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Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather

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Willa Cather has definitely been on my list of authors I’m stockpiling rather than reading – so I decided to rectify that a little. I picked up one with a name in it, mais naturallement, but it also turned out to be her first novel – Alexander’s Bridge from 1912. She apparently disowned it later in life, but I thought it was rather good.

The Alexander of the title is Bartley Alexander, an engineer who has specialised in bridges and secured a great deal of money and renown with his ambitious designs. We first see him through the eyes of a man who has known him since he was a boy, Professor Wilson, and is now visiting Alexander and his wife in their Boston home. Mrs Alexander is intelligent, warm and conscious of having made the choice to live in her husband’s shadow. I found Mrs Alexander the most intriguing character in the novel, and would have loved to spend more time with her. Cather is so good at memory and a feeling that is not quite regret, but wondering how life could have been different. But with a romanticism that has not been dimmed by this:

“The bridges into the future—I often say that to myself. Bartley’s bridges always seem to me like that. Have you ever seen his first suspension bridge in Canada, the one he was doing when I first knew him? I hope you will see it sometime. We were married as soon as it was finished, and you will laugh when I tell you that it always has a rather bridal look to me. It is over the wildest river, with mists and clouds always battling about it, and it is as delicate as a cobweb hanging in the sky. It really was a bridge into the future. You have only to look at it to feel that it meant the beginning of a great career. But I have a photograph of it here.” She drew a portfolio from behind a bookcase. “And there, you see, on the hill, is my aunt’s house.”

But Alexander isn’t just hanging around in Boston. He works in London regularly, and there he meets again a woman he used to romance… and picks up where he left off.

I found Cather rather less convincing in this part of the novella, and it doesn’t help that I find tales of adultery rather dull on the whole. She is still an excellent writer, but there felt like there was less truth and sincerity in these sections. Maybe that was why she wanted to disown it later. They’re not terrible pages, but they contrast poorly with how good she is elsewhere.

The novella ends with a very effective climax, beautifully described – and based on a real event from the news, though I don’t think Cather drew the characters from life outside this moment. I really enjoyed reading it and it’s given me a keenness to return to Cather’s portraits of small-town American life again before too long. A Lost Lady is better, but there is enough here for me to relish.

The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis

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The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) was the final book I read in 2019, and I read it pretty much in one go – not all that difficult, as it is just under a hundred pages. I hadn’t heard about it until I was reading someone’s favourite books in The Week – I don’t remember whose, but they chose several lesser-known books that I loved so I thought I could probably trust them on this too.

One morning in January, 1539, a wedding was celebrated in the village of Artigues. That night the two children who had been espoused to one another lay in bed in the house of the groom’s father. They were Bertrande de Rols, aged eleven years, and Martin Guerre, who was no older, both offspring of rich peasant families as ancient, as feudal and as proud as any of the great seigniorial houses of Gascony.

So the novella opens. Bertrande has only been told about the wedding the day before, and she is a little bewildered by what has happened – a match between two families that has been long planned. The wedding ends with her new husband pulling her hair and hitting her, but they are equally unsure of themselves as they retire to their new marital bed. Don’t worry, nothing unpleasant happens there – they are married but not expected to act as grown ups just yet.

As we move forward quickly in time, we see them about a decade later. They have a young son and love one another, though Martin is not an overly affectionate man. Rather, he is ambitious and rebellious. He is the sort of man who will choose to go bear hunting despite being forbidden from doing so, and doesn’t feel much chagrin when his father hits him across the face for it. A couple of teeth are broken, but this is the discipline he uncomplainingly accepts. His father is the dominant and violent head of the family, and that’s that.

So, when Martin decides to plant fields of crops without his father’s permission, he knows he’ll be in trouble. He tells his wife that he will disappear for a week, to give his father time to calm down. And so he goes, not telling her where – so that she isn’t lying when she tells the patriarch that she is ignorant.

But, after a week, he hasn’t come back.

And weeks turn to years without him. In that time, both his parents die and Martin’s uncle installs himself as head of the family. Betrande finds her place in it, but never loses hope that the man she loves will come back.

And he does, almost a decade after he left! All is forgiven and he settles back into life with Bertrande, and they have another baby together. But she can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t her husband. He looks the same, he knows about their life together, he even has the same two broken teeth – but he is kind and loving where her husband was ruthless and dominant. Eventually she can’t keep quiet, and asks that a court decide whether or not this man is her husband.

