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My top books of 2024

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One of my favourite bookish moments of the year is sitting down with my reading diary – a list of the books I’ve read since 2002 – and choosing my favourites of the year. Usually there are some that jump out at me, but which I’d forgotten about until my memory was jogged. Not this year! Without consulting my reading diary, I knew what the top nine would be – and there were a lot of solid contenders for tenth place, but I settled on the one that brought me greatest joy.

You know I love to rank things, but I’ll be honest – numbers four to nine could probably be in more or less any order. But there was a definite top three.

I’ll do a post about 2024 reading stats soon, but – here are my favourite books of 2024 (as usual, no rereads or repeat authors). Click on the links for full reviews.

10. My Darling Villain (1977) by Lynne Reid Banks

A young adult novel about a troubled teenage romance between a middle-class girl and a working-class boy – it’s Lynne Reid Bank’s exceptional storytelling that sweeps you along and makes you fall for Kate and Mark.

9. Dept. of Speculation (2014) by Jenny Offill

The whole of a marriage is shown through Offill’s innovative, fragmentary approach – a patchwork of vignettes, sometimes several paragraphs and sometimes only a handful of words. Searing psychological trauma might be placed next to an objective fact about space travel. It all coheres mesmerisingly, and tells the story of a couple with more thoroughness than many traditional novels five times as long could manage.

8. A Body Made of Glass (2024) by Caroline Crampton

The only non-fiction title on my list year, Crampton weaves together memoir and research as she shares her own experiences of health anxiety/hypochondria with a history of the condition (including a vogue for believing your body was literally made of glass). A Body Made of Glass is so helpful, so well-researched, and often moving – not least when Crampton shares the ways healthcare professionals marginalise women and people of colour.

7. The Visitors (1958) by Mary McMinnies

An incredibly rich, detailed (and very long) novel about a British Foreign Office official and his wife living in a thinly disguised Krakow, Poland. There aren’t a huge number of characters, but we are fully immersed in every moment of their lives. I wouldn’t often want a novel this densely thick with the minutaie of everyday interactions, but McMinnies does it so well that I have seldom found a world and its characters so perfectly realised.

6. Such A Fun Age (2019) by Kiley Reid

A novel of race relations in modern-day America that shows, with nuance and humour, how even the most well-meaning white people can get things horribly wrong. Starting with a young, Black woman being falsely accused of kidnapping the child she is babysitting, Reid takes us on a rollercoaster of morals, misunderstandings, competing memories, self-deception and a twist that blindsides you.

5. The Oracles (1955) by Margaret Kennedy

A small village is glad to have a noted sculptor living there (albeit with mistress and a tangle of semi-wild children) and the local would-be intelligentsia are marvelling at his latest sculpture… not realising they’re actually looking at garden furniture that has been struck by lightning. Kennedy’s novel is very funny and unafraid to swipe at intellectualism, but has a great deal of heart in its central characters – a married couple who misunderstand and mistrust each other, for whom the fall-out of the sculpture situation has far wider implications than anybody could anticipate.

4. Lady Living Alone (1945) by Norah Lofts

Something that never ceases to be a joy to me is that a novel can be out of print when I read it – and in print with the British Library Women Writers series by the end of the year. Penelope Shadow (what a name!) is an erratic woman with a notable foible: she cannot cope with being in a house on her own. What starts as a witty novel with excellent comic timing gradually becomes something much darker – ending in full-on thriller territory. Lofts is known for her historical fiction, but her domestic thriller is exceptional.

3. The Spring House (1936) by Cynthia Asquith

Set during the First World War, The Spring House tells of Miranda (whose husband is stationed in Canada) and the various flirtations she has, the nursing she undertakes at her palatial home turned into a hospital for invalided soliders, her relationship with her mother, her best friend, her brothers and various others. Asquith is brilliant on adult siblings and, more than that, simply exceptional on character and place. It’s hard to convey why The Spring House is so good, except for how immersively wonderful the reading experience was. Sadly, it’s very hard to track down.

2. Interpreter of Maladies (1999) by Jhumpa Lahiri

Beautiful, thought-provoking short stories, mostly about the relationship between two individuals – some romantic, some familial, some very fleeting. Whether tourist/driver, husband/wife, or child/babysitter, Lahiri is so good at mining the depths of these connections – the spoken and, especially, the unspoken. It’s my first experience of Lahiri’s writing and I’m excited to read more.

