Spotify’s recommendations have come up trumps again. Not to be confused with ‘This Town Is Killing Me’, which I featured here a few weeks ago, here is a spectacular song by Natalie Hemby – ‘This Town Still Talks About You’. As well as being beautiful, I love the story to it – which looks at a small town remembering somebody who has left it, rather than the usual narrative from the perspective of the leaver.
You know how I’m not buying books this year, except for special trips? Well – this Saturday I’m off on one of those trips, back to Astley Book Farm. It’s not been super long since I was last there, and I don’t know how quickly they replenish their stock, so who knows what I’ll come back with. But I suspect something. And I also think this might be the second and final bookshop trip of the year! I’d planned them both last year, which is why they were the caveats.
While I’m there, I hope you’re enjoying your weekends – and here’s a book, a blog post, and link to help you do just that:
1.) The link – is an ingenious idea for an article from the Guardian. They contacted five people who won ‘lifetime supplies’ of different things, from toilet roll to chicken, and learned how this affected their lives (and what ‘lifetime supply’ means in practice). Guys, one of them is books!
2.) The book – I keep going back to WhichBook (after testing out lots of book recommendation websites) and writing down book titles and not buying them – but I was particularly intrigued by Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst. I can’t remember what I put in the sliders, but it did seem very up my street. Find out more! (Has anybody read it?)
3.) The blog post – Moira makes The Strange Case of Harriet Hall by Moray Dalton sound pretty appealing, but the main reason to visit Clothes in Books this week is those lovely pictures of 1930s clothes. Heaven!
I’ve been watching still more movies, and it’s fun to write a little about each of them. Not least because I never seem to remember what I’ve seen if I don’t write it down. Don’t let that put you off these films, though, because I’ve watched some really good stuff recently.
Lilting
I loved this moving film about a man (Ben Whishaw) whose boyfriend has died – the film sees him trying to connect with his boyfriend’s grieving mother (Cheng Pei-pei), who is Chinese and doesn’t speak much English. With the help of a translator, they try to connect (and Peter Bowles is in a supporting role!) If you speak Mandarin and English, it might be a bit annoying that every line is essentially repeated by the translator, but that was not an issue for me. A simple, beautiful, thoughtful film – and a brilliant performance by Whishaw.
Moonlight
It won the Best Film Oscar a couple of years ago – remember envelope-gate? – and I’d avoided watching it because I thought it had lots of drug-taking in it. Turns out, no. It shows three periods of one man’s life, from child to teenager to adult, as he deals with an abusive mother, his sexuality, and being bullied. If that sounds super dark, then fear not – the film is oddly lovely, even with all those elements, and that’s probably because of the way it’s shot. A worthy winner.
Paterson
I forget where I saw this recommended, but was pleased to see it on Amazon Prime. Adam Driver plays Paterson (who lives in Paterson) – a bus driver who also writes poetry. He lives with his creative, affectionate girlfriend and their dog, and the movie mostly sees him go about his ordinary, everyday life. It’s truly lovely. There are few momentous events, and those that seem momentous turn out not to be – it’s rare to see ordinary, contented people shown so well, and it’s another beautiful film to add to this list of beautiful films.
We the Animals
Speaking of, the cinematography in this film is mesmerising, and that’s not something I’d usually notice. It’s about three brothers who grow up with volatile parents in near-poverty – and about the confusion that can come about from the mix of love, angst, violence, affection, and the failure to fit in. It drags a little in places, but Raul Castillo’s performance is brilliant, and (again) the way it is shot and edited is stunning.
Isn’t it Romantic
And now a change of pace! I set aside my irritation that this title doesn’t have a question mark (why?!) to enjoy a sort of spoof rom-com that was made by Netflix. Rebel Wilson hits her head and wakes up in a world that resembles a rom-com – she lives in an enormous New York apartment, has a female nemesis at work, and Liam Hemsworth is in love with her. It’s certainly not groundbreaking, but Wilson is always very engaging to watch, and the whole thing is super fun.
