I’m trying…

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book addiction, book buying habit, New Year's Resultions, to-read pile

I was never one for making New Year’s Resolutions , even as a child, perhaps I’ve always been aware of the unwisdom of trying to commit yourself to something you know you’re unlikely to be able to achieve.

I’ve never been rash enough to try to commit myself to a dry January which would have made me both miserable and feel like a failure when I finally toppled (inevitably) off my wagon but this year I did make a couple of sort-of resolutions.

The first, which is more of an ongoing rather than a New Year’s resolution is to do new things.  I got the idea off a fellow blogger a couple of years ago – she was doing a new thing every week which I feel veers into doing things for the sake of it, my objective is to do things I’d normally wimp out of (I still haven’t driven the OOH’s elderly 4 x 4 or the tractor mower which terrifies me), be impulsive occasionally, not refuse to buy something because I don’t know how to cook it, generally not allow myself to sink into a rut.  I can’t say that I’ve done anything startlingly new this year, I have a feeling that buying myself a Desigual handbag in the sales doesn’t really count, even if I’ve never owned anything by Desigual before or a jade green and pink bag r.  There was nothing new about one of the daughters saying airily as she clutched the bag, ‘If you decide the bag’s too young for you I’ll have it.’

It’s mine.

Marginally more successful was the decision arising from my realisation that my book buying habit had got out of control.

Sadly I don’t have a local English language library though I do have the excitement of parcels in the post.  As a result this is the bookcase in the bedroom where I keep the to-read pile.

It doesn’t look like that much – except that I haven’t read any of them and all the shelves are double stacked so there’s about 190 books in there.  That’s only our bedroom too…

So I took myself in hand and decided that with effect from New Year’s Day there would be no more book buying, except for my book groups, until the end of March.  I prudently put in an order on December 31st.

I can say that for a month now I’ve been clean – well there was a slight lapse when I was ordering two books for the book groups and saw that there was a copy of Frances Spalding’s biography of Gwen Raverat which I’ve been after for ages, but is both hard to find and very expensive, for £4.  Even the sternest resolution monitor would have agreed that it would have been foolish not to snap it up.

Otherwise I’ve been really good, I’ve only read what was already in the house (and what came in the post from that last order) and I felt inspired to do some bookish housekeeping.  Sorting out the to-read bookcase and ejecting the books I know I’ll never read, it’s not really a cheat’s way of diminishing the pile, going through all the many shelves and culling what I’ll never read again and the girls and OH have no interest in, and collecting all the books that various people have left on tables, the edge of the units, the middle of my desk in the expectation that the tidiness fairy is going to sweep them up and put them away and doing it myself.

There lies the rub.  I was hoping, expecting really, that at the rate I read I’d have cleared at least one front layer of books off the to-read bookcase by the end of March.  Except that in going through all the shelves culling and sorting I’ve been discovering books I forgot I had and want to read.  And where do the books I want to read go?

My to-read bookcase now has more books in it than it did on January 1st.

So much for New Year’s resolutions.

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What a find!

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Bookish Trvia

Yesterday after I’d put up my post about Something Stupid and the Fussy Librarian I saw it had been liked by a blog I’d never heard of before, Interesting Literature. Naturally I took a look and was hooked from this first item on ‘The Twelve Best Facts From A Year Of Interesting Literature:

1. In 1910, Virginia Woolf and her friends dressed up in costumes and donned fake beards in order to convince the Royal Navy they were a group of Abyssinian princes. And thus they pulled off what became known in newspapers as the ‘Dreadnought Hoax’, earning a 40-minute guided tour of the ship. Several members of the Bloomsbury Group were involved, but Woolf was the most famous among them.

It’s so rare to read a ‘Best Of’ that probably really is and this is just the sort of thing that gets me spending far too much time on the internet.   As in stopping what I was supposed to be doing and having a lovely trawl through their archives.  As I said when I was talking at the Parisot Literary Festival, to write you need to distance yourself from all distractions and that includes animals who want to go in and out, then back in again…and out once more, and addictive blogs.

