StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Friends, I have Covid. At the time of writing (Friday evening) it isn’t too bad – coldy symptoms and exhausted – so hopefully it’ll stay that way. Hopefully the days of isolation will help me get through some books, though early signs suggest it might be better at tackling the Netflix queue.

They: The Lost Dystopian 'Masterpiece' (Emily St. John Mandel) By Kay DickAnyway, whether you’re at home or out and about, here is the usual Miscellany to help kick off your weekend….

1.) The link – I am heartbroken that Neighbours is facing the axe. For those not in the know, it’s an Australian soap opera – and, except my family, has been the longest constant in my life. I’ve been watching for 24 years, and love mocking how silly it is, but love it all the same. If you fancy signing a petition to keep it alive, then what’s the worst that can happen?

2.) The book – everyone is talking about the newly rediscovered They by Kay Dick, reprinted by different publishers in the UK and US in recent weeks. I only know Kay Dick for her interviews with Ivy Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith in Ivy and Stevie, but if They is even a tenth as good as people are saying, then I’m sure it’s worth seeking out.

3.) The blog post – I was so delighted to see Asha’s review of Which Way? by Theodora Benson at her excellently titled blog, A Cat, A Book, and A Cup of Tea. And those are exactly the three things that are going to occupy the next part of my evening.

Project 24: Book #1

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As mentioned, I’m only buying 24 books this year. Two a month. We’re nearly halfway through February, and I have bought my first book – so I am doing well with my rations!

It’s always interesting (to me, at least) to see which books come to the fore in a Project 24 year. It’s an opportunity to buy some of the books that might otherwise not be in my budget, and probably not so much the year for experimenting on new names – and the first book I bought, by post, is by an author I adore.

In our recent Tea or Books? episode, Claire mentioned that The Flowering Thorn is one of her favourite books by Margery Sharp. I do have quite a few unread Sharps, but I didn’t have that one. And when I googled to see which secondhand copies were available, I came across this one. Well, I couldn’t be expect to resist that cover, could I?

I’m very happy with this one as a Project 24 title, and I’m looking forward to diving in before too long.

Project 24: Have I Read The Books I Bought Last Time?

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I can’t remember if I’ve talked about Project 24 in 2022 yet – basically, I’m only going to buy 24 books (for myself) this year. I’ve done it a few times in the past, and succeeded by the skin of my teeth. I’ve found that I buy a lot more books for other people in Project 24 years…

Why? It’s not a budget thing – it’s because I don’t have space. I live in a very small, very full flat. I also have about 1700 books I haven’t read, so I do realise that I won’t run out of things to enjoy.

Because it’s primarily about space, I’m not limiting the number of audiobooks I’m buying. If I read e-books, they’d be fine too.

It’s interesting to get to the end of the year and see which books where deemed important enough to get hold of. So, yes, I will be keeping you up to date with what I buy in 2022, but I thought it would also be fun to look back at 2017 and see how many of the 24 books I’ve read.

(Incidentally, I’d read 10 before 2022 ended – so I’ve got a good start.)

1. Dearest Andrew by Vita Sackville-West
Yes – I read this collection of letters more or less as soon as I bought it.

2. Norman Douglas by H. Tomlinson
No – I collect Dolphin Books whenever I see them, but this is one of the ones I’ve not yet read.

3. The Runaway by Claire Wong
Yes – my friend Claire wrote this one, and I read it straightaway. Though have yet to read her next novel, and must.

4. The Pleasures of Reading: a Booklovers’ Alphabet by Catherine Ross
No – though it’s been a while since I read a book about reading, so…

5. A Winter Away by Elizabeth Fair
Yes – bought this one for a podcast episode, so read it pretty quickly.

6. Sunlight in the Garden by Beverley Nichols
Yes – another one I read instantly, because I had the other two in the trilogy and adored them.

