1990s

So Many Books

StuckinaBook All , 6 Comments

I know I’ve read Simon Savidge’s post on Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books, because I commented on it, but when I saw the book in a local charity shop, I came upon as a new friend. Just goes to show – there must be hundreds of blog posts out there that I’ve written “Oh, I must keep an eye out for this!” – and I always mean it – but somehow the book slips from my mind. What I *did* note was that a) it was called So Many Books, and thus was likely to be my sort of book, and b) it was published by Sort of Books, the wonderful people behind the Tove Jansson translations. And so I bought it…

Like Simon S, I wasn’t expecting quite what I got – I was in HEiotL-withdrawal mode, and was hoping Zaid had written something about his own book collection, and his relationship with it. What he *has* written is actually much more about books as commodities. I suppose this has the bonus that it can’t deter anybody with unheard-of tastes and obscure favourites, but equally So Many Books can’t rouse my love and affection much.

You can Simon S’s thoughts, best bet, because he sums up so well the topics covered in Zaid’s book. Zaid looks at the production of books – how people are reached, cost differentials, how it works as a commodity in the marketplace. He compares the book to speech, and wonders how a conversation can be had. He approaches the topics of electronic reader, public library, and ancient manuscript with the same investigative mind, facts falling out of his head onto the page, always keeping his love of reading peeping over the parapet of economics and functionality. And there are occasionally nice little phrases: And how many college classes are no more than the tortuous reading of a text over the course of a year? Is anything more certain to make a book completely unintelligble than reading it slowly enough? It’s like examining a mural from two centimetres away and scanning it at a rate of ten square centimetres every third day for a year, like a short-sighted slug.Well, quite. The point Zaid returns to again and again is, in fact, the title – so many books. If no books were ever published again, it would take me 250,000 years to read all the ones already published. Even reading a list of the titles and authors would take fifteen years. He comes back to this point throughout the book, it seems to haunt his life. But not with the wry smile I expect of a bibliophile, as they cheerfully take Pride and Prejudice off the shelf to read again, but with some sort of panic that he can’t get everything into his mind at the same time… it was a bit off-putting, to be honest.

And that sums up my lack of enthusiasm for So Many Books as a whole, actually. If all these topics I’ve touched on fill you with interest, then this might be the book for you – but I must confess, I found it a little dull. I don’t think of books as commodities – I think of them as acquaintances and friends. I love the sort of bookish book which feels the same. And this wasn’t it… So, a word of warning – before you spot the title and buy this for all your bibliophile friends, check first to see if they’re the sort of person who also thrives on facts, figures, and ref. fig. 1-ing. If not, perhaps I can recommend Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing…

Hours and Hours

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It is many moons ago that I promised to write about The Hours by Michael Cunningham, and the 2001 film adaptation. And now, finally, I’m doing it – I daresay you haven’t been nervously scratching away at the computer keyboard, wondering when it would be posted about, but it’s always good to keep one’s promises. (On a side note – my surname is Thomas, and my parents used the phrase ‘Thomases Don’t Cheat’ throughout our childhood, in a bizarrely successful attempt to instil partisan responsibility in us. It’s only lately that I’ve been thinking ‘Thomases Keep Their Promises’ would have been equally noble, with the added advantage of rhyme.)

Anyway. Onto The Hours. Like many people my age, I suspect, the film of The Hours was my first introduction to Virginia Woolf. Having really enjoyed watching it, but remaining rather confused, I went away to read Mrs. Dalloway and the novel The Hours – setting me off down a Ginny track which hasn’t stopped, and which has significantly influenced my research at university. Mrs. Dalloway remains one of the books I have read most often – I think four times, maybe more.

Does anybody not know the plot of The Hours? Perhaps. I’ll summarise the premise as quickly as I can… the novel follows three separate trajectories. In 1923 Virginia Woolf is writing Mrs. Dalloway; in 1949 Mrs. Brown is reading Mrs. D, and in 1998 Clarissa Vaughan’s life in many ways mirrors Mrs. Dalloway’s. Michael Cunningham had originally intended simply a modernising of Mrs. Dalloway, the thread with Clarissa Vaughan, but eventually decided to write a more nuanced, and much cleverer, novel. The strands are all complete in themselves, telling in miniature the struggles and triumphs of three different women, but the true greatness of this novel (and it is great) comes from the ways in which the strands reflect upon each other. Mrs. Brown is trying to cope with marriage to the war veteran, popular at school, who feels that he did her a favour by marrying her. The scenes where she tries to pull on the guise of motherhood for the sake of her son, while feeling utterly adrift, are powerful and excellent. Clarissa Vaughan, similarly, is trying to find her place in life – a lesbian regarded by others as abandoning a ’cause’, and another slightly bewildered mother, her qualms about the superficiality of her life are those shared with Mrs. Dalloway herself. And the difficulties of Virginia Woolf’s life are not secret – the novel opens with her drowning herself, in 1941.