Oh well, at least I’m not playing Angry Birds…

Not a hard rule to follow

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Rules for life

I borrrowed this off the Bluestocking Review page on Facebook, a treasure trove of reviews, pictures and bookish wisdom…

The Sublime and the Compelling

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A Glass of Blessings, Barbara Pym, Blood Harvest, S J Bolton, slow reading

It was only just over a week ago that I declared I had a new favourite author – Barbara Pym.  She’s refined, restrained, very English, writing with an acerbic and witty pen about “good women” and church affairs, genteelly fading areas of London and the deluded convictions of high church protestant vicars that they will remain celibate – (deluded because a vicar in possession of a living is always in want of a wife, according to some of his parishioners anyway) and other such matters which could be sneered at for not being very important but are so enjoyable to read about, especially from her pen.

I’ve only read three of her books so far; Excellent Women, Jane and Prudence and, for the Barbara Pym reading Week,  A Glass of Blessings which has a self-confident heroine not unlike Emma in many ways but to my mind so much more appealing.

This is the cover of my copy, from a 1989 edition, which gives padded shoulders to the elegant Wilmet Forsyth as if she’d just stepped out of one of those women-rising-to-the-top-and-doing-everything-including-getting-the-best-man-in-town novels of the 80’s.  If I’d been buying on cover alone I’d have passed it by but I’d already been alerted to Barbara Pym and I absolutely loved A Glass of Blessings.  It’s not as funny as Excellent Women, it’s more subtle and a delight. I’m going to be grabbing every Pym I can in future, but I won’t be reading them one after another for this is delicious stuff, to be savoured and appreciated at your leisure, not something to gollop down in one hit lest you miss something and where you allow yourself the luxury to re-read paragraphs for the sheer pleasure of her prose and sly humour.

And at the same time that I fell in to the joys of slow-reading with Barbara Pym I discovered an author who is quite, quite different.  Margaret from Books Please wrote a post about her six years blogging and mentioned Blood Harvest by S J Bolton as being one of the books she has most enjoyed. I wasn’t totally sure if it was my sort of thing.  I usually find books that promise terror barely raise a ripple down my spine (in the same way whose covers say that “only the hardest-hearted won’t cry at the end” merely prove that I must be made of grante) but Margaret was so enthusiastic, and she shares my tastes in a lot of books, that I put in an order. Here’s what she had to say:

“Crime fiction set in the fictional town of Heptonclough in Lancashire where the Fletcher family have just moved into a new house built on land right next to the boundary wall of the churchyard.  I was completely convinced not only by the setting but also by the characterisation that the place and the people in this book were real. It’s full of tension, terror and suspense and I was in several minds before the end as to what it was all about. I had an inkling but I hadn’t realised the full and shocking truth.”

If I really enjoy a book I’ll usually buy one other by the author and build the collection up quite slowly.  I finished Blood Harvest and ordered the whole of S J Bolton’s back list that evening.  When it arrived a few days later I went through three of her books on the trot, something I don’t do often as I get bored with reading the same style over and over again.  Sacrifice, her first book, is slightly slow to start and I’d agree with Margaret that it’s far-fetched in places but so riveting that I didn’t give a toss.

Now You See Me and Dead Scared, are the first two in a police procedural series with a more straightforward tone than her previous ones.  Dead Scared is frightening in the sort of way that gives you bad dreams and I’d challenge anyone to read it slowly.  My general tension level wasn’t helped by my daughter, who’d been snatching up the books as I finished them, eyeballing me and going, ‘Mum, haven’t you finished that yet?’  (About an hour after I’d started it).

As you might gather I’d wholeheartedly recommend S J Bolton.  And Barbara Pym.  But perhaps not to read at the same time.

Guilty As Charged.

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book hoarding, Japanese words, not ironing, reading, tsundoko

I discovered a vital new word this week on Book Group Online – tsundoko – which is a Japanese word to describe buying books and letting them pile up unread on the floor, on nightstands, or as in my case double stacked in a bookcase.  I think it’s quite normal, it’s saving one, or several, or more than several for later just in case you feeel like reading it.

Definitely tsundoko – I bought these in October and most of them are still there on top of the kitchen cook-book cabinet.