7. The Pelicans by E.M. Delafield
Yes – I really kept pace with buying and reading in Project 24, as apparently I also finished this one before 2017 was over.

8. Country Notes by Vita Sackville-West
No – still waiting, still enticing.

9. All the Dogs of My Life by Elizabeth von Arnim
Yes – having accidentally bought a book I already had, I have since read it. Really interesting, and quite troubling.

10. Catchwords and Claptrap by Rose Macaulay
Yes – I think I’d read it before I bought it, in the Bodleian, but have re-read it since.

11. The ABC of Authorship by Ursula Bloom
Yes – a wonderfully out-of-touch book about becoming an author – that I quoted in the afterword to Tea Is So Intoxicating.

12. Jacob’s Room is Full of Books by Susan Hill
Yes – loved this sequel to Howards End is on the Landing.

13. Insomniac City by Bill Hayes
Yes – a lovely memoir by Oliver Sacks’ widower.

14. Letters From Klara by Tove Jansson
Yes – I’ll always buy, and instantly read, any new translation of Jansson’s fiction.

15. ABC of Cats by Beverley Nichols
No – though honestly don’t know why, since it combines Nichols and cats, two of my favourite things.

16. Stephen Leacock by Margaret McMillan
Yes – and with special memories of visiting Leacock’s house.

17. My Remarkable Uncle by Stephen Leacock
No – I think it’s a bit different to the other Leacock books I’ve got, so should experiment.

18. Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson
Yes – in fact, I finished it earlier this week.

19. The Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson
No – but even keener, now that I’ve read and really appreciated Swamp Angel.

20. A Journey Round My Skull by Frigyes Karinthy
No – it’s an odd one to be the right mood for, but its day will come.

21. Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman
No – I used to have a book of letters on the go all the time, but it’s been a while.

22. David of Kings by E.F. Benson
No – and it is definitely too long since I read an EFB.

23. Aspects of E.M. Forster by Rose Macaulay
No – if I’m honest, this felt more like one for the shelves, to dip into, than one I’d necessarily read cover to cover.

24. E.M. Delafield by Maurice McCullen
No – and why not? This study seems so up my street. I’m not entirely sure where I put it…

So, I’ve read 13 – just over half, but only 3 of those were between 2018 and today…

Have I learned anything from this exercise? Sadly, no. But it was fun.

My first Project 24 book of 2022 has been bought online, and I’ll share what it is when it arrives. Wish me luck!

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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I’m going to do a slightly different weekend miscellany this week, largely because I had so many contenders for the blog post that I wanted to include. So this is just a round-up of reviews that I wanted to draw your attention to…

  • I read Neeru’s review of Denis Mackail’s The Majestic Mystery ages ago, but didn’t get around to mentioning it. It follows the rule that every novelist in the 1920s and 30s had to write at least ONE detective novel, and Mackail’s is very entertaining. I listened to the audiobook, which is much easier to find than a paper copy.
  • So pleased that Barb is back blogging at Leaves and Pages, and particularly since she has read and loved Miss Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes – though, while you’re there, scroll through the other recent reviews.
  • Radhika’s review of Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour is one of the best reviews I’ve read recently, and it reminds me of why I love Taylor (when I’m in the right frame of mind). I have read this novel and don’t remember much about it, and Radhika’s writing and analysis make me want to go back asap.
  • Let’s finish with Lil’s video about F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin To See The Peepshow – I love when Lil covers the British Library Women Writers series, and she has lovely things to say about this one too…

Tea or Books? #102: Do We Read Books about Grief? and Five Windows vs Four Gardens – with Claire The Captive Reader

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D.E. Stevenson, Margery Sharp – and a special guest!

In this episode, we have a special guest in the form of Claire – you’ll know her blog The Captive Reader. We were delighted to have her as a guest, especially as she also came up with our topics.

In the first half, we discuss books about grief – and whether or not we are drawn to them. In the second half, we compare two novels with similar premises: Five Windows by D.E. Stevenson and Four Gardens by Margery Sharp. Both, thankfully, have recently been republished by Dean Street Press.

