Month: June 2010

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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My best laid plans to type out a week’s worth of reviews this evening have rather crumbled and fallen. Instead, I did my ironing, baked a cake, and watched soap operas online. I feel a little like a 1950s housewife… but I’ve read/seen The Hours and I know how that ends.

Off to a wedding tomorrow, should be fun – and will hopefully avoid dancing. As Mary Bennett once said before me, “I should infinitely prefer a book.” And, had she found her way to Stuck-in-a-Book, she’d get even more than that: a book, a blog post, and a link. Don’t say I don’t spoil you.

1.) The book – I was wondering to myself what else Nicola Humble might have written, except the very Simon-friendly The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s (see more here) and came across this rather winning title: Cake: A Global History. It’s advertised on Amazon as Cake: A Global History (Edible) which I thought was an exceptionally clever gimmick, but turns out Edible is the name of the publishing company. Basically it looks like it does what it says on the tin – a history of cake! What’s not to like?

2.) The link – is to an Oxfam Bookfest. Includes a day-long readathon… Click the link to find out more.

3.) The blog post – I’m a sucker for so-I-went-bookshopping sorts of posts (especially since I’ve been on rations myself) so hive on over to Thomas at My Porch and his latest spree…

Did you know it’s Independent Booksellers Week?

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I really value independent bookshops, so have copied a press release I was sent… (see this link for more)

Independent Booksellers Week June 14th – 21st 2010

Bookshops all over the country are hosting hundreds of promotional events this week during Independent Booksellers Week (June 14th to 21st), a major marketing drive championing the energy and fun to be found amongst the long-established and new-generation booksellers operating on Britain’s high streets.

Customer-focused, commercially-savvy and digitally-aware, booksellers are carving an invaluable niche for themselves in their local communities, despite difficult trading conditions. Consumer spending on books is down by 5% in value year on year to £2208m and by 1% in volume in 2008/9. The independent sector, however, held up with an increase of 1% in volume over the same period.*1

There are around 1,200 independent bookshops in the UK , with over 100 opening their doors for the first time in the last two years.

Taking their place alongside some very savvy and incredibly creative existing booksellers, this new breed of book entrepreneurs have several things in common: well-honed business skills, often from previous careers; highly-creative marketing campaigns and excellent relationships with customers.

This week 250 shops are taking part in Independent Booksellers Week (IBW), and hosting visits from dozens of authors such as Katie Fforde, Lynda La Plante, Robert Muchamore, Justin Lee Collins and Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman. Community-based events range from Where’s Wally fancy dress competitions at several locations to guided meditation led by a Buddhist monk (Jaffe & Neale, Chipping Norton).

Regular customer events, with activities for schools, community groups and local residents are commonplace for many indies. The Chepstow Bookshop is one that runs frequent author events – more than 80 last year – attracting high profile names such as Clarissa Dickson-Wright, Andy McNab, Simon King and Sir David Attenborough.

Some, like Jaffe & Neale of Chipping Norton, Oxon, are the base for regular book clubs. This award-winning indie also hosts a creative writing course with publisher Faber and Faber, authors’ evenings and non-book events including an environmental movement and art exhibitions.
Others take part in local festivals. The Book Hive, Norwich is linking up with the Norfolk Food Festival this summer, inviting customers to enjoy some sake while the chef from a nearby Japanese restaurant prepares sushi.

Food and drink have become an important part of the booksellers’ offering, with in-store cafes now commonplace. Some indies have gone one step further: SilverDell Books, in Kirkham Lancs, has an ice cream parlour and creates recipes in honour of visiting authors. Cox’s Special (named for Josephine Cox) and Tasty Terry (for Terry Wogan) are just two popular varieties dreamt up by proprietor Elaine Silverwood.