I shan’t spoil the end, though this is based on a real story, oddly enough. I hadn’t heard of it, though it’s been used many times in fiction. It’s certainly an interesting premise, but what makes Lewis’s novella so good is how deeply she takes us into Bertrande’s feelings – her uncertainty and insecurity. She is a very human character, and the book never falls into the trap that usually puts me off historical fiction, of seeing everything in costume. It feels real and eternal, and there aren’t heaps of period details to show off the research, or dialogue that sounds strange to modern ears. I call it the ‘jeans test’ – would it be as interesting if all the characters were wearing jeans instead of their historical outfits? And the answer here is definitely yes.

I’m glad it was so short. It was exactly right to focus solely on the abbreviated marriage and the dilemma that came afterwards. Anything extraneous would spoil it. So, thank you to whoever it was who recommended it in The Week!

2019: Some Reading Stats

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I love reading people’s Best Books lists, and I also love reading stats posts. Sometimes I forget that normal people don’t even keep a list of the books they read, let alone analyse them – but they are much the poorer for it. Here are some highlights and statistics from my reading year (and comparison’s with 2018’s stats)…

Number of books read
I read 133 books last year, which is significantly above my usual average of around 100 – but rather fewer than the 153 I read last year. I’m not sure why it dropped, since my commute has been cut by an hour in the second half of 2019 and I should have had more reading time. But I always read more in years when I do A Century of Books, so maybe that’s an impetus?

Male/female authors
I read 58 books by men and 74 books by women – i.e. about 55% by women, which is the same percentage I had in 2018. And I read one book that was co-written by a man and a woman.

Fiction/non-fiction
85 fiction books (54 by women, 30 by men, 1 by both) and 48 non-fiction (20 by women, 28 by men). So men win out in the non-fiction stakes, slightly surprisingly. 64% fiction, which is a very slightly lower percentage than 2018. I do read more and more non-fiction, but I seem to buy fiction at a speedier rate…

Books in translation
2019 is my all-time highest ever for reading in translation – the first time I’ve ever broken double figures! I read 11 books in translation – 9 novels and 2 biographies. They came from Portuguese (2), French (2), Italian (2), Japanese, Flemish, Finnish, Russian, and German. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a novel translated from an Asian language before.

Most-read author
Nobody came in with more than 2 books this year – quite a few tied on that number: Agatha Christie, R.C. Sherriff, Mollie Panter-Downes, May Sinclair, Paul Collins, Muriel Spark, and Adam Silvera. But clearly no author obsessed me in 2019.

Re-reads
I re-read seven books in 2019 – as usual, a few were for podcast or book group. And some were for a secret project that I’ll tell you about in the next couple of months…

New-to-me authors
In 2018 I broke my usual 50/50 approximation by only reading 39% new-to-me authors. And in 2019 it was 62 new-to-me authors, which 47% of the books I read and closer to where I expected.

Shortest book title
Appropriately enough, it was Less by Andrew Sean Greer – tied with Omar by Wilfird Blunt.

Books by friends
I’ve reached the stage of life where friends are getting books published, it seems. It’s not quite the first time – but it’s the first time it’s happened more than once. I was delighted to read the excellent non-fiction books This Golden Fleece by Esther Rutter and The Remarkable Life of the Skin by Monty Lyman, both of whom are friends. And I read another one that hasn’t been published – also excellent.

Persephones
I’m trying to read more from my Persephone bookcase, partly because there are some books that have been there for an age, but mostly because they’re reliably brilliant. In 2019 I read The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff, Mariana by Monica Dickens, and The Carlyles at Home by Thea Holme. Plenty more there, of course.

Most disappointing book
I don’t know if it counts, because I wasn’t super excited to read it, but The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho was pretty stupid. I also couldn’t stand Baltasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago, so it’s not been a good year for books translated from Portuguese…

Animals in book titles
Will there by any this year?? There always seem to be… but it’s quite low this year. Mrs Fox by Sarah Hall, Molly Fox‘s Birthday by Deirdre Madden, and The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov are the only ones that get in this year. Unless you count Albert and the Dragonettes.

Strange things that happened in books this year
A woman turned into a fox, a hyrax started speaking, a meteor hit the earth, a man grew wings, a dead girl’s hand appeared, a murderer tried to get other people to accuse her, a woman went missing in Israel, a woman went missing in Russia, a church meeting lasted for eternity, a bridge collapsed and killed its engineer, a flood enveloped a house, dozens of people died from dancing, and phone calls told people the day they’d die.