Having surprised myself by how I loved Pigs in Heaven last year, I was keen to read more by Barbara Kingsolver. I wouldn’t have read Pigs in Heaven if it weren’t for A Century of Books, and I was glad to find it still on my shelf – as I’d got rid of a few Kingsolver novels when I moved house. Mostly because they’re usually chunksters, and take up too much room on my limited shelves. Well, I ended up kicking myself for that, didn’t I?
After asking around, I decided to give Prodigal Summer (2000) a go – and I also decided (shelf space still an issue) to listen to the audiobook, read by Kingsolver herself. I didn’t know a lot about it, except that it had multiple narratives. And that it was very many hours long.
Unlike many books with multiple narratives, these weren’t separate perspectives on the same central story. Rather, these are tales of three people living different lives in the same broad area in Virginia. It covers a single summer, transformative for each of them in different ways. They are:
It is a rich a complex novel. Each of the characters has enormous depth, including most of the many secondary characters, and Kingsolver unfolds this in a leisurely way over the course of the book. I particularly appreciated that Deanna is not a lonely spinster type, and that she loves the solitude – or, rather, the human solitude. One of my favourite moments in the book is the line that “solitude is a human presumption’, because of course she is always surrounded by any number of creatures, large and small.
Even characters who initially seem a little cartoonishly drawn, through the eyes of Lusa or Garnett, grow as Lusa and Garnett learn more about them – whether that be tragedies in Nannie’s past, or Lusa discovering more about her siblings-in-law, nephews, and nieces. I shan’t say the enormous moment that affects Lusa’s journey, but it happens very early on and sets the tone for all of her sections.
So, I loved almost anything which involved more than one (human!) character. Kingsolver is brilliant at the gradual evolving of human relationships (romantic or otherwise), and paces them wonderfully. What I didn’t love so much were scenes with only one person in – and there are a lot of them. Equally, some polemical scenes are rather overdone.
The reason for these introspective scenes is often because of biology. As you may have spotted, all three of the main characters are fascinated – even obsessed – by one element of nature. Lusa the entomologist, Garnett and his trees, Deanna and coyotes. If you are also interested in biology, then this might also fascinate you. I am profoundly uninterested in bugs, trees, or predators. Nothing in science has ever really captivated me, and biology was always bottom of the list. Kingsolver evidently shares these interests, and explores them at length, but I would have preferred more about the human interactions and less thinking about food chains or cross-pollination.
And there are some scenes where one character will elaborate to another why their biological perspective is wrong – the lack of subtlety here reminded me of Kingsolver’s lack of subtlety in The Poisonwood Bible, which had initially put me off reading anything more by her. Deanna, particularly, with her lectures on why you shouldn’t kill coyotes, really began to pall at times. It was narratively interesting to me.
On the other hand, what did work with an impressive subtlety was the interweaving of the narratives. It was very occasional, and didn’t lead to any enormous revelations or substantive changes in the direction the novel was heading, but we gradually learn about the connections between these seemingly distinct lives. It helped give greater reality to this world she’d created.
Ultimately, then, I don’t think this book is ‘for me’ in the way that Pigs in Heaven was. But I think it would be the perfect book for somebody interested in biology and novels with real human depth – and, despite its faults or elements that put me off, I’ll be thinking about those wonderfully realised characters for a long time.
I’m sure you know about the exciting and excellent Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press – if not, hurry to them – and today I’m going to share my post about Alice by Elizabeth Eliot. Below is the beginning of my review – you can read the rest over at Shiny New Books.
Hurrah to Dean Street Press and their continued Furrowed Middlebrow series, bringing back underrated women writers that most of us haven’t heard of before. Elizabeth Eliot certainly fits that category for me, but after reading Alice (1949), I’ll be keen to read more Eliot.
Despite being called Alice, the narrator is Margaret – she first encounters Alice when they are at boarding school together, in the late 1920s. It is immediately clear that Alice has left a significant effect on her schoolfriend, with Alice’s almost artless carefreeness showing options for a bohemian lifestyle that Margaret can’t quite aspire to.
Let’s face it, I’m never at a loss for book recommendations. Even if I somehow got through the 1300+ books on my shelves that I haven’t read, there are enough titles that I read about on blogs, hear about on podcasts, and learn about from friends that I am never going to run dry. And yet, nonetheless, I am intrigued by the concept of book recommendation websites. Do they work? Can algorithms understand my tastes?
