Aisfor

N is for Nichols

StuckinaBook All , 12 Comments

This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

For some reason it took me a while to think who I could write about for N. I love E Nesbit but don’t have that many books by her; I have a few by Irene Nemirovsky, but don’t feel enormously enthused by her. And then it struck me – of course! Beverley Nichols! Sorry Bev that you didn’t come to mind immediately – but, fear not, I will do you justice because I have lots of books by you. It’s not all the books in this photo, but it is quite a lot of them – as well as one on my paperback shelf, one on biographies, and one with the Folio editions.

How many books do I have by Beverley Nichols?

Great question, I’m so glad you asked. And the answer is – a lot. He is one of those authors who was very prolific and also widely printed, so it’s not difficult to stumble across his books. I have 26 books by Nichols, and there are still plenty I haven’t read. That covers everything from his famed memoirs about houses, gardens, and village life (I say ‘memoirs’, but they are heavily fictionalised) to books about faith, America, cooking, war, cats, and more. And, of course, some of his novels.

How many of these have I read?

I didn’t realise until I did my count just now, but I’ve read 13 of these books – exactly half way! I’ve only read one of Nichols’ novels, and none of his detective stories, so plenty more to entice me.

How did I start reading Beverley Nichols?

If you’ve been reading Stuck in a Book for a while, then you might remember that Nichols often appeared in blog posts about recent book hauls, and every time I’d say “I haven’t read any Nichols yet, but I’m sure I’ll like him…” I just kept amassing them, filled with faith that he would be to my taste. The first one I ever bought was A Thatched Roof, from a market secondhand book stall in Pershore in 2004. And I finally read something by him in 2017 – Merry Hall, for the 1951 Club. It was my favourite read of 2017. After that, I couldn’t stop myself.

General impressions…

Well, I was right that I’d love him! The Merry Hall trilogy are still my favourite books by Nichols (and much better than the Down The Garden Path trilogy IMO, though I did enjoy those too) – I also really, really loved The Sweet and Twenties, about the 1920s. The only novel I’ve read by him is Crazy Pavements, which was also really fun. Basically, when Nichols is using his witty, insouciant, slightly gossipy tone, I can’t get enough.

My only real disappointment was The Powers That Be, about spiritualism, because he becomes much more earnest and less amusing. Some of his other essays have been good but not brilliant. On balance, though, I trust that I’m going to have a great time when I start reading a book by Nichols, and I’m almost always correct.

M is for Milne

StuckinaBook All , 31 Comments

 

This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

I can’t believe I haven’t done anything in my ‘A is for’ series since JANUARY? I knew I was putting it off for a bit because it meant moving some books around (my Milne shelf is on the back of a mantlepiece, with plenty of other books in front of them). But I finally did it, and here we are. When I started this little blogging project, I always knew who would be in the alphabet for M – and any long-term readers of StuckinaBook wouldn’t be in any doubt either.

How many books do I have by A.A. Milne?

When I did Stephen Leacock for L, I thought I was hitting a peak with 27 books. Well, I have 50 books by A.A. Milne. That’s more or less everything he ever published, and I’d reached about 46 of those a long, long time ago. Over the intervening years I’ve managed to get hold of some very obscure pamphlets (e.g. War Aims Unlimited) and plays (e.g. Other People’s Lives), and the books that remain missing are either prohibitively expensive or might never have been published. There are a couple of plays mentioned on his Wikipedia page that I’ve never seen, so would have to rely on stray acting editions turning up. I don’t care at all about having first editions or pristine editions – I just want to get my hands on everything Milne ever wrote!

How many of these have I read?

Hold onto your hats, because I’ve read it ALL. Most of my Milne collecting came around 2002-2005, when I only had a few hundred books and (gasp) often read the ones I bought. Because Milne was, and is, my favourite writer, newly acquired books by him always went straight to the top of the pile. I’ve done quite a lot of re-reading too, though there are still some books I’ve only read once, nearly two decades ago.