My Top Ten Books of 2019

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I love the end of the year because I get to read everyone’s Best Books list – and I get to make my own. I’ve usually got a good idea what will be at the top of the list, but it’s only when going back through my reading that I decide which will make the full top ten.

This year, I think the top four could have been in any order. They were all a delight. But you know me – I don’t like the ‘in no particular order’ sort of list. Be brave and rank things, people! So here is my top ten, with the usual rules I give myself – no re-reads and no author can appear twice.

10. Miss Carter and the Ifrit (1945) by Susan Alice Kerby

The Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press is my favourite thing from the past few years in publishing – and this book was more or less made for me. A spinster is surprised when an enthusiastic and slightly chaotic ifrit – a sort of genie – turns up to do her bidding. A very funny clash of worlds.

9. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) by Brian Moore

This had been on my shelves for seven years, and I’m so glad I finally read it. In a claustrophobic boarding house, Judith Hearne arrives with a picture of Jesus to hang above the bed, and a world of loneliness and frustrated hope. It’s a melancholy, perfectly observed novel with a subdued humour below the surface.

8. Turn Back The Leaves (1930) by E.M. Delafield

I read this for the 1930 Club and found it one of EMD’s most enjoyable novels. It has none of the humour that laces most of her work, but is rather about the clashes of a Catholic family when various members fall in love outside The Church.

7. Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) by Deirdre Madden

A beautifully written novel about a single day in the life of a director house-sitting for her famous actress friend – though largely made up of flashbacks and recollections.

6. The Wells of St Mary’s (1962) by R.C. Sherriff

I can’t get enough of R.C. Sherriff – having read all the ones Persephone have republished, I got this one about a small village where a neglected well proves to have miraculous healing properties – and how this leads to murder…

5. Notes Made While Falling (2019) by Jenn Ashworth

This memoir-in-essays starts with a traumatic birth and the psychological damage it caused, and ranges over topics as various as Mormonism, Agatha Christie, Freud, and Virginia Woolf. The whole thing is united by brilliant, insightful writing.

4. The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (1982) by Charles Osborne

What fun I had reading this one! Osborne goes through each of Christie’s works in turn, giving the context from her life and the initial reception, as well as his critical opinion of the book. Even better, there are no spoilers.

3. All The Lives We Ever Lived (2019) by Katharine Smyth

This books explores Smyth’s grief at her father’s death through the lens of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. She writes about Woolf extremely well, and about her own family with honesty. I think you probably have to love Woolf to love this – but I do and I did.

2. O, The Brave Music (1943) by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

I read this novel twice this year, and I’m sure I’ll read it many times more. It’s a coming-of-age story that feels like it comes from the same world as I Capture the Castle, with the same freedom and uncertainty and love.

1. The Book of William (2009) by Paul Collins

I wasn’t expecting to love this book so much when I picked it up – prompted by Project Names. And yet, once I started, I fell completely in love. Collins traces the history of Shakespeare’s First Folio from its first printing to its rising and falling popularity over the centuries. Fascinating and often funny, I’d heartily recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest in the Bard of bibliophilia.

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So, there we go! Seven different decades represented and, more surprisingly for me, two books that were published this year. Another year where non-fiction comes out on top, which seems to have become a habit for my end of the year lists – though six novels in the top ten.

Full stats for my year’s reading will be coming soon – I’m still hoping to finish at least one more before the year is over!

 

Looking back on #ProjectNames

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It’s the final days of 2019, so I thought I’d take a look back at the major reading project of my year – Project Names. It hasn’t been one that I’ve done with a huge number of people, but it’s been lovely having Rosemary do it at the same time – and you can read her thoughts in the second half of this blog post. Thanks for sharing them with us, Rosemary!

In case you haven’t picked it up along the way this year, Project Names was a year-long project to read books with names in the title. It didn’t come with a target, and I certainly didn’t read these books exclusively – rather, when I was choosing the next books to pick off my shelves, it was a useful way to help decide from among the many options.

What counts as a name? I only looked at people’s names, rather than places – first name, surname, both, whatever. I let The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark in on a technicality, and counted God as a name in God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew. I was surprised to discover that Less by Andrew Sean Greer would count after I started it – because Less is the surname of the main character. For the most part, though, I was intentionally picking them off the shelf. And then reading something else if I wanted to.