1. The Spring Begins (1934) by Katherine Dunning

And finally, my first read of the year was my best book of the year. Scott chose it as his best read last year, so I’m delighted to carry the torch for this extraordinary forgotten novel (and so grateful to Scott for sending me a pdf). Dunning foregrounds three women who would normally be in the background of other novels – Maggie the scullery-maid and Lottie the nurse-maid at the rich Kellaways’ house, and Hessie, an impoverished ‘lady’ who acts as governess for the vicar’s family. Each is such a wonderfully perfected creation, from Lottie’s fearful naivety to Maggie’s sensual daring to Hessie’s self-conscious misery. Dunning’s writing is beautiful, from descriptions of sea and sunshine through to the everyday lives and anxieties of women whom most novels would only glance at in passing. The novel is somehow both pacy and dreamlike, and a world I longed to speak longer in. It’s extraordinary that The Spring Begins is not in print. And I’m delighted to say that will not be the case for many more months…

Finishing A Century of Books with Alice Thomas Ellis

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My final slot on A Century of Books turned out to be 1990, and I decided to read The Inn at the Edge of the World by Alice Thomas Ellis, which I bought last year in the Lake District. When I chose it, I hadn’t realised that it is set at Christmas – but what a perfect book to take away for my Christmas break at my brother’s.

Eric and Mabel live unhappily together on a remote Scottish island, running an inn with bar and guesthouse that is largely despised by the locals and only infrequently occupied by visitors. Eric has the brainwave to place an advertisment for people who want to escape the Christmas season – where could be further from the busy commercialism of Christmas than an island where nobody goes outside the summer, bar a handful of permanent residents?

Mabel quickly abandons the island and her husband, and he is left to look after the five people who do decide to take up the offer. There is actor Jessica, best known for commericals; beautiful Jon, a less successful actor who follows her there; Anita, a dissatisfied shop worker; Harry, a depressed ex-military man, and Ronald, a self-important psychologist whose wife has recently left him. Each has their own reasons for going, and each is equal parts ready and tentative to form new connections.

Ever since I read And Then There Were None as a teenager, I’ve loved stories about random (or seemingly random) people coming together. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim is another good example, but far happier than The Inn at the Edge of the World – though perhaps Alice Thomas Ellis has something in common with Elizabeth von Arnim when it comes to descriptions of her characters. Both authors love depicting self-deception, and undercutting their characters even while they try to reveal their natures. Here’s Alice Thomas Ellis on Ronald the psychologist.

Ronald was also travelling in second-class accommodation because his wife’s desertion had left him unconfident and fearful that he might, at any moment, find himself penniless. He rationalised his decision by telling himself that, these days, there was very little difference between first and second class. He was right, but he was, nevertheless, slipping unawares into an unfortunate trend towards self-deception.

She slips in such brilliant little moments in passing, helping us to instantly understand not only the people she’s created, but the worlds they inhabit. Jessica the actress, for instance, ‘had a large pleasant face, which she could, when called upon, make beautiful’.

I found much of the novel very drily funny. Alice Thomas Ellis spares nobody and nothing. Here she has the inn’s decor in her sights. (Finlay is the man-of-all-work who seems involved in everything on the island, and his sister-in-law is the totally silent, totally capable woman who gets everything done and looks with evident cynicism on it all.)

When Finlay had gone Eric went to take a final look at the rooms which he and Finlay’s sister-in-law had prepared. The previous owner had had a regrettable passion for stripes. The wallpaper, curtains and counterpanes had all been resolutely striped and several chairs had had tartan-covered cushions on them. Eric had removed all these in his first enthusiasm and replaced them with a pale and restrained chintz he had got cheap when a shop in Glasgow, which had been too pale and restrained for its own good, went out of business.

The Inn at the Edge of the World certainly isn’t going to end up as heartwarming as The Enchanted April, but nor does it feel bleak. An unlikely friendship strikes up between Jessica and Harry, with limits imposed by their dissimilar natures. Eric admires or loathes the guests in turn, sometimes the same person, while Anita sets out to marry Ronald with the singlemindedness of a middle-aged woman exactly the right mix of imaginative and unimaginative. All the while, we remain aware of the wildness of the island – the dangerous sea around it, the possibility of being stranded, and the strange mythologies that are never too far from the everyday.

This is my third book by Alice Thomas Ellis, and I wasn’t entirely sure what I thought about Unexplained Laughter and The Birds of the Air. I don’t have to think twice about this one: it is far and away the best book I’ve read by Alice Thomas Ellis. She is brilliantly witty and a little dark, quietly ridiculing her characters without dehumanising them. Her deep knowledge of human nature never wavers, and though there are elements of the surreal that felt slightly self-indulgent, they don’t seep into the form and logic of the novel as they did in the other two I’ve read.

I absolutely recommend The Inn at the Edge of the World – particularly at Christmas, but it would be a great read at any other time too. I’m so glad I finished A Century of Books on a high – and with a handful of days to go, too.

