StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

Is it spring? Is it still winter? We’re being kept on our toes here. By the time you read this, I’ll be doing a treasure hunt around Oxford (no real idea what it entails) and it’s meant to RAIN, so we’ll see. Hope you have good weekend plans, and here’s a book, blog post, and link to get you through it either way.

1.) The blog post – one of my favourite bloggers has reviewed my favourite book! Even better, she likes it. I still get thrilled whenever I see someone review Miss Hargreaves, and I’m particularly pleased that it’s at Radhika’s Reading Retreat.

2.) The link – I haven’t watched it yet, but I discovered that there is an adaptation of Miss Hargreaves available to watch on YouTube! Sadly not Margaret Rutherford’s – we can but dream of that being unearthed – but Mary Wickes’, from 1952. Only 45 minutes, so will be intrigued to see what they’ve managed to include.

3.) The book – it’s not out until end of May, but I was excited to get a review copy of the latest Gertrude Trevelyan novel that will be reprinted by Boiler House Press – her final novel, Trance By Appointment. And what an excellent cover choice. It also reminds me that I’ve yet to read As It Was In The Beginning, so plenty to enjoy.

P.S. you can also have a reminder that the 1952 Club is coming up in one month’s time! 21-27 April – looking forward to it.

 

Project 24: Book #5

It is very surprising to me how many of my Project 24 books so far have been IN PRINT. It’s quite unusual for me at the best of times, but particularly when I’m narrowing my gaze to limited buying. Truth be told, Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico wasn’t on my radar at all – but I need to read it for the next episode of ‘Tea or Books?’

Perfection (Paperback)

I’ve read lots of Fitzcarraldo’s non-fiction, but this will be my first delve into their fiction. And look how zeitgeisty, it’s just been nominated for the International Booker, or something like that.

Not where I thought Project 24 would take me – but pleased that I’m still very much on track with my rations.

Dew on the Grass by Eiluned Lewis – #ReadingWales25

I don’t think I’ve managed to join in Reading Wales before – an annual project led by Karen at Booker Talk. To be honest, that’s largely because I have no idea which authors on my shelves are Welsh. I imagine there are quite a few hiding among the vintage books, and perhaps I should do some digging into the more Welsh-sounding surnames (though, as someone with the surname Thomas and no Welsh blood, I know it’s not always a given).

But I knew about one Welsh book: Dew on the Grass by Eiluned Lewis. It’s a classic of Welsh literature, hovering somewhere in the hinterland between novel, memoir, and children’s book. I suppose it falls down most certainly on ‘novel’, but it feels very like a memoir of childhood – four siblings living in Pengarth, called Delia, Lucy, Maurice and Miriam – as well as the vicarage children nearby. The oldest is 11 years old and the youngest ‘Miriam – who ran to width rather than height – barely managed to reach the key-hole at three and a half years’. (We are introduced to them by that most familial of things – heights etched into a doorpost.)

As far as I can tell, Pengarth isn’t a real village, but it represents any similar community in the Welsh borders. The novel was published in 1934 but is set in a hazy past. As Charles Morgan hints in his brief prefatory letter, Dew on the Grass is aimed at those who have ‘said “My childhood is gone!” and mourned for his giants’. Childhood is bathed in a glow of nostalgic innocence. The children here may have minor feuds and grievances, but you know that they will not outlast the sunlight. They experience nothing that will scar them psychologically – significant, as Morgan writes, in an era with ‘legends, now intellectually in vogue, which represent children as Freudian Yahoos incontinently abandoned on the doorstep of the London School of Economics’.

I’ve been calling this a novel, but it’s really a series of vignettes. Here’s a taste from the beginning of one of them…

The Rectory children had come to tea and now all of them had run out into the garden and were deciding what game they should play next. Released at length from the spell of Louisa’s eye and the cool, leaf shaped nursery, they danced out on the lawn, shouting, hopping with excitement, ready for something adventurous, scarcely able to contain their glee.

“Rounders!” someone shouted. But were there enough of them for rounders? Yes, if they got Dick the stableboy to join in; then Delia remembered that Dick was cleaning out the hen-house under Jarman’s eye, so it was no use counting on him.

“Hide and seek!” called out David. “I vote for hide and seek.”

“No, no, not hide and seek,” Lucy thought to herself. “Oh God,” she prayed rapidly – half shutting her eyes because you should always pray with your eyes closed, but only half because the others might notice and laugh at her – “let it not be hide and seek. Please, dear God, let it not be hide and seek.”

