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A round up of audiobooks (#ABookADayInMay, sort of)

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Today’s book was finishing off an audiobook that I don’t have masses to say about, so I thought I’d use it as an excuse to round up a whole bunch of audiobooks I’ve listened to this year – so I can tick them off on my A Century of Books list. Buckle up and discover the variety of books I listen to on audio!

Superforecasting (2015) by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
A non-fiction about people who are particularly adept at forecasting the future – not in terms of psychic powers, but through teamwork, second guessing themselves, a deep understanding of logic and a good dose of humility. It was an interesting listen, though not quite what I thought it would be. Some of it was how-to, and I have no aspirations to being a superforecaster. But I enjoyed hearing about the people who are (without it being a book I’d necessarily rush to recommend to people).

Excellent Women (1952) by Barbara Pym
This was a re-read for book club, and (as recently discussed) I have really leant into re-reading by audiobook. It was 20 years since I read Excellent Women and I didn’t remember anything about it except that I was disappointed it was set in London. This time around, forewarned that it wasn’t in a village, I could concentrate no how much I enjoyed the humour of this story: about a single woman called Mildred, her travails trying to get to know her boisterously feuding neighbours, her various almost-romances with clergy, and the weight of expectations on her shoulders as one of society’s ‘excellent women’.

Passing (1929) by Nella Larsen
This was an absolutely excellent book about Black women ‘passing’ as white, and the consequences of it, that I must write about properly one day.

Life With Picasso (1964) by Francoise Gilet
An absolutely fascinating portrait of life not-quite-married to a total narcissist. It sounds like living with and loving Picasso was absolutely exhausting, and it’s no wonder he tried to get the book thrown out before publication. My one qualm with the book is that Gilet recounts extremely detailed conversations at enormous length, many years after they happened. Whoever did the introduction to the book tries to claim that Gilet often told her these conversations over the years in exactly the same words, but methinks the lady doth protest too much. (The book is also rather too long – the nuances of life among artists in mid-century Europe is my favourite, perhaps, but it wouldn’t be the same sort of book if it weren’t dominated by Picasso and his selfishness.)

From Bauhas to Our House (1981) by Tom Wolfe
A short non-fiction, basically railing against modern architecture – and, along the way, giving a potted history of architecture in America. It was less personality-driven and funny than I’d imagined, and more informative (though I don’t think I remembered many of those details.)

True Stories (1996) by Helen Garner
My journey into Helen Garner’s non-fiction continues apace, and I enjoyed this collection of essays from across Garner’s career. The 1991 label is a bit misleading, because they come from several decades of career. It’s a real mix, and I particularly appreciated the extended section on Garner’s siblings and their dynamics as adults (‘If there are five of you, you form a complex network of shifting alliances’) – the other books I’ve read by her are less revealing about her own life.

50 Great Myths Of Popular Psychology (2009) by Scott Lilienfeld et al
What a rich book! Lilienfeld (and a bunch of other authors) go through 50 myths of popular psychology – neatly explaining why all of them are false, and why a lot of what is passed down in popular consciousness or stereotype isn’t accurate. Some are widely known not to be true (e.g. we only use 10% of our brain), some aren’t myths I’d ever heard (e.g. people with dyslexia see words back-to-front), while some were truly revelatory to me (there ISN’T safety in numbers). Each chapter ends with a list of other mythbusting dealt with quickly, so there’s actually far more than 50 in here. I listened for free on Audible Plus Catalogue, but you can also get the ebook free from Lilienfeld’s website. My one critique of his reasoning is how often ‘people widely believed this’ is evdienced by ‘it appears in films’. I don’t think people believe in time travel, but that appears in films…

There we go! I can fill up some gaps on A Century of Books, and hopefully have given you some possible reading options.

A couple of #ABookADayInMay disappointments

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Inevitably, not every book in A Book A Day in May is going to be a success. The past couple of days have both been novellas that are gonna go straight to a charity shop (unless someone from the UK would like me to post to you – in which case, let me know). (You might not want to when you’ve read the reviews.)

The Cheval Glass (1973) by Ursula Bloom

When I read Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex – one of Bloom’s pseudonyms, and now in the British Library Women Writers series – I was amazed that a book so enjoyable and well-crafted could be written by an author of 500+ novels. How could one maintain that level of quantity AND quality? Well, I’ve long suspected that she saved her best work for the ‘Mary Essex’ name – and The Cheval Glass suggests that might be the case. It’s the first fiction I’ve read under her own name, and it’s pretty bad.

Pearl is a young girl living in a family’s ancestral home. Her mother Mary was taken very ill during childbirth and becomes an invalid, having to stay in bed most of the time – so Pearl entertains herself by rambling around the large house and its attics, inventing friends to play with. More on that later.

While Mary is ill, her husband (James) falls in love with Hilary, an artist who has rented a house in the village. This happens entirely off the page. We no sooner encounter her than this love is taken as read. Curiously (in one of several signs of terrible editing), we hear about the meeting twice. We also hear, twice, about Mary getting terminal cancer. Quite how that relates to difficult childbirth, I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s the sort of novel where people decide to Honourably Do The Right Thing and then tell each other about it thoroughly unnatural dialogue. Here’s James, speaking to Hilary…

In a low voice he said, “I could never part with you, Hilary. This love has come to pass and is for ever. When the hour comes and she goes,” he choked a trigle uneasily, for it hurt him, “when the hour is here, we will marry after a reasonable waiting period, and the neighbourhood will think that we became so accustomed to each other during her illness that this automatically ensued. They will accept it as being that.”

