypsy’s Baby – Richmal Crompton

“We had some dear friends in India, who went on to Singapore once, and they liked it very much. The wife, I’m sorry to say, was drowned in a boating accident there. That rather spoiled their stay.”
Mrs. Harter – E. M. Delafield

‘She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post office, as something large, secure, and fixed; and though she knew the small numbers of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.’
Dubliners – James Joyce

‘The writer’s art consists above all in making us forget that he uses words’.
Principles of Psychology – William James

‘It is true when you are by yourself and you think about life, it is always sad. All that excitement and so on has a way of suddenly leaving you, and it’s as though, in the silence, somebody called your name, and your heard your name for the first time.’
‘At the Bay’ – Katherine Mansfield

‘Prissy felt a little cheated; as one does, for instance, when someone in a book goes out at a door on the right, whereas in one’s mind the door has been all the time on the left’.
Tea With Mr. Rochester – Frances Towers

‘Sam had many excellent qualities, but he did not in the least resemble a potted gernaium.’
Sam The Sudden – P. G. Wodehouse

‘There were young men who read, lying in shallow arm-chairs, holding their books as if they had hold in their hands of something that would see them through; they being in torment, coming from midland towns, clergymen’s sons’.
Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf (writing about me, it seems, as a midland clergyman’s son!)

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed BAFAB week again. Buy-a-Friend-a-Book, that is, and I encourage you all to enter. For those who haven’t come across this before, check out their official website. The idea is simple – you just add your name in the comments, and, at the end of the week, I find some ingenious method to award a winner. No word yet on whether or not Patch the Wonder-Dog will be resuming his masterful selection process. I think I’m going to continue to send a book from the heart of Stuck-in-a-Book – that is, the winner can select their free book from my 50 Books You Must Read… which currently stands at 14.

In unrelated news, I saw the film Paris, Je T’aime this evening. I’ll confess, the main reason I wanted to see it was because subtitles = sophisticated, and I fancied a dose of self-improvement, however superficial. I don’t know whether or not this illusory intelligence has lingered, but the film really impressed, amused and moved me. For those not in the know, this is a series of 18 short films, each named after an area of Paris and taking place there. The genres and styles vary wildly, and each is a complete entity, with unique directors and actors. Some duds, of course (no idea what the Elijah Wood + vampire bit was about – especially since I had my eyes closed for most of it) but some really beautiful gems. My favourite was an almost dialogue-less piece, following a nanny as she leaves her own baby in a creche, in order to care for the baby of her rich employer. Beautiful acting from Catalino Sandino Moreno. The most moving was the final one; an American tourist recounts, in appalling French, her lonely trip to Paris and the emotions it evokes. You begin be laughing at her silliness, but end by feeling deeply for her. The DVD isn’t out in England yet, but I recommend you seek out this beautiful series of visual vignettes – a homage to humanity as much as Paris.

Oh, and don’t forget to enter BAFAB!

Have you ever come across those On This Day… books, which list all the significant events to take place on a single date throughout time? Today, for example, being 28th September, witnessed Toronto becoming the capital of Ontario, Canada; cannabis was outlawed in the UK; the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation aired. Brigitte Bardot, Gwyneth Paltrow and Confucius were born (how can they know when Confucius was born?!) Herman Melville, Louis Pasteur and Harpo Marx died.

But Stuck-in-a-Book is going to look at something both more trivial and more literary than these – trivial and literary, that’s a fairly accurate description of this blog… I’ve kept a list of books read for a few years, and thought it might be quite interesting to see what I was reading on September 28th every year. One of those utterly arbitrary, but nonetheless intriguing, things which can occupy the blogger with time on his hands (and, incidentally, a cold. Bah.)

In 2007… right at the moment I am reading L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between and utterly loving it. I anticipate reporting back in the near-future…

In 2006… get ready to be impressed – I was reading Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. What good fortune that I chose today’s date; had it been a week earlier, I would have had to confess to The Devil Wears Prada.

In 2005… Fidelity by Susan Glaspell. Goodness, that doesn’t feel like two years ago. A Persephone Books reissue, and a rather wonderful one, though perhaps that is tautologous.

In 2004… In a nice piece of cross-post serendipity, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, read in my preparation for starting university and my VicLit course.

In 2003… The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. This does seem to be a fairly misrepresentative list – I read so few classics, as the rather peculiar books mentioned on this blog demonstrate… perhaps September is my month for reading renowned works?

In 2002… I was reading the very wonderful General Impressions by E. M. Delafield. For those who’ve loved Diary of a Provincial Lady, do seek out this book, and As Others Hear Us. Both are compilations of sketches, generally writing about an aspect of British domestic life in a way even funnier than the PL herself.

In 2001… First Plays by A. A. Milne. Some of his earliest work was as a playwright, and these are well worth seeking out. Probably due a re-read now…

Hope you didn’t find that trip down memory lane too dull! I find these comparisons so interesting, and, if you don’t object, they might be back at a later date. If nothing else, they should offer a representation of how my reading has changed and developed over the past seven years. Anyone else able to share their September reads through time??

If you were listening to Radio 4 in the days when Our Vicar’s Wife was Our Primary School Teacher, you may have heard a bright young thing winning a national short story competition with Mrs. Dean’s Dilemma. It rose, according to the Irish host whose name I forget, like a flower from the thousands of others. This lady was Miss Anne Durdin, who later became Mrs. Peter Thomas, and still later my lovely mother.

On Monday OVW made her much anticipated return to the world of radio, appearing on Libby Purves’ The Learning Curve, talking about that best of topics; twins. In her capacity as Primary Education Consultant for Tamba (Twins And Mutliple-Birth Association) Mum was able to give wise words on whether or not to split twins into different classes. Never much of an issue to The Carbon Copy and myself in our primary education, since my First School (pop. 80) only had one class per year, and sometimes two years per class. As the years went by, we were in different classes for lessons, but the same house – until we converged back towards each other, and ended up in most of the same classes for A Level. Not a particularly deeply thought out process, but one which hopefully didn’t do us too much harm – we both managed to get degrees without hating each other, so that’s probably a tick.
Anyway, if you’d like to hear OVW, you can Listen Again here. Not sure how this works for non-UK readers, but good luck.

On an entirely different note, Ruth sent me a salutary email this week. Johnny Look-in-the-Air shares not only hyphens with Simon Stuck-in-a-Book, but also a reluctance to look where he’s going. In weeks when essays looked unlikely to finish themselves, I could sometimes be found wandering the streets with my nose in a book, to the peril of pedestrains, traffic and myself. See the page here; don’t worry if your German isn’t the best, there is a translation on the right hand side. Thank you Ruth, I shall take your warning to heart.