Independents, being close to their customers and at the heart of their communities, offer a bookstock tailored to their market and customer base. They also understand the need to be ‘multi-channel’ booksellers; many sell online as well as on the high street, find books for customers online and even order through Amazon to track down books or for people who don’t want to do it themselves. Booksellers increasingly go where the customers are, and, in common with many other independent retailers, no longer run their business from behind the till, but from the midst of the community they serve.

Increasingly the indies are digitally-savvy, using e-marketing to reach their market. Nic Bottomley from Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, Bath , is an expert internet user with a blog, and regularly both sources, and sells, books online. Retailers are now using e-newsletters, Facebook and Twitter on a regular basis to keep in touch with their customers.

The indies also design store layouts to cater for their customers’ interests and lifestyles, and to include space for complementary activities. The Kemptown Bookshop, a well-known south-coast independent, has an events space for lectures, art classes, film screenings and writing groups. The Book Hive ( Norwich ) features a trompe l’oeil bookshelf, complete with parents’ peep-hole, a striking design which adorns the wall and partitions a secure children’s area.

Many of the newer booksellers have changed career to open a bookshop, bringing with them business skills acquired in other industries. Nic Bottomley of Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, Bath, was a lawyer, Sue Lake of White Rose Books, Thirsk, worked in advertising, while Henry Layte of The Book Hive, Norwich, was an olive oil importer – and all are now run thriving ‘indies’. Patrick Jaffe of Jaffe & Neale is one of many who worked elsewhere in the book industry – in his case 16 years at Waterstone’s.

Meryl Halls, from the industry trade body The Bookseller Association said:

“Successful independent booksellers like these are bucking the trends on the high street by offering their local communities the sort of service that sets these shops apart, and making their position in their local village, town, city or suburb integral to that community. Independents are close to their market, they know their customers, they know what is going on locally – they can make a real difference. We count some of the most creative, entrepreneurial retailers on the high street today amongst our members and Independent Booksellers Week is an excellent showcase for the great work they do”.

* Carol Ann Duffy reading from The Princess’ Blankets, Monday 14th June at The Steyning Bookshop in West Sussex.
* Michael Morpurgo, on the 18th June, Mainstreet Trading Company, Edinburgh

* Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue and a judge of this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction will give a talk about choosing the Orange shortlist and winner at the Woodstock Bookshop, Oxfordshire on 14th June.

* Evie Wyld, award-winning author and Booktrust’s online writer in residence, will be leading a creative writing event with London-based charity Kids Company at Review Bookshop in Peckham on 15th June.

* Bestselling romantic novelist Katie Fforde will be talking at an evening event at Brendon Books in Taunton , Somerset on 15th June.

* The county Hall in Preston will be hosting an evening with Lynda la Plante (bestselling author and writer of the TV Prime Suspect series) in association with Silverdell bookshop in Kirkham, Lancashire on 15th June.

* Douglas Hurd will be talking about his book Choose Your Weapons at Jaffé & Neale Bookshop and Café in Chipping Norton on 17th June.

* Comedian and TV host Justin Lee Collins will be signing copies of his book ‘Good Times’ at Torbay Bookshop, on 16th June.

* Patrick Gale event at One Tree Books, Petersfield, 17th June. As part of IBW celebrations re-read Rough Music and come along to discuss it with other like minded readers and Patrick Gale.

* The Book Hive in Norwich are holding a debate on 18th June to mark the 25th anniversary of Philip Larkin’s death. Guest readers and speakers include: Larkin specialist Dr. Mark Rowe and authors Anthony and Ann Thwaite.

* An introduction to Buddhist Meditation, guided by a Buddhist monk, at Jaffé & Neale Bookshop & Café, Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire on 15th June.

* GWR Week, with events and promotions all week to celebrate 175 years since the Great Western Railway was founded by Brunel, at Ian Allan Book Shop in Cardiff.

* An Evening of Antiques with Judith Miller & Mark Hill, 12th June at Palace Theatre, Torbay, organised by The Torbay Bookshop.

