Novella a Day in May: Days 7 and 8

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I did read my novellas (…sort of) on days 7 and 8, but I didn’t write yesterday because I was in London overnight. (I saw the musical &Juliet, and if you get a chance then please do so – it’s such a marvellous combination of 90s/00s pop and a clever spin on Shakespeare. It could have been purpose-made for me.)

Day 7: What the Neighbours Did (1972) by Philippa Pearce

On the train on the way there, I read What the Neighbours Did and other stories by Philippa Pearce – as you can tell by that title, it is a collection of stories rather than a novella. It’s one of those I bought on impulse online a decade or so ago, probably after (re)reading her masterpiece Tom’s Midnight Garden, but somehow didn’t get around to it. 

I thought that it was a collection for adults, and I suppose you could argue it is, but every story features children. The events are quite mundane – a tree being felled, a midnight feast, going blackberry-picking – but Pearce fills them with expansive wonder. Everyone and everything feels so free in this collection. The children head out for adventures in the countryside on their own, as every generation believes they were the last to do, and somehow Pearce gives these stories the feel that they will be treasured memories – like we are seeing the creation of nostalgia in the moment.

This edition also has the bonus of characterful illustrations by Faith Jaques. They give added beauty to a collection that is quietly joyful.

Day 8: Heartburn (1983) by Nora Ephron

Last year, in a work ‘secret’ Santa, I was given Heartburn by Nora Ephron. I put ‘secret’ in inverted commas because I know it was my good friend Katherine, and she chose very well. A bit of a gamble to get such a well-known book, but I hadn’t read it and had long intended to.

Heartburn is a fairly (but not completely) autobiographical novella about a cookbook writer called Rachel discovering that her husband Mark is having an affair while she is seven months pregnant with their second child. It covers the next couple of months, but also fills in the gaps about Rachel’s first unsuccessful marriage, as well as how she and Mark met and fell in love. 

Ephron writes just brilliantly, and I’m going to spend most of this short review sharing quotes… like this one, which was the first bit I noted down:

It is of course hideously ironic that the occasion for my total conversion to fidelity was my marriage to Mark, but timing has never been my strong point; and in any case, the alternative, infidelity, doesn’t work. You have only a certain amount of energy, and when you spread it around, everything gets confused, and the first thing you know, you can’t remember which one you’ve told which story to, and the next thing you know, you’re moaning, “Oh, Morty, Morty, Morty,” when what you mean is “Oh, Sidney, Sidney, Sidney,” and the next thing you know, you think you’re in love with both of them simply because you’ve been raised to believe that the only polite response to the words “I love you” is “I love you too,” and the next thing you know, you think you’re in love with only one of them, because you’re too guilty to handle loving them both.

She is very funny, and often takes sentences in a different direction than expected – both in terms of what they are saying, and the emotion she is conveying. For example…

My father said a lot of terrific daddy things to me that made me cry even harder, partly because the dialogue was completely lifted from an obscure Dan Dailey movie he’s played a pediatrician in, and partly because he nevertheless delivered the lines so very well.

Along the way, food is an important factor. Several actual recipes are included, and my edition even has an index of the different recipes as people clearly try them out. I might give the bread and butter pudding a go, and need to find out if her vinaigrette is really as marvellous as she suggests. The food isn’t incidental either; it connects with various stages of her life and her journey. And it gives way to this glorious quote about the association we have between specific cooking techniques and people we’ve known:

The next man I was involved with lived in Boston. He taught me to cook mushrooms. He taught me that if you heat the butter very hot and put just a very few mushrooms into the frying pan, they come out nice and brown and crispy, whereas if the butter is only moderately hot and you crowd the mushrooms, they get all mushy and wet. Every time I make mushrooms I think of him. There was another man in my life when I was younger who taught me to put sour cream into scrambled eggs, and since I never ever put sour cream into scrambled eggs I never really think of him at all.