Alongside all of this is the significance of the cheval glass. It has been in the family for generations – and, in it, Pearl starts to see one of her ancestors from generations ago. Here she is, telling Hilary about it:

“There is a lady here,” she whispered, complacemently and calmly. “Another lady,” she said, as though this was merely a piece of information which she accepted as being true. No more.

“Another lady?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“In the glass,” said the child, and stared up at her with a curious look in her eyes. She went on more slowly. “It is so very difficult to tell anybody who is grown-up, but she lives here. She does not always come when I want her. But most times. She is here.”

It’s a promising premise, but Bloom does very little about it. Everybody more or less immediately accepts that the mirror is a portal to the past, and ‘the lady’ (always in inverted commas) doesn’t seem to have anything more pressing to pass on than vague relationship advice to Hilary. Poor Pearl seems to disappear from the novel after the first half, having been seemingly its heroine, and The Cheval Glass becomes about Hilary’s rather tedious love triangle/square.

It’s a very weak novel, and shows clear signs of having been written at speed without any editing. Every sentence is clunky, and I found it rather a chore to get through. From now on, I think I’ll stick to Bloom when she appears as Mary Essex. Such a shame, since the cover is so striking.

The Grasshoppers Come (1931) by David Garnett

This one isn’t bad so much as it is not my taste. From the title, I thought it would be about nature – and that is how things start, with a three-page description of the heat and the ‘stridulations’ of grasshoppers:

As each day of the early summer passed, the sun grew hotter, the fine windless weather more settled, and the stridulation noisier, more incessant, and the little whirlpools, which seemed to catch up the flying insects over the reeds, larger and more powerful, holding them up longer in flight.

But then it becomes clear that it’s other flying things that are going to take centre stage – for this is also an aerodrome. Garnett cleverly describes the planes in similar manner:

Round and round they flew, some higher up wandering off a little way over the surrounding country, others lower down, and these lower machines were continually shutting off their engines and gliding almost silently in to land, dropping their tails as they settled down and bounced upon the earth, when, after a short run, they stopped until suddenly the engine was opened up again, and they would roar across the grass into the eye of the wind and fly away.

From here, it becomes a novella about life at an air base and descriptions of flying, with a variety of pilots I struggled to tell apart except one of them is a woman (in an era where all female pilots seemed to be celebrities). I suppose, in 1931, reading about flying was quite thrilling. I found it all a little tepid.

The Grasshoppers Come then gets into adventure mode, I think, with all manner of challenges and obstacles to the flying. Towards the end someone is stranded after a crash and has to survive of the self-same grasshoppers of the title, and I found this section the most compelling – perhaps because it didn’t rely on flying as inherently interesting.

So, there we go. Two more novellas off the shelf and off to a charity shop!

The Chip and the Block by E.M. Delafield – #ABookADayInMay Day 22

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E.M. Delafield was a very prolific novelist, and even though I’ve been reading her steadily for more than 20 years, there is still a handful of her books I’ve not read. I am pretty sure I’ve owned The Chip and the Block (1925) for the best part of those 20 years, and I finally got it down from my special Delafield shelf yesterday – and it’s lovely to spend more time in her company. (I will note that she needlessly uses the n-word in the first line, which was not an auspicious beginning, and I’m glad didn’t continue beyond that.)

If you’ve only read The Diary of a Provincial Lady and its sequels, you might think of E.M. Delafield primarily as a comic writer. And, yes, she is brilliant at comedy – often weaving dry humour into most of her more serious novels. I think The Chip and the Block is one of the least overtly funny – though there is dark humour, and the comedy that comes from somebody being totally lacking in self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge (and, yes, its lack) is the dominant theme in E.M. Delafield’s oeuvre, taken as a whole. In The Chip and the Block, it is seen chiefly in Charles Ellery, also known as Chas. He is the patriarch of a small family, with his tired, good wife Mary and his three children – Paul, Jeannie, and Victor. As the novel opens, the children are young – Victor, the youngest, is only recently engaging in conversations. The whole family has been recovering from influenza, and the most affected are Victor and Charles. Victor has been seriously ill. Charles has declared himself so. This telling scene happens during the recuperation period:

“Come along!” Father shouted gaily, catching Jeannie by the hand.

“You’re forgetting your stick, Father,” said Victor’s baby voice.

He pointed to the stick that had fallen unnoticed to the ground.

Father looked at Victor, and Victor looked back at his father. Paul could not help noticing them.

Although he was so unobservant about things and places, he always noticed people, and he often felt curious certainties as to what they were thinking and feeling.

This time he did not feel any certainties at all, but only a little uneasiness that he could not possibly have explained even to himself.

It is emblematic of many personalities. Paul is also watching, bewildering by the world even while he can perceive things that others miss. He is often close to tears, and fears his father’s ready wrath – which irritates him even more. Jeannie is content, happy to dismiss any sad feelings, and amiably unintelligent. And Victor? If Charles is the block, he is the chip. He sees through his father’s masquerades – while also being given to many of the same foibles as he grows older.

Delafield’s portrait of Charles is so frustratingly accurate. We all know people who have at least some echo of his personality. Charles is a fairly unsuccessful writer, totally given to self-mythologising. He is ruthlessly selfish but presents himself as angelically selfless, always berating his children for not considering anybody except themselves. He tells stories of finding Beethoven so beautiful as a four-year-old that he bursts into tears of artistic joy (his sharp elderly mother says he was seven years old, and cried because he’d eaten too many plums). He claims to have slaved night and day to write books while the children played and cried around his feet – while they distinctly remember being kept far from his study, and shouted out if they made any noise.