Decades

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A nice bonus to going through all my reviews and labelling them by decade is finding out statistics for my reading tastes. (N.B. sorry, the links don’t work unless you’re me! If you want to see the relevant posts, you’ll have to use the drop-down menu in the left hand column… oops!)

1770s (1)1810s (1)1830s (1)1860s (2)1870s (4)1880s (3)1890s (4)1900s (1)1910s (3)1920s (22)1930s (31)1940s (16)1950s (17)1960s (9)1970s (9)1980s (17)1990s (18)2000s (96)2010s (5)
Obviously there is definite weighting towards the 2000s, not least because for the past three years these are the books I’ve been sent to review (although I’ve only managed to review five published this year, oops!) but I was surprised to see the 1950s and 1980s quite well represented, as I didn’t think I read much from these decades. Well, the 1950s-1980s really, so I wasn’t surprised to see the ’60s and ’70s neglected!

All good fun… I know most of you won’t have statistics like these to hand, but which decades do you think your reading usually falls into? Let me know!

Simply Devine

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31. Being George Devine’s Daughter – Harriet Devine

I haven’t told Harriet that I’m doing this, and I’m hoping she won’t mind, but I’m going to write about her (auto)biography Being George Devine’s Daughter because – well, it’s simply too good not to. Harriet very kindly gave me a copy of her book a few months ago, and (my tbr pile being what it is) I only got around to it the other day. I’m not often in a I-must-read-non-fiction sort of mood, but when I am, nothing else will suffice.

To those of us in the blogging world, Harriet is probably best known as writer of this blog, but to those with more knowledge of theatrical history than I, she is the daughter of manager, director, and actor George Devine. And that ‘(auto)biography’ label I used earlier was intended to convey that the book is about both the Devines, falling into neither camp. Being completely honest, I hadn’t heard of George Devine in any but the vaguest of ways before I ‘met’ Harriet in the blogosphere – so perhaps I approached Being George Devine’s Daughter in a different way from most of its potential audience. (And I’m going to call the author ‘Harriet’ throughout this, because it feels too odd to use just the author’s surname, as I normally would in a review). But I had definitely heard of lots of other folk mentioned in the book – without being remotely name-droppy, Harriet seems to have met just about every notable theatrical personality – she is Peggy Ashcroft’s goddaughter, after all. (And she met Leonard Woolf! In the words of teenage fans of American TV shows throughout the world, squeeeee!) For someone like me, who had a very happy but uneventful childhood, and whose nearest connection to fame was a distant ancestor had been dressmaker to royalty, this all seems incredible: Harriet, naturally, takes it in her stride. Don’t our childhoods always seem normal, to each one of us? I think it must be very strange, for instance, to grow up without a twin – and never know how to answer the question “How does it feel to have a twin brother?” But enough about me.

Being George Devine’s Daughter starts with a series of letters written between Harriet’s parents, George and Sophie, during Harriet’s first years. George was away at war in India, and didn’t meet his daughter until she was a toddler. The recent (when the book was published, in 2006) discovery of these letters seems to have prompted Harriet’s book – which follows a more-or-less chronological structure, looking at her parents’ relationship and her own life. An only child, the line between these aspects is necessarily not as demarcated as it would be for those of us with siblings. Her world is her parents’ world, in and out of the theatre – and she picks up on the emotional nuances of their relationship to a greater extent than most children would. And, not insignificantly, a discovery of Harriet’s plays a pivotal role in the house dynamics.

That sort of line sounds like I’m describing the plot of a novel, doesn’t it? I’ve never studied biography as an academic subject, still less as a biographer, but my experience of them leads me to suggest that the most successful biographies could equally be novels. That is to say, they are interesting in and of themselves. It must be tempting, writing about oneself and one’s family, to have all sorts of references to jokes the reader won’t understand, or people who are relevant for one story but never again. Harriet doesn’t do this – there is nothing here that would be edited out if the book were fiction; it all comes together to form a structured narrative whole. Throughout it all, Harriet’s tone is beautifully honest and thoughtful, without being unduly introspective or (conversely) coolly detached. It is the perfect tone for autobiography, I think – one seen later in Emma Smith’s The Great Western Beach, though without Smith’s deliberate naivety. Events are not callously laid out, but instead are considered; turned this way and that; reconsidered. Yet they also form a story rather than an analyst’s discussion.