How did I start reading A.A. Milne?

He was really my gateway into a world of interwar literature. It all started when I watched a documentary about Winnie the Pooh in about 2002, and I decided I wanted to read more about it. That led me to Christopher Milne’s first autobiography, The Enchanted Places, which in turn led me to Ann Thwaite’s biography of Milne. And after that I scoured secondhand bookshops, began using ebay and other embryonic online places for buying books. It was surprisingly easy and cheap to get most of Milne’s books (and difficult and expensive to get the remaining handful).

General impressions…

Well, I love him, of course! On this shelf are plays, novels, sketches, essays, poetry, pamphlets, autobiography, and of course children’s books. He turned his hand to almost everything. And he was brilliant at it all, with an insouciant, witty, capable tone that pervades everything. It is a joy to fall in love with an author whose style is so identifiable and yet can be turned to such a wide variety of works. Every now and then something by him is rediscovered – his detective novel, The Red House Mystery, seems to be rediscovered every few years, and it was great to see Mr Pim Passes By and Four Days’ Wonder come back into print a little while ago, though I’m not sure if they’re still available. For my money, my favourite AAM books are his autobiography It’s Too Late Now, the touchingly comic novel Mr Pim Passes By (and the play it was adapted from), his pacifist work Peace With Honour, and any of the early sketch collections about the ‘rabbits’. He is a joy. Incidentally, one of the best blogging experiences I’ve had was watching Claire at the Captive Reader fall in love with AAM too.

You can read more about what reading Milne has meant to me in a post I wrote eight years ago.

L is for Leacock

StuckinaBook All , 8 Comments

This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

Some of the letters of the alphabet, in this ongoing project, are no-brainers. I already know who ‘M’ is going to be, and I suspect you do too if you read this blog. And I knew who would step forward for L – it had to be my boy Stephen Leacock. Look at that towering pile of Canada’s finest.

How many books do I have by Stephen Leacock?

There are TWENTY-SEVEN Leacock books there, though that does include a couple of ‘best ofs’ that I think replicate content found in the others. I’ve no idea how many books Leacock wrote, and I’ve only actively sought out one of these books – My Discovery of England – relying on serendipity to find the others. He is one of those authors who turns up often, almost always (in this country) in 1910s-30s editions that speak to a popularity he once had.

How many of these have I read?

I have almost no idea. Because so many of them are collections of essays/sketches, the titles don’t always clue you in to their contents. According to my LibraryThing, where I mark whether or not I’ve read a book, I have read 14 of them. But the bulk of my Leacock reading was pre-blog, around 2004-6, so I don’t have a firm recollection of how accurate that is. I still read one every year or two, so I can keep going for a bit.

How did I start reading Stephen Leacock?

I think I was lent some by my aunt, but it’s also possible that I discovered him in the same place I discovered E.M. Delafield – a 1940 volume of sketches called Modern Humour. As I say above, I was on a bit of a blitz of reading him 15 or so years ago, and whenever I pick one up I’m reminded why I enjoy him so much.

General impressions…

What a joyful writer Leacock is. His essays and sketches tend to be ironic or dry, or sometimes openly pastiching some well-known writing of the day, and he has a taste for the surreal that almost always lands on the right side of too far. He is an exemplary judge of that – of being careful with the absurdities to make them still enjoyable. Among the books in that pile are some more serious things, I think, but I’ve only dabbled in them.

When I went to Canada in 2017, I was keen to fill some Leacock gaps – and to visit his house, which was a wonderful experience. It was a novelty to see editions of his works that were printed in the past 70 years, and a couple of the paperbacks up the top of the pile came from that trip. I don’t think Leacock is much read anymore, even in Canada, but he should be.