Back by Henry Green

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You know when Caustic Cover Critic used to those funny posts of appalling cheap reprints of classics? Here’s an example. Among those that are simply confusing were a few that clearly put the title into some sort of search engine and stuck whatever appeared on the front. Three Men in a Boat gets three men in speedboats; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire gets a seductive woman hanging outside the Colosseum; Little Women gets a woman who is admittedly quite short, but is also apparently in the military of an East Asian country.

Well, when I pick up Harvill Press edition of Back (1946) by Henry Green, I can’t help feeling that it is a similar scenario. ‘The River Picnic’ by Victor Pasmore is a lovely painting, and painted only a handful of years before the novel was published – but it does seem to have been chosen primarily for the naked back on it. And the ‘back’ in Back refers to something quite different.

It is very timely, as a 1946 novel – because the title comes from Charley Summers coming back from the Second World War, having been held as a prisoner of war for the majority of it (and also having had a leg amputated). One of the first places he goes to is a graveyard – to visit the resting place of Rose, the woman he had loved.

What should he do? All he had was this suit he stood up in, which he had bought, and which the tailor had not delievered, but had kept safe till he got back. The rest was looted. Oh, he was lost in this bloody graveyard. Where could she be? Rose that he’d loved, that he’d come so far for? Why did she died? Could anyone understand anything? Perhaps it would have been bestg if they had killed him, he felt, if instead of a sniper’s riflge in that roebush that had pooped off something heavier at him. Rose would never have known, because she had died some time about that identical week. God bless her, he thought, his brown eyes dimmed suddenly with tears, and I hope she’s having a jolly good rest.

Charley cannot return as a grieving widower, or even a grieving partner, because Rose was married to another man – one who is ignorant of their relationship, and ignorant of the fact that their son is (probably) Charley’s. Charley does know the boy is probably biologically is, but seems pretty unmoved by it. He is too occupied with his grief for this woman. Rose remains hard for the reader to grasp: she is the catalyst for this man’s complicated series of responses, but she is something of a cipher herself. I think, and hope, this is deliberate on Green’s part.

Things get complicated when Charley goes to see Rose’s parents, who knew of their friendship. Rose’s mother has some kind of dementia, or possibly a grief-inflicted psychological response, and Rose’s father is caring for her in a chaotic sort of way. The scenes with Mr and Mrs Grant are bittersweet, of course, but also the parts of the novel where Green’s humour is at the forefront. It is undeniably a sad situation, but he finds the comedy of the absurd.

Mr Grant points Charley towards a local young widow, Nancy – and Charley is shaken by how much she looks like Rose. Indeed, he thinks she is Rose. And it’s this relationship that is the core of the rest of novel, as well as Charley’s wavering belief that she is, or is not, the woman he loved. Sometimes he seems to believe both things at once.

It’s an interesting angle on the mental disintegration caused by war, and I particularly appreciated the way Nancy’s personality manages to circumnavigate the curious box that Charley is trying to put her in, so that the reader does get to know her despite it. She resents being a ‘walking memory’, particularly for somebody else’s existence. But she also doesn’t seem able to escape a relationship of sorts with Charley who, after all, is paying attention to her in a world where not many people do.

Stylistically, I found Back rather a mixed bag. I’ve struggled with some Green novels (Living was incomprehensible), enjoyed others (Loving and Blindness), and Back was a curious mix of straightforward prose and very stylised. Well, I assume it was stylised. There were a fair few sections where Green layered on clause after clause, with a rhythm of commas which seemed purposeful. Here’s one example…

Another morning, in London, in which he worked, Charley ran across a man by the name of Middlewitch, whom he had met, in July, at the Centre where he had been to have his new leg fitted.

On a couple of occasions, these long, clause-heavy sentences take up most of a page. There are far more of a shorter, but still distinctive, variety. But not enough for it to feel like a storytelling technique? And, indeed, fewer and fewer as the book continues – so that it feels a bit like something Green tried and then wearied of. For most of Back, the writing is – dare I say it – quite ordinary. If you read this novel in isolation, you certainly wouldn’t consider him a leading light of Modernism. Perhaps, by the 1940s, he had tired of some of the formal and linguistic trickery that had earlier been his calling card.

So, I enjoyed Back and thought it was a very compelling psychological portrait. I suppose I just hoped for a bit more, and for something a bit more distinctive. It was good, but it could have been rather better.

Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark

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When I ranked Muriel Spark’s novels recently, there were a couple I hadn’t yet read. A few people had good words to say about The Bachelor though nobody seemed very enthusiastic about Aiding and Abetting. But the latter filled one of my remaining slots on A Century of Books, so here we are with Muriel Spark’s penultimate novel(la), published in 2000.