As well as an involving and ingeniusly-crafted novel, I’d argue that The Hours is a fascinating piece of social history investigation, and a not inconsiderable contribution to an understanding of Virginia Woolf. No novel, least of all one with three competing heroines, could wholly encapsulate a novelist’s life – but Cunningham certainly develops a credible and well-researched angle from which Woolf can be viewed. (For another excellent portrayal of Woolf’s life, through fiction, see Susan Seller’s Vanessa and Virginia).


So that is the book, deserved winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. Onto the film. Did it do the book justice? Well, my quick answer to that is YES, since it’s my favourite film ever. I should add that I am not particularly well versed in film history, and my points of reference are probably not that sophisticated – but it’s still my favourite film, and you might well like it too, if you haven’t seen it.

Stephen Daldry’s direction is spot-on – what is best about the film, and impossible in the book, is the swift comparison of the three strands. This is best demonstrated in the opening sequences, the morning passages of the three women, viewable here (about halfway through). The scenes shift between Virginia, Laura and Clarissa going about their morning rituals, and is done very cleverly, as the actions of all three conflate.

The lead performances by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep are all quite brilliant, any of them would have been worthy of the Oscar (and, no, Nicole didn’t win because of the fake nose any more than she did for the fake hair. Why do people say that about her, and not about the make-up-frenzy – not to mention snooze cruise – that was Lord of the Rings? Cat now officially amongst pigeons). The Hours is one of those rare films where all the casting is incredible. Aside from the three leads, the film can also boast Ed Harris, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, John C. Reilly, Eileen Atkins, Miranda Richardson, Stephen Dillane, and Allison Janney. Quite an embarrassement of riches. The way it is shot, the script adaptation by David Hare, the beautiful soundtrack by Philip Glass – The Hours doesn’t put a foot wrong. The portrayal of Virginia Woolf may be simplified a bit (film doesn’t have the scope for characterisation that novels do) but, again, it shows an angle of her. Both book and film The Hours are exceptional, and should be classics of their respective media for decades to come.

Fugitive Pieces

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I went to my first advanced-screening yesterday. My friend Hannah and I went to see Fugitive Pieces (which is on general release next week) and after a fun Chinese restaurant (‘Pock-marked Old Woman Beancurd’, anyone?) and getting rather lost, we eventually ended up in the little cinema with eleven other people, to watch it.

My friend Louie lent me the book Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels ages ago, and not long after that I found a cheap copy in a charity shop, so bought it intending to give Louie her copy back. Which, of course, I forgot to do. And the other day Bloomsbury sent me a review copy, since they’ve done a rejacketed edition. Three copies of it in my bedroom, and I still hadn’t read it when Marie emailed with the opportunity to attend a screening… One bus journey to London later, and I’d read it. Quite quickly, not picking up on all the details perhaps, but certainly it was read.

Fugitive Pieces was published in 1996, and won the Orange Prize for fiction. It might have been a really big deal: I was only ten so I wouldn’t know. The novel kicks off with Jakob, a Polish Jew, hidden in his house as Nazis come and take away his family. He buries himself up to his neck in the forest, to escape detection, and is found by Greek archeologist Athos, who takes him home. The novel takes so many turns and twists that I can’t simplify it here – but, to give a vague gist, it’s about Jakob’s life, the repercussions of what he’s witnessed, his continual meditation on lost sister Bella, and the relationships he has – both familial and romantic. The final section of the book is narrated by Ben, an admirer of Jakob’s poetry, and in his own way affected by the far-reaching effects of the Holocaust.

I didn’t think the book was very filmable, when I read it. The story is involving, but Michaels’ main strength is her incredibly viscous, rich writing style. Metaphors and images overlap and interlace, beautifully. But how to film this?