We follow Harriet’s life as she tries to determine which path to take, which career to choose, and with which men to become besotted(!) There are dead ends, surprising developments, happy and unhappy accidents. There are (as in all lives) far too many stories and angles for me to even attempt to cover them all. So many have stayed in my mind – running away from school to attend the theatre; the house by the river; the laundry-van… The book does have a chronological structure (with occasional hints of what is to come, or skips backwards to fill in gaps) but there is an anecdotal feel to it all. As such, the passage I’ve chosen is one which is generally representative rather than especially significant. It’s this sort of inventive ingenuousness which threads through much of the book, and is a joy to read:

One day she and I devised a game that proved to be surprisingly successful. We got some empty bottles with good corks, and we painstakingly wrote out messages, which we put inside, sealed up, and cast into the river. The messages began like this:

We are two ladies in distress
9, Lower Mall (Hammersmith, London, W6) is our address.
With our tutor harsh and cruel
Our lovers dear did fight a duel…

The gist of the whole thing was that we were waiting to be rescued, but I’m not sure how seriously we believed that anything would ever come of it. Imagine our surprise when one day, well over a year later, a letter came from Belgium with a finely poetic reply. A covering letter explained that our bottle had been found by an old fisherman who had taken it to his local village schoolmaster for a translation. Intrigued, the schoolmaster had sent the response. Even better, some months later I was as usual hanging over the balcony watching the passers-by when a dapper, foreign-looking young man came by and accosted me: on investigation he proved to be the very schoolmaster who had written the letter, on holiday in London and curious to see the writers of the appealing poem. He came in for a cup of tea, but whether he had been expecting a real damsel in distress or not we never found out.
It’s always a bit nerve-wracking when a friend recommends a book, in case you don’t like it. It’s even scarier a prospect when the friend has written the book, but I was always fairly confident that I needn’t be worried. And I was right. Being George Devine’s Daughter is one of the best biographies or autobiographies I’ve ever read, and up in the top ten books of any variety that I’ve read this year. My only criticism is (despite great design by Harriet’s daughter Sophie, and lots of great photographs throughout) I think this book deserves a fancier edition and printing. For an honest, moving, and thoughtful account of an immensely varied life – you can do no better. Thank you, Harriet!

Books to get Stuck into:

White Cargo – Felicity Kendal: another daughter writing about her father, and also from a theatrical background – a very moving and well-written book.

The Great Western Beach – Emma Smith: surely a modern classic of autobiographical writing, and the antidote to misery lit.

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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By the time this comes up on Blogger… well, hopefully I’ll be tucked up in bed, but chances are I’ll be on the way back from a birthday dinner in London. That’s right, the Big City three times within a week – I’m quite literally hip and happening. But not too hip for a book, a blog post, and a link…

Before I do that – please note that you can now search my reviews by decade of first publication! It took ages, so I hope *someone* uses it…(!) Have a look in the left hand column, and there’s a drop-down menu for it… also for publisher, but there I’ve only included a select few of favourites whose names are synonymous with certain types of book – i.e. not the big publishers, who are also wonderful but publish many different sorts of thing…

1.) The book – arrived through the letter box this morning, to my happy surprise. It’s a new OUP edition of Cousin Phillis and other stories by Elizabeth Gaskell, which is rather lovely – thanks OUP! I reviewed Cousin Phyllis (sans other stories) back here, during I Love Hesperus Week – and I assume the ‘y’ instead of an ‘i’ doesn’t denote a different book? Gaskell is a really good short story writer, as well as novelist, so I encourage you to go and explore…

2.) The link – came courtesy of my very good friend Lorna, who saw it and thought of me… Here it is. It’s not book-related, but it does concern the other burning passion in my life… (and, no, I don’t mean Neighbours. Or even, unfortunately, Jesus. It’s cake I’m talking about.)