There’s still a couple of days left in the year, and I have a handful of contenders on the go (as well as some still to review), but at the time of writing I’ve read 72 books with names in the title this year. I haven’t counted up my total books read in 2019, but I’m confident that’s more than half of the books I read. By contrast, only 32 of the 152 books I read in 2018 had names in the title.

And what did I learn? Well, it was a super fun way to structure my reading without limiting myself to a particular period, genre, geography, or anything like that. It was really fun to see if there were any commonalities between books with names in the title – and I’m always interested in how the title of a novel shapes how a reader experiences it. Obviously, it brings the character or characters mentioned to the fore.

Some of my reads were disappointing. Looking For Enid by Duncan McLaren, about Enid Blyton, was pretty terrible and went to a charity shop as soon as I’d finished it. Noah’s Ark is apparently widely considered one of Barbara Trapido’s worst novels. The Progress of Julius by Daphne du Maurier was so anti-Semitic that I felt bad even giving it to a charity shop, but that’s where it went. On the other hand, some of my best reads this year would have stayed unread if it weren’t for this project – The Book of William by Paul Collins had been neglected;  for ages; The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore is one I assumed I’d love, and did, but might have waited still longer to be picked up; Mr Emmanuel by Louis Golding has striking scenes that will stay with me for years.

I’m quite excited about having no reading structure at all next year, but this was the perfect way to follow on from A Century of Books without feeling panic at the multitude of options on my shelves. So, 2020 will be a largely anything-goes reading year, but I’d love to try something similar to Project Names the year after, if I come up with anything that works similarly.

If you’re tempted to give this a go, I definitely recommend it. Even if you don’t read all that many Project Names books, maybe bear it in mind when you’re deciding what to pick up next?

Over to Rosemary for her thoughts!

My reading was distinctly in the doldrums at the end of 2018. Having been a complete bookworm since my mother first started taking me to the local library at the age of three, I was reading less and less and missing it more and more. Other things – work, family, the dreaded social media – had crowded in, so when I saw Simon’s #projectnames idea, I knew it was just what I needed.  I spent an enjoyable hour searching my shelves for suitable titles, assembled them all in one place, and began what has become one of my most rewarding years of reading for decades.

My first book was DE Stevenson’s Bel Lamington; Stevenson was born here in Edinburgh, and having once been to a wonderful Persephone Books tea at which her granddaughter shared childhood memories of this amazing woman, I like to think of her, prone on her chaise longue, a cigarette (in an ornate holder, of course) in her hand, dictating her books to her secretary. She wrote many ‘light romantic’ novels, but this description does her a disservice, as all of them have sharp observations and wonderful characters. Later in the year I returned to Dorothy (who had a handy tendency to use her heroine’s name as the title) for Charlotte Fairlie. Both of these novels had been languishing on my bookshelves – I bought them in a job lot in Michael Moon’s famous Whitehaven shop years ago when visiting my in-laws; #projectnames led me to read them, and I am so glad that it did.

The focus on names meant my reading this year was far wider in scope than it had been of late. Sara Hunt of the estimable Saraband Books sent me Iain Maitland’s Mr Todd’s Reckoning, something I’d never normally have opened – but the title fitted, so in I plunged, and what a book it was. The twisted, self-justifying mind of a psychopath is brilliantly revealed, bit by tiny bit, as the temperature rises in a run-down suburb of Ipswich. Mr Todd could be your neighbour; he could be mine. Terrifying, and definitely one of my books of the year. I’d also never read any Henry James, always thinking he’d be hard work, but Daisy Miller was a name, so read it I did; I loved it and still think of Daisy often – surely the mark of a great novel.

I decided also to re-read some Amanda Cross. Cross, aka Professor Carolyn Heilbrun, was one of my very favourite authors in my student years, and I did wonder how her books would stand up after all this time; although they are all murder mysteries, they are very much rooted in the radical feminism of my youth, and I feared they might now seem dated. Well, maybe it’s because I am also now somewhat dated, but it was pure joy to return to The Question of Max, and especially to No Word From Winifred, the first Cross I ever bought from Heffers bookshop. Would readers who weren’t around then like them? I don’t know (I feel the same way about Posy Simmonds’ Wendy Weber cartoons – if you weren’t there in the 80s, would you get it?) but I thank #projectnames for leading me back to them. 