Who put Muriel Spark would come up with this premise? The starting point perhaps isn’t that eccentric – what if Lord Lucan were still alive, and went to a psychiatrist? But where many novelists would reach the limit of their strangeness, Spark sees it as a place to jump off from. Here he is with that psychiatrist, Dr Hildegard Wolf (whose usual treatment style involves just speaking about herself for the first several sessions):

It was towards the end of that month that Hildegard asked him her first question.

“What can I do for you?” she said, as if he was positively intruding on her professional time.

He gave her an arrogant look, sweeping her face. “First,” he said, “I have to tell you that I’m wanted by the police on two counts: murder and attempted murder. I have been wanted for over twenty years. I am the missing Lord Lucan.”

Hildegard was almost jolted at this. She was currently treating another patient who claimed, convincingly, to be the long-missing lord. She suspected collusion.

But that’s not all. Hildegard Wolf, in turn, has changed her name as she used to be a fraudulent stigmatic (i.e. someone who regularly bled from the places Christ was wounded, and thus considered a miraculous being). As I say, who but Spark?

There are another couple of characters – related to someone who allegedly harbour Lord Lucan during his escape from justice – who are out to gather information and track him down. I found them less interesting, and that storyline less successful. And, frankly, even the two characters who might be Lucan were less interesting than Hildegard Wolf – she is without a doubt the star of this novel.

According to Louise Welsh’s introduction, Spark wrote in her notes for Aiding and Abetting that ‘the theme of novel is blood’. And that is the link. We hear about the menstrual blood that Wolf has used in her past to fake this miracle – though perhaps less information about this past life than you might expect. We hear about the blood from the nanny that Lord Lucan murdered, and the way it became uncontainable.

As Hildegard knew from her own experience as a stigmatic fraud, blood, once let loose, gets all over the place. It sticks, it flows, it garishly advertises itself or accumulates in dark thick puddles. Once it gets going, there is no stopping blood.

I didn’t know very much about the Lord Lucan case. I knew the vaguest outline of what he did – killing the nanny, having mistaken her for his wife, then fleeing – but it happened 11 years before I was born (to the day, in fact). As Spark alludes to with the title to her novel, he managed to escape because a group of titled people closed ranks and aided his escape. Many of the accepted events of the murder are referenced in Aiding and Abetting but I think the novel is probably more successful for people like me, largely unaware of the case, than they would be for those who were immersed in the details of it at the time.

As I started Aiding and Abetting, I couldn’t see why people weren’t rating the novel higher. It was so well done – typically Spark matter-of-fact-madness, with some beguiling and well-drawn characters. But as the book went on, I could see why it doesn’t rate among her finest. The confidence of the opening wanes rather, and it doesn’t really hold together as a whole. At her best, Spark has a tautness and completeness to her novels that somehow make them feel like a polished form, even when she plays with narrative time and nothing does what you expect. Aiding and Abetting, contrarily, felt rather formless and random, and not in a deliberate way. It was still good, because it’s Spark, and better than some of hers I’ve read – but I certainly wouldn’t suggest anybody start their Spark reading journey with this one.

Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

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I was quite a way into my choice for 1969 on A Century of Books – Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall – when I decided I’d had enough. I’m sure I’ll go back and finish it and, in another mood, might even enjoy it. Drabble is a brilliant writer. But I was finding the details of a new mother’s affair with her cousin’s husband very, very tedious. I simply didn’t care.

And so it is perhaps surprising that I turned, instead, to Kundera’s short story collection Laughable Loves, translated from Czech by Suzanna Rappaport. After all, if I was finding one person’s granular exploration of an affair very uninteresting, what was I hoping to find in a book that – in my edition at least – was described as ‘seven short stories of sexual comedy’?

Well, if I picked up this book blind, it would have gone right back on the shelf. Nothing sounds less up my street than ‘stories of sexual comedy’. But luckily this isn’t my first rodeo with Kundera, and I know that he’s an absolutely brilliant writer – and, indeed, this is a pretty inaccurate description of what we’ll find inside.

I think the stories in Laughable Loves are published in different orders depending on your edition, but mine starts with a fascinating one called ‘The Hitchhiking Game’. A young couple are on a road trip together and have just stopped for petrol when they slide by silent agreement into their hitchhiking game. He pretends to be a stranger; she pretends to be a hitchhiker. There is an eroticism to it, though it isn’t just foreplay. This is a way for them to find an exciting freedom in their personalities, able to say things they wouldn’t normally, but with the solid bedrock of a stable relationship beneath it. Only, in this story, the bedrock is starting to shift.

“I wouldn’t have to think too hard about what to do with such a beautiful woman,” said the young man gallantly, and at this moment he was once again speaking far more to his own girl than to the figure of the hitchhiker.

But this flattering sentence made the girl feel as if she had caught him at something, as if she had wheedled a confession out of him with a fraudulent trick. She felt toward him a brief flash of intense hatred and said: “Aren’t you rather too sure of yourself?”

