2000s

50 Books… but this one you WON’T read…

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8. Scar Tissue – Ruth Mary Hills

First of all, apologies to those of you whose experience of yesterday’s post was a blur of pictures dotted all over the place. That apology might extend to every post – I’ve discovered that screen definition, or some such, will alter things like where photos are positioned. Consequently, some of you will have seen my self-erasure in straight lines… some like a manic collage. Sorry!

And back to books, after a couple of days in other territories. Today’s book is a little misleading – yes, I’ve nominated it for my ’50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About’, but in actual fact, I don’t expect any of you to read this. I’d be surprised if you did.

Do you want to know why?

Well, try Googling “Ruth Mary Hills”, the author. Remember the quotation marks, so that you only get the results where her name has been written in full. I’ll give you a moment whilst you do that, and I’ll just dust a bookshelf and sweep some crumbs under the rug.

Done?

Right. Unless I’m very much mistaken, you’ve come away from a total of ‘no’ results. Fear not, I haven’t made up this book, and used my limitless powers in PhotoShop to create that photo. It’s just that Scar Tissue: theological and other poems is limited to a print run of 75 copies. It’s not in the Bodleian. I can’t even find an address for the Amaté Press, who published it. I had no idea it was this exclusive when I picked it up in Blackwells, and liked the look of it. It’s a beautiful book; very white, clean, lovely font inside – all these things made me buy it. And now I’ve read the poetry inside, I can declare it an all-round success. I’ve typed out my favourite poem at the bottom (N.B. cannot find contact details for the author – but will, of course, remove if required) – but, as I said, I don’t expect anyone to read this.

So what is the point of this entry? Well, the Book You Must Read is not Scar Tissue, but what I shall now refer to as A Ruth Mary Hills, or an RMH. Hope that doesn’t mean anything nefarious. An RMH is a book only you know about, and which no-one else really has an opportunity of hearing about. Your copy is the only loanable one; you have an exclusive relationship with this work. Maybe it’s something a friend or relative has written; something you’ve written yourself; or, like my RMH, one just happened upon accidentally. I love reading books which aren’t wildly well-known, but an RMH takes that one step further – and gives you a great, unique relationship with the novel, poetry or whatever it is. I don’t usually sign up to Reception Theory, but in this case…

So, my question is – what’s your RMH? Do you have one yet?

Revelation

The Christ child came to me
In mystic mode
As if to warm
A heart stone cold

I knew not whence or how
The sudden flame
That burnt and glowed
Within my frame

Yet on the way betwixt home and town
A wondrous love was in me known

Forlorn and mean
And quite alone,
Mere skin and bone,
Was I to whom
This love was shown

50 Books…

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7. Watching the English – Kate Fox

Just to prove that a book needn’t be/be about literature in order to interest me. Fox’s book is pop-anthropological, though with a staggering amount of research, and manages to be both highly informative and incredibly funny.

Her objective is to discover what it is that characterises the English. Here’s the catch – she’s English herself. And a lot of the experiments she conducts involves breaking every tenet of Englishness, to find out how this goes down with those around her. Generally, not well. She even jumps queues.

Fox looks at pretty much every aspect fo Englishness that she you can think of – starting, of course, with ‘Weather-Speak’ (no, we aren’t obsessed by the weather – we’re obsessed with avoiding personal interaction), and covering gender, dialect, clothing, driving, holidays, furniture, sport, food, offices, pets, tea, whether to say serviette or napkin… all heavily laced with that most important of all English traits: ‘The Importance of Not Being Earnest’. What makes this book successful is how funny Fox is – in the self-aware, self-deprecating, laughing-at-nothing-in-particular way that enables English people to have even the slightest amount of social interaction.

Now, I’ve only ever lived in England – I’ve covered most of the West side, having gone from Merseyside to Worcestershire to Somerset, but certainly haven’t been in any other culture for a particularly long time. When reading this, I kept thinking “well, yes, of course – that makes sense”, wondering how the book could be received by non-Brits. Until I got to the section on Pubs. I very rarely go into pubs, and certainly don’t count myself a ‘regular’ – so reading this section opened a whole new world to me, and must be like most of the rest of the book, for unEnglish people. Instead of “well, yes, of course” I started uttering “Do they? Really? How absurd”. But, while Fox never justifies our more stupid habits, she does make them seem extremely endearing. Like a small animal which hasn’t quite learnt the most sensible way of getting around.

My favourite section is on queueing (or ‘lining up’ if you’re American, I believe). Is anything more English? Or more outrageous if contravened? But it is apparently a matter of wonderment for foreigners, the way in which we can deal with multiple tills, several toilets, the bus turning up at the wrong spot, a pub counter, a wake – an appropriate queue for every occasion. I love the bit where Fox talks about a ‘one person queue’ – it is so true. If I am alone at a bus stop, I will stand by the pole, facing the right direction, as though an invisible queue were behind me, and threatening to take my place.

You’ll love this book if you’re English – but it is also a wonderful tome of information and amusing trivia for our weird little nation, if you’re not.