But it was. Perhaps God didn’t mind what game they played, although it mattered so much to Lucy; or perhaps He was punishing her for being rude to Louise that morning.

That’s about as high as the stakes get in Dew on the Grass. So, what did I think? Well, it’s undeniably charming. It crosses the line into twee, really. And sometimes I am happy for a dose of twee.

In an episode of Tea or Books?, Rachel and I talked about books that do or do not have ‘bite’, and I’ve found it a useful categoriser in my head ever since. This book has the least bite of any novel I’ve ever read – which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a choice and something that can delight in certain moods and irritate in others. The children act like children, so it’s not a case of unlikely Victorian moralising from their mouths – but they also live a fundamentally happy, peaceful, contented life in a narrative totally absent of irony.

I can see why Morgan found it delightful, and I can particularly see why it was precious to buyers of my 1944 reprint. In the midst of war, this was exactly the sort of world that people believed they were fighting for. It’s a very selective vision of any era – but, why not. It wouldn’t suit every mood, but sometimes it’s lovely to read something in which happiness is so evident on every page.

#136: Does Reading Make Us Better People? and And Then There Were None vs The Invisible Host

Agatha Christie, Gwen Bristow, Bruce Manning and reading morality – welcome to episode 136 of Tea or Books?!

In the first half of this episode, we discuss whether or not we take moral instruction from the books we read – does reading make us better people? In the second half, we compare two very similarly plotted books – And Then There Are None by Agatha Christie and The Invisible Host by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning. Many thanks to Susan for suggesting this (and sorry for forgetting your name when we recorded!)

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you, even if I’m quite bad at replying quickly. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us. And you can support the podcast at Patreon.

FYI Hargreaves gets very noisy in this episode!

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Stasiland by Anna Funder
Mrs Dalloway: A Biography of the Novel by Mark Hussey
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
On Reading Well by Karen Swallow Prior
Book Girl by Sarah Clarkson
Emma by Jane Austen
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Jack by Marilynne Robinson
The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
How To Know A Person by David Brooks
Ghosted by Nancy French
Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
Walkable City by Jeff Speck
Pioneer Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Pamela Smith
Brink of Being by Julia Bueno
Shaun Bythell
A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie
A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
The Diviners by Margaret Laurence
Catherine Carter by Pamela Hansford Johnson

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

Spring seems to have sprung. I went out without a coat! It’s all happening. And, since it’s International Women’s Day, I thought I’d mention the blog post I posted last year – ranking the British Library Women Writers titles. A few books have come out since then, and I’d put the forthcoming The Spring Begins by Katherine Dunning high up the list – probably #4. Available to preorder wherever you preorder!

1.) The book – Nicola Wilson sent me a proof of her book, which I’ve very excited about. It’s called Recommended! and is about the Book Society. I wrote about them during my doctorate – one of the book-of-the-month clubs that proliferated in the 1920s and ’30s, and I can’t wait to find out more about it. Readers of the Provincial Lady series will have come across several mentions of it already.

2.) The blog post – do go and wish Rebecca a happy 10th blog birthday! It feels like she’s been part of the blogosphere for even longer, and we’re lucky to have her wide-ranging, thoughtful posts.

3.) The link – well, it’s a video, but I wanted to highlight again the excellent Never Too Small series on YouTube. It looks at small homes (usually flats) around the world, and how clever architectural decisions have maximised their use. My only criticism is that usually they seem to be lived in by people who don’t own any possessions, but this recent home is clearly loved and lived in.

Project 24: Book Four

I’m on track with Project 24 – buying just 24 books in 2025 – with my restrained rate of two-per-month. It was while reading Pipers and a Dancer by Stella Benson that I decided I should probably make sure I had all her novels – and Goodbye, Stranger is thus added to my shelves. It hasn’t been reprinted by Mike Walmer yet, though I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

Now, maybe I should actually read one or two of the books I’ve bought so far this year.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

Happy March! Here in the UK we seem to be alternating bright sunshine and torrential rain. As I write this, it’s one of the sunny days – cold, sunny weather is my favourite, and hopefully it’ll continue as I jaunt round London this weekend. The world might continue to get worse and worse every day (don’t you miss the days when villains were at least a little nuanced? Not ‘I’m going to deprive the world’s most vulnerable and then lie about fraud’ levels evil?) but here’s a book, a link, and a blog post to make things feel momentarily less bleak.

1.) The book – I’m halfway through a proof copy of Mark Hussey’s Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel and absolutely loving it. Hussey goes from the genesis of the novel through its writing to its publication, reception and aftermath. Definitely one for people who already know and love Mrs Dalloway, but I am happily in that camp. Looks like it’s out in May, so get your pre-orders in now.