Somehow they did. Jeremy Podeswa (the director and writer) does an incredible job translating this moving novel to the screen. Though it doesn’t follow the same structure as Michaels’ work, quite, with more flashbacks and flashforwards, all the most memorable sections and expressions remain, and remain poignant. ‘The miracle of wood is not that it burns, but that it floats’ is there, for example, very moving in both film and novel. I’m often dubious about the possibility of capturing the ‘ethos’ or ‘atmosphere’ of a novel, rather than a direct translation of what the author set down, but Fugitive Pieces is a great example of this transferral succeeding.

Stephen Dillane plays Jakob throughout much of his life (though not, obviously, as a young boy – a rather mesmeric Robbie Kay) and does so brilliantly. I only know Dillane from his expressive portrayal of Leonard Woolf in The Hours, but Fugitive Pieces shows a range and depth which I hadn’t imagined. Though Rosamund Pike gets her name on the posters, her role as Jakob’s wife Alex is short, and doesn’t bring across Alex’s kookiness quite enough – a gently zany character who works better on page than screen, I suspect. Much more central is Rade Serbedzija as Athos, who is impressively warm and wise throughout, hiding pain without being oppressed by it.

Fugitive Pieces, both book and film, are poetic and sensitive narratives of the effects of the Holocaust – but that is only where they begin. It’s difficult to say anything new about the awful suffering and incredible acts of cruelty (as well as those of heroism) brought about by the Nazis – Michaels realises that a list of graphic ill-treatment isn’t the way to do it. By writing characters with strong loving relationships, and others desperately seeking them, she can best emphasise the trauma which pervades far beyond the moments of evil – and also how good can be brought out of despicable acts. Podeswa’s film expertly translates these themes, and – though not always a comfortable film to watch – is a beautiful, sensitive and captivating one.

Forever England

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Though I always find some sort of interest in my studies, occasionally a lit crit book comes along which is such a pleasure to read that I almost feel guilty alloting work time to it. Step forward Alison Light, and Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. If the name rings a bell, then perhaps you’ve read her more recent book, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants (which has made it from my must-read-very-soon shelf to my bedside table, about as far as a book can get before it’s actually in my hands).

Forever England was published in 1991 and is essentially the outcome of Light’s dissertation – not as wide-ranging as Nicola Humble’s The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s-1950s (see my post here), Light’s book is instead specifically about four authors, each with a chapter devoted to them. And they are all authors who’ve cropped up on Stuck-in-a-Book in the past – Ivy Compton-Burnett; Agatha Christie; Jan Struther (well, Mrs. Miniver really); Daphne du Maurier. Light treats them as serious authors, not amusing side-notes in a literary history, and that is what is so refreshing about Forever England. Not that she claims more for them than is there, but rather she values the role of these writers for what they are. Christie was professedly lowbrow; ICB has a complex way of presenting dialogue; Jan Struther wasn’t a proto-feminist; D du M had an odd relationship with her family in her writing – all of this is true and acknowledged, but each writer is also re-evaluated and investigated with honest interest.

Not sure how available this book is; I have a feeling it might be quite tricky to track down, but perhaps libraries will have copies, or can get them. Unlike most literary criticsm, I would recommend this as a cover-to-cover read, utterly accessible without being insulting to the intellect. While the scope of Humble’s book makes that remain the first port of call for me, Light’s contribution to the specifics of these four writers is fascinating and genuinely enjoyable to read.

Putting bread and butter on the table

StuckinaBook All , 14 Comments

You know that, even when you have hundreds of unread books, not a lot of spare cash, and no spare reading time – sometimes, even with these limitations, a book will make you buy it? Impossible-to-resist, head-straight-to-Amazon-to-buy sort of book? Well, my e-friend Lyn (from dovegreybooks Yahoo group, a source of many such books) mentioned one the other day, and, mere days later, it is in front of me.