Get episodes a couple of days early at Patreon, and listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your podcast app of choice. Your ratings and reviews make a big difference, and we’d really appreciate them.

Get in touch at teaorbooks@gmail.com with any suggestions or feedback – we love hearing from you.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Maeve Kerrigan series by Jane Casey
The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley
Let’s Get Physical by Danielle Friedman
Ghosts: A Cultural History by Susan Owens
Un Noel de Maigret by Georges Simenon
Miss Buncle’s Book by D.E. Stevenson
Dishonoured Bones by John Trench
John Buchan
Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson
Hetty Dorval by Ethel Wilson
Margaret Atwood
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott
Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery
Enid Blyton
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill
Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt
Let Not The Waves of the Sea by Simon Stephenson
Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
All The Lives We Ever Lived by Katharine Smyth
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
A Half-Baked Idea by Olivia Potts
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
Anthony Trollope
A Magnificent Obsession by Helen Rappaport
After the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport
These For Remembrance by John Buchan
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
In the Mountains by Elizabeth von Arnim
Mrs Tim of the Regiment by D.E. Stevenson
The Stone of Chastity by Margery Sharp
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp
The Gipsy in the Parlour by Margery Sharp
Britannia Mews by Margery Sharp
The English Air by D.E. Stevenson
Green Money by D.E. Stevenson
Listening Valley by D.E. Stevenson
Miss Read
Moon Tiger by Penelope Tiger
The Diviners by Margaret Laurence

More audiobooks: the good, the bad, and the funny

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I don’t seem to be finishing many paper books at the moment, but I am tearing through audiobooks. If I continue at this rate, I might end up listening to as many books this year as physically reading them. Thanks Audible Plus! (Not a sponsor, but I’m open to offers.)

Here are three more that I’ve listened to recently…

Surprised by Joy (1955) by C.S. Lewis

I’ve actually got the book on my shelves, but I decided to listen instead. I thought it was about his encounter with Jesus and decision to become a Christian – and it is, but only at the end of what is really a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood. With emphasis on childhood. It takes us through his days at various different schools, and really delves into what makes these positive or negative experiences. Nobody has better expressed how awful P.E. is, and what a blessing it is not to have to do it anymore.

I really enjoyed this book, and Lewis’s gentle thoughtfulness. The only downside with the audiobook is that I think it would have been better in Lewis’s (presumably) Northern Irish accent. The fact that the narrator was English was particularly odd when Lewis was talking about feeling out of kilter in England, as an outsider.

Come Again (2020) by Robert Webb

One could hardly ask for a better narrator than Olivia Colman, and in Come Again she often juggles three or four distinct accents in conversation with each other. She is brilliant, but sadly the book isn’t. It’s about a middle-aged woman called Kate whose life has fallen apart in the wake of her husband’s death from a brain tumour that had been growing for decades – but with almost no symptoms. She wishes she could go back to when they met at university, and warn him. And one morning she wakes up to find out that her wish has come true – she is waking up on the day she met him, as a 19-year-old.

This part of the novel is brilliant. Kate is snarky, funny, and a complex emotional character. The book is often very poignant, as well as delightfully funny (though some tangents on Brexit and Donald Trump, while I wholeheartedly agree with Webb’s/Kate’s stance, don’t really cohere). The trouble is that it doesn’t work at all with the rest of the novel – which is about gangsters trying to track down a memory stick that exposes the secrets of a powerful man. The final quarter of the novel, particularly, is very weak – car chases, fights, and all sorts of nonsense that lets down all the emotionally sophisticated narrative that preceded it. If only an editor had spoken to Webb about not putting ALL his ideas in one novel.