Charles doesn’t develop or grow as a character, it is fair to say, but Delafield has drawn him so well that it doesn’t matter. His arguments and self-presentation are so eloquently twisted that it is hard to disagree with him – and he certainly wouldn’t brook any contradiction, given his self-proclaimed artistic and sensitive temperament. But he is a nightmare to be near, poisoning the family around him.

The novel progresses until the children are grown up, and the second half of the novel looks more at the legacies of this upbringing – including careers, romances, and the inescapable expectations of their father. Again, they develop entirely in line with the personalities they showed as infants. Is that true? Perhaps, though I imagine there is more scope in reality for people to be distinct from their past selves. I hope I’m not very like my eight-year-old self, though maybe that is wishful thinking.

Anyway, I think this is a strong, convincing and engaging contribution to E.M. Delafield’s wide output. I did miss the wit that characterises most of her books, and she clearly wanted to do something more sombre and serious. On its own merits, it’s very good indeed.

A very short novella by Vita Sackville-West #ABookADayInMay no.21

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I read Vita Sackville-West’s The Death of Noble Godavary back in 2019, as part of another book-a-day project, but it’s taken me another five years to read the second novella in the slim volume. It’s not mentioned on the cover, but there is a 60-page novella in there too, called Gottfried Künstler. I’m pretty sure it’s a novella rather than a long short story, but who’s counting. (Well, me, I suppose.)

The story is slightly inexplicably set in Germany in 1523, though the dialogue and most of the details feel a lot more 20th-century than 16th. It is the depths of winter and opening scene is the whole town gathered to skate on the frozen river. Everybody is there, from every class and community. Among them is our hero, Gottfried. As with everything in this beautifully written novella, Sackville-West describes his skating in a lovely way:

Besides – for he was fastidious and proud – he liked the idea of cutting his patterns as it were in space; if he left a mark at all, it would soon be obliterated; he liked doing something very difficult, which no eye would observe or be able to follow, and which he himself would not be able exactly to repeat. Indeed, one of the reasons why he loved the ice was because it so soon dissolved and was lost without trace into the commonwealth of waters; so fine, so enchanted, so steely, so perfect in itself, when it was there, it was yet so brief; in such a way, he thought, he would wish the best of himself to crystallise once into existence and then be lost and forgotten.

The novella was published in 1932 but there is a note saying it was written in 1929 – I wondered if Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf compared notes on their skating scenes, since there is such memorable skating in 1929’s Orlando.

Off he glides, but everything changes when he falls and hits his head. The local doctor assists, but doesn’t take him home – since he worries his wife would object, and he is scared of her disapproval (an enjoyable dose of character comedy in these side figures). Physically, he is not too bad – but he has lost his memory completely. He has absolutely no idea who he is.

The only person who will help him in Anna. She lives alone, always seen hooded, and rumours abound that she is a witch. The townspeople seem content to gossip about and ostracise her, rather than anything more concrete, and nobody puts up much of a fuss when she invites Gottfried to stay with her. At which point, Sackville-West breaks the fourth wall in a way I appreciated.

The sophisticated reader of novels will long before now have completed this story according to lending library experience, by assuming either that (a) Gottfried Künstler fell in love with Anna Rothe, (b) that Anna Rothe fell in love with Gottfried Künstler, (c) that – most promising of all – Gottfried Künstler and Anna Rothe fell in love with one another. A great disappointment is in store for the sophisticated reader of novels: none of these three things happened.

As she adds, again rather beautifully, ‘Love is not the only thing in the world, though novelists appear to believe so; and fortunately there are other ways of resolving the confusion of life into some sort of synthesis.’ For much of the novella, Sackville-West depicts and celebrates the chaste, sweet, naive friendship that springs up between the two. We don’t know all that much about Gottfried before his accident, but he has clearly transformed – into a man with a simple, fervent love of the natural world and the small adventures of life. They make a snowman together, for goodness’ sake.

There is almost no dialogue for most of Gottfried Künstler, which I think helps us remain at a bit of a distance – watching the two get to know each other and find great joy in that. Usually I love dialogue in a story, but in this novella its absence helped prevent it becoming cloying or fey. It felt in many ways like a fable.

And, like a fable, there is a darker twist in the tale – which I shan’t spoil. It felt fitting, and was done very well, but it was appropriately sad too.

More or less every time I write about Sackville-West, I mention that we do her a disservice when we only think of her in relation to Woolf. She is an exceptionally good writer, and this little-known example of her work is another instance of that writing. It might, in fact, be the purest distillation of it that I’ve read.

Shadow Lines by Nicholas Royle #ABookADayInMay Day 20

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Shadow Lines: Searching for the Book Beyond the Shelf [Book]

Today’s book is another one I can lay at Karen’s door, with her recent review, but I was always likely to get hold of Nicholas Royle’s Shadow Lines (2024) since I enjoyed White Spines so much. That bookish memoir was centred around Royle’s need to collect all of the white-spined Picador books. Shadow Lines has less a throughline – it’s really just an ambling non-fiction around the joy of books, with chapters on topics like reading while walking, the different Penguin Short Stories books, books in films etc.

It could feel self-indulgent, and perhaps some sections go on slightly too long – the books in films is an endless topic that does begin to feel a touch endless – but it’s really a delight because you are in the hands of such an ardent bibliophile. And I use bibliophile in its true sense – Royle loves reading, but he really loves books. It’s a distinction that not everybody would understand, though I suspect most readers of this blog would. Book shopping, book hunting, book collecting, book browsing. They are all pleasures that are only tangentially linked to reading – and Royle fully understands the validity of those pleasures.