K is for Kingsolver

StuckinaBook All , 37 Comments

This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

I don’t have a lot of candidates for ‘K’ in the alphabet, though perhaps more than I would have expected at first: I own and have read books by Emily Kimbrough, Jessie Kesson, Molly Keane, Margaret Kennedy, Sheila Kaye-Smith off the top of my head, and maybe even some books by men beginning with K too. But Barbara Kingsolver is my choice – partly because she wrote one of my favourite reads of recent years, and also because I know she is well-loved across the blogosphere.

How many books do I have by Barbara Kingsolver?

I’ve got five books by Kingsolver, which is quite low for an author in this series – perhaps you remember the dizzying piles of Crompton and Delafield books. But there are probably more pages in these five than five books by any other author I have in the house.

How many of these have I read?

From this pile, I’ve only read three (including one I finished yesterday). Confusingly, I’ve read another two that aren’t here – and one of the pile I have read was actually another edition. The Lacuna has had a journey of getting, giving away unread, re-buying, and still not having read.

How did I start reading Barbara Kingsolver?

My first Kingsolver was The Bean Trees, borrowed from a friend and finally bought earlier this year. It was part of a postal book group I was in, where we chose a book and posted it around a dozen people before it came back with a notebook of comments and thoughts. I loved it, but then I read The Poisonwood Bible for a book group. I can’t remember if it was borrowed from the library or a friend, or if I decided not to keep it – but it made me lukewarm on Kingsolver (for reasons I’ll go into below). It was only when doing A Century of Books that I turned to Pigs in Heaven because I needed something to read to fill the 1993 slot. It was so brilliant that I got back on the Kingsolver train. (The only I’ve read that isn’t pictured is Prodigal Summer, which I listened to as an audiobook.)

General impressions…

As you may have gathered from the above – mixed! Pigs in Heaven is one of the best modern novels I’ve read (I can count 1990s as modern, right?) and I loved The Bean Trees. I did like Prodigal Summer a lot, though perhaps could have done with a little less description of the environment and more about the fascinating characters she had created. As for The Poisonwood Bible – some brilliant writing, the final quarter should have been lopped off, and the preacher was a rare misstep in Kingsolver’s aptitude for subtlety. And I’ve just finished Small Wonder, a collection of her essays, which I’ll write about soon and which were great – if rather locked in one particular moment of time.

Overall – I think she is a great prose writer, able to be just poetic enough without losing the storytelling momentum. I’m not sure the things I find interesting totally overlap with what she finds interesting, and I think she’s at her best when she doesn’t let the message overpower the story. But I will certainly keep reading her (and her ENORMOUS books) and am glad that such a thoughtful writer is finding a wide audience.

J is for Jansson

StuckinaBook All , 21 Comments

This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

It was really difficult to decide whether to use Tove Jansson or Shirley Jackson for ‘J’ – two authors I love, and two authors I’ve read widely. But I went for Tove Jansson because I’ve loved her longer – and because there ARE some books I haven’t read by her. (By the by, if you’re concerned about my windowframes in the pic – fear not! A painter is coming to sort them out soon.)

How many books do I have by Tove Jansson?

I’ve got 12 books by Jansson, which I think includes all of her works for adults that have been translated into English. I’ve only actually got one of her Moomin books which, in the fine tradition of these posts, I forgot to include in the picture. I might have one or two more Moomin books that I’ve forgotten about, but my children’s books are under the bed so who knows.

How many of these have I read?

I’ve read almost all of the novels and short story collections – and Moominpappa at Sea. Let’s say 9 in total. I know she is best loved for the Moomin books, but maybe I came to them too late, or maybe I just prefer her (and all writers) when she is writing about real people. I will go onto her other Moomin books at some point, I’m sure, but to be honest I often forget that she wrote anything for children.