2.) The link – not a usual one for me, and not about books, but this long read in the Financial Times by Madison Marriage is absorbing, excellent, and devastating. It’s about the inquest into her brother’s death, and the 48 hours that led to it while he desperately tried to get an urgent repeat prescription – and the ways the NHS, pharmacies and others failed him.

3.) The blog post – March is Reading Wales month – get some suggestions over at Booker Talk.

Flickerbook by Leila Berg


My second (and final?) contribution to this year’s #ReadIndies is an autobiography that was sent to me by CB Editions – Flickerbook (1997) by Leila Berg. It was a very canny choice of reiew book to send, given my recent interest in memoirs and novels told in fragments – I’ve repeated the titles often, but the Big Three from the past couple of years are Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer by Joan Givner, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, and In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Flickerbook very much follows in the same mould – being told in fragmented paragraphs, sometimes following on from each other for a bit before taking a new direction, sometimes calling back to an earlier paragraph, and sometimes building up a portrait from a series of stray impressions. The title, Flickerbook, refers to what I have always called a ‘flipbook’ – where you draw gradually changing illustrations on every page of a notebook, so that they form a sort of animation when you flick through them. It’s a great comparison for this sort of approach to a book.

Berg starts the autobiography in 1921, when she was four years old – ‘I am the Bridesmaid. I stand on the table.’ are the first two lines. It is clearly her earliest memory – and the autobiography continues from there until the moment war breaks out in 1939, when Berg is in her early 20s.

Particularly in the early sections of the book, Berg is writing impressionistically – trying to echo the imprecise ways in which a child begins to understand the world. Or, rather, the very precise way that they latch onto small details, building up their place in the world by observing, interrogating, and assuming the things and people they see in front of them. In these early years of Flickerbook, Berg particularly concentrates on what makes her Jewish family distinct from many of the other families in their area of Manchester. She is constantly dividing into us and them, trying to make sense of the world. ‘Christian girls don’t wear knickers. Knickers are Jewish,’ she decides. Or ‘Christians say Granny. Or they say Nan. They don’y say Bobbie. And Christians say Grandad. I have heard Ronnie talking.’ Her only way of comprehending her own experience is by homogenising the ‘other side’. The same is true of her understanding of herself as female – particularly the restrictions placed on her that boys don’t have to observe.

In these early sections, Berg re-assumes a naivety that was long behind her. It leads to passages like this (and that interruption about the wickets gives you a sense of the way the fragmentation works):

Mr and Mrs Cohen came and had tea, and I saw a smudge on the white tablecloth. I thought it was a flea, and I was afraid Mr and Mrs Cohen had seen it, because you mustn’t see them.

I don’t really understand how fleas are smudges and not thick. Can people be smudges?

Wickets are the lines boys chalk on the wall when they play cricket. There is a good wall round the corner in Hilton Street. Bails is the bar they chalk on top.

I think that is what ghosts are. People smudges.

As the years go by, Berg grows less naive and more knowledgable. We see her join the anti-fascists, consider politics, reject various futures and explore others. Boys become more interesting (and more confusing), and she steadily goes from flirtation to infatuation to a sort of cool detachment:

I have had ten offers of marriage in as many weeks. How conventional and idiotic the Communist Party is. I sleep with a boy, and immediately he asks me to marry him. Supposing I said yes. Where would we be?

A thread I particularly enjoyed was the cinema. Berg often goes, and references many films and actors that she has been to see – throwing us into the experience of a teenage girl in the early 20th century with authenticity. Yes, this is a portrait of a time and place and a memoir of being Jewish in an era of rising antisemitism – but it’s also an account of being a young girl who is captivated by the fictional characters and matinee idols dominating the cultural conversation of the day.

The only reason I don’t love Flickerbook as much as I love the other fragmentary memoirs I’ve read does, actually, go to that question of authenticity. Yes, it is all Berg’s experiences. But she was 80 when the book was published. I don’t know if she kept diaries that helped her put it together or relied on her memories, but either way it felt continually like she was putting on the costumes of the past. Of course, anybody writing an autobiography is looking back – but Flickerbook is told in an eternal present. The voice is a child’s for the period of childhood; the voice is teenage, then young adult. So it felt a bit jarring to know, all the time, that the voice was ventriloquy. For instance, an anecdote about an ‘Invisible Mender’ being surprisingly visible would be funny is told in retrospect, but feels a bit awkwardly fey when spoken as though for the first time with the pen of an octogenarian.