I felt affinity with him in broad themes rather than individual mentions, for the most part. Our tastes in literature are clearly very different, and I hadn’t heard of many of the authors he prizes. He, in turn, didn’t instantly know who Clive Bell is, which suggests he’s spent less time than I immersed in the interwar years. But none of that matters. I was in such good company with a bibliophile that I lapped it up – there is no pretension to Royle’s tastes or writing, or any attempts to cloak the reality of his interests with what Should Be Liked. It’s all from the heart, albeit filtered through the recognisably British deflection of dry humour and self-deprecation.

Oh, and occasionally I felt truly like I was with a brother. I marked out this section:

If we agree that it’s impossible to read everything, then we have to choose which books to read and which books to leave on the shelf. Assuming the act of choosing is more sophisticated than flipping a cooin, it is surely not unreasonable to apply criteria. For mine, see above. I’ll read just about any other adult fiction. Apart from historical fiction, romance, and novels over 400 pages long (with exceptions).

Amen! Both in person and in the blog I’ve had people get slightly irked when I say I don’t want to read historical fiction, as though there were only a thousand novels in the world and I’d limited myself from a large swathe of them. I could say ‘I only want to read novels set in mid-century America by authors beginning with G’ and I’d probably still find enough to last me a decade. Part of coping with the vast and growing world of literature is to demarcate the bits you’re not going to invest in. One day I’ll write out my full list of ‘no thank you’s.

So, what of the title? A ‘shadow line’ is the indication, looking at the top of a book, that there is something physical hidden inside – an ‘inclusion’, as Royle terms them. I don’t think he ever explains quite what attracts him to these, but he buys a lot of books simply because of these inclusions. Bookmarks don’t cut it. Here are some examples of things he does like:

I love a bus, tram or train ticket. I love a boarding pass. I’m more than happy to find a postcard, business card or Debenhams store card (inside Irene Nemirvosky’s Fire in the Blood, which I found in Mark Jackson-Hancock’s extremely well-kept Chapter Two Community Bookshop in Chesham. Mrs M Sussum, get in touch if you’d like it back). I’m over the moon if I find a PR’s request for support for a book addressed to a former member of Blur (PG Wodehouse’s Blandings) or a personal message on hotel memo paper for a founding member of Del Amitri (Anais Nin’s Little Birds).

To do Royle his due, please know that the two missing accents/diacritics in the authors’ names above are my own laziness, not his. Any typos, it goes without saying, also my own.

Like most people, I imagine, I often find things tucked in books and I throw them away. It’s seldom anything more exciting than a receipt or business card, though I did recently find a birthday card with a tenner in it (sadly one of the old paper ones, so no longer in circulation). But it draws Royle, and he adds duplicate books to his collection if they have something tucked away inside. As when I read White Spines, I marvelled at the enormous house Royle must have, to house many duplicates of books for any number of reasons. (And I reflected that he bought books for very odd reasons, until I realised I do too, but for different odd reasons – see that time I wrote 27 Genuine Reasons I Have Bought Books.)

Would I phone someone if I found their telephone number in a book? No, and I’m not sure what conversation Royle expected to have if anybody answered, which nobody seems to. Would I return a book to an old address I found in it? No, but it does seem rather a lovely thought. I guess my point is that I am a very different book-lover from Royle in my activities and my tastes – but we are birds of a feather when it comes to loving books as objects and as histories of their owners’ experiences. I absolutely loved reading Shadow Lines because that love comes across so strongly. If you solely love stories, just as happy to have them as ebooks as books, then this particular book probably isn’t for you. If you are a bibliophile in the purist sense of the word, then race towards Shadow Lines. And if you end up giving it away, make sure to leave the strangest possible inclusion inside it.

A Book A Day in May – Days 17, 18, 19

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I’ve not been blogging, but I have been keeping up with my reading. One of these (the middle) I read entirely outside on a sunny Saturday. The first and last of the trio were books I mostly listened to as audiobooks, then finished off 180 and 140 pages (respectively) in the paper copies. It’s quite fun to mix and match that way. Let’s race through some quick thoughts about the three books…

Tipping the Velvet - Wikipedia

Day 17: Tipping the Velvet (1998) by Sarah Waters

I’d read all of Waters’ other novels, but somehow not got around to her first. As you’ll probably know, it tells the story of Nancy. She grows up in a Whitstable family whose living is made by selling oysters – and by all the messy process that precedes selling them. This was back in the days when oysters were eaten by the bucketload by all and sundry, not reserved for fancy restaurants – because we are in Victorian times. The 1890s, to be specific.

Nancy is content with fairly simple pleasures, until one time she attends a variety show. There, she is beguiled by Kitty Butler – a singer and male impersonator. Night after night, Nancy goes to watch the show – impatient for the other acts to finish so she can watch Kitty. Eventually they meet, and Nancy gets past her starstruck-ness to form a friendship with Kitty – and then follows her to London, to work as her dresser. Along the way, they have developed a romantic relationship.

I shan’t spoil all the turns of the novel, but suffice to say this isn’t Nancy’s last lesbian relationship in the book. Indeed, Tipping the Velvet is very episodic – often, for whatever chaotic reason, a period of Nancy’s life will end and she is catapulted into another. It will come with a whole new set of characters (a wealthy dominatrix, for example, or a charitable brother and sister), leaving the previous set behind. Almost every woman she meets seems to be a lesbian, or at least bisexual.