The couple bob and weave between their parallel personalities – the real and the costume – with each sentence in danger of commenting on the wrong one. It’s a beautifully crafted story, growing steadily darker, and reminded me a lot (in theme and sensibility) of Harold Pinter’s play ‘The Lover’ (1962).

If ‘The Hitchhiking Game’ is fraught and tense, then the next story is elegiac – from the title ‘Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead’ onwards. The title comes from a middle-aged, unnamed woman visiting the grave of her (rather older) husband – only to find that somebody else is now buried there.

Upset, she went to the cemetery administration. They told her that upon expiration of leases, graves were canceled. She reproached them for not having advised her that she should renew the lease, and they replied that there was little room in the cemetery and that the old dead ought to make room for the young dead. This exasperated her and she told them, holding back her tears, that they knew absolutely nothing of humaneness or respect for man. But she soon understood that the conversation was useless. Just as she could not have prevented her husband’s death, so also was she defenseless against his second death, this death of an old dead man, which no longer permitted him to exist even as a dead man.

While in this old town, she meets a young man (also unnamed) who was infatuated with her in the past. He is 15 years younger than her – about the age she was, when he last saw her – and they quickly go from reminiscences to romance. Then the story becomes about her inner conflict: should she sleep with this younger, attractive man, or would it shatter his remembrance of her beauty which would, in turn, shatter her own self-image?

Yes, there was no doubt about it: if he got her to make love, it would end in disgust—and this disgust would then tarnish not only the present moment, but also the image of the woman of long ago, an image he cherished like a jewel in his memory.

It is a curious will-they-won’t-they, with rather more psychological acuity than that premise would usually be expected to hold. Kundera was only 40 when this book was published, and of course not a woman, but it seems to me (admittedly also about 40 and not a woman) a very insightful portrayal of the many emotions that face a woman in this woman’s position.

Ok, you’re thinking, I’m beginning to see why ‘sexual comedy’ was thrown about as a term. And, yes, quite a few of the stories have some sort of sexual impetus in them – but my favourite of the book doesn’t really. ‘Nobody Will Laugh’ is one of those things-spiral-out-of-hand stories. Klima, the narrator, is a professor who gets a letter from Zaturetsky, asking him to write a review letter of his scholarship, for a journal. The amateur scholar is laughably bad, and Klima enjoys mocking the research with his girlfriend, but wants to avoid conflict and so sends a vague letter implying (but not promising) that he’ll write a review at some point.

Zaturetsky is determined, though. He starts turning up at Klima’s office, and Klima’s long-suffering secretary makes up excuses for his absence. Eventually Zaturetsky is turning up at Klima’s home, and the further lies Klima makes up to avoid writing the review end up derailing his job, his relationship, and his standing in the notoriously censorious society. It’s a brilliant and believable exploration of a lie getting out of hand that has a through-line to Kundera’s first novel about a joke getting out of hand (The Joke), albeit that was very dark and ‘Nobody Will Laugh’ is the funniest story in this collection.

I’ve written at length about the first three stories because they are the strongest in the collection. Indeed, I was anticipating Laughable Loves being a late entry on my Best Reads of 2024 list – but sadly the collection is a bit uneven. The Symposium is particularly shapeless – about various medical staff and their would-be exploits – and others lack the excellent grasp of pace and structure that mark out the brilliance of the first three. Thankfully, Laughable Loves ends on a stronger story – ‘Edward and God’ – about a man who pretends to believe in God to appease his girlfriend. Like ‘Nobody Will Laugh’, it’s a lie that begins to get out of control, and a reminder of how much Communist Eastern Europe persecuted Christians at the time – though it is also a lie that begins to become psychologically more and more important in Edwards’s life, while still resisting the pat ending of a genuine conversion.

It’s always a joy to go back to a Kundera book. I’ve read eight now, somehow without including his most famous, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This collection isn’t as postmodern and stylistically daring as he can be, but it is a reminder of his searing understanding of human relationships – both their tragedy and their comedy, often intertwined.

I can see why Penguin called these stories of sexual comedy, and that is an area that fascinates Kundera – but I think anybody buying the book on that premise will be disappointed, and it may well deter those who’ll find in Kundera far more nuance, psychological insight, and slanted beauty than those words suggest. (This edition has an intro by Philip Roth, which I have absolutely no interest in reading.)

Revisiting an old favourite

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When I had a cold a month ago, feeling sorry for myself and tired, the latest Slightly Foxed Edition arrived through my door. I was a bit surprised that it was the series’ first fictional offering, but delighted to add to my collection of Diary of a Provincial Lady editions. And, since I was coldy and tired and grumpy, it was absolutely the perfect book to read straight away. As soon as I turn to that first diary entry on November 7th 1929 (my birthday! albeit more than half a century early), I was at home.