The author I kept thinking about, as I read Heartburn, was Anita Loos and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I don’t know if that’s a common comparison or not, but it has the same feeling of words tumbling out uncontrollably. The same endless self-reflection, but never pausing to get any of the benefit of it. Everything is told quite matter-of-factly, so even when Rachel is telling us how heartbroken she is, it comes in a stream of other stories and events and thoughts, so somehow the book maintains an even emotional keel in the telling.

Though I saw comparisons to Loos, Ephron has a really distinct voice here – and one that is kept up successfully throughout. I thought it was marvellous, and wonderful that somebody capable of writing such a cynical comedy of a novel could also write quintessential romantic comedies.

In Pious Memory by Margery Sharp (Novella a Day in May #6)

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When Madame Bibi and I realised we both had In Pious Memory (1967) by Margery Sharp on our shelves, we decided to put it down for the same day of Novella a Day in May – the only forward-planning I’ve done. I haven’t read Madame Bibi’s review yet, but you can do so (and I will do so as soon as I’ve finished writing this).

I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Sharp, and find her such an interestingly diverse writer. Going into this novella, I didn’t know whether she’d be in serious or comic mode. It’s a book about death, but definitely leans more towards the latter. With some surreality thrown in, for good measure.

In Pious Memory comes later in Sharp’s long writing career, and I wasn’t sure whether she’d still have the lightness of touch which makes her dry, sparkling sense of humour work so well. I needn’t have worried. There was something so piercingly wonderful about the opening lines that I knew I was back in safe company with Sharp:

After some thirty years of marriage, Mrs Prelude’s sole manifestation of independence was always, when travelling by plane, to sit in the tail. She and her husband flew a good deal; he was an authority on international banking, much in demand wherever his European colleagues gathered in conference, and though austerely avoiding all attendant junketings – receptions, or visits to historic monuments – invariably took Mrs Prelude along to look after him at the hotel. He suffered from asthma. His giant intellect was housed in but an average body – indeed rather below average; average only in the sense of being unremarkable: all the more startling therefore was the effect when on rostrum or at banquet board he suddenly rose to his feet and let his intellect loose like a line from a mouse-trap. Mrs Prelude naturally never witnessed this transformation herself, she was always at home in the hotel bedroom sterilising his inhaling-apparatus with water boiled over a portable methylated-spirit stove; but other wives told her about it.

Mrs Prelude feels safer sat in the tail of a plane, and chooses it even when her husband can’t get a seat next to her. We are just preparing to smile at her silly foibles when, on the second page, we learn that her precautions are justified. Mr and Mrs Prelude are in a plane crash: ‘Mrs Prelude, in the tail, was but shocked and bruised, whereas of her husband there remained but the remains.’

The Preludes had two adult children (Elizabeth and William) and a daughter on the cusp of adulthood (Lydia). None of them were particularly close to their father, who had more time for economic academics than for his flesh and blood – but they speedily begin recreating him in false memories, giving him attributes that they wish he’d had, and recalling things that it would have been convenient for him to say.

But then… Mrs Prelude announces that she thinks her husband might still be alive.

Quite a lot of the rest of In Pious Memory focuses on the impetuous Lydia and her cousin Toby going to France, to see if they can find their missing father/uncle. We dart back to England often, to see how unaffected William and Elizabeth are – and how Mrs Prelude is choosing the next stage of her life. This isn’t a novel about grief, but about how a big change in a family will set off other changes – and how much will remain the same.

Unlike other Sharp novels I’ve read, this one doesn’t feel meticulously planned. Particularly in the French sections, the plot spirals off into such unexpected and disconnected directions that it felt a bit like Sharp was making it up as she went along. But that made it feel irrepressible rather than incoherent. It was odd but great fun – or perhaps I should say odd and great fun.

I really enjoyed In Pious Memory, and I think Sharp was wise to make this one a short book (my edition coming in at 160 pages). A longer novel with this plot might have required the reader to feel stronger emotions than amusement, and occasionally exasperation. As it is, Sharp guides the reader through the strange experience and we come out the other side having had a delightful, unusual time.