There’s even a Tsundoko list on Goodreads; I have to admit I haven’t read or even tsundokoed The Last of the Mohicans or Contact by Carl Sagan which are numbers 1 and 2 on the list, but I have read Vanity Fair, Dracula, The Three Musketeers, The King Must Die which are all high up on the list and practically knew Dune, number 4, off by heart as a teenager because I’d read it so many times.  Which all goes to show that one person’s tsundoko is another’s essential reading.

Japanese is full of useful words – Nito-onna describes a woman who is so dedicated to her career that she has no time to iron and dresses only in knitted tops.  I wonder if it also includes non-career women who just don’t want to iron.   A bakku-shan is a woman who looks pretty from the back but not from the front,  Komorebi is the sort of scattered, dappled light effect that happens when sunlight shines in through tree leaves and Amagami is to pretend-bite someone.  This might be more useful in football matches than the real thing, perhaps.

There’s about to be more tsundoko in this household as it’s the Phoenix Euro Book Sale next week, 18,000 second books in English for a euro.  I know I don’t need any more books but there’s always room for a few more…

 

Too much, too soon?

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Cynthis Harrod-Eagles, Eowyn Ivey, Erin Morgenstern, Harriet Lane, Jonathan Coe, not doing housework, Patrick Gale, the ironing mountan

Can you ever read too many good books?  It’s not even the end of February and this year’s reading list so far has already got enough brilliant reads for a Best Of 2013.  It’s making me nervous, fate doesn’t allow you to continue having such good fortune and I dread to think what dross is in store for me in the coming months.

This is so true…

I’m an impatient reader and because I’ve got a serious book buying habit there’s always more to read on my overflowing shelves so I freely abandon books if I find them boring.  So far this year there hasn’t been a single book I’ve felt like giving up (now that’s tempting fate, big time).  The least enjoyable book of this year was a book club read, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe, which was superbly written but somehow didn’t engage me, though it was still interesting.  I kicked off January with the wonderful The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, dazzlingly imaginative and so good that I immediately sent it on to my daughter in Le Mans because I knew she’d adore it too.  Then there was one of Elaine Simpson-Long of Random Jottings ‘s recommendations, the Bill Slider books by Cynthia Harrod Eagles, sly, witty detective stories.  Even better there are twelve of them.  That was followed by Harriet Lane’s Alys Always, which is called a thriller on the cover, I wouldn’t necessarily agree but it’s a superbly assured book, concise, utterly readable, don’t want to put it down book.

I finally got my hands on Magnificent Obsession, another of Elaine’s favourite books and she’s right, it’s first class biography; that was followed by Waiting for Sunrise which isn’t William’s Boyd’s best book in my opinion, but considering that his bar is set at Any Human Heart that’s hardly a damning criticism.  WFS is far, far better than most of the books that I read In 2012.  There was also Eowyn Ivey’s magical and enchanting The Snow Child and just when I was convinced my run of superb books must come to an end I picked up one of my charity shop finds, When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman.   Quite a few reviewers didn’t like this book, found it too whimsical and thought she’d included too many elements – which is true in a way but I still absolutely loved it.  It’s laugh out loud funny in places (and I rarely find books that amusing) and the sheer energy of her writing is fantastic.  Definitely one to watch.

 

This reading habit is infectious

The list goes on; I always love Susan Hill’s Simon Serraillier books and The Betrayal Of Trust didn’t disappoint, Curtis Sittenfield’s American Wife, another charity shop find, loosely based on Laura Bush was a great read even if I didn’t enjoy the last section much, and I was only only a few pages into our February book club read, Rough Music by Patrick Gale, before I was thinking, Why the hell haven’t I read this author before?  As soon as I’d finished I started looking up his backlist.

See why I’m worried this can’t go on?  It’s a good thing that I’ve got Dalmatians who need walking for an hour a day otherwise the combination of all this lolling around reading and putting in heavy duty writing time too means I’d shortly not be able to fit on the sofa.  Of course, something’s had to give – the housework.  I’ve been conducting an interesting experiment to see how long I can leave things before the other members of the household crack.  As far as the dusting is concerned, it looks like never; however the daughter couldn’t take regularly passing an ironing pile that was rapidly approaching Everest like proportions and did the lot.  Twice.