3.) The blog post – is from the rather lovely Rachel at Book Snob, and her rather lovely thoughts brought about by her first blog birthday. If you’re not feeling warm and fuzzy after reading that, then you must be lying in a bath of ice, drinking iced tea, and wearing a penguin for a bonnet.

Stone in a Landslide

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The weekend miscellany will be a bit delayed this week, as I wanted to write about Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal (translated by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell), and the launch event in London yesterday evening… which I would have done last night, but we provincial folk have to travel back to our provincial homes, all provincially. (By the by, sorry for only one pic… Blogger is doing something where it won’t accept any pics if they go below the first few paragraphs. Thanks, Blogger…)

Which to talk about first? Erm… let’s start with the book, and move onto the event, because after all that’s the order in which I did things. Chronology, folks – it’s your friend.

Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal is a Catalan classic, originally published in 1985 (which was described last night as ‘modern’, but since it’s the year I was born I couldn’t feel it was that modern) and – like all Peirene’s titles – very short. At just 126 pages this novel (novella? Let’s stick to ‘novel’ for now) manages to encapsulate an entire life, from childhood to death – and never does it feel rushed.

Anyone could see that there were a lot of us at home. Someone had to go.
The opening line of the novel – and I think it’s rather a great one – sets the tone for the narrative throughout. Conxa’s voice could be called dispassionate, but perhaps a fairer description is ‘stoical’ or ‘resilient’. She moves to her aunt’s house; later gets married and has children; sees her family disrupted in the Spanish Civil War, and ends the novel in a state that, in other hands, would be tragic. But Conxa never bewails her fate, there is no gnashing of teeth – rather, her story is told simply and honestly. I love what Polly wrote in her review – “Barbal’s writing is simple but not simplistic”. Conxa is given a voice that is undemonstrative, flowing along in a way that is unobtrusive but never dull. I don’t know how Barbal does it, because each individual sentence is very plain, but somehow they combine to make a voice that is startlingly present and human.

Polly has done much better than me with her review, as have the others out there, because all I can think to say is that it’s a good, good book, with ingredients that shouldn’t quite have worked, but in Barbal’s capable hands it does so. It seems to me impossible to analyse Stone in a Landslide’s component parts and discover why it works, but suffice to say: it does.

I’m so grateful to Meike and Peirene Press for making these European modern classics available in English, and in such beautiful editions too. For more details see their website and their witty blog. If you have any suggestions for European books published after 1945 and under 200pp. long (and which haven’t yet been translated into English) do let Meike know your ideas: meike.ziervogel@peirenepress.com

And… onto last night! Meike very kindly invited some bloggers along to the launch of Stone in a Landslide, and so it was a mini-reunion for me, Simon S, Polly, and Sakura. Which was lovely, nice to see you guys, sorry I was teasing you all… The four of us – and seemingly the rest of London – piled into the tiny bookHAUS shop to hear a bit of introduction to the novel, and Claire Skinner (yes, the mum from Outnumbered, though doubtless she has Shakespeare under her belt too) read sections from the novel. It was very hot, but very good – Skinner’s readings were an especial treat; she really ‘got’ Stone in a Landslide and brought its simplicity and truthfulness alive.

And Meike wins gold stars and suchlike for being one very lovely lady! Although there were lots of very important-looking folk there, she made us feel really welcome – we had a nice chat, and I realised afresh just how brilliant the people behind independent publishers are. The relationship between bloggers and smaller publishers is still in its early days, but can be so mutually joyous – last night being a great example. Long live bloggers, and long love Peirene!