Reading more widely did, of course, mean that I came across a few duds as well. I was disappointed with Sandi Toksvig’s Gladys Reunited, and with Nella Last’s War (sorry Simon!), and Don’t Tell Alfred was certainly not one of Nancy Mitford’s best, but I’m still glad I read  all three. And I discovered some real gems too; I’d probably never have picked up Patrick Dennis’s eccentric Auntie Mame or Mavis Cheek’s Country Life, but both got four stars from me. I’m finishing the year with AJ Pearce’s Dear Mrs Bird.

So thank you so much Simon for reinvigorating my reading life, and I look forward to 2020’s theme, whatever it may be, with great anticipation. 

Books I got for Christmas!

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Hope you all had a really lovely Christmas! It was a new and different Christmas for the Thomas family, as it’s the first one since my dad retired as a vicar – Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife will have to change their nicknames! I’ve been in a vicarage for every Christmas of my life until now, and it’s very odd to have it as a quiet time when we can all stay in the house together, rather than madly going to a dozen carol services and never having all four of us in a room for many hours at a time. I missed some things, but it was lovely – Colin hosted, and we had a Christmas BBQ. I made roast potatoes in the kitchen, because even a BBQ needs added roast potatoes at Christmas.

I thought I’d share the pile of books I got among my presents. A few aren’t shown in the photo, because a couple were Secret Santa presents opened earlier, and one was packed somewhere else, but I’ve listed them all.

Told in Winter by Jon Godden
Also published as Winter’s Tale, this is by Rumer Godden’s sister – real name Winsome!! The top four books in the pile were all from a Secret Santa in the Virago Modern Classics group on LibraryThing. This Secret Santa always ends up bringing me such interesting things.

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
This one was on my wishlist – the subtitle is ‘adventures with Russian books and the people who read them’, and doesn’t that sound amazing?

The House in Norham Gardens by Penelope Lively
I love a bit of Lively – and, fun fact, Norham Gardens is where I started my driving lessons. The widest roads in Oxford, so it’s where you’re taken to learn a turn in the road!

Twelve Poems by Sylvia Townsend Warner
I love Warner and thought I had more or less everything she’d written, but somehow hadn’t heard of this one. Fab!

A Little Original Sin by Millicent Dillon
This is a biography of Jane Bowles, who wrote the brilliant novel Two Serious Ladies – it’ll be fun to find out more about her. [Or potentially not fun… I have a vague memory that her life wasn’t great… but interesting!]

Grandmothers by Salley Vickers
My friend Lorna got this for me – you might have heard her on the latest episode of Tea or Books? – and it’s not only a very pretty book but signed too!

The House Party by Adrian Tinniswood
Another one where the subtitle tells you how perfect this is for me – ‘A short history of leisure, pleasure and the country house weekend’.

Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham
This and the book above were from my friends Paul and Kirsty, and they’ve been keen for me to read this – not least so I can talk about sci-fi more authoritatively on the podcast in future!

Albert the Dragon and the Centaur by Rosemary Weir
I loved Albert the Dragon as a child and I haven’t read all of them – this was among the presents Colin got me, which is lovely.

Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading by Maureen Corrigan
I mean, the title says it all, doesn’t it? Thanks Mum and Dad for recognising the limits of my sociability!

The Bride of Northanger by Diana Birchall
A sequel to Northanger Abbey by my friend Diana – who wrote a brilliant sequel to Pride and Prejudice called Mrs Darcy’s Dilemma – and another great choice by Colin.

Stanley Spencer by Kenneth Pople
Mum and Dad got me a biography of my favourite painter – not pictured is a lovely book that functions as a catalogue of an exhibition from the 80s.

And, not pictured, a couple of books I got at book group Secret Santas – Inventing Love by Jose Ovejero and Lanterns Across the Snow by Susan Hill.

What a great bunch of books! Hope you also got lots under the tree, and have some nice time off to read.

My favourite books of the decade

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I messaged my book group about us doing ‘the last meeting of the decade’, and everyone had a panicked meltdown. It feels quite a big deal that NONE of us are ready for, right?? Not least because the current state of politics in the West doesn’t exactly make one feel optimistic about the next decade… but we can only hope and pray.

Anyway, I thought it would be a good opportunity to share my books of the decade – or, rather, the nine books that I chose as my Book of the Year from 2010-2018. 2019’s to be added when I’ve decided it!

Some of those years were better reading years than others, so my ultimate books of the decade might not exactly these. But it’s intriguing to see what rose to the top each year – follow the links for the full lists each time :)

2010: Nella Last’s War

What I wrote: “An early read in 2010, but my lasting favourite – a very talented writer who, but for Mass Observation, would never have had courage to put pen to paper. I’m looking forward to reading her later diaries in 2011.”