Since then it’s grown again, and I suppose I shouldn’t really expect her to do it all again.  The only thing is I’ve just started another of Elaine’s recommendations, The Coroner by MR Hall and it’s an absolute cracker…

Grounds for Divorce No 1

You go to the post bix every day for a week hoping that the book you’ve ordered – Magnificent Obsession by Helen Rappaport –

has arrived.  Finally it does, you bring it home, upwrap it, and leave it on the kitchen table to savour later.

When you come back, you find your husband – who normally describes anything you like to read as ‘rubbish’ and ‘girly’ – already 30 pages in.  He look up and, with the air of someone who’s afraid you’re about to insist on having his last Rolo, says, ‘You don’t mind if I read this before you, do you?’

I reckon a literate judge would agree that swiping someone’s new book prives ample grounds.  On the other hand Waiting For Sunrise by William Boyd which the OH has been longng for arrived this afternoon.  I finished reading Bill Slider at lunchtime…

The Best Reading of 2012

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Ernest Hemingway, Lindsay Davies, Madeline Miller, Robert Radcliffe, Sarah Dunant, Sarah Turnball, William Boyd

One of the sites I really enjoy is Book Group Online which is exactly what it says on the label, an online book discussion group with intelligent, polite commentators and moderators who don’t have little Hitler complexes and as far as I know have only ever banned people for trolling and never for simply disagreeing with the site bosses.  They also have a very useful section for listing what books you’ve read during the year which I find embarrassingly useful – I could complain about my ageing memory but I have a nasty feeling that it’s never been that good, but of course I can’t remember exactly.  Sadly Book Group Online has disappeared during the last week, it’s even gone from Google and I’ve got a nasty feeling that might be the end of it.  I’ll miss the site, and I’m really going to miss my book lists which go back several years.

So, without the aid of notes, here are some of the best books I’ve read during the last year – as they say on Strictly, in no particular order.

Almost French by Sarah Turnball, quite simply one of the best books I’ve read about living in France.  It’s amusing too.

Mad World by Paula Byrne which I read only a few weeks ago.  I re-read Brideshead Revisited afterwards and found having all the background information fascinating.

The Song of Achilles was a wonderful romp – there’s no other word for it – through the Illiad.  It’s a deceptively easy to read book, a real page turner but one that stays with you afterwards, even the scenes which I knew well from studying Latin in at school still had the power to shock.  And at long last I know why Achilles sulked in his tent.

Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant sat unread on my bookshelf for three years and when I finally picked it up I couldn’t understand why I’d deprived myself of this wonderful book for so long.  Set in a convent in Ferrara in 1570, just as the council of Trent was starting to reform monastic and conventual life, it paints a picture of the life in enclosed orders, for women who hadn’t necessarily chosen to take the veil, that is completely unforgettable.  It’s also got a cracking good plot.  It’s not a faast read but that seemed to suit the leisurely pace of life in a convent.  Definitely one the the best, and most memorable books of the year.

I wrote about Under An English Heaven when I read it, and looking back after eight months I can say it still deserves its place as a thoroughly memorable book.  Everyone I’ve lent it to, male and female, young and, ahem, not that young have adored it too.

I freely admit that I loathed Hemingway, I caused a terrible storm in my book group by saying I didn’t want to read another Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls had left me feeling queasy and I’d never have picked this up if Claire from Word By Word hadn’t said that in her opinion this was one of the best books about Paris she ever read.  So I took this to read in Paris.  Clare was right, I loved it.  I’m still shying away from any of his books that have killing in them, be it bulls or people.

Amongst other great books I re-read Any Human Heart by William Boyd for the book group and it’s just as good the second time round, one of his best, if not his best book, in my opinion.  English Passengers by Matthew Kneale is flawed, it’s too long especially the last part, but is still a terrific read.  It’s set in Tasmania in the early nineteenth century and can be uncomfortable, especially if like me you’re half way through it and realise that your great-great grandfather was stationed in Hobart at the time so may well have been one of those persecuting the Aborigines.  Before I Go To Sleep is riddled with plot holes and unliklihoods but I defy anyone to put it down for long enough while they’re reading it to analyse the plot and let the inconsistencies occur to them.  Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter was a spooky atmospheric page turner, no I didn’t shudder like the book blurb promised but then I’m distressingly pragmatic, it was very good.