Of all the Waters novels I’ve read, this is probably my least favourite. She’s obviously a very good writer, excellent at character and turns of phrase. And goodness knows Tipping the Velvet became a huge seller, so my opinion scarcely matters – but I did find the plot to be quite weak. She is renowned for her clever plotting and twists now – this novel doesn’t have any twist or really any plot. It’s just a series of things that happen to Nancy, with very little to link them, and a new cast of characters whenever things start to pall. I’d certainly have preferred a much shorter novel that concentrated on a smaller number of them. But, yes, by gosh Waters can write. I often thing her masterpiece is ahead of her – to be honest, I don’t think her editor (editors?) have done her a service. Her novels always, in my opinion, are very good but fall short of what they could be. The perfect Waters novel is still to come.

Day 18: The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) by Yoko Ogawa

Rachel and I will be discussing this on the next episode of Tea or Books? so I won’t write about it now – but I did really like it.

By Nightfall: Michael Cunningham

Day 19: By Nightfall (2010) by Michael Cunningham

Now that I’ve read all of Cunningham’s novels – yes, even the first one that he disowned – I’m having to re-read to get my fix of Cunningham. He is up there with my favourite living writers, though admittedly I don’t read a huge amount of living writers – but I don’t think there are many I prefer.

When I first read By Nightfall, in 2017, it was my third of his novels. I still wasn’t sure whether I loved him or if I just loved The Hours and now, rereading, I can see why By Nightfall didn’t help me quite make up my mind.

I shan’t repeat everything I wrote in that earlier review, but I found the focus of the novel – art dealer Peter living a privileged life in New York and worrying about his wife and daughter, annoyed and attracted by his sexy young drug addict brother-in-law – to be a bit eye-rolly. Were the passages about art, culture and society deliberately pretentious or a satire? I’m still not sure, and I think it’s probably somewhere between the two. And Peter, too, has probably adopted this lifestyle with an initial irony that quickly became unironic.

I stand by what I said earlier – that the pacing is all off. Too much is left to happen in the final third of the novel, and it feels like it ends too suddenly. But I forgive all this much more willingly now. Because I just love, love, love Cunningham’s writing. When his sentences are so sublime, I can forgive anything slightly too arch or abrupt. Nobody is better than him on beauty – its attractions and its limitations. Few equal his ability to depict self-consciousness – assessing everyone while constantly questioning how other people are assessing you. And I’ve never been to New York, but it still feels like Cunningham knows and depicts it intimately, with the censure and celebration of an insider.

When I unnecessarily ranked Michael Cunningham’s books, By Nightfall came in 7th out of 9. I think I stand by that. But it’s a healthy #7 – I still admired and enjoyed it a great deal. Rather more than when I first read it – and perhaps the next time I’ll like it even more.

Two frenetic novellas #ABookADayInMay – Days 15+16

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The past couple of days, I’ve read two quite strange novellas. I don’t think they have anything in common except strangeness, so let’s dive in.

The Following Story

The Following Story (1991) by Cees Nooteboom

I hadn’t heard of The Following Story (translated from Dutch by Ina Rilke) until Karen reviewed it the other day, and the premise instantly grabbed me. Herman Mussert wakes up in a hotel room in Portugal – but he doesn’t remember how he got there, and he’s pretty sure he was in Amsterdam the day before.

I had woken up with the ridiculous feeling that I might be dead but whether I was actually dead, or had been dead or vice versa, I could not ascertain. Death, I had learned, was nothingness and if tat was the state you were in, as I had also learned, all deliberation ceased. So that was not the state I was in, since I was still full of musings, thoughts and memories.

As he explores what’s going on in the first-person narrative, we are piecing together who he is. Herman used to teach classics, though now writes travel guides under a pseudonym, and the worlds of Greek and Roman mythology are almost as real to him as his own life. They are rather more real now, in fact. A particular pupil from his teaching days becomes significant, and the timeline dives and weaves between past and present. At one point Herman merges with the myth he is recounting, and the schoolroom past and Lisbon present are equally intermingled. It’s all rather dizzying. Nooteboom never gives us any sure footing or easy conclusions. We are trying to establish Herman’s identity, but he is doing the same thing himself.

But this is also, in a way, a morality tale. The hotel room is a place he once, decades earlier, slept with a married woman. What bearing does that have on the story? I was strongly reminded of a very different writer – May Sinclair’s brilliant short story ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quench’d’, where a woman keeps running but always ends up in the hotel room where she had an affair.

I really enjoyed the first half of this novella. Nooteboom isn’t trying to give the reader any stability, but the writing is mesmerising and elegant. You can more or less work out what’s going on, even if you’re always a step or two behind, deducing what’s happening a moment or two after it has. I struggled a bit more in the second half… suddenly Herman is on a ship with a wide cast of strange people, going goodness knows where. In Karen’s review, she talked about a ‘gut-punching ending’, but I have to admit I am very hazy on what actually happened in the second half. It all got a bit too frenetic and confusing for me. I think I know what happened to at least one of the main characters, but I’d have liked a little more clarity to have the full emotional impact.

The Bloater: The brilliantly original rediscovered classic comedy of manners

The Bloater (1968) by Rosemary Tonks

Any listener to the Backlisted podcast will doubtless be familiar with Rosemary Tonks – and I think they’re pretty much responsible for this strange, good novella coming back into print. It’s about a BBC sound engineer called Min and her various friendships, dalliances, and (most interestingly to me) profession.