2011: The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

What I wrote: “From the first page onwards, Hamilton’s writing was so good that it left me actually astonished. How could an author be this talented? He is the 1940s missing link between writers as disparate as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. A shy woman bullied in a boarding house is an unlikely topic for great literature, but this is one of the best novels I’ve ever read – and Hamilton one of the most exceptional writers.”

2012: Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton

What I wrote: “I was only a couple of pages into this heavenly book when I knew it would be my book of the year. Morgan narrates the bizarre life of her isolated family of sisters. It certainly owes a debt to I Capture the Castle, but is perhaps even better – the most charming, lively, lovable, and eccentric family imaginable, I couldn’t believe how good it was, while I was reading. Others have been quite lukewarm, but causing a mini-revival for this glorious novel has been one of my proudest blogging moments.”

2013: London War Notes 1939-1945 by Mollie Panter-Downes

What I wrote: I was so lucky to track down an affordable copy, after borrowing from the library, and I know that it isn’t available easily – but I can think of no more accomplished, humane, and plain useful record of the wartime home front from a contemporary’s viewpoint. It changed the way I think about the day-by-day events of the second world war, and (like Guard Your Daughters at the top of 2012’s list) I think it is scandalous that it’s out of print. [2019 Simon adds: and now they’re both Persephones!!]

2014: The Sundial by Shirley Jackson

What I wrote: “An extremely funny and surreal novel about an extended family who will survive the apocalypse by staying in the family home together. Brilliantly, they are all rather unconcerned about the impending fire-and-brimstone, and Jackson gives us their squabbles and passive aggression instead. A superlatively inventive, amusing, and bizarre book.”

2015: The Shelf by Phyllis Rose

What I wrote: “And, in at number one – this wonderful book about a reading challenge! Rose chooses to read all the books on a (more or less) random shelf from a New York library, and the various ventures it leads her on. A joy for any bibliophile.”

2016: The Lark by E. Nesbit

What I wrote: “Once I’d remembered that this was one of my first reads in 2016, how could anything else come top of my list? It’s rare to read a novel this funny, joyful, and charming – about two young women setting up a flower shop, and their witty adventures. Even better – it’s coming back into print from Scott and the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint at Dean Street Press!” [2019 Simon adds: and Penguin too! What riches.]

2017: Merry Hall by Beverley Nichols

What I wrote: “It truly has been the Year of Beverley. I’ve read quite a lot of books by him this year, but I had to pick the one which kicked off my Beverley love affair – I read Merry Hall for the 1951 Club, and never looked back. This (presumably heightened) account of buying a house and doing up the garden is hilarious, charming, and (praise be!) the beginning of a trilogy. Don’t wait as long as I did to read Beverley – if you haven’t yet, make 2018 the year you read him!”

2018: The Sweet and Twenties by Beverley Nichols

What I wrote: “For the second year in a row, my favourite book of the year was by Beverley Nichols! This time, it’s his retrospective of the 1920s that Karen and I discussed when she was a guest on ‘Tea or Books?’. From the Thompson/Bywaters case to the fashions of the period, it’s historically rich and fascinating, as well as being soaked in Nichols’ inimitable style. A total delight!”

Love Notes From Freddie by Eva Rice

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I got Love Notes From Freddie (2015) as a review copy, based on how much I’d enjoyed her novels The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets and The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp, so I don’t know why it took me quite so long to get to it. In fact, I did give it a go a couple of years ago and wasn’t in the right mood – but Project Names made me get it off the shelf again.

I suppose I should start by saying that I was under Miss Crewe’s spell from the moment she walked into the room, picked up a piece of chalk and scratched an isosceles triangle on the blackboard. She had that effect on people – made all the more remarkable by her absolute blindness to her own power.

Reading it this time, I can see why it was a tougher sell than the others. It starts off in a school in the late 1960s, and you get the feeling that it might all be about detentions and stern headmistresses and that sort of thing. Marnie Fitzpatrick is the focus – a goodie two-shoes who is excellent at maths and impresses her teacher Miss Crewe. But perhaps she doesn’t want to stay well-behaved and predictable all the time – one of the reasons that she gets drunk with her friend Rachel. But during school hours and in school uniform – and so she and Rachel are expelled. Marnie is off to a different school that doesn’t have the inspirational Miss Crewe.