Screens Against the Sky by Elleke Boehmer (Novella a Day in May #5)

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I bought Screens Against the Sky (1990) by Elleke Boehmer in 2008 – just weeks before I started my Masters, because Elleke was running the course and I thought it would be fun to read her book before I met her. And here we are, a short 14 years later, and I’ve finally read it! I haven’t seen Elleke for almost a decade, but it was fun to think of her as I read her debut novel.

I’m not sure how autobiographical Screens Against the Sky is, but it would certainly fit – like Boehmer, Annemarie is a teenager in 1970s South Africa. She lives with her mother, Sylvie, and towards the beginning of the novel they mourn the death of Sylvie’s husband, Annemarie’s father. And begin the next stage of their relationship – as the only two people in the household, in a mother/daughter relationship that sometimes seems unhealthily close, sometimes is threatened by Annemarie’s leaps towards independence, sometimes in the sanctuary they need in grief. The title is literally about some hail-screens that are attached to the windows, but is also about Sylvie’s wish to keep the scary, vast outside world out.

The long slope of the veld leading up towards the hills drew her [Sylvie’s] own eyes towards the sky and the bleak white sun. There was too much space about. She preferred not to see it. With the chicken wire netted across the windows, she could focus on something close at hand. The screens made a web to which her skittering eye might cling.

They are not quite the only people in the household, in fact. There is also Simon – the garden boy, not far off Annemarie’s age. He is Black, and he introduces Annemarie to a world she had known nothing about. Her father taught her only to read world news, not local – and so she was almost entirely ignorant about apartheid, and how things were beginning to change. The most significant moment is the murder of Steve Biko, a victim of police brutality. Shamefully, I didn’t know anything about this real event – if you’re the same as me, then I recommend reading the Wikipedia article. It is a discovery that changes Annemarie’s outlook, and one of many contemporary events that leads Simon to leaving their employment. I wouldn’t say that Screens Against the Sky is a novel about apartheid, but it is unavoidably the background against which the novel is set.

But front and centre is that tortured relationship of mother and daughter – with some ups and rather more downs. The novel alternates between third and first person, the latter being Annemarie remembering this period from an undefined future. As a teenager, she rigorously recorded journals – though she no longer has them, her recollections often involve the journaling, and an approximation of what she thought she’d written. The differing perspectives come together well, often changing in a few paragraphs. It works as a patchwork.

I was a bit worried when I started Screens Against the Sky that it would be very overwritten. The style of the first few pages is certainly leaning that way, with sentences like ‘On the bedside table, painted buff eggshell off-white, lies a New English Bible, abutting on a colonnade of pill phials.’ More of this does appear later, occasionally, but the style calms down for the most part. And quite a lot of it is told in spare, effective sentences – like this:

The Reverend Guthrie brought relief. Within an hour of his eventual coming, he and Mother retired to the seclusion of her bedroom to pray. I heard her voice rising, falling and rising. I heard them pray together, prayer after prayer. I feared they might at some stage call me in to join them, so I went walking. There was an errand I had to run for which I had not yet had the time. I walked to the edge of town, a place not far from the bus depot, the site of the municipal dumping grounds. It was a wide piece of land, covered with slowly smoking ash and hidden from the road by dense bramble bushes. It smelt distinctively of rust and pus. I did not spend very long. As soon as I arrived, I felt I had to hurry home. I was right in doing so. At the gate Mother was waiting: she wanted me to be with her during the Reverend’s closing prayer She said it would help her. I walked with her to the bedroom, she behind me. She asked where I’d been. I said to town and back – for air. That was, I think, the first lie I consciously told my mother.

Screens Against the Sky is a novel written in a place and a decade that I know little about in literature, and it was rewarding to spend time there. I’d certainly be intrigued to read more by Boehmer, and found the different elements of this book very rich – I think it would merit rereading, exploring all the depths.