I have a feeling that I would have had Bring Up The Bodies and The Night Circus in this list as they were earmarked for my Christmas reading but I had to read  a truly dire book for the book group so I could pass it on to someone else who needs it.  All I can say is that I bitterly resent wasting two days of reading time on sentimental, badly written drivel and I’m not going to be able to say what I feel as the person who chose it is very nice and might well be hurt at an honest appraisal.  I’d ploughed my way to the last page (reading one word in three), put it down with a sigh of relief and saw my daughter had left a copy of Nemesis by Lindsay Davies on the table.  It was exactly what the book doctor ordered.  She’s sharp, she’s funny, her characters are great, she can plot and it doesn’t matter in the slightest that my inner pedant is noting that senators’ sons in ancient Rome were hardly likely to say, ‘We’re stuffed,’; the world she’s created is so vibrant that my inner pedant doesn’t give a toss. What a good way to finish off 2012.

Mad World

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Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, Paula Byrne

In early 1944  Evelyn Waugh applied to his commanding officer for three months leave of absence from the army to write a book.  He gave various reasons for why the army wouldn’t miss him, including the disarming admission that he was unsuited for a desk job as he was no good at admin, he was also honest enough to admit that the book would be no use whatsoever for propaganda purposes.  Eventually he got his way and Waugh retired to Devon to explore the idea that was obsessing him – the idea that became Brideshead Revisited.

Paula Byrne’s fascinating book is about Waugh and the Lygon family who were the inspiration for the Flytes in Brideshead Revisited.  The Lygons were from the very top echelons of the English aristocracy, their father Earl Beauchamp was a good looking bon-viveur, charming, fabulously rich and one of the most important men in the Liberal party, they were brought up in Madresfield Court, a huge rambling house in Worcestershire, there were seven children, three of whom became close friends (and a lover in one case) Waugh’s, Hugh the second son, feckless, not very bright but utterly charming and loved by all;

Hugh Lygon, principal inspiration for Sebastian Flyte.

Lady Mary – known as Maimie, the most beautiful of the sisters,

Julia Flyte was a composite character but had a lot of Maimie Lygon in her.

and the youngest daughter Lady Dorothy, usually called Coote, who was the model for Cordelia. The Lygon’s should have led untroubled, gilded lives of luxurious ease yet the family was ripped apart by one of the biggst scandals that had ever hit the English aristocracy, something that was made even more bitter by it being Lord Beauchamp’s brother in law, the Duke of Westminster,  who orchestrated his downfall.

Mad World works magnificently on two levels, firstly it’s an absolutely riveting story of the times and the people.  Paula Byrne is very good at describing the anger that Evelyn Waugh’s generation felt towards that of the previous one for allowing and fighting in the first world war and how much it separated them from what went on before. The Lygon’s were hardly your usual stuffy, hunting, shooting, fishing members of the aristocracy either, the girls behaved with a surprising freedom, one, Lady Sibell, was the mistress of Lord Beaverbrook for many years and Maimie, the most beautiful of the sisters, had a series of lovers.  Hardly the demure, heavily chaperoned debutantes that were supposed to epitomise well brought up girls of the 20’s and 30’s.

Secondly Mad World satisfies the inner geek of people like me who love finding out background information about favourite books.

Diana Quick (Julia) and Anthony Andrews (Sebastian) bore a remarkable resemblance to their real-life inspirations in the 1981 TV adaptation, Evelyn Waugh, who based Charles Ryder on himself, looked nothing like Jeremy Irons.

It’s particularly rich pickings for the literary geek in fact as Evelyn Waugh wove his stories around events in his own life, people he knew and places he’d been too.  Madresfield Court appeared in one of his earlier books, Brideshead is modeled on Castle Howard – just like the TV series, though the chapel at Brideshead is an exact description of the real one at Madresfield down to the angels wearing arts and crafts printed cotton smocks.