From the stack pictured, I haven’t read the collected letters yet, and I’m saving Sun City. It’s not in print, and I can’t bear the idea of getting to the bottom of my Jansson novel pile. There is a novel that hasn’t been translated yet – Stenåkern or The Field of Stones – but I don’t know if Sort Of are planning to bring out an edition. I do hope so! I’m also not entirely sure I’ve read Sculptor’s Daughter all the way through – quite a lot of the stories appear in the collection A Winter Book, and I seem to remember reading the others at some point.

How did I start reading Tove Jansson?

I did watch the Moomin cartoon growing up, but it was in about 2003 that my friend Barbara lent me her copy of The Summer Book and I became an instant fan. At that point, very little had been translated – so it’s been good fun waiting for them to appear in bookshops.

General impressions…

Jansson is one of my favourite writers, and I love pretty much everything she’s written. Her stories are often beautiful, observant gems, and I love her experimental epistolary or fragmented stories too. She can do dark brilliantly, in The True Deceiver, and her sweeter books remain uncloying because she never has a moment of sentimentality.

Of course, I have only read her through her translators – usually Thomas Teal, but also Silvester Mazzarella and one or two others. Teal and Jansson are ideal collaborators, and I sincerely hope he’ll finish off anything remaining. And if he doesn’t – well, of course I have the Moomins waiting for me.

I is for Isherwood

StuckinaBook All , 17 Comments

This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

‘I’ was always going to be a tricky letter of the alphabet, wasn’t it? A toss up between Isherwood and Ishiguro, neither of whom I’ve read a lot by. But it does mean that I’m not doing my usual thing of forgetting to include some of their books in the picture! I only have five books by Isherwood.

How many books do I have by Christopher Isherwood?

Look, I just said. Five. I don’t even know how many he wrote, but I have decided to stop buying them until I read a few more.

How many of these have I read?

Two – Mr Norris Changes Trains and Prater Violet. I definitely preferred the second of these, largely because I had a wildly different idea of Isherwood in my head than the German sex clubs of Mr Norris Changes Trains, which I thought would be a charming rural tale, for some reason. Fun story: I was reading Mr Norris Changes Trains on a train and, when I got up to get off at my station, discovered that the woman in front of me had also been reading it. I wish I’d said something, but I had to ‘disembark’ (as they put it) before I ended up in the wilds of Devon.

How did I start reading Christopher Isherwood?

I picked up the Folio Mr Norris Changes Trains first, largely because that print is lovely. I don’t have the Folio case for it, so the print is always on display. And he is the sort of author you see a lot in secondhand bookshops, so it has been pretty easy to pick them up cheaply over time.

General impressions…

Difficult to draw any conclusions from two books, of course – especially since I was pretty lukewarm about one, and really liked Prater Violet. He is one of those writers whose life seems to interest people more than his writing now – is that fair? Anyway, I’m keen to read the others I have – but not yet quite keen enough to get to them. Thank goodness they’re short!

From the ones I have, anything particular you’d recommend?

And I think I’ll have more to say about J :D

H is for Hill

StuckinaBook All , 20 Comments

This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

How many books do I have by Susan Hill?

As always, I haven’t quite remembered to include all the books I have in the photo. Every time, I vow I will… anyway, there are 16 books in the pic, but I actually have 17 because I forgot to check my memoir shelves, where I would have found The Magic Apple Tree.

How many of these have I read?

Only seven of the ones that I own – Howards End is on the Landing, Jacob’s Room Is Full of Books, A Kind Man, Black Sheep, The Beacon, In the Springtime of the Year, and The Bird of Night. And a couple of the short stories from The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read but I don’t remember which ones…

How did I start reading Susan Hill?

Quite unusually – it was actually a book called The Battle for Gullywith, which I was sent as a review book in the early days of this blog. I don’t think it has been one of her greatest commercial or critical successes, and it certainly wasn’t aimed at me and my age group. But in that era of blogging, Hill was herself quite active – and, indeed, linked to my blog and occasionally commented on it. She was a forthright presence, for sure, and at some point decided it wasn’t for her – but she is the only author I’ve known to be a real part of the book blogging world. Her most iconic moment was doing a reply to a student who’d been asked to compare The Woman in White and its influence on The Woman in Black – and said ”I’ve never read The Woman in White.”