Well, let’s see.
I’m using the first list of sites that I came across, which is on a site called Life Hack – “10 Best Book Recommendation Sites You Need to Know“. The article isn’t dated but, as we shall see, I think it must be a little bit old. I’ll be trying each of the sites out, and where they require me to add in some books to guess my taste, I’ll be using the three listed below. (I thought it might be mean and unhelpful to pick wildly different things I’ve liked.)
Let’s take the recommended recommendation sites one at a time, and see how things go.
This relies on you having put all your books in already. I have a GoodReads account, but I don’t use it, and I have no books listed there. Strike one.
I do, however, have a LibraryThing account, and have all my books listed there! So I don’t have to put in my test three, because it’s using nearly 3000 books to recommend from. And these are the top five books it tells me I should read:
You can even click on ‘Why?’, next to the recommendation, and it will list all the books that have made them bring up that recommendation. There were 83 reasons why for the Frankau!
These recommendations look really good, and I’ve been meaning to read more Frankau and try Jameson. I’m less sure about the Hannah, but the Marsh and Pym would be great. And they’ve listed 1,999 recommendations for me! (#1999, in case you’re wondering, is A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys, which is way too long.) You can even remove all authors that you already have books by – then I get 786, from Sophie Hannah to Katherine White.
I’m off to a very strong start with LibraryThing.
Points for clarity in the name. You can only add one title, it seems, and they didn’t have Miss Hargreaves in their database. I was able to add it via ISBN, but then got this screen:
Ok, let’s try I Capture the Castle instead. Yep, more luck here – and this is the top five:
Ah. This is where the strength of LibraryThing’s hand becomes clear. Because WhatShouldIReadNext.com can’t tell that I already own all these books, and have read four of them (Good Wives is tbr). On the plus side, I love the Gibbons, Bronte, and Mitford. I really didn’t like The Woman in White, but 3/4 ain’t bad.
I got 14 recommendations in total, and none of them are particularly adventurous or out of the ordinary. The most unusual is probably Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn (which I’ve also read and loved). Oh, wait, except Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan and PJ Lynch, which I’ve never heard of, and is tagged ‘frontier and pioneer life’, ‘stepmothers’, ‘mail order brides’…
Hmm. The website still exists, but they don’t seem to have any recommendation function any longer. I guess they changed their purpose?
This just plain doesn’t exist. It’s merged with GoodReads.
Ok, sure. Now, this will give me some recommendations based on my purchases (the first five are Furrowed Middlebrow publications, four of which I already have) – but, to return to my initial aim, let’s see what they recommend alongside Miss Hargreaves.
Unsurprisingly, since it was a Bloomsbury Group reprint, they’ve picked three others – Henrietta’s War and Henrietta Sees It Through by Joyce Dennys and The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson. Equally unsurprisingly, I already have them all.
When I look up I Capture the Castle, I am recommended… two other editions of I Capture the Castle, but also:
We’ve already covered the Gibbons. I’ve heard the Rosoff recommended glowingly before, but the Cassidy seems a bit of a curve ball. Does I Capture the Castle really scream “would love a book about child murder”?
This isn’t an enter-a-title-and-get-a-recommendation site; rather, it’s a newsletter that gears towards cheap books. I took a several-step questionnaire where I said what sort of books I was into. Having done all that, though, they did come up with some suggestions (that made me want to instantly unsubscribe). Here are the first five:
I wouldn’t dream of reading any of these. The worst one yet.
This one isn’t personalised, it’s just a list of books they think you might like. Though how they’re deciding that when they don’t know anything about me is anyone’s guess. Let’s see what they say under ‘fiction’…
I haven’t heard of three of these, so I like that it’s out of the ordinary. But, having clicked on the middle three, I have no wish to read them. Why so many child-killing books out there?? I do want to read more Kate Atkinson, though, so thanks for the reminder. There’s a good mix of genres/periods/authors, and I had to get to the 48th recommendation before I came to a book I’d already read (The Stranger by Albert Camus).
Oo, fun! This one is based on slider scales of emotions and types of content – as below. So I can’t put in my favourite titles, but I can try to match my mood. You can only do four sliders at a time – you can see what I chose in the screenshot.