This qualm meant Flickerbook kept me at a bit of a disbelieving distance. I found it fascinating, well-written, eye-opening about a period of history in an environment and for a type of person whom the history books have glossed over. I didn’t feel any genuine immediacy. If the same technique had been done in the past tense, without affecting the voices of different eras of her youth, I think Flickerbook would have been both less experimental and more successful. It’s still a very good read, and I’m sure many readers would wholeheartedly disagree with my views on how it could be better, but for me it fell a little short of brilliance.

Pipers and a Dancer by Stella Benson

February is drawing to an end, but I’ve managed to get in with a Read Indies post – #ReadIndies being an annual event run by Karen and Lizzy, encouraging us all to read books from independent publishers. In this case, I’ve picked Pipers and a Dancer (1924) by Stella Benson, published by the one-man publishing house Michael Walmer. He has steadily been republishing Benson’s novels, which is just one of many ways in which his excellent taste is helping a new generation of readers discover lost gems.

Stella Benson is probably best known for Living Alone, her novel about a boarding house of witches, and I’ve really enjoyed discovering I PoseThis Is The End, and The Poor Man. I love the eccentric, witty way she writes, often upending expectations and occasionally breaking the fourth wall. Her characters are always odd, and some of that oddness comes in the stark, ironical way they are presented to us. Here, in the first paragraph, we are introduced to Ipsie:

Ipsie suddenly stopped speaking and heard with horror the echo of her own voice saying, “You see, I lost my three brothers in the War.” “How damn pathetic,” she thought, and she reminded herself for the thousandth time that she had determined to be reserved. No man ever told her half as much about himself as she told nearly all men about herself. This was why men were so seldom in love with her. Indeed, she thought, no one who knew her very well ever loved her much. Rodd, with whom she was sitting now on the starlit boat-deck, was not attracted by her. For the first two or three days out of San Francisco he had energetically sought her company, but now he did not seem much interested to learn that she was bereaved and lonely.

Ipsie has a ‘Showman’, which is something of a variation on the ‘I pose’ of her first novel – i.e. a self that she presents to the world, overdramatised for the response she is likely to get. That might be laughter, shock, sympathy or anything really. It is self-conscious but not deceptive. It is a version of Ipsie, even if not the most natural one. And she realised, when talking about moments of grief – she has, truly, lost three much-loved brothers – that the Showman is the one doing the talking.

Her superimposed self may be needed in the future. Ipsie is on a boat to China, where she will meet with her fiance, later to return home. It’s not entirely clear why she makes this arduous journey when he’ll be coming back home almost immediately, but it certainly isn’t for mutually romantic reasons. Even before we meet Jacob, we know that he isn’t going to inspire any warmth in our hearts. Ipsie has hopes that, getting to know each other better, they will have some version of passion between them. Jacob, meanwhile, considers her with ‘indulgent contempt’, hoping ‘she would, when properly trained, make a good little wife’. Marriage is a matter of good sense to him, and nothing more. We, naturally, loathe him.

On the other hand, Rodd is a much more appealing Benson hero. He will be taking on Jacob’s position in China (as a customs official) and becomes bewitched by Ipsie, and keen to change her mind about her forthcoming marriage – and if he happens to be a substitute, so much the better. Like all likeable young heros in this sort of book, he is spontaneous, enthusiastic and passionate. Ipsie is kind and friendly towards him, but her vision of Jacob has yet to splinter. He, in turn, considers her as ‘little Mary’, rather than Ipsie. They will both find their expectations of the other to be thwarted.

The blurb of this edition mentions that it is Benson’s first novel set in China (is there another?), but it could equally well have been set anywhere else. All the principle characters are British or American, and Benson’s sparse, pacey style doesn’t leave any space for dwelling on local colour. There is a major incident that I won’t spoil, which perhaps had to happen in China – but a slight variant of it could have happened in rural America, or somewhere like that.

While a fair amount of this novel has Benson’s characteristic oddness, there is rather less than I expected. Sentences, paragraphs, pages go by without any of her clever wordplay or iconic detachment. People don’t say as enjoyably unnatural things as they often do in her oeuvre. For a lot of the time, this is a heart-on-its-sleeve about a love triangle.

As such, I enjoyed it, but I did miss Benson’s unique style. She can still deliver, of course – I noted down this cultural exchange, as relevant now as then:

Mrs Hinds beamed at Ipsie through pince-nez and bubbled her joy through thin lips, but Ipsie made no reply. Americans see English people always reduced to dumbness on a first introduction; they must think us an oddly inarticulate race. However, I suppose they remember William Shakespeare and Ethel M. Dell and hope for the best.