We don’t get a huge anount of the profession, actually, but the novella’s best scenes are those that take us behind the scenes of a BBC audio programme – discussed, as everything in the book is, with jagged, slightly disjointed, often amusing back-and-forth dialogue. Min is nothing if not frank. Though married to a kind, negligible man (he is ‘always on the way to or from the British Museum’), she is preoccupied with possible romances. She and her female friends discuss these things openly, and with a sharp narrative verve that never goes in quite the direction you’d anticipate.

“Yes, but I’ve seen his chest. And I want him dreadfully.”

“Pooh! What’s a chest?”

“This one’s absolutely smooth, with thick rounded shoulders. And it shudders when it’s near me.”

I reflect that you really can’t ask much more than that. So I say disgustedly:

“This is all very objective, Jenny. But what sort of person is he, for G-d’s sake?”

“Quick as a flash, very pop Cambridge, I told you, success and plastic high living. He’d flit through any kind of situation without turning a hair.”

“He sounds genuinely nasty.”

Speaking of nasty, let’s discuss the Bloater of the title. Actual name Carlos, and her lodger, he is a constant presence in Min’s life – and here is how he is introduced:

This huge, tame, exotic man was reading a book as though he was sitting in an airport lounge, with no more regard for me than one has for the factotum in tinted nylon uniform-pyjamas who brings a cup of coffee and wipes over the simulated marble formica with a morsel of rubber skin. Not content with ignoring me, this loafer, this self-regarding bloater – smells. Oh yes, he does. I, personally, can smell him from the kitchen door.

Min seems disgusted and fascinated by the Bloater in equal measures. She invents elaborate excuses to try and avoid him, but then seems quite keen to sleep with him. It’s all very odd and quite unsettling, and you can’t help wondering why she doesn’t spend more time with her poor husband. I’m not sure why the novel is named after the Bloater, rather than (say) Min herself, but perhaps it is representative of the uncertainty at the heart of Min’s character. She doesn’t know what she really wants, but she’ll self-destruct in an effort to get it.

I enjoyed The Bloater mostly for its curious writing style. I’m always drawn to dialogue-heavy books (if they use speech marks!) and the off-kilter way the book chops between sparse sentences reminded me of other, similar mid-century writers like Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge. In her strangeness and slight nastiness, Tonks belongs with those significant names. I’d be interested to see what she can do on longer scale, if any more of her books ever get reprinted.

Mind, Body, Forest, French: 3 non-fiction reads for #ABookADayInMay

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I’ve been getting my reading done for A Book A Day in May, but not very good at fitting in writing about the books – so today we have a triple whammy. And the last three books I’ve read have all been non-fiction (and all books I’d started before the days in question).

The Immune Mind

The Immune Mind (2024) by Dr Monty Lyman

Monty is a friend of mine, and I always make sure I read a friend’s first book – but he is also a brilliant writer, which is why this is his third and I’m still pre-ordering copies. The first two were on skin and pain, and the third is on the links between the mind and the body in health – specifically between the brain, the immune system, and microbes in the gut.

This is one of those areas which feels like less of a surprise the less you know? I know basically nothing about medical science (or any science), and would have merrily assumed that the mind and body were closely interlinked in health. We all know that being ill makes us feel sad and cross, and we know that feeling low is a time when you always seem to get ill – we use terms like ‘being run down’ to cover both. But apparently this sort of casual chat was not transferred to science – until recently.

The reality is that there is no mental disorder that is not also physical, and most physical diseases have some mental element to them. We have been trained to pigeonhole disease into either one or the other, even to the extent that we visit one hospital for the body and another for the mind. I know from my experience as a doctor that there are both implicit and explicit pressures to force patients down the grooves of either ‘physical’ or ‘mental’, evem when it is clear that neither is a perfect fit.

As Monty Lyman makes clear, this is an exciting area of medical science where things are starting to change. People are beginning to challenge long-held separations between mind and body, and increasing research is being conducted into the ways our mental health and our immune system affect each other. As one snapshot, a woman with severe allergies was shown a plastic flower – and not only responded badly in my mind, but also in her physical symptoms: the brain’s expectations affect the body’s defence mechanisms.

The first part of this book explores in depth what lies behind the immune system and behind the brain’s defences, and starts to look at how these crossover. Monty Lyman explains everything very well – I don’t know if it’s just because we’re friends, but it feels like he is cheerfully encouraging me along through the more densely scientific bits. It’s more challenging that skin and pain, because I instinctively understand what those are, even if I wouldn’t have a clue how to describe or define them. The immune system? That’s further from my grasp.

As The Immune Mind continues, I enjoyed myself more and more – the case studies are really helpful for illuminating Monty’s arguments. And you can’t say he isn’t game in his research. At one point he makes himself deliberating ill, and another time takes something that causes depression. He’s immersed! As with his other books, there is a compassion and empathy to his writing that makes it feel so much more than a scientific treatise. Again, I don’t think it’s just because I know he’s a good, kind man – it is evident there on the page. Particularly when he discusses people with long-term illnesses, there is great care as well as knowledge.

In the final section, The Immune Mind has advice for how to foster good microbial health, good mental health, and good non-inflammatory health. Monty Lyman is clear that this isn’t a work of self-help – but I appreciate that he doesn’t want to leave something with such potential, personal impact as theory alone. (I’m making a list of the number of different plants I eat this week – will I make it to the target of 30? I was surprised to find that I’m on 18 after three days, so fingers crossed.)

It’s a fascinating book, beautifully written – and I believe Brits can hear some it excerpted on Radio 4 this week, fyi.