I’ve read and listened to Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield so, so many times that I basically know all the words at this point. There is no book more comforting to dive into. The daily reflections, wry asides, embarrassments, and ironies of a 1930s wife and mother are so funny, so self-deprecating, so curiously recognisable even to someone like me who shares very few of her experiences.

This new edition comes with an enjoyable preface by Slightly Foxed favourite Ysenda Maxtone Graham (who is able to make apt references to her own grandmother’s most famous work, Mrs Miniver). I don’t agree with Graham’s assertion that Diary of a Provincial Lady is the best of the series – that honour goes to The Provincial Lady Goes Further in my opinion – but I really appreciated her comparison with Delafield’s more sombre examinations of staid married life in books like The Way Things Are, and why the Provincial Lady books are somehow more effective.

I suspect you’ve all read and loved this book, so instead of a full review, I’m just going to put some quotes that made me laugh – even on the zillionth reading.

February 28th

Notice, and am gratified by, appearance of large clump of crocuses near the front gate. Should like to make whimsical and charming reference to these… but am interrupted by Cook, saying that the Fish is here, but he’s only brought cod and haddock and the haddock doesn’t smell any too fresh, so what about cod?

Have often noticed that Life is like that.

March 1st

Crowds of people at the reception. Know most of them, but am startled by strange lady in pink, wearing eye-glasses, who says that I don’t remember her – which is only too true – but that she has played tennis at my house. How, she says, are those sweet twins? Find myself telling her that they are very well indeed, before I know where I am. Can only trust never to set eyes on her again.

March 9th

Barbara goes to Evening Service, and I go to look in on her mother, whom I find in shawls, sitting in an armchair reading- rather ostentatiously – enormous Life of Lord Beaconsfield. I ask how she is, and she shakes her head and enquires if I should ever guess that her pet name amongst her friends once used to be Butterfly? (This kind of question always so difficult, as either affirmative or negative reply apt to sound unsympathetic. Feel it would hardly do to suggest that Chrysalis, in view of the shawls, would now be more appropriate.) However, says Mrs. Blenkinsop with a sad smile, it is never her way to dwell upon herself and her own troubles. She just sits there, day after day, always ready to sympathise in the little joys and troubles of others, and I would hardly believe how unfailingly these are brought to her. People say, she adds deprecatingly, that just her Smile does them good. She does not know, she says, what they mean. (Neither do I.)

April 11th

Look for Robin and eventually find him with the cat, shut up into totally unventilated linen-cupboard, eating cheese which he says he found on the back stairs.

(Undoubtedly, a certain irony can be found in the fact that I have recently been appointed to new Guardians Committee, and am expected to visit Workhouse, etc., with particular reference to children’s quarters, in order that I may offer valuable suggestions on questions of hygiene and general welfare of inmates… Can only hope that fellow-members of the Committee will never be inspired to submit my own domestic arrangements to similar inspection.)

—

If you haven’t read Diary of a Provincial Lady yet then, gosh, you have a treat ahead of you. And if you’re looking for a last-minute stocking filler, then this beautiful new Slightly Foxed edition is perfect.

#133: Do We Have Reading Rules? and Two Willa Cather Novels

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Willa Cather and reading rules – welcome to episode 133 of ‘Tea or Books?’!

In the first half, we discuss reading rules – when we’re picking up a book, are there certain things that will definitely put us off? In the second half, we compare two novels by Willa Cather: Sapphira and the Slave Girl and A Lost Lady.

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you. 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. Among the bonus things you’ll find is our talk from the Marlborough Literary Festival!

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Back by Henry Green
Living by Henry Green
Loving by Henry Green
A Woman’s Place by Ruth Adam
A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmondeley
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble
Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Katherine Mansfield
Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Professor’s House by Willa Cather
Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather

Another Century of Books Round-Up

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As December continues apace, so does my need to catch up with A Century of Books posts. So here is a whole bunch of mini-reviews (more mini than review) of books I’ve read for ACOB that I don’t have a whole blog post worth of stuff to say about…

Lolly Willowes (1926) by Sylvia Townsend Warner
I got my village book club reading Lolly Willowes, and listened to the audiobook. As usual, I was bowled over by how brilliant Warner’s writing is – about the dynamics of an overlooked spinster living with her brother’s family, and the lengths she calmly goes to for some form of autonomy. I’ve read the novel many times and I always love it. It’s fair to say my book group were more mixed… and generally confused when she becomes a witch.

The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) by Grace Paley
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) by Grace Paley
Both these collections have been on my shelf for a very long time, and I’ve heard such good things about Paley’s short stories… but I ended up feeling quite lukewarm, and I can’t think of anything to say about them?