– and, for any other novelist, this could be a curio. But it is Benson in ‘normal mode’. There isn’t much breaking of the fourth wall, certainly compared to some of her earlier novels, but this was a fun moment:

Sometimes Ipsie would check herself in full pose with a devastating confession. “I was lying when I said that, though I didn’t think so at the moment…” “Make me stop talking – I am only copying the heroine of one of Stella Benson’s novels…”

Ipsie is, indeed, a very Benson heroine – and I enjoy the idea that this is particularly because she has, also, been reading I Pose or This Is The End. Her spirited naivety is great fun, and I enjoyed the novel a lot. I have no idea why it’s called Pipers and a Dancer, on reflection. If it’s my least favourite Benson so far, that’s only because her quality is so high and her style so perfectly and unusually honed. If you already love her, do track it down. If you’ve never read her, maybe this isn’t the place to start.

A whole bunch of non-reviews

It’s that time again, where I blitz through a whole bunch of books I’ve read or listened to in the past few months. Think of it like that viral guy on Instagram who rates outfits at awards events in one or two words (too niche a ref?)

The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo
I listened to this short Japanese detective novel for my book group, and it was fun – about a quarter of the total was the ‘reveal’, which did feel a bit imbalanced, but there was a likeable, unusual ‘detective’ character and a culturally specific spin on the locked room mystery. I particularly enjoyed the references to other classic crime novels, including A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, which seems to be perpetually getting reprinted and never quite making it to mainstream awareness.

On Reading Well by Karen Swallow Prior
A non-fic that somebody here recommended to me, I think? It goes through different virtues and relates them to classic literature – from Persuasion to Huckleberry Finn – as well as a couple of more modern books that I didn’t know about. It’s quite an unfashionable idea, that we can learn to be better people from the books we read – and KSP is writing from a specifically Christian perspective – and I found it fascinating and edifying (which is another unfashionable compliment). She writes very well about literature, and equally well about moral behaviour.

Heap House by Edward Carey
This young adult trilogy is free on Audible at the moment, and my love of Carey made it a no-brainer. It’s a world where everyone connected to an exclusive family have ‘birth objects’ that range from a safety-pin to a huge piece of furniture – and there is one boy who can hear objects endlessly repeating mysterious names. There’s a whole lot more lore that I don’t have time to write, and the chapters alternate between this nervous boy and a charismatic girl – it’s very Carey in its oddness, and perhaps a bit more enveloping in its world creation than some of my favourite books of his.

Weird But Normal by Mia Mercado
I love a book of personal essays, particularly when they link individual experiences to wider cultural phenomena, and do it well. I’ll be honest, this collection was very good and immersive, but I now don’t remember any of the specifics (unlike, say, Emilie Pine’s Notes To Self or Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, which are still with me many months/years later).

The Purgatory Poisoning by Rebecca Rogers
Since there are endless murder mysteries written (all branded to look like Richard Osman’s series), I suppose it was inevitable that one of them would be set in purgatory eventually? In Rogers’ novel, the protagonist has been murdered and has to work out from purgatory who did it. There’s a very likeable angel character, and it’s well written for this sort of thing, but the characters are quite annoying and the solution very obvious (and somehow, simultaneously, nonsensical). It won a prize for humour, but it wasn’t to my taste, humourwise.

Into the Dark by Jacqueline Yallop
I got this from the Big Green Bookshop’s clever idea of giving two strangers the same book, based on some criteria you send in. I loved the idea of Yallop’s book, looking at a cultural and scientific history of darkness, prompted by her father’s dementia. And it is fascinating. Into the Dark is so wide-ranging that often I wish she’d spent a bit more time on certain areas, and I would have liked more memoir/more about her father in it – but it is still a very good, interesting, unusual book and I’m glad the Bookshop chose it.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
I loved this long novel about the longstanding friendship between a man and woman who are obsessed with video games – turning that obsession into a successful professional life. I’ve never played a video game, but was fascinated by Zevin’s exploration of their creation and development. Above all, this is a novel about friendship, which is an overlooked relationship in the history of literature – which, of course, has always privileged romantic relationships first. The only reason I haven’t written more about Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow on here is because it’s so well-known already that I don’t have anything to add to the wider discussion. But it’s brilliant (and a gift from my dear friend Mel, who proves how important friendship is).

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
A young girl suddenly discovers that she can taste the feelings of a baker/cooker in the food they have produced. It’s a brilliant conceit that sort of spirals too far from its origin, and I enjoyed the book but not as much as I would have done if Bender had kept more tautly to the initial idea.