Books to get Stuck into…

I’ve chosen a couple of books which you might like if this review’s whetted your appetite. I think they both work as links, but for very different reasons…

Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair: for another short book encapsulating an entire life, you can do little better than Sinclair’s excellent 1922 novel.

Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell: completely different tone, and non-fiction to boot, but this incredibly well written account of Orwell’s experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War gives an alternative angle and would make a fascinating companion read.

Long Wittenham

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I mentioned that I spent Monday in a lovely little village called Long Wittenham, and I thought I’d share some of my photos from the day. I chose the village more or less at random – I wanted it to be within an hour’s drive, and somewhere along the river. I mosied (moseyed?) off on my own, because every now and then I need to get back to the countryside. I’d hoped to read a book there, but it was spotting with rain the whole time – not enough to be unpleasant, but enough to make reading rather hazardous. So I took pictures instead… at least until my camera battery died. Oh, and as I mentioned the other day, the zoomy bit of my camera has just started working again, so indulge me in close-ups of flowers that could have been anywhere…












The Green Child

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I was flicking through the titles printed by Capuchin Classics the other day – and by ‘flicking through’ I mean ‘scrolling down their website’; and by ‘the other day’ I mean ‘a couple of months ago’ – and spotted The Green Child (1935) by Herbert Read. My only encounter with him had been a book called Prose Style, or something like that, which I’d flicked through – unaware that he’d written novels. Or, in fact, one novel – for this is it. This part of the blurb had me hooked: Widely debated when it came out more than a generation ago, The Green Child is truly a masterpiece, a rare blend of fantasy and reality.And so I emailed off to see if the had a review copy to spare – which they did…

I said that Read had only written one novel, and in a way that’s true – but he certainly made up for it with The Green Child. Although under 200 pages in length, the three parts of the book are essentially three different novels. The same story runs through them, and the same central character of Olivero, but the feel and style differs so dramatically that it’s unlikely you’ll react the same way to each section.

We learn on the first page that Olivero, the President of a South American country, has faked his own death by assassination. As you do. His yearning to return to his roots, a little English village, has overcome his political ambitions (wise man) and he makes his way back to the countryside of his youth. As he wanders around, seeing what has changed and what has remained, he is struck by a change which seems unlikely: It was then that he noticed, or thought he noticed, an extraordinary fact. The stream as he remembered it – and he could remember the pressure of its current against his bare legs as he waded among its smooth, flat pebbles – ran in the direction of the station from which he had just come. But now, indubitably, it was flowing in the opposite direction, towards the church. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice might say. And he follows the stream until he arrives at a mill… wherein he sees a ‘frail and pallid’ woman being kept captive by a man he had once been schoolmaster to; Kneeshaw. Yes, the perspicacious amongst you will have guessed correctly: this is the Green Child of the title. No sooner has Kneeshaw been vanquished, and the silent Green Child headed off with Olivero, but: With a cry of happiness, as if a secret joy had suddenly been revealed to him, he raced forward, and hand in hand they sank below the surface of the pool.
And that’s the last we hear of them for a bit, because Part Two is all the back story of Olivero’s life. I’d wondered why they bothered making him an ex-President, and now I see why – we follow him through his political ascension and… well, to be honest, I skim-read quite a lot of this section. To be frank, I found it really dull. I don’t think novels should include huge chunks of ‘and this is what had happened beforehand’ (analepsis, is that?) because it’s difficult to be interested. And combine that with political stuff… well, if you’re interested in political novels, then this section might work for you – but I’d just got really interested in the first section, so was frustrated when we were diverted off track. It’s the diary section of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall all over again.

Fast forward ninety pages or so, and we’re onto Part Three: they’re in the underground world from whence the Green Child came, and they’re exploring. This section has most in common with utopia literature like Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis and, indeed, Thomas More’s Utopia. It would make really interesting reading alongside, especially the former. We’ve moved from fantasy-in-the-real-world to fantasy-in-a-fantasy-world where, for instance, there is no concept of time. I wonder what J.W. Dunne would have to say about that?