It’s The Bread and Butter Stories by Mary Norton. For those who recognise the name but can’t think where, it’s probably because she is the author of The Borrowers, a back I’m shamefully never read, but indeed to do so soon. We grew up loving the TV series. I’ll tell you what Lyn wrote about it, not sure where it’s quoted from, perhaps the Virago website…

Reminiscent of Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor, these 15 recently discovered short stories by the author of The Borrowers are wonderful period pieces about being an upper-middle class woman in the 1940s and early 50s. Many are reminiscent of Brief Encounter with their longings for adventure or romance to break the stifling constraints on their lives. Here are respectable conventional women settled into dull marriages finding themselves entertaining the notion of an affair while on holiday; a dowdy woman who suddenly decides to have her face done and take the £1.00 post-office savings and blow it on a fine hat. Then there are funny, satirical pieces: useful knowledge like how to cure cold feet at bedtime, a sideways look at acting for a television drama and a very entertaining and fascinating piece on writing for children which includes dialogue with an editor who wants short words and happy stories. Written with a wry and gentle humour, the collection makes for fascinating reading.

Doesn’t it sound wonderful? I’ve yet to read them, but it will only be a matter of time… Lyn did only mention the book four days ago, after all. I have read the Introduction by Mary Norton’s daughter – apparently Mary Norton called these stories ‘bread and butter stories’ because they put bread and butter on the table – written for magazines, but not published together until the 1990s when found in the attic… I’ll report back when I’m done, but I’m willing to bet at least one person will already be scrambling to Amazon or abebooks to get their hands on a copy!

(Results) – Letters from Menabilly

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What a nail-biter the Dickens vs. Hardy match was – and the final result was… a tie! 9 votes each, and 3 going for neither. And, what was even more interesting, most voters seemed not to have to hesitate for a moment. I wasn’t sure which way it would swing, but didn’t expect it to be so close as to be identical. Which, I suppose, means that my vote will be the decider… and I choose Dickens. Something unique in his writing, so witty but grotesque, a world which is unmistakably his. I admire Hardy a lot, but… Charles wins it.

Onto a wholly different topic, I finished Letters From Menabilly today. These are letters from Daphne du Maurier to Oriel Malet (Persephone author; I read the introduction ages ago, so can’t remember the reasoning behind excluding Oriel’s letters. Perhaps they weren’t saved?) Bought it in the midst of my *intended* du Maurier spree, which ended up being just The Flight of the Falcon and My Cousin Rachel, and now this. Somehow it hasn’t worked out exactly as I’d hoped… instead of building on my deep love of Rebecca, and hopeful adoration of Daphne du Maurier, she has rather faded in my estimation, both as a writer and a person. I shouldn’t have expected her to be able to match Rebecca, but I found The Flight of the Falcon fairly tedious at times, though My Cousin Rachel was rather good. It was more on the personal front…

Others have read Letters from Menabilly and loved Daphne as a result. Lynne aka dovegreyreader rather liked it, I think Becca Oxford Reader was also a fan. I enjoyed reading it, but found Daphne to be rather cold-hearted, a little selfish, and not altogether charming. I think opinion shifted irredeemably when she wrote this to Oriel Malet: “If I had never married, and hadn’t had financial success with my books, I think I’d have lived the same life you do”. I paraphrase a little, because I can’t find the quotation, but that’s more or less it. How insensitive! Yes, perhaps I can’t judge the friendship from outside, but so many of these letters seem to gloss over Oriel’s concerns and talk about Daphne’s own.

And then the in-jokes and funny neologisms. We know, from reading the Mitford letters, that these can be adorable or witty – I just found them “tarsome”, as Georgie would say, in Daphne’s letters. Tell-him and crumb and a shilling and beeding and waine and pegging and Doom… incomprehensible without a glossary and so often used, and without any noticeable charm. Am I being contrary? Perhaps. But ‘Tell-Him’ (used to describe more or less anything Daphne found dull or lecturey, to the slightest degree) was a label for almost everything she encountered, and seemed a bit cruel.

There was one exciting bit, which I’d already read about in Lynne’s review – when she writes about Frank Baker, the author of my beloved book Miss Hargreaves. He sent Daphne du Maurier a copy of his novel The Birds, which predates her short story which Alfred Hitchcock adapted so memorably – Daphne writes, ‘So I began his, rather smiling derisively, thinking it would be nonsense, and it’s frightfully good! Much more psychological politics than mine, and going into great Deep Thoughts, I was quite absorbed!’ I have The Birds but have yet to read it…

One final thing I must say – Oriel Malet comes across as a lovely, lovely person. Not only the recipient of the letters, so intersperses letters every now and then with prose for context. Usually explaining where they both were at the stage of their lives when writing, but also with such interest and charm and I looked forward to these sections the most. Her experiences living on a houseboat are especially delightful. So, though Daphne comes across as no fairy godmother, the book is worth seeking out – and I shall be turning my Daphne-fest into an Oriel hunt.