Waugh was no straightforward reporter though, his genius lay in the way he could take two or three people he knew and twine them together to make something different with his or her own voice.  And he wrote dialogue beautifully, was a consummate writer of prose and was very funny too – in short he was a superb writer…

The final reason why I enjoyed this book so much is a very personal one because it re-established Waugh as a reasonably decent human being for me.  About fifteen years ago I read Selina Hastings’ biography of Waugh which presented him as such a deeply unpleasant person that it put me off reading his books.  I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its author’s personality but sometimes it’s hard not to be coloured by it. Paula Byrne’s Waugh is far from faultless but he’s human and a very good friend, when Maimie Lygon fell on hard times in the 5O’s Waugh sent her substantial sums of money and no-one who had so many people who were very fond of can be all bad.  So I can start re-reading Waugh with unalloyed delight.   I’m off to England today and I know what books I’m looking out for.

Re-reading waugh after fifteen years, it’s going to be such a pleasure.

Bookish Pleasures

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Phoenix Book Sale

One of the consequences of living in France is that I suffer from acute book browsing deprivation.  There are a couple of bookshops with English language sections in Bordeaux but I don’t go there that often, besides I don’t know what the buyer in one of the shops reads but it definitely isn’t to my taste.  There is a charming little librarie in Cadillac which sells tea along with toys and books and has a tiny selection of surprisingly varied and good English books, I’ll go in and yearn but as they’re 12 euros each they’re a treat for special occasions only.  Otherwise I largely have to rely on book sites on the internet.  They’re wonderful, I rely on them, but you have to know what you’re looking for, you don’t get to browse, to pick up books at random, to see something that you’d never have thought of…

Unsurprisingly the bi-annual Phoenix book sale – about 15,000 second-hand books for a euro each – has the same effect on me as truffles do on a pig.  To be honest I don’t need to buy any more books, there are enough in the to-read bookcase to last for a year and that’s not counting what’s crammed on other book shelves.  But try telling a pig in a truffle wood that it’s had its ration for the autumn…  Anyway all the proceeds go to helping abandoned animals so you could say that by adding to the piles of unread literature in the house I was just doing my bit for charity.

I got there a bit late so the initial rush was over which meant more space just to look and see what might catch my fancy.  Rather a lot as it happens –

Not all of them are for me, my youngest daughter has just discovered Mary Stewart and I don’t think she has The Ivy Tree.  I read about The Magicians by Lev Grossman on a blog and thought it sounded her cup of tea so that was lucky find.  So was Ernest Shackleton’s account of his journey to the South Pole which is the sort of book I’d never think of looking for on the net.  Child 44 and Even Steven are for my husband, he also seized Tim Pears’ Disputed Land with an ‘Is this for me?’  No actually, it’s for me, but I’ll allow him to borrow it.  He is really pleased with Ernest Shackleton’s South, his account of his journey to the South Pole though.

I’d vaguely registered that if I ever saw Perfume from Provence by Lady Fortescue I’d buy it but there’s no way I can claim that I need the prettily illustrated Dear Cassandra, Jane Austen’s letters to her sister – but I’ve got it.  I met Rosin McAuley last year, she’s absolutely charming, I’d read two of her books and was delighted to come across Singing Bird.   I have to confess that I’d never heard of R K Narayan, but it looks delightful and there were a couple of Scandi crimes by new authors, a Paula Gosling I’m sure I haven’t read and the third volume of M M Kaye’s autobiography in a pristine hardback, Pure by Andrew Miller and Fire and Woodsmoke by Claude Michelet which describes itself as ‘a powerful saga of one family in the heart of rural France.’  Irresistable!

I’m always riveted by what other people buy.  There was one woman with an armful of misery lit, all with pictures of miserable children and one word titles like ‘Beaten’, ‘Abused’ or ‘Forsaken’, another whom I heard saying to her friend, ‘I’m done, I’ve been round everything and I’ve chosen myself a book’.  She came to a book sale with a choice of 15,000 with the intention of chosing one book?

Unnatural I call it.