The Adventures of Sally (1922) by P.G. Wodehouse

Oh, inject Wodehouse straight into my veins. What a delightful experience. The plot scarcely matters – it includes a surprise inheritance, various actresses, a theatre impresario, boxing, jaunts across the Atlantic, broken engagements, irritating brothers, love at first sight and all the other usual Wodehouse ingredients. Sally is funny, spirited, and with a lovely dryness. As usual, it is Wodehouse’s mastery of the humorous sentence that, time and again, makes this novel a hoot. I particular loved Ginger and his inability to translate his own brand of slang.

He glanced over his shoulder warily. “Has that blighter pipped?”

“Pipped?”

“Popped,” explained Ginger.

As before, anything you’d recommend from the Audible Plus catalogue? Do let me know! (I think I paid £3 for Webb’s book, but the other two were free.)

L is for Leacock

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

Some of the letters of the alphabet, in this ongoing project, are no-brainers. I already know who ‘M’ is going to be, and I suspect you do too if you read this blog. And I knew who would step forward for L – it had to be my boy Stephen Leacock. Look at that towering pile of Canada’s finest.

How many books do I have by Stephen Leacock?

There are TWENTY-SEVEN Leacock books there, though that does include a couple of ‘best ofs’ that I think replicate content found in the others. I’ve no idea how many books Leacock wrote, and I’ve only actively sought out one of these books – My Discovery of England – relying on serendipity to find the others. He is one of those authors who turns up often, almost always (in this country) in 1910s-30s editions that speak to a popularity he once had.

How many of these have I read?

I have almost no idea. Because so many of them are collections of essays/sketches, the titles don’t always clue you in to their contents. According to my LibraryThing, where I mark whether or not I’ve read a book, I have read 14 of them. But the bulk of my Leacock reading was pre-blog, around 2004-6, so I don’t have a firm recollection of how accurate that is. I still read one every year or two, so I can keep going for a bit.

How did I start reading Stephen Leacock?

I think I was lent some by my aunt, but it’s also possible that I discovered him in the same place I discovered E.M. Delafield – a 1940 volume of sketches called Modern Humour. As I say above, I was on a bit of a blitz of reading him 15 or so years ago, and whenever I pick one up I’m reminded why I enjoy him so much.

General impressions…

What a joyful writer Leacock is. His essays and sketches tend to be ironic or dry, or sometimes openly pastiching some well-known writing of the day, and he has a taste for the surreal that almost always lands on the right side of too far. He is an exemplary judge of that – of being careful with the absurdities to make them still enjoyable. Among the books in that pile are some more serious things, I think, but I’ve only dabbled in them.

When I went to Canada in 2017, I was keen to fill some Leacock gaps – and to visit his house, which was a wonderful experience. It was a novelty to see editions of his works that were printed in the past 70 years, and a couple of the paperbacks up the top of the pile came from that trip. I don’t think Leacock is much read anymore, even in Canada, but he should be.

The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull

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The Murder of My Aunt (British Library Crime Classics): 54: Amazon.co.uk: Richard Hull: 9780712352802: BooksI had a little blogging absence because I had a nasty cold – which I presumed might be Covid, given how everyone seems to have it at the moment, but a zillion tests turned out negative. Just a normal cold! Back to normal winter life!

Anyway, if you’re anything like me then feeling under the weather means you turn to very easy reading. I didn’t have the energy for books where fine writing or depth of character were the focus. So I turned to murder mysteries.

That’s probably unfair, because murder mysteries can certainly have great writing and characters, but it felt like a safe bet for an enjoyable, pacy plot. And the first one up was The Murder of My Aunt (1934) by Richard Hull, which I think I got as a review copy from the British Library in 2018. I was picking more or less at random from my piles of yet-to-be-read British Library Crime Classics, though I do also dimly recall someone recommending this one. If that were you, many thanks.