Journey Through A Small Planet by Emanuel Litvinoff (Novella a Day in May #4)

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Journey Through a Small PlanetOops, I keep cheating on this novella challenge – though today’s cheating was accidental, since I was about 30 pages into Journey Through A Small Planet (1972) by Emanuel Litvinoff when I realised it was an autobiography. Simply from seeing it on the shelf, I had assumed it was a sci-fi novella – though that in itself would have been a surprise, being worlds away from The Lost Europeans, my (brilliant) previous experience with this writer.

Instead, we are taken to the East End of London in the years after the First World War. Emanuel is the son of working-class Jewish immigrants from Russia, living in a community that shares his poverty and his ethnicity. I won’t say faith, because Emanuel determines relatively early in childhood that he doesn’t want to follow the Jewish religion, though of course he remains Jewish. And in the eyes of many people at his school and, later, his first places of employment, he is still Russian. Even though he has never been there. Sadly, recent political decisions in this country show that British-born children of immigrants don’t today have much more certainty that their nationality will be respected…

I found the writing in The Lost Europeans captivatingly beautiful. In Journey Through A Small Planet, the prose is much more understated – Litvinoff is more interested in translating the perceptions of his childhood than in framing it elegantly. We see how he is bullied and ostracised at school, both by pupils and teachers – on the first day, his form teacher makes much of his ‘foreign’ surname, and sets the trend for the way Emanuel will be treated by everyone who encounters him. Despite there being a significant Jewish population in his area of London, none of his contemporaries at school seem to be Jewish – and Emanuel feels all the more alienated because he doesn’t see himself in his community either. Judaism pales in comparison to Communism in his mind. He is captivated by faintly understood tenets, and Litvinoff takes us inside the passion and in-fighting of those on the left of the spectrum in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Of course, Emanuel is also occupied with less abstract issues. There is hunger, there is lust, there is envy – all the human emotions, conveyed with all the sense of newness that everyone feels in experiencing them for the first time. Eventually he disappears from home in a way that seems very far-fetched, but presumably happens. And the autobiography – or perhaps memoir – ends almost in the middle of a scene.

Along the way, the infant Emanuel and the adult Litvinoff coalesce. The emotions are the child’s, but he blends it well with the observational power of the reflecting adult. It combines to give the memoir an authenticity that is amplified by perceptiveness. Here’s a rather lovely bit I noted about a child (otherwise a background character in the book) whose father returns from long exile:

Acquiring a father unexpectedly like that could be either horrible or marvellous for a boy. In Mendel’s case it was marvellous. You’d see the two of them walking hand in hand through the raucous streets, talking to one another as if no one else in the world existed. They went to museums, parks, art galleries, visited the Tower, climbed the Monument, inspected the Palace Guard, all things that Mr Shaffer must have dreamed of doing with his son during those long years of waste and deprivation in Russia. If the boy was happy, the man was ecstatic. I saw him one Sunday standing in the marketplace utterly dazed by the mounds of ripe fruit, barrels of shmlaz herring and pungent strings of sausages, gazing at these and the stalls flowing with coloured silks and heaped with new-smelling leather, as if the wonder of the world was spread before his feasting eyes. And the way Mendel smiled up at the tall man you’d think he was the father, not the child.

If Journey Through A Small Planet didn’t bowl me over quite as much as Litvinoff’s fiction, it impressed me in a different way. Definitely recommended – and now I’ll re-shelve it in the correct section of my library.

My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof by Penelope Mortimer (Novella a Day in May #3)

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I’m playing cold-or-Covid roulette at the moment – it would be unlucky to get Covid again so soon, but you never know – and Penelope Mortimer accompanied me while I wasn’t working or napping today. My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof is the curious title of this 1967 novel(la), somewhere in the middle of her writing career. A few of her books have come back into print through various houses, but I am still surprised that she has not survived as unstoppably as other contemporaries. Her style is assured, odd, and captivating.