The Tao of Pooh (1982) by Benjamin Hoff
A fun book explaining the principles of Tao through the principles of Winnie the Pooh et al – and quoting liberally from the books, so enjoyable chiefly because it was a bit like re-reading the Pooh books. I’m not sure I remember much about Taoism off the back of it, but I certainly enjoyed remembering what a genius A.A. Milne was.

Tentacles of Unreason (1985) by Joan Givner
A slim collection of short stories by Joan Givner, whose The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer I enjoyed so much last year. Definitely not in the same league as her autobiographical writing IMO, but very readable and some very interesting character creation. I’d definitely read more stories by her, but it didn’t have the same oh-wow-this-is-excellent spark that her other book had.

Keepers of the Flame (1992) by Ian Hamilton
This is subtitled ‘literary estates and the rise of biography’, and so I’d thought it might be similar to Janet Malcolm’s ruthlessly brilliant book about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – or, more accurately, about their literary estates and biographers. Hamilton covers a wide, wide range from Donne to Shakespeare to Hardy to Plath but I wished it had been (frankly) more gossipy. But perhaps I shouldn’t hope for a Malcolmesque book from someone who isn’t Malcolm. On its own terms, this is very well researched. It’s not really about literary estates or biography until the final chapters, but it’s an interesting enough walk through the history of authorial reputation.

Notes from a Small Island (1995) by Bill Bryson
A few years ago, I gave up on Bryson’s much-loved book about touring the UK. I’ve loved some of his books, but Notes from a Small Island felt a bit try-hard. It turns out I enjoy it an awful lot more as an audiobook – my second attempt at it was far more successful. It’s still not very subtle humour, and his book on Shakespeare is definitely much better and funnier in my opinion, but I’m glad I got closer to seeing what the fuss is about.

Uncle Tungsten (2001) by Oliver Sacks
I adore Sacks, and I loved his much-later autobiography. This earlier attempt of ‘memories of a chemical boyhood’ was interesting to me when it was autobiographical, and much more tedious when it was explaining various histories of science. I’ve realised why I love his neuroscience: because it is unabashedly about people. I’m just not interested in science that isn’t directly, obviously about people’s behaviours. That’s a failing in me, not the book, of course.

The Audacity (2021) by Katherine Ryan
Katherine Ryan’s memoir is exactly what you expect it to be. For me, that was a good thing.

Why I chose these books in Hay-on-Wye

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I’ve been away in Hay-on-Wye for a couple of nights, staying in a lovely airbnb cottage with some friends. I’ve stayed overnight in Hay once before, but I’ve never done two nights. It was lovely to have a whole day without having to worry about driving there or back.

Friday was a beautiful day, and then The Storm hit. I’ve never seen Hay so empty on a Saturday as it was today! But I did my bit to keep the bookshops going – though, having gone in February, there wasn’t as much turnover as there would usually be between my visits. Some of the books below are ones I’ve picked up more than once in the past, and finally succumbed to…

Country Boy by Richard Hillyer
My LibraryThing catalogue told me I didn’t have this Slightly Foxed edition, which turned out not to be the case. Indeed, I even reviewed it back in 2013. But it will make a nice present for someone!

Modern English Fiction by Gerald Bullett
I wouldn’t normally pick up this sort of pocket intro to English literature, even one coming from 1926, but I was intrigued by his very personal take on the big names of the period – and the chapter ‘Eccentricities’, which I see includes May Sinclair.

Doctor Serocold by Helen Ashton
Rachel often talks about Ashton’s novels on Tea or Books? podcast, and so I was really pleased to stumble across this fairly hard-to-find copy of one of her early novels.

A Gentleman of Leisure by P.G. Wodehouse
Do I need more Wodehouse novels? Arguably no, given how many unread I have on my shelves. But I was in a shop where the paperbacks were £1 each and… you see my predicament.

People in the Room by Norah Lange
Someone recommended Lange’s childhood memoir to me, which put her name on my radar. This one is about a women spying on three women in the house opposite – unsure what their relationships are or what they’re doing. It sounds fascinating, and I hope it lives up to the intriguing blurb.

Twice Round the Clock by Billie Houston
A British Library Crime Classic that I don’t have was on the £1 shelves. Again, you see my predicament…

Confessions of Mrs Smith by Elinor Goulding Smith
Mrs Smith is apparently the wife of Robert Paul Smith, a humorist I have not heard of – flicking through this, it looks like a comic take on being a wife and mother, and for some reason that is totally my jam.

The Friend in Need by Elizabeth Coxhead
Barnham Rectory by Doreen Wallace
Out of Tomorrow by Stella Morton
Love Thy Neighbour by Sally Benson
Hush, Gabriel! by Veronica Parker Johns
I’ve grouped these because I basically don’t know anything about them, and they’re all mid-century novels (or, with Benson, short stories) that I’ve decided to chance my arm on. I’m particularly interested by The Friend in Need, which the blurb says is about social work – so could be one of the earliest novels about the modern social care system.