So, what did it choose? Here are the first five:
It sorts in ‘Best matches’, ‘Good matches’, ‘Fair matches’ etc. I had no ‘Best matches’, and only the first of these was a ‘Good match’, so apparently my combination of requests is unusual. But, onwards – I haven’t heard of any of these authors or books, and I love what an unusual selection it is. I’ve added Natural Novel to my wishlist, and I can see these sliders becoming super addictive.
You have to sign up, but you can add categories you like, the book you’re currently reading (Noah’s Ark by Barbara Trapido), and three favourites. There are various other options – find good local bookshops, etc. – but what did it end up recommending?
Well, it does recommendations per book, rather than collectively. Some of these are a little uninspired (all of the recommendations related to Noah’s Ark were other novels by Barbara Trapido), but here’s what it had to suggest for Miss Hargreaves:
We’ve established that I love Ferguson, and I’ve been happily dipping in and out of the Edwards for a long time. My podcast co-host Rachel loves Norman Collins, so I was pleased to see that come up – and I haven’t heard of the Wood.
Conclusions
As I said, I’m unlikely to need to throw myself on the mercy of book recommendation sites – but it’s been fun to see what options are out there! Of this mixed list, I can certainly see myself exploring the LibraryThing recommendations list more often – but the one I’m most likely to return to is WhichBook. I love the idea of those sliders, and it brought up such intriguing and unusual titles that I’d be very unlikely to come across them otherwise. And it’s easily the most fun!
Let me know if you go delving into any of these sites – I’d love to know what you come up with.
That early summer sunshine we got last week seems to have hidden again, so I hope you have a nice March weekend planned. I’ll be visiting friends in various locations, and probably not getting much reading done. But I can leave you with a book, a blog post, and a link… (and don’t forget that the #1965Club is only a few weeks away!)
1.) The blog post – is Karen’s/Kaggsy’s excellent review of Olivia Laing’s wonderful book To The River. Go over and find out more…
2.) The link – I won’t often link to rap battles, but this one is an exception.
3.) The book – now that I’ve read Paul Collins’ excellent book about Shakespeare, I’m going to have to read Sixpence House, about the time he and his family lived in Hay-on-Wye. Since I’m not buying books this year, that could be tricky…
Recently, I wrote about some of the films I’d been watching. Well, dear reader, I’ve been watching some more. This time of year brings all sorts of Oscar contenders, of course, and I love keeping an eye on what wins – though all I really wanted was for both Olivia Colman and Glenn Close to win, which was obviously impossible. Here’s a few more movies that I’ve been watching recently:
The Wife
I wanted to see The Wife when it came out, but it didn’t seem to come to Oxford. Now it’s available to watch at home for less than half the price of a cinema ticket, so I did that. I haven’t read the Meg Wolitzer novel it’s based on, but this tale of a woman living in the shadow of her husband’s literary success is brilliant. They travel to accept his Nobel Prize, and things begin to unravel. Jonathan Pryce is great as the husband, but Glenn Close is extraordinary as the wife. In any other year, she’d have nabbed the Oscar, no problem.
Green Book
It just won Best Film at the Oscars, so you probably know all about this one – it’s the 1960s, and a white Italian-American is the chauffeur for African-American musician Don Shirley. As they drive around the south, on routes labelled in the ‘green book’ as safe for black people, they learn from one another. It does get trite at times, and Tony’s racism is solved in a heartbeat, but I think it could have been a lot more trite and dodged some pitfalls. Great performances – and, in a year for film that hasn’t been particularly inspiring, not a terrible choice for the best film IMO.
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant are brilliant in this dark comedy based on the real-life biographer and literary forger Lee Israel. I also loved that a film just expected us to know who Noel Coward is, which is refreshing. Both the leads got Oscar noms and deservedly so.
Bareilly Ki Barfi
My colleague Rishi has started recommending Bollywood films to me, and this was the first (available on Netflix, in the UK at least). It’s funny and lively and also rather bittersweet – a headstrong woman reads a novel where the heroine seems exactly like her, and she sets out to meet the author. The only problem is that it was written under someone else’s identity. Unusually for a romantic comedy, it was genuinely unclear who she’d choose at times. Some great songs, too.