Dear Diary…

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I don’t know about you, but I always feel in some sort of quandry when reading someone else’s diaries. I mean published ones, of course – I would never commit such a violation as to read a friend’s diary or journal… but why do we make the distinction here? Because the author is dead? Because they are a stranger? Because they are famous? Hmm… You see, the difficult thing is, I love reading diaries of people – and letters, especially if a book has the correspondence between both, er, correspondents. For some in this ilk, look out for the letters of Joyce Grenfell and Virginia Graham; or Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill. You see, there I go already, recommending things I’m not *quite* sure I feel comfortable reading.

I’ve kept a journal since 2001 – they are all spread out in that picture up there. Now, I would hate, hate, hate for anyone to read them – and I imagine anyone else would hate, hate, hate to be put through the experience. I was 15 when I started writing them, remember. I love this quotation from Richmal Crompton’s novel ‘The Gypsy’s Baby’, she even got the name right: “Simon was at the age when he imagined that everyone around him took an intense and generally malevolent interest in his doings.” Well, that was me, I daresay.

So why am I content to read the diaries of, say, Virginia Woolf? Partly because they’re brilliant pieces of writing, but what IS it that makes the diaires of lesser beings so interesting? Just curiosity? A couple of years ago an Oxfam worker discovered the diary of Ilene Powell, from 1925, and published it (see pic). It was incredibly mundane, with tiny scraps of entries – about two days’ output for a regular, angsty teenager. So why was it so interesting?

Well, all of this soul-searching had to be followed with some sort of book recommendation, didn’t it? Having questioned the practice of reading diaries, I am going to flag up The Assassin’s Cloak (not to be confused with Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, as I did for a while). For every day of the year, the editors have selected entries from ‘the world’s greatest diarists’. All the invasive fun of diary-reading, plus the excitement of serendipity, as you see that Pepys was eating an egg on the same day as Vita Sackville-West centuries later. Ok, I made that one up – but there are all sorts of interesting comparisons. The usual suspects, such as Pepys, are featured – but all periods are covered, and The Provincial Lady even gets a look-in. The only dull ones are those from self-important politicians and/or celebrities, publishing their own highly-edited diaries, citing how many famous people they have met. I’m a few weeks behind, but this is an ideal day-by-day companion, but also good to flick through. For instance, on my birthday Maurice Collis was listening to Lady Astor talk about Stalin; Anthony Powell was assuring Frank Longford that he wasn’t used in A Dance To The Music of Time; Jean Cocteau was musing upon the lure of the radio.

I suppose blogging is the new diary-writing – though they should retain their very different approaches. Unless you fancy a list of famous people I have met…

Oh yes… any recommendations?
Hypocrite, me!?

50 Books…

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3. The Piano Shop on the Left Bank – Thad Carhart

There is thus far an imbalance towards modern literature on my ’50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About’ list, which probably won’t continue… but today’s entry is chosen because I’m rather hoping the suggestee might materialise in the near future…

A very dear friend of mine, Barbara-from-Ludlow, lent a copy of this book to me in 2004, and I adored it. It achieved what twelve years of piano lessons had not done; I fell in love with the piano. That all rather subsided when I failed my next grade, but time is a great healer – and now I am back to celebrate Carhart’s work!

On first reading, I thought this was a novel – but closer inspection reveaks that it is in fact (!) non-fiction – but of the sort which teeters on the edge. The best kind, in my opinion. Quite unusually, the ‘blurb’ on the back is accurate, and thus you shall be treated to it in full:

T.E. Carhart, an American living in Paris, is intrigued by a piano repair shop hidden down a street near his apartment. When he finally gains admittance to the secretive world of the atelier, he finds himself in an enormous glass-roofed workshop filled with dozens of pianos. His love affair with this most magical of instruments and its music is reawakened. Packed with delicate cameos of Parisians and reflections on how pianos work and their glorious history, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank is an atmospheric and absorbing journey to an older way of life.

Hmm… tails off a little in the truth stakes towards the end. Delicate cameos? Beg pardon? And I must confess ‘their glorious history’ is packed into one rather dull chapter which I skipped over. But aside from that, this is a beautiful novel, very much a ‘love affair’ with the instrument. Do check out Cornflower’s comments on this book, around the 7th March 2007. I does rather look like I’m stealing her blog wholesale… honest I’m not, guv!

Having said that, the discussion she started re:music lessons rings a bell. I had a nice teacher – Miss Lylah Goodwin, whose most unintentionally brilliant and far-reaching act MUST be lending me Miss Hargraves; more on soooon – but I HATED practising and lessons for a very, very long time. Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife, never ones to overindulge their offspring, proved resistance futile, and I only stopped just before I came to university. Luckily, by then I liked it (my parents were RIGHT? Really?) and this very afternoon I took myself off to one of Magdalen’s piano rooms, to hammer out a bit of Bach. Lovely revision break,

I shall add a disclaimer for this book: don’t read it if you can’t play the piano and really, really wish you could. It’ll only frustrate you. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not excellent at the ivories by any stretch of the imagination – but if piano-playing is a deepset ambition which has never been fulfilled, this book can only wrankle. Otherwise, you’ll love it!

N.B. The cartoon may make no sense to American visitors. Google HSBC and NatWest. It may also make no sense to those with a more sophisticated sense of humour than I…