My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof is about Muriel Rowbridge – the only women in a group of journalists who have been flown to Canada. They aren’t there for a particular event so much as to soak in the culture of the area, and report back on it in their various ways. Muriel’s writerly output is a column in a woman’s magazine (though they avoid the term). She has some aspirations of writing novels, though lies about this, and doesn’t seem particularly fulfilled by her job. Though nor is she ashamed of it as some people expect her to be.

Muriel is in something of a turbulent period of her life. Only a few months before the novel starts, she has had a mastectomy. She has a brassiere with a fake breast, and is far from getting used to the change in her body, and in the way she believes that people see her. After the mastectomy, she ended her relationship – a long-term affair with a married man called Ramsey.

Then they told her she was not going to die and her concern changed to a sense of outrage; she became convinced that no one could ever feel anything for her, sexually, but pity and disgust. She sent Ramsey away, his mirror after him. They said she would get over this too, and suggested therapy. But she did not want to get over it, the cheat she was perpetrating on the world by pretending to be a normal woman gave her a kind of terrible liveliness; without that liveliness, that feeling of perpetual shock, she believed that she would drift into an apathy which would be worse than death. she went back to work in new clothes, everything hidden. They called her brave behind her back, but treated her, according to the General’s directions, with affectionate indifference. Very few people telephoned her at home, or asked her out, in case she should feel pitied or find it difficult to refuse. The men who had previously patted or stroked her. out of friendliness, avoided her; the women, in her presence, avoided the men, obscurely ashamed of themselves.

Mortimer writes about this experience with a sort of brutal sensitivity, if that isn’t an oxymoron. Muriel’s feelings are not given anywhere to hide, but there is somehow a kindness in the unflinching way her new life is examined.

She certainly needn’t have worried about men finding her attractive, though. While there is a complexity to each of them, the crux of the novel is Muriel forming a relationship with every man on the trip. More than one are sexual. Some are based on shared disappointment, some on a meeting of minds and questions, and some simply on unstoppable interest in one another. I’ll be honest, I did struggle to separate the men – they did have distinctive traits, but I couldn’t remember which traits went together, or with which name. She shuttles between them all, one by one and back again, often in the form of sparse back-and-forth conversations. There is definitely something Spark-like in the way Mortimer presents conversations – a sort of emotional openness that never quite answers the questions the reader is probably asking.

I thought My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof was very good, and the writing is exactly the sort of curious, spare prose I love from this period. Mortimer is expert at conveying the damage that Muriel feels. I think the only thing that stopped me really loving this book is that I was a bit too confused by it. But maybe that was part of the point.

William – an Englishman by Cicely Hamilton (Novella a Day in May #2)

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William - an Englishman – Persephone Books

William – an Englishman (1919) by Cicely Hamilton isn’t really a novella, coming in at 226 pages, but I needed to reread it for Tea or Books? so I thought a Bank Holiday Monday was a great opportunity to read something a bit longer. Never too early to break the rules!

I can’t remember when I originally read this book, but not that much of it had stayed in my mind – except some searing scenes. And this is a decidedly searing book. It was the first novel published by Persephone Books, and it certainly dispels from the off the idea that they only publish cosy books. It’s hard to imagine anything less cosy – William – an Englishman is almost a work of horror at times.

It is titled after William but it is also about his wife, with the rather absurd name Griselda. As the novel opens, they have not met – but both have been swept up in the contemporary tide of socialism and suffragism. It is 1913 at this point, I think, and both movements are in full sway. William and Griselda are not paddling in the shallow waters of these movements either. They have dedicated their whole lives, their whole beings, to the cause.

From that day forwards he devoted himself to what he termed public life – a ferment of protestation and grievance; sometimes genuine, sometimes manufactured or, at least, artificially heightened. He was an extremist, passionately well-intentioned and with all the extremist’s contempt for those who balance, see difficulties and strive to give the other side its due.

Hamilton writes quite satirically about them. She doesn’t doubt their convictions, nor does she particularly undermine the causes for which they fight – she just portrays their extremism in the light of an authorial voice for whom calmness is the hallmark of good sense. The reader feels safe. There is a definite safety in seeing such passion from a distance, where we can turn it around in our mind, chuckling at its excesses.