Book summary: Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson - Live Wildly

Consolations of the Forest (2011) by Sylvain Tesson

There’s some nominative determinism for you! Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson – translated from French by Linda Coverdale – is subtitled ‘alone in a cabin in the Middle Taiga’. If, like me, you don’t know where Middle Taiga is – it’s in Siberia. This isn’t a balmy woodland retreat: Tesson went to spend six months in temperatures a long way below freezing, with ever-present dangers including bears. Why? The opening paragraph dryly suggests that it is to get away from the capitalist indulgence of a supermarket shelf having fifteen types of ketchup. Later on, he gives a list:

Reasons why I’m living alone in a cabin

I talked too much
I wanted silence
Too behind with my mail and too many people to see
I was jealous of Crusoe
It’s better heated than my place in Paris
Tired of running errands
So I can scream and live naked
Because I hate the telephone and traffic noise

Consolations of the Forest takes the form of diary entries over the time he is ‘alone’. I was surprised by how very many visitors he had. There were people in similar cabins about four or five hours’ walk in two different directions, there to deter poachers or similar, and he would sometimes trudge off to see them – but there are any number of Russians passing by who pop in to drink vodka and make crude jokes. At one point there’s even an American tourist. I felt sometimes like I am more alone in my flat than Tesson was in his cabin.

There are beautiful descriptions of unabashed wilderness in this book, and some people would find his account very interesting. I’ll admit that I did find it a bit hard to warm to the book. I think of similar ventures like Nell Stevens’ in Bleaker House (on Bleaker in the Falkland Islands) which I absolutely loved – and I think that was because she was freer with her foibles, more willing to reveal her practical and emotional struggles. Tesson leans more into philosophy. He is – how else to say it? – very French.

Our fellow men confirm the reality of the world. If you close your eyes in the city, what a relief it is that reality doesn’t erase itself: others can still perceive it! The hermit is alone in the face of nature. As the sole consciousness contemplating reality, he bears the burden of the representation of the world, its revelation before the human gaze.

I was quite happy to keep reading Consolations of the Forest through to the end, but some slight spark was missing in it for me. Interesting, but not quite up my street.

When in French: Love in a Second Language [Book]

When in French (2016) by Lauren Collins

Speaking of French – here’s a book I started ages ago, and somehow forgot to continue, all about French. Specifically, it is about Lauren’s experience being married to a Frenchman, Olivier. They met in England (she is American), and moved to Geneva, a French-speaking part of Switzerland. It is essentially asks the question: what is it like to love across a language barrier?

I was nervous, the usual anxieties a person has about whether or not her boyfriend’s family will like her overlaid with uncertainty as to whether, in the fog of language, they’d even be able to make out the right person to like or not.

In amidst that question is a huge amount of other research – are people different in their second languages? Can you be your true self when you are learning a language? Can goats have regional accents? (Yes, it turns out.) It’s an ambitious amount to cover in a book that is also a more straightforward memoir of living abroad, struggling to acclimatise, losing some of yourself, finding triumphs and humour in the everyday.

We spoke to each other in endearments. My darling, my love, mon amour, ma chérie, poussin, mouton, bébé. This was new to me, not characteristic. The word baby, applied to anyone over two, had always seemed like the adult diaper of endearments.

“Mon amour,” he’d say. “Pass me the salt?”

I’d yell across a store, trying to get his attention: “Bébé! Over here, in dairy products.”

People we knew, I think, made fun of us. What they didn’t know was that we couldn’t say each other’s names.

There are two very real people at the heart of the book, in Lauren and Olivier. Olivier is admittedly harder to read, and I’m not sure he comes across quite as Lauren sees him. As I’ve already mentioned this month, I love non-fiction where memoir and autobiography intermingle. I think I’d have preferred the balance in When in French to lean slightly more towards memoir, but that’s perhaps because the worlds of language and identity are so vast that you can only really scrape the surface on an objective level. The subjective is slightly easier to package.

I’d definitely recommend the book – and feel some personal triumph that my Duolingo French lessons have enabled me to translate most of the (easy) French she peppers into the story. It’s fun, thoughtful and honest.

A Body Made of Glass by Caroline Crampton – #ABookADayInMay Day 11

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A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria

When I was shopping in Blackwells bookshop last weekend, I saw A Body Made of Glass (2024) by Caroline Crampton on a display table and was very intrigued. As the month had rolled over, I had my 15 hours of audiobook listening time renewed on Spotify – and during the week, I spent 9.5 of those hours on Crampton’s excellent book.

A Body Made of Glass is subtitled ‘A History of Hypochondria’ and it’s in a genre that I really appreciate – non-fiction that merges historical research with personal memoir. Crampton is self-professedly a hypochondriac, which is also called (or at least strongly overlaps with) health anxiety. It is recognised in a couple of different variants by modern medical reference books and likely to be taken more seriously by doctors than it would have been a while ago – depending, as Crampton discusses, on your gender, race and class.

So what is hypochondria? It’s one of the questions Crampton poses and explores at length, and there isn’t a simple answer. It may vary between people, but the main things are hypervigilance about symptoms, and extreme anxiety about them. It may manifest as a lot of googling and fixation on possible illnesses, including genuinely developing symptoms that you are concerned about. It often includes medically unexplained symptoms – tests will show the all-clear, but that might not allay the anxiety. The hypochondriac is likely to fear that something has simply been missed,

Crampton’s own medical history can partly explain her anxiety. She had cancer as a teenager, and had to start chemotherapy at a time when most teenagers are concerned with far more trivial matters. As she explains, it means her fear about symptoms is always taken seriously. She gets rushed into tests that others might have to fight hard to get on a waiting list for. But it also means she knows her health is not guaranteed. She knows the truth of the hypochondriac’s fear that this time the slight twinge could be the first signs of something drastic.