Tanu Weds Manu
Another Bollywood film – this time based on googling “best Bollywood romantic comedies”. A young man is being introduced to various different potential brides, but falls for the one who is constantly rude to him. Sparks fly, etc., and none of it is believable but all of it is fun.
The Blind Side
Another true story – Sandra Bullock plays a Christian mother who decides to take in a young black man who is excellent at American football and from a disadvantaged background. It felt very like a made-for-TV afternoon movie, and it must have been a lean year that meant it got a Best Film Oscar nom and Bullock won Best Actress. I mean, it was enjoyable enough, but that’s pretty much it.
It’s only February, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read one of my books of the year – The Book of William by Paul Collins, published in 2009. The subtitle is a little misleading, but it gives you the gist: ‘How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World’.
I bought it in 2013, when I was working for the Rare Books department at the Bodleian and had been commissioned to write a very short biography of Shakespeare (and accounts of various portraits, false portraits, etc.) to accompany a DVD of adaptations of his plays. I never found out if that text was used (though I do remember that my first draft of the biography was rejected for “having too many facts” and “not being swooning enough”). But it did reignite my interest in Shakespeare – I picked up this book and James Shapiro’s excellent Contested Will around this time.
Collins’ book looks at various stages in the First Folio’s history – starting, understandably, with its creation. Shakespeare died a few years before it was printed, and there wasn’t much precedent for printing plays on such a grand scale – but he had champions of his work who saw that it happened. I’d learned quite a lot of this section before, at university and in other books, but Collins puts it together excellently. My attention was already caught.
My favourite sections of The Book of William were the next few chapters – more or less the bulk of the book, I suppose – looking at the waxing and waning of Shakespeare’s popularity. And these ups and downs sometimes, but not always, coincided with the popularity of the First Folio in the secondhand market. Collins’ accounts of rival editors in the 18th century is brilliant. One of them was Alexander Pope, no less, and his hacking away of Shakespeare’s plays led to a bitter back and forth with an editor, Theobald, who had a much more rigorous respect for the original – and wasn’t above publishing a book which highlighted hundreds of Pope’s errors.
We dart all over the place, as the account moves on. There is the gentlemen in the middle of nowhere, who stopped being a successful businessman to launch an exhaustive project to discover all the differences between the remaining First Folios, and their ownership, in an enormous five-volume series. There is the Folger Library’s collection of folios, as well as the mirror machines they use to trace distinctions between them. It’s all worlds away from a man from Stratford writing out blank verse, and fascinating to see how many chance or unlikely steps in between that moment and the present have led to his reputation – and that of this first printed collection of his plays (albeit incomplete).
I can join the ranks of those who have held a First Folio. Again, the Bodleian – I was able to look through a copy, and was amused that a previous ownership had amended the list of plays, adding or removing them according to their own beliefs about canonicity. Most of the editions Collins looks at have been similarly desecrated by earlier owners, unaware of how sacred these books would become. And some of the most tantalising moments are those that come from a similar unawareness – plays lost to history, or First Folios that disappear. As Collins points out, it’s not a particularly rare book (as these things go), with over 200 known to still exist. I own books with shorter print runs than that. A combination of things – Shakespeare’s genius, lore about the book, and of course demand – make it so valuable.
I have to admit that the end of the book sort of petered out for me. We are taken to Japan, and left there. I suppose it would be difficult to resolve something that can never truly end – for the history of the First Folio will continue and continue. And any scholars will be frustrated using this book, because there are no footnotes or sourcing – all the statements are doubtless well researched, but have to be taken at Collins’ word.
The accounts would be interesting in any writer’s hand, but Collins brings something special to this book. I love anything which foregrounds the author’s own experience of researching the book – so he is always present as we journey with him around the world. His tone perfectly captures reverence, fascination, and amusement at the absurdity of many moments in the history he relays. It’s made me all the keener to read his book about Hay-on-Wye – and also to find more and more to read about Shakespeare’s legacy. A real treat.
The Discover playlist on Spotify is turning out to be pretty great – and I really like ‘Rainbow’ by Kacey Musgraves, that cropped up on it. Enjoy!