Ammonite and Leaping Fish by Penelope Lively
I’ve not enjoyed Lively’s non-fiction as much as her fiction, but I thought I’d give this one a go – Lively says it’s not a memoir so much as a book about old age.

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri was the only author I went hoping to find, after loving her stories Interpreter of Maladies earlier in the year. I thought there would be armfuls of Lahiri books about but I only found a couple – and the other was such a massively tall hardback that I didn’t think I’d ever be able to hold it. So it was these recent Roman Stories that came home with me – translated from Italian by Lahiri herself.

Man With A Blue Scarf by Martin Gayford
And finally, one that’s been on my wishlist for a long time, though I don’t remember where I first heard about it – a diary about sitting for a Lucian Freud portrait. I think it also looks at his work more broadly, but there’s something I find fascinating about recording the process that leads to the still image.

Ok, there we have it! As usual, I’d be interested to know if you’ve read any – or where you’d start. I’m doing my restricted book buying Project 24 next year, so finishing 2024 on a haul high.

Choose by M. de Momet

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Last year, I decided to watch three films which dealt with oh-so-relatable problem of “Oops! I remarried and my first spouse is still alive!” The first was the execrable modern schlock One True Loves; the second was misogynistic Too Many Husbands (1940) and the third was another 1940 hit and comfortably the best of the lot – My Favorite Wife, starring Cary Grant and possibly overshadowed by him also starring in The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday in 1940. Big year for Cary.

I will say this: the oops-remarried genre sparks some very good titles, regardless of the quality of the films themselves. When I saw Choose (1947) by M. de Momet advertised on the back of another 1940s book, I couldn’t resist getting a copy – sadly without the excellent dustjacket above. I forget exactly what the advert said, but it was clearly another novel where someone found themselves in an accidental bigamy pickle.

We rush straight into the heart of the thing. Shelly has been married to Peter for a year when (on page two) she receives a letter from her first husband, John, saying that he is coming home. He went missing during the Second World War and was presumed dead – but has in fact been in a POW camp for years, missing an arm and a leg but otherwise fully alive. Shelly’s friend George offers what I could consider some rather unduly calm advice:

“Try not to worry too much, it may settle itself quite easily. One of these two must have a greater claim.”

“But which? That’s the question. Which? John had the first claim, and Peter has the last. I can’t see the answer to this – I don’t think there is an answer.”

Before John comes home and discovers the truth, we are whisked back to their initial meeting and courtship. Indeed, the next 140 pages of this 200-page novel focus on the development of their romance and their young marriage and happiness together. Reader, any hope I had for Peter winning the husband-off quickly faded. Choose is really a fairly silly romance hung on a conceit that de Momet, for some reason, thinks should be incidental to seeing John be forceful and bold and Shelly be giggly and overwhelmed. As an example…

She held out her hand. He took it and let it lie on his outstretched palm. “What a little hand,” he murmured. “So very little – it’s like a child’s. You’re so young… so young.” His voice was low as if he were speaking a blessing.

Shelly didn’t feel lonely any more – she felt as if someone had wrapped something very soft and comforting about her as a protection from the hashness of the world.

I wondered about ‘M. de Momet’, about whom I haven’t been able to find any info. Is ‘M.’ an initial, or does it stand for ‘Monsieur’, with that French-sounding surname? My suspicion is that it’s a pseudonym – and it certainly feels more like a woman writing for most of the novel, though I was given pause by how much Shelly enjoys John explaining things to her. Surely only a man would have written that part of their wooing?

Choose isn’t badly written, and it certainly isn’t well-written. As you might guess from the excerpt above, it rattles along good-naturedly. There are some enjoyable descriptions of homes and nature and a very idealised version of young love. It toys with being daring at times, though in such an unprogressive way that I can’t imagine anybody being scandalised by the hints at sex – though perhaps we might be more scandalised now by his careless ignoring of consent.

He bent and kissed her.

“Shelly, I am going to sleep with you tonight.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Don’t be afraid. It’s a horrid business for a girl, so we’ll get it over now. I don’t want our honeymoon to be spoilt.”

She turned her head so that her face was buried in his shoulder.

Yikes. Anyway, by the time we’re back in the present, we haven’t learned a thing about Peter or why Shelly chose to marry him – only that she turned him down a fair few times first. He doesn’t stand a chance in the choice of the title – and I’m rather astonished that M. de Momet decided to make that decision such a small part of the novel. It feels like such a waste of an inventive idea – which can be treated comically, tragically, or everything in between. Instead, in Choose it is an afterthought to a very ordinary, silly, enjoyable and forgettable 1940s romance novel.