But, at the same time, she knows her anxieties are not an accurate representation of reality. She has the brilliant line: “I become an unreliable narrator of my own body.” But how else to judge something as subjective as health? Especially when it comes to the complex, unclear tapestry of the interplay of mental and physical health.

A Body Made of Glass is not exclusively a memoir, though. Often Crampton uses her own experiences to set the tone of a chapter, returning to it when apt – but this is a work of history. The title refers to one form of historical hypochondria – people who believed that their bodies had become glass. King Charles VI of France was one of the most famous sufferers from this delusion. Victims of it would be terrified of touching other people, lest they splinter – or would sit on piles of cushions to avoid breaking. It’s interesting to see how the particular manifestations of hypochondria have changed over times – strongly influenced by the culture. People didn’t have this glass delusion before glass became a common household item. Fast forward centuries – there was a spate of people developing the ‘tic’ symptoms of Tourette’s after TikTok videos about the illness became extremely popular during the pandemic.

Crampton goes right back to Hippocrates, and has done a brilliant amount of research into different theories of health over time, and about how hypochondriacs were treated. To pick a handful – there was the period where the womb was believed to travel around the body, causing mischief. At another time, physicians believed the nose was a microcosm of the body, and treating part of the nose would heal the relevant part of body. She traces the way treatments have been sold and mis-sold over time – from quacks deliberating fooling 17th-century London society to the way in which placebos can be used in genuine medical treatment.

It’s a really brilliant combination. The deep history comes mostly in the first half, interspersed with Crampton’s own experiences. As the book continues, it becomes more philosophical – while tethering discussions about how you diagnose illnesses and how you consider the ‘reality’ of symptoms to the concrete world of the GP’s office. It is a book with a lot of heart and care for people with health anxiety, and a subtle clarion call for them to be respected.

This is one of the reasons I so appreciated A Body Made of Glass. Hypochondriacs – particularly in popular culture – are so often mocked and derided. Think Mr Woodhouse in Emma. His fears about health make him a sweet but tiresome figure of fun. There’s no real consideration about how these anxieties weigh on him. Hypochondriacs are often portrayed as ‘doing it for attention’, or dismissed simply as making things up. I saw so much of myself in what Crampton writes, and it was really encouraging and refreshing to feel seen and understood.

Crampton gives sufferers from health anxiety the dignity and voice they/we deserve. The autobiographical sections were the ones I most liked, but it is overall a well-measured balance of the subjective and objective. It’s an absolutely fascinating, brilliantly written book – and I hope many doctors are among those who read it.

Days 9 and 10 of #ABookADayInMay

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Some super quick thoughts about two days of books! Both are books I finished, but did not start, on the respective days.

The Thursday Murder Club (2020) by Richard Osman

What is there to say about this extremely popular novel that hasn’t already been said? Its the first in a series of cosy(?) crime novels set in an old people’s home – Osman says he was inspired by seeing his mother in a similar home, and recognising how older people could observe and deduce while being underestimated by everyone around them.

The best thing about this novel is definitely the characters. Elizabeth used to be in the police, and is now a wise, sharp, kind retiree. Her friend Joyce is less confident of her cleverness and a bit fluffy, but every bit as sharp in her own way. There are several other people in the Thursday Murder Club (the group who gather to solve cold cases in their spare time, not expecting anyone to take notice) but they are the best two.

I will say that the murder plot itself isn’t very good. The red herrings are too red and too complex. Without spoiling the end, there’s really not much reason why it’s that solution over any other – it would be equally convincing if he’d picked someone else at random. One of the brilliant things about someone like Agatha Christie is that the eventual solution, though a surprise, is satisfying: it’s the only one it could have been, you suddenly realise. That’s absolutely not the case with The Thursday Murder Club.

But it works because of those characters, and because of Osman’s warm, funny writing. There were more genuine villains than I was expecting, and perhaps the wider cast isn’t as cosy as I’d imagined, but it was really enjoyable for all that. I’m not sure I’ll necessarily read another, but it’s certainly much better than other books which have runaway bestsellers.

Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1942) by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough

I read this years ago and was all set to link to my review, but apparently I never wrote one? Which is a shame, because it is an absolutely brilliant, hilarious memoir that I have just reread – or relistened to, as part of Audible’s free ‘Plus’ catalogue. It tells of Cornelia and Emily travelling to Europe during the 1920s when they were both young and naive. With a couple of decades’ hindsight, they are willing and able to poke an awful lot of fun at themselves. The people they meet may come in for a joke or too, but it is chiefly self-deprecating – and they are brilliant at self-deprecating humour. They also have a brilliant turn of phrase which, since I listened to it, I haven’t noted down. You’ll have to take my word for it.

Along the way, they have disastrous moments – Cornelia catching measles on the boat across the Atlanic and having to cloak her face to get through customs, for instance, or accidentally staying at a brothel under the delusion that it was recommended for Young American Women Abroad. Incident after incident is described with liveliness. Some are genuinely unusual or embarrassing moments. Others are rather more normal, but feel special because of the way they’re described. Some, I suspect, have been exaggerated out of recognition. I forgive every exaggeration and deception, because I love the book so much.

Reading this in 2011 or so set me off reading everything else I could by the pair, particularly Cornelia Otis Skinner’s comic essays. There’s a lot to love, but nothing will equal Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. It is suffused with nostalgia for a period that was clearly exciting and uncomplicated for the two – and it is also suffused with a friendship that has clearly lasted many, many years. It’s a special book and I can’t recommend it enough.