Black Dogs

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Somehow, over the years, I’ve read five novels by Ian McEwan. Not such an astonishing fact, except that he is far from being my favourite novelist – I admire quite a few of them, really like some, dislike others. And, thinking about it, four of those five have been read for book groups or similar – including Black Dogs which I finished (and, indeed, started) today.

It certainly battles out with Atonement for being my favourite McEwan – people have recommended ‘early McEwan’ to me, and I can see why. The writing here is compact, tense – so often I’d finish reading paragraphs or phrases and think “wow” – quite the opposite of Saturday.

Black Dogs centres around an incident which happened on a couple’s honeymoon, involving the dogs in question. We spend most of the novel knowing that something took place, but not knowing what, so I shan’t spoil it for you – the novel is filled with the impact and effects of the event. June and Bernard are the central couple – both old by the ‘present day’, both recounting their lives to the narrator, Jeremy, who is writing a sort of biography. We flit back to their youth, forward to their separate old age, to Jeremy’s life and marriage (to their daughter). Bernard is an ex-Communist whose narrow ideology cannot be made compatible with June’s spiritual ‘conversion’. I give that word inverted commas as, though June is supposed to represent ‘religion’ in the novel, she never does much other than embrace a hazy spirituality.

Nevertheless, she is the novel’s most interesting character, one with more depth than the rest. It is particularly to see her in an old people’s home; how disorientated she is: ‘In the few seconds that it took to approach slowly and set down my bag, she had to reconstruct her whole existence, who and where she was, how and why she came to be in this small white-walled room. Only when she had all that could she begin to remember me.’ Makes me want to watch Away From Her again…

Perhaps the most intriguing bit of the book is something Jeremy thinks, when researching the lives of June and Bernard: ‘Turning points are the inventions of story-tellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by, a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character’s growth.’ If McEwan is anything, he is the novelist of turning points. And usually very good with this technique, I must say – why is he arguing against it here, I wonder?

All in all, I thought it was very good – not much of a linear plot, more vignettes pulled together by the centring force of the Black Dogs incident. Some incredibly taut language and effective writing. I should add, however, that the majority of the group’s response at book group was middling or negative – but we all agreed it was better than Saturday!

For the benefit of those who have found their way here from the book group, here are the links to other Book Group Books which I’ve written about here…. not as many as I’d thought. And, for anyone interested, this is the book group’s website. Very nice it is too.

Speaking of Love – Angela Young
Alva & Irva – Edward Carey
To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

The Good Life

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As promised, another book to add to my (in no order) 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About – and the sixth non-fiction book to make the list. White Cargo by Felicity Kendal was a book I picked up 20p in a local charity shop years ago, on the strength of loving her performance in The Good Life. For those who don’t know it (the programme was called Good Neighbors in the US) it was a 1970s sitcom about self-sufficiency in Suburbia. Felicity Kendal and Richard Briers kept chickens and a goat in their suburban back garden, much to the displeasure of their decidedly upper-class (and hilarious) neighbours, played by Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington.

So, I assumed Felicity Kendal’s autobiography might focus on this sitcom, and the British acting scene of the 1970s. I couldn’t have been much further from the truth. What I didn’t know about Felicity Kendal was that she was born and brought up in India, as part of an acting troupe led by her father Geoffrey Kendal – they toured from place to place, performing everything from (lots of) Shakespeare to (hurray!) A. A. Milne. These recollections are leant poignancy by the fact that Kendal writes her autobiography at the bedside of father Geoffrey, who is in a coma and slowly dying. It would be mawkish in fiction, but in non-fiction it is courageous and moving and gives Felicity Kendal a real drive to write her history.

And a compelling history it is. Having her father so near death doesn’t affect the honesty of her narrative – the loving/warring relationship between the two is represented with great truthfulness, and comes to a head when she decides to move to England to pursue her acting career. Before that decision is made, she describes a childhood surrounded by hand-to-mouth actors with a love of their trade – as well as a firsthand guide to living in India in ‘the long twilight of the British Empire’, as the Evening Standard described it.