Anyway, it wasn’t much later that I read the wonderful Howards End is on the Landing, and that sent me off on a hunt for more.

General impressions…

I could be wrong, but I think Hill is best known for I’m the King of the Castle and The Woman in Black, and I haven’t read those. She is an astonishingly prolific author, and writes in quite separate genres and worlds. I don’t have any interest in her crime fiction or her children’s fiction, but I love the short literary novels and, of course, her books about reading. In the former category, In the Springtime of the Year is a brilliant book about grief, and I also really got a lot out of the spin on misery memoir The Beacon. I haven’t read a novel by her that I haven’t admired.

But the books for which I love Hill most are, of course, Howards End is on the Landing and, to a lesser extent, Jacob’s Room is full of Books. Reading memoirs are everywhere nowadays, and I will continue to lap them all up, but Hill was among the first and among the best. Neither book quite does what it says it’ll do, but they are wonderful nonetheless.

Any recommendations from the Hill books I have waiting?

G is for Gallico

StuckinaBook All , 18 Comments

This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

If it’s a numbers game, then Gallico is an easy choice for G in this ongoing series – but I also think he’s a really interesting and varied author. Above is my colourful pile of Gallicos!

How many books do I have by Paul Gallico?

There are 18 books in the picture above, but there are a couple that are 2-in-1, so I’m going to call it 20. He was very prolific and there are an awful lot of his books I haven’t got, including some pretty famous ones – The Poseidon Adventure, for example. I don’t remember buying any Gallicos online, so I think these are all books I’ve stumbled across in bookshops – with the exception of a handful of reprints I got as review copies.

How many of these have I read?

Exactly half. I’ve read the four Mrs Harris books, Jennie, Love of Seven Dolls, Coronation, The Hand of Mary Constable, The Foolish Immortals, and The Small Miracle. I started The House That Wouldn’t Go Away once but wasn’t quite in the mood for it.

How did I start reading Paul Gallico?

I’m pretty sure it was with Flowers for Mrs Harris, also known as Mrs Harris Goes to Paris or even Mrs ‘arris Goes to Paris. It’s a whimsical story about a charwoman who saves for many years to go and buy an expensive designer dress in Paris. But there are dark undertones to the whimsy.

It was republished as part of the wonderful and sadly short-lived Bloomsbury Group reprints from Bloomsbury, in which Miss Hargreaves was famously included.

General impressions…

Gallico is a fascinating author to me, not least because all his novels seem to be twists on fairy tales – not traditional reinventions of them, but borrowing from them. Some lean very much to the whimsical, like Jennie, about a boy who turns into a cat. Others are so much darker, like the brilliant novella Love of Seven Dolls, where a young woman falls in love with a group of puppets but suffers abuse at the hands of the puppet master.

Mrs Harris is a wonderful character, deserving of her three sequels. That is perhaps Gallico at his most charming, with enough wry humour to save it being too fey. One has to be in the right mood for the sweetness of The Small Miracle, but it is so short that I found it perfectly hit the spot. The one of his I was most excited to read, based on the premise, was The Foolish Immortals – about a couple of people convincing a lady that they have found a cure to mortality. But it didn’t really live up to the premise, and became a bit meandering.

He is an ingenious and very varied author. I think Love of Seven Dolls is his masterpiece, but just make sure you’re in the right mood for the particular brand of Gallico you’re picking up at any particular time.

F is for Fitzgerald

StuckinaBook All , 21 Comments

This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

I wasn’t immediately sure where to go with F – Rachel Ferguson, maybe – but then I remembered my addiction to getting matching Fitzgeralds, and it had to be she.

How many books do I have by Penelope Fitzgerald?