But Hamilton has lured us into a false sense of security. The novel is about to become much less safe.

William and Griselda get married and set off to spend their honeymoon in Belgium, at the holiday home of a friend. They are three weeks into their time there, away from newspapers and letters and any contact with the outside world, when they spot some soldiers on the horizon. With their pacifist stances, they just mock the men out ‘playing at murder’. They do not realise that, since they last heard the news, a war has been declared – and Belgium has been invaded by German soldiers.

From here, William – an Englishman becomes much darker – even brutal. It is fast-paced, as the couple find themselves caught up with swift intensity in a situation they couldn’t have imagined. Hamilton switches tone expertly, and we can no longer smile at the naivety of this young pair. None of it feels melodramatic or gratuitous, simply because the horrors they are suddenly exposed to are horrors that genuinely happened to enormous numbers of people.

Later in the novel, I found the intensity flagged a little, and Hamilton loses a bit of her subtlety for a period – but the ending recaptures the pathos of the early novel. It’s extraordinary that this novel is more than a century old – it still feels fresh and vital, and one can’t help thinking about other invasions and violence happening in the world today.

Rachel and I will soon be recording an episode of Tea or Books? comparing this with a novel about a couple at the beginning of World War Two – Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune. Look out for that!

Murder on the Second Floor by Frank Vosper (Novella a Day in May #1)

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I’ve done a few book-a-day projects – for 25 days, for Novella – but they’re all inspired by Novella A Day In May, which Madame Bibi Lophile has done for a few years. And since May was rolling around, I checked to see if she was planning on doing it again in 2022 – she is, and so we are doing the project together! Always fun to do these things in tandem. (I should add, for my own project, that they might not all be novellas – some will be a bit longer, some might be non-fiction or short stories.)

I started off with one of my Project 24 books – Murder on the Second Floor by Frank Vosper. When I wrote about choosing it, I included a largeish section from the beginning of the novel, which really sold it to me:

Meet Sylvia Armitage. She is the heroine of this story. Sylvia is not reclining gracefully in a hammock, attired in a simple gown of flowered muslin, beneath a cherry-laden tree in a quaint, old-world garden. Neither is she sitting on a table, swinging her long, slim, graceful legs, with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in a long holder in the other, saying shocking things about biological urges to a horrified aunt. She is not even in a notorious night-club in New York, standing on a table, attired in less than half a bathing-dress, with a gentleman’s silk hat at a rakish angle on her wicked little head, drinking her own health – in such liberal potations as must seriously impair it – surrounded by fifty intoxicated lovers in paper hats, carrying a dozen balloons apiece. No; at the risk of opening our story in a drab and disappointing manner, the truth must be told. Sylvia Armitage is washing-up. Yes, washing-up, in the scullery in the basement of a most ordinary boarding-house in a most ordinary street in Bloomsbury.

There are splashes of this same wit throughout, though there is also plenty of melodrama and it’s hard to know which is intended to be taken more seriously. I suppose both are ingredients of Golden Age murder mysteries, for that is what Murder on the Second Floor is – the action takes place in a boarding house (hurrah for boarding house novels!) run by Sylvia’s parents. There is a maid who is fairly useless, residents ranging from a timid old lady to a florid travelling salesman to a playwright with whom Sylvia is evidently in love, and a handful of others. One of them will, of course, end up dead – though it doesn’t happen for much of the book.

The whole thing rattles along enjoyably, and at rather a dizzying speed so that Vosper could probably have written a book twice the length without any detriment to the pacing. It’s always relatively obvious who did the murder, at least to anybody who has read any other detective novels – though there is a neat twist towards the end that you’ll either enjoy or resent.

What lifts Murder on the Second Floor above the pacey nonsense (that it undoubtedly is) is Vosper’s style. He is funny, observant, and manages to make the charming characters charming. He’s a bit less successful with the characters we’re meant to dislike, who are drawn rather cartoonishly, and there are racist and classist elements to the novel which aren’t surprising but are off-putting. If you can swallow this, it’s an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours.