Utterly fascinating, moving, witty and with a writerly skill which makes one wonder if the stage’s gain was the book’s loss. Certainly the best autobiography I’ve read by someone whose profession isn’t writing. Even if you’ve never heard of Felicity Kendal, this is a captivating account of an experience both extraordinary, and representative of a type of acting group whose story is seldom told, and which doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

Blinking, Bells and Butterflies

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Doing well on yesterday’s challenge, people – keep up the good work!

I read another Oxford Book Group book today – in fact, had to request it to a reading room and read it all in my tea breaks. Luckily it was quite short. That’s what happens when the entire book is dictated by the winking of an eyelid.

I don’t know how familiar people are with Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly? A film is coming out soon, so perhaps that has helped it leap to the public eye. It is basically the selective autobiography of an editor-in-chief of Elle magazine who has a major stroke and is left with locked-in syndrome. As he points out, the first (and he suggests, only) character in literature to have this condition is Noirtier in Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. He can no longer move any of his body, except his left eyelid, but retains total cognitive ability. The French term for it, “maladie de l’emmuré vivant”, literally means walled-in alive disease.

How does one make a book out of this? Well, if it weren’t true, it could only be used as a tasteless or lazy gimmick in the background of another narrative – as it is, Bauby writes an honest but witty account, heart-rending but not chest-beatingly gloom. Alongside day-to-day occurences, like the visit of his two children, Bauby intersperses nostalgic recollections, ironies, witty musings and a very human frustration and spirit. He is able to see the humour in a desperate situation – one of my favourite bits, which had to be translated for the version I read, was when he asked for his glasses, only to be stopped early and asked why he wanted the moon (lunettes; lune). And in some ways (forgive me if I stretch a point) that is what The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly performs – the mundane alongside the extraordinary; the glasses alongside the moon. Though a slim volume, Bauby has created a beautiful elegy to living and a pathos-filled account of life as an observer rather than participant. You will finish this autobiography recognising the fragility of existence, but laughing at the pomposity of any such idea in the face of Bauby’s humour and stubborn refusal to let even the most extreme situation crush him.

Letters, Pray

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Following on from yesterday’s post about my own personal letters, we’ll move onto published letters. I think the topic has come up here before, and Karen has definitely discussed it, but I had a slightly different angle on the matter today.

I tend to read letters when I’m, um, otherwise occupied – useful to have something to peruse in snatches, where the thread won’t be lost if five minute bursts are the only opportunity nature affords – and have recently finished Dear Friend & Gardener by Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd. This is two years of exchanged letters, covering a few topics but almost always gardens and gardening. The scenario is a little unlike most collections of letters, in that these friends appear to have been approached by a publisher before the two years exchange began: this is from the last letter –

I suppose this’ll be my last letter of the year, which means of the series, but it does not mean that we shall stop writing to or telephoning each other. Just that was shall no longer be going public. I don’t think that has inhibited us much. The main difference, from a totally private letter, is the extra explanatory matter that is necessary, as, in this letter, ‘the autumn-flowering Crocus speciosus’. Obviously ‘autumn-flowering’ would be omitted in a wholly private letter, as we both know this perfectly well. Apart from that, perhaps the odd indiscertion had to be forgone, but nothing much.

Quite. I know absolutely nothing about gardening. As I read the letters, I got the feeling I was one of the people Beth and Christopher would most pity – someone who likes seeing gardens, but is content to remain in total ignorance as to how and why it looks like it does. These letters are littered with Latin plant names, and at one point Beth professes quite sweet astonishment that the public might not know them all. For subject matter, I couldn’t grasp this book – I read on because of the friendship and the passion these two writers exchanged. Dear Friend & Gardener is a small window on a practice I know nothing about, but also a thriving love of gardening that is both alien and captivating to me.

Have you ever read a book about something about which you knew nothing, only to be enthralled by the writer’s passion? A biography, perhaps, or letters or just regular non-fiction. I’ve never picked up non-fiction before unless I was confident I’d be interested in the topic, but in this genre – like any other – good writing can be read for itself, and spark an unknown interest.

The next collection of letters I’ve started is Letters to a Friend: The Spiritual Autobiography of a Distinguished Writer by Rose Macaulay. The ‘Friend’ in question is a Catholic priest in America, whose guidance and wisdom helped Macaulay rediscover her faith. Only Macaulay’s side of the correspondance is published, but so far it is proving witty, touching and interesting. And has a beautiful cover…