Thirteen – nine novels, two biographies, one collection of essays and one collection of letters. Which is almost everything by her, I think – I’m missing a biography, but that’s about it. And you can tell by this pile that I’m pretty keen on getting matching editions. I need to replace my The Gate of Angels at some point. These Flamingo paperbacks aren’t particularly rare, but I like their design and have snapped them up when I’ve stumbled across them. Confusingly, half of them are labelled Flamingo and half are Harper Perennial, so who knows what’s going on there.

How many of these have I read?

Six: Human Voices, The Bookshop, At Freddie’s, The Blue Flower, Offshore, and Charlotte Mew. I did dip into A House of Air, the essays, at one point, but I don’t think I got super far.

How did I start reading Fitzgerald?

My first was Human Voices, about working in BBC radio, and I can’t remember how or why I picked it up. I do remember that I didn’t much like it – something in the prose didn’t quite connect. But then somebody gave me The Bookshop and I gave her another go, because it was so short. Something clicked that time, and her spare, ironic writing delights me. She writes a little like she hasn’t ever read another writer, and I mean that as a compliment. And more power to her for publishing her first novel when she was over 60!

General impressions…

I am still a bit hit and miss with Fitzgerald. I didn’t particularly get on with Offshore, which felt like a lot of moments not tying together – but At Freddie’s is a hoot, and she is a wonderful biographer. I only dimly knew who Charlotte Mew as before I read Fitzgerald’s biography, but it is totally captivating. I think I might go The Knox Brothers next.

Oh, and my well-documented distaste for historical fiction could be an obstacle to some of these – but I really enjoyed The Blue Flower, set in 18th-century Germany and about the philosopher Novalis, of whom I had never heard. Perhaps because she maintains her eccentric style, rather than bowing to any contemporary restrictions. I’ve heard people call The Blue Flower her masterpiece – my favourite is probably The Bookshop. Expect the unexpected with Fitzgerald, and enjoy the journey.

E is for Essex

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

There are going to be a handful of letters in this series that aren’t that easy. None of us are looking forward to X. But I didn’t have to think too hard to come up with my E – even if the author is really a B. Step forward Mary Essex, pseudonym of the extremely prolific author Ursula Bloom.

How many books do I have by Mary Essex?

I have five, as you can see – not up there with the Crompton and Delafield numbers. I do also have a couple under the name Ursula Bloom, but I haven’t read either of them. From the research I’ve done, Bloom seemed to write quite differently under different names – she had about five pseudonyms – so I’ll treat the Essex novels as a class unto themselves. It’s hard to find an exact number of books she wrote but it’s definitely in the hundreds – of which more than 50 are under the name Mary Essex.

How many of these have I read?

Four – from the above set, I haven’t read The Herring’s Nest.

How did I start reading Essex?

I think it was 2002 and I was in Oxford, a couple of years before I moved there. I mosied into a charity shop (that is now an HQ for a bus company) and was drawn to the title Tea Is So Intoxicating. As who would not be?

This was back in the days when I used to read books shortly after I bought them – hollow laugh – so I read it in late 2002. I remember that I read it immediately after Moby Dick, and for years I wondered if I only liked it because it wasn’t Moby Dick. But when I finally tried some more of her work, I really liked it.

General impressions…

Mary Essex certainly isn’t the most highbrow reading in the world, but nor is it anywhere near as trashy as you’d expect from an author who seemed to write a book every five minutes. Later in her career, the Mary Essex novels seem to be lean more towards romance, especially medical romance – but in the 40s and some of the 50s, they followed less of a predictable pattern.

Yes, she overuses exclamation marks – but the characters are thoughtfully drawn and the books are often very funny, especially The Amorous Bicycle. Yep, she had a way with a title.

I’m really pleased that Tea Is So Intoxicating is coming out from the British Library Women Writers series next month, so more people can enjoy her. It’s definitely towards the lighter end of what the series has published, but we can all do with some of that sometimes, can’t we?