So there you go. One short novel; three genres. The first of them was my favourite, and I did rather wish that The Green Child had continued entirely in that vein. While the third section was interesting, it felt more like the set-up to a different novel. And, as mentioned before, the second section was very much not my cup of tea. And perhaps that’s the problem with the novel – I can’t imagine anybody loving each ‘genre’ equally? Surely you’ll want more politics and less fantasy, or vice versa, and so forth?

But someone who did approve is Mr. Graham Greene, who wrote the 1946 introduction included in this edition. The Green Child is definitely intriguing, and a very unusual novel, but I can’t agree with Greene in his unqualified enthusiasm – whilst I am not wholly unenthusiastic, there are a lot of qualifications.

Many & Various

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Usually my round-up posts come at the weekend, but there are a few things I’ve been promising, and a few that are time-sensitive (gosh, that sounds important – trust me, it’s not) so we’re going to have a bit of a round-up post today, ok? We’re on the same page?

1.) First off, do keep checking back at this post for A Picture Paints a Thousand Books. I’ve been so delighted with the responses – both quantity and quality. People have really put thought into this, and I’m keeping the page updated as more people have a go. Do comment if you’ve done it on your blog, and I’ll add you to the list. (picture credit)

2.) The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns – Polly and Claire and I had a little read-along, and although (probably because it was out of print!) not a lot of people were able to join in, I hope these fab reviews will make you run and get a copy:

Harriet Devine
Novel Insights
Paperback Reader
Verity’s Virago Venture
Stuck-in-a-Book
and Hannah Stoneham has written about My Silent War by Kim Philby… click on the link to find out why it’s relevant to this read-along!

Ooo, EDIT: another review! Buried in Print

3.) A couple of links to BBC Radio programmes, probably only applicable for UK readers – these expire, I think, hence the time-sensitive thingummy. Jane very kindly emailed to tell me about Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers – you can listen to it here, courtesy of BBC7. I had to confess to not liking Ms. Sayers, but I’m aware that a lot of you do… You can see Jane’s thoughts about the same book here.

And a couple people alerted me to this Radio 4 programme about The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks (which is in my 50 Books You Must Read). It’s the book’s fiftieth anniversary, and Banks is in fine fettle (at 80) as she discusses it with James Naughtie and some readers. Will I raise all sorts of fury against me if I say Naughtie’s questions are a bit asinine? But LRB is fascinating, as is the programme. Do have a listen – and read the novel, of course!

That’s all for today, folks. I spent my afternoon exploring Long Wittenham, chosen at random as a pretty-sounding Oxfordshire village – I was not disappointed, and I daresay there’ll be photos later in the week.

Project 24…

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Project 24 – #11

I thought of Colin when I bought my eleventh book this year, because one of his (failed) missions in life is to stop me buying copies of books I already have. Well, I already have three other copies of this book… but it’s a personal favourite, and I don’t have this edition with this introduction, and… well, I don’t imagine I need to defend myself to you lot.

I bought it in the Albion Beatnik bookshop in Oxford, a lovely little shop which has both new and secondhand books (and, recently, a cafe – amazing how much they can fit in there). They shelve their new books by decade of publication, and even wrap up your purchases nicely:


But I will tease you no longer. The eleventh book I’ve bought this year is The Love-Child by Edith Olivier. I already have a couple Virago editions, and one from its first printing, but not this little gem – not only does it have a lovely dustjacket with an illustration by the Rex Whistler, it also has an introduction by Lord David Cecil. OH, it’s just lovely. And another lovely thing is that my camera has started doing its classy-closey-zoomy function again, after sulking for a year or more. It’s outlived several laptops, so I can’t get too cross with it.


Hope you had a good weekend – and have a great week ahead of you!