The novel is told by Edward Powell, a grown man who lives with his Aunt Mildred on the outskirts of a tiny town in Wales. It sounds idyllic, to be honest, but Edward is not a man who appreciates the countryside – still less does he appreciate having his freedoms curtailed by his aunt’s watchful eye, and his finances falling far short of his dreams for himself. Towards the beginning of the novel, they are in a battle over whether or not he will drive into town – which involves his aunt cutting off his petrol supply, and Edward concocting a lie about how he successfully got there nonetheless.

There is something of the Ealing Comedy about this – the stakes are high, but it is all affably ridiculous enough that they don’t seem high. Early on, Edward has decided he should kill his aunt – and the reader goes along for the ride. Murder feels like it’s rather playful here.

And does the aunt deserve it? Well, here’s an example of what annoys Edward so much:

My aunt, after studying the ordnance map with great care, tells me that you have to go up just on six hundred feet, and apparently it is a good deal. I can well believe her, but these figures mean little to me. It is, however, typical of my aunt that she not only possesses many maps showing this revolting country-side in the greatest detail for miles round, but that she can apparently find some pleasure in staring at them for hours on end, ‘reading’ them as she is pleased to say, and producing from memory figures as to the height of every hillock near by.

Frankly, as someone who loathes maps and being forced to look at them, I was fully on Edward’s side at this point.

From here on, he develops various ruses for offing his aunt, and shares them in the novel – which is really a diary of his attempts. Keeping a diary of your murder attempts probably isn’t the wisest move, but we’ll forgive it. As you can tell by the plural ‘attempts’, he isn’t very good at achieving his goal. I shan’t spoil whether or not he was successful, but I will say that The Murder of My Aunt was a delight throughout. Edward reminded me a bit of Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces, in that he considers himself vastly superior to the people around him – and reveals himself, through his own self-portrait, to be rather more ridiculous than he would like.

It’s not the sort of murder mystery where you are desperate to find out whodunnit – indeed, there is no mystery at all. But it’s a great reading experience, and Hull’s dry touch is perfect.

BookTube Spin #5: What Will I Be Reading?

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I made my list, I checked it twice – and Rick has done the spin.

As you’ll have seen in that video, there are two numbers – the second for those who really want to go for it. I haven’t decided yet, but I’ll definitely be picking up The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill (which a couple of you recommended) with the option of The Twisted Tree by Frank Baker. I guess the spin REALLY wanted me to read about trees.

BookTube Spin #5: My List

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You may well know Rick’s BookTube Spin – pick 20 books, he gives us a number and we have a couple of months to read. Think the Classics Spin but not necessarily classics, and with the addition of lovely Rick:

I did quite well in previous ones, and then last time I made a list of Persephone titles… and read three of them, but not the one the spin selected. Oops! Let’s see if I do better this time.

A mini-project I’ve been considering this year is digging out some of the books I bought/received in 2012 and haven’t read yet. A decade on the shelves seems long enough. Luckily my LibraryThing catalogue tells me when I added things there, so I was able to look through the embarrassingly high number of books I got 10 years ago that are still languishing, and came up with this list of 20 candidates. Believe me, there were a lot more than 20 to choose from…

1. Underfoot in Showbusiness by Helene Hanff
2. A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
3. The Ha-ha by Jennifer Dawson
4. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
5. Adele and Co by Dornford Yates
6. The Limit by Ada Leverson
7. The Initials in the Heart by Laurence Whistler
8. The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill
9. Winnowed Wisdom by Stephen Leacock
10. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
11. Down and Out in London and Paris by George Orwell
12. The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble
13. The Twisted Tree by Frank Baker
14. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
15. New Moon With The Old by Dodie Smith
16. It Ends With Revelations by Dodie Smith
17. Woman in a Lampshade by Elizabeth Jolley
18. Bachelors Anonymous by P.G. Wodehouse
19. Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison
20. Merlin Bay by Richmal Crompton

Any you’re hoping the spin will land on? Any I should dread?

The number will be revealed on Friday, so it’s not too late to make your own list if you want to join in…