The chapters are alternatively from the perspectives of Marnie and Miss Crewe – we learn that the latter was an excellent dancer in her youth, but an injury (and her natural brilliance at mathematics) led to a teaching career.

They’re both interesting characters, but I didn’t find the initial set-up particularly interesting. Thankfully, though, it is just a background to what follows. And what follows is (finally!) Freddie. The novel certainly gets a new lease of life when he arrives, and we breathe a sigh of relief that the novel won’t be about a maths prodigy’s education. (Unless you wanted to read that sort of novel, I suppose, then you’ll be disappointed – but it didn’t seem quite to fit.) Marnie comes across Freddie at the local factory, where he works as an electrician. But he also uses the space to dance. Marnie sees him at it, and decides to volunteer her old maths teacher as a possible dance teacher. Diffidently, Freddie agrees.

Describing dancing is a difficult task, but Rice manages to convey the freedom Freddie feels when he can dance – along with the uncertainty, the self-criticism, and the insecurity – all from the perspective of somebody watching the dance, because we never hear from Freddie himself. And the perspectives of Marnie and Miss Crewe, watching him dance in different chapters, are cleverly different. Marnie sees him with the adoring eyes of a girl falling in love for the first time. Miss Crewe sees him with more world-weariness – superimposing her own failed dancing career, and the short-lived romance from the same period.

From here, Rice’s excellent storytelling ability takes us through to the end of the novel. It was a slower start than the other two I’ve read, but perhaps a deeper emotional centre once we’ve got going. There is a joy to the novel, but it is offset with greater uncertainty. Marnie’s naivety clashes with Miss Crewe’s hard-lost hope, and Freddie is somewhere between the two. Rice is very good at young love and the exuberant anxiety of it – and she’s equally good at reining the novel in to something more nuanced and cautious than a straightforward romance.

So, if you give this one a go, power through the maths at the beginning and get to something with Rice’s special touch. Or loiter in the maths and the school scenes, if that’s your jam.

My favourite novel of the year? (O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith)

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I don’t do a huge amount of re-reading, and I almost never read the same book twice within a year. Hopefully that’s a mark of how I loved O, The Brave Music (1943) by Dorothy Evelyn Smith. I read it back in March, and didn’t write about it for ages because I wanted to do it justice – and I re-read it recently to see if it was as good as I’d remembered. Oh, and it was.

I first heard of Dorothy Evelyn Smith when I was lent a copy of Miss Plum and Miss Penny, which was quite good. For some reason that I can’t quite remember, it didn’t live up to its promise (though Scott had nicer things to say). But I thought I still might as well buy O, The Brave Music when I came across it in a wonderful little bookshop in St. David’s. I was a little put off by the stupid title, which is one of those quotations-as-titles that only make sense if you know the context – and, even then, doesn’t make much sense in this case.

This is a coming of age novel in the mould of I Capture the Castle and Guard Your Daughters. Though published in the 1940s, the childhood being looked back upon takes place in the late nineteenth century (exact date rather vague). Ruan is the seven-year-old daughter a non-Conformist minister. Her sister is widely considered more beautiful and well-behaved than she, and her bold imagination and love for the moors that surround them are not thought advantages by the society her family moves in. But that family is far from a unified front. We see them through the seven-year-old eyes and the older-and-wiser eyes of the adult Ruan simultaneously. The child can only half understand how poorly matched her parents are – her conservative, absent-minded father and her beautiful, unhappily tamed mother – and can’t really comprehend the dislike her mother feels towards her. Ruan is not daunted by her surroundings. She is confident, thoughtful, determined. She feels much older than her seven years.

Ruan has another sibling – two-year-old Clem. Here’s a passage about him that is indicative of the way Smith writes:

At the back of our house was a long, narrow strip of garden, very much overgrown with weeds, because Father did not care for gardening and had no money for professional help. But it was a garden, at least, and, the weather turning very hot and dry, I was allowed to wheel Clem up and down the weedy path, or sit on the rank lawn and play with him. I had always loved my baby brother dearly, and in those long, quiet June days my love became more articulate and, alas, more sharp of vision. I began to watch Clem more closely; to think and worry and make comparisons; but it was Annie Briggs who finally tore the scales from my eyes, and gave me my first, salt knowledge of the sorrowful thing love can be…

Those final words are so beautifully pitched. In these years, Ruan gains plenty of that ‘salt knowledge’ – but this is far from an unhappy book. She is equally keenly aware of the things that bring her joy. That includes nature, freedom – and David.