And a couple of hours entertainment were what plenty of people had from this in the period – since Vosper also wrote a play of the same name. The playwright in the book is writing a play called Murder on the Second Floor, so it all ties together nicely. What I haven’t been able to ascertain is whether the play or the novel came first, and how closely the plots align. Perhaps I should try to track down one of the two films that were made of it… I haven’t even been able to establish the date, since there is no copyright page and library holdings seem to just be the acting edition of the play.  Perhaps the most sophisticated mystery is the book itself?

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend – and, if you’re in the UK, happy long, bank holiday weekend. Hope you have a lovely one. I’ll be going to a bookshop on Saturday, so Project 24 might bulk out a bit. Watch this space. Here’s your usual round up – and keep an eye out tomorrow for a new reading project I’ll be doing with another blogger throughout May.

1.) The link – is about running an independent bookshop – I’d also love to read this article about being a celebrity book stylist, but I don’t have a New York Times subscription. Have it, if you do!

2.) The book – I still haven’t read the Nancy Spain reprint I bought a while ago, but that doesn’t stop me being pleased that there’s another – R in the Month – on the horizon.

3.) The podcasts – cheating this time, and including podcasts instead of blog posts. Because I’ve appeared as a guest on two brilliant podcasts recently! I was so delighted to be asked to speak about my beloved O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith with Amy and Kim on the Lost Ladies of Lit podcast. And then I got to chat with Trevor and Paul on the Mookse and the Gripes podcast, talking about novels about books. What could be more up all of our streets? Check them out via those links, or wherever you listen to podcasts. (And, if you don’t know those podcasts already, subscribe to both pronto.)

Project 24: Book 6

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Having rationed my book buying severely in the early days of the year, I have tumbled through my first six books quite quickly – even more quickly than posts appear, because I bought this one more than a week ago but waited until the 1954 Club finished before sharing.

(For those not in the know – I’m only buying 24 books this year. Click the Project24 tag to see what else I’ve bought.)

I was in London to see a play, so obviously I went to Charing Cross Road. Firstly, I found that Henry Porde books has moved and got rid of most of its stock? But Any Amount of Books is still there, and I made for the basement. Weirdly, I felt oddly confident that I’d find a Margery Sharp and it would be one I didn’t own. Which is precisely what happened!

I hadn’t heard of In Pious Memory before Ali wrote her review of it last year – and you can see me in the comments saying how keen I was to get hold of it. So I am delighted that I now have! It does look like I was very lucky to get hold of a cheap copy, since there aren’t many secondhand copies online.

Sharp makes up a third of the books I’ve bought so far for Project 24 – and, while I doubt that rate will keep up, I am pleased to be using my meagre allowance on an author I love and admire so much. Now I just have to read some of the Project 24 books…

Announcing the next club…

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What fun the 1954 Club has been! At the time of writing, we are very close to 100 reviews (see them on this round-up post) – and more still to come as Sunday finishes across the world. I’m always blown away by the number of people who contribute, and the range of books that are included.

It’s always interesting to see what major themes come out. Yes, we had books from our usual suspects of Georgette Heyer, Georges Simenon, and Agatha Christie – stalwart and prolific authors that appear in almost every single club year, and it’s always wonderful to see them. Besides them, it seems also to have been a heyday of children’s literature. And detective fiction, of course, though fading away from the peak of the Golden Age into slightly darker territory.

My favourite cultural moment was reading the comments about whether or not there were fridges in 1954 England (conclusion: not very many) – I love that this sort of thing comes up. And, of course, some of the club readers can just about remember 1954 and add in their memories.

I suspect nobody will remember our next year – because, in October, we are going to travel to 1929! Here is your six month’s warning to get hold of 1929 books. I can’t wait to see what you all read. And thanks again to Karen for her wonderful co-hosting – and, again, to everyone who wrote and read the reviews.