David is the son of the local factory owner – a rich man who came from a working-class background. He is five years older than Ruan but sees a kindred spirit in her, calling her Tinribs and treating her without any of the awkward deference she experiences from almost everyone else. In him she sees a new sort of family, and loves him.

The novel covers about eight years, during which Ruan has to go to school – and then later to an enormous, mostly closed-up house, Cobbetts, belonging to a relative. Wherever she is, Smith is brilliant at giving the feeling of the place – whether that’s the dirty claustrophobia of the school or the cold, reassuring Cobbetts – and how it affects Ruan and her personality.

Like all the best coming-of-age novels, the strength of O, The Brave Music is in the empathetic central character and how deeply immersed the reader feels in her life. As Ruan sees and experiences and understands new things, adding them to the catalogue of her impressions of the world, we half feel that we are seeing them for the first time too – and half want to protect this child against the bad and good and overwhelming that life will bring. But whenever it has become too overwhelming – there are the moors, or there is Cobbetts, or there is David – and joy is back.

David is kind, stubborn, generous, and believable – becoming a little more strained as he grows older and goes to school, and they meet less frequently, but warming up and still being the David that Ruan needs him to be. Being children, this is not a romance – but my only criticism of the novel is that the five-year age gap does get rather unsettling when he becomes an adult and she is still a child, and still devoted to him. Considering how she always seems older than she is, I don’t know why Smith didn’t make it only one or two years between them. But I can reassure you now that nothing untoward or icky happens!

I was confident early in O, The Brave Music that is was something special – and a re-read confirms it. It’s going to be my favourite novel of the year, I feel sure – and one I’ll be revisiting often.

Six Degrees of Separation: Sanditon

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I’m joining in the Six Degrees of Separation monthly meme from Books Are My Favorite And Best – each month, everyone starts with the same book. And then each bloggers heads off in different directions with their own subjective or objective associations. I’ve been waiting for one that started with a book I’ve read – and I recently read Sanditon, so we’re good to go!

Image result for sanditon cover

While Sanditon starts in the countryside, the town of the title is very much by the sea – and the Parkers are hoping it will become THE place to go for sea-lovers. Who knows whether or not it would have been, if she had finished the novel. But it got me thinking about other novels set by the sea – and you couldn’t find a nicer one that The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff. It’s been republished by Persephone, and it’s a simple tale of a family going to their usual holiday destination – though getting older, and wondering if they have changed too much to still enjoy it.

Image result for fortnight in september sherriff

Months in book titles is my next link, and which will get us away from the sea – and to Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl, translated by Anne Born. It’s about the breakdown of a marriage, and the middle-aged male narrator isn’t the most sympathetic character – though whether or not he’s meant to be, I’m unsure. What gets it into this list is Grøndahl’s beautiful writing. When I was in the right mood, I adored it.

Image result for silence in october jens christian grondahl

The narrator of Silence in October isn’t given a name. There are lots of novels with unnamed narrators, and I always wonder if the conceit is worth the frustration it must cause to the writer. Anyway, I could have chosen any number of them – but I’m going with The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer. The narrator has a large number of children – we are never told exactly how many – and is an eccentric with a matter-of-fact voice. Her husband is building a large glass tower in the middle of nowhere, for some reason. It’s bizarre and brilliant.

I spent a long time getting Penelope Mortimer, Penelope Lively, and Penelope Fitzgerald confused. Now that I’ve read at least one book by each of them, they are easy to distinguish – with not much in common besides their names. But At Freddie’s, perhaps my favourite Fitzgerald novel, does have a central female character of equal eccentricity, albeit manifested differently. Freddie is the doyenne of a children’s acting school. The novel is witty and odd and very like Muriel Spark, which can only be a good thing.

Image result for at freddie's penelope fitzgerald

I love novels connected with theatrical acting, and so my next choice is the only Ngaio Marsh novel I’ve read: Opening Night. It’s set in the rehearsals for a play, with a wonderfully realised and funny cast of characters. I did begin to wonder if the murder was ever going to come – but, fear not, it does…

Image result for opening night ngaio marsh

Let’s finish with Marsh’s fellow New Zealander, the incomparable Katherine Mansfield. She’s my favourite short story writer and one of my favourite writers of any variety. She’s at her best in very brief pieces, and everything in the collection The Garden Party is extraordinary – particularly the title story.

Image result for the garden party katherine mansfield

That was fun! Let me know if you have a go yourself – or why not try your six degrees of separation in the comment section of this post?