2007

Finishing off #ABookADayInMay

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Well, here we are! For the third? fourth? year in a row, I’ve finished a book a day in May. I’ll get onto some thoughts about this year’s experience in a moment, but let’s rattle through the final three books…

24 for 3

24 for 3 (2007) by Jennie Walker

This novella is strong competition for ‘review book that sat on my shelves for the longest period’, as Bloomsbury sent it to me in 2008. It was independently published by the author the year before, so I’m considering it a 2007 title. And the author is in fact poet Charles Boyle – ‘Jennie Walker’ is a pseudonym he has used only once, so far.

24 for 3 is from the perspective of a middle-aged woman and her musings over the course of a week – mostly about her stepson, her husband, and the man she is having an affair with (whom she refers to as ‘the loss-adjustor’). As the title suggests to those in know, this is also a novella about cricket. But her husband and the loss-adjustor are cricket fanatics, and some matches between England and India recur through the week.

What’s the equivalent of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl for a middle-aged man who wants a woman to have an affair with him AND ask him the rules of cricket? It did feel a bit wish-fulfilment at times, and when you know the author is a man, perhaps even less convincing as a real person.

Having said that, it is a rather beautifully written novella – a lovely observant voice, calmly exposing all sorts of truths about human nature. I marked out one paragraph, which is really more about the stepson.

Then his stepmother apologises for speaking to him the way she did and this is sad, almost as sad as the way his parents spend years of their lives fussing about his table manners or whether he’s cleaned his teeth or his toenails need cutting or he’s getting enough vitamin A or B or Q and then suddenly they stop, they ignore him completely, as if the whole family thing has just been a game to pass the time, like throwing balled-up socks. Although after they’ve dropped out oft he game they still insist, when they bother to notice that he’s still around, that the rules apply to him, and that his vitamn levels are the most important things in his life.

I did find the cricket sections more tiresome, as I find pretty much anything about sport in any context. But otherwise it was a really good little book, and it’s a shame there aren’t any more novellas under Walker’s name. Better late than never?

Everything’s Too Something! (1966) by Virginia Graham

This is a collection of short humorous essays collected from Homes and Garden, of all places. I love Graham’s writing, and I want to review this collection properly – rather than in a speedy A Book A Day in May fashion – so watch this space. She deserves to be better known, and I think she might have been if she’d written this sort of thing thirty years earlier. To tide you over, here’s a paragraph that gives a sense of her tone (and probably, on reflection, couldn’t have been written in the 1930s):

Individualists naturally ahve this tendency to think that laws are not made for them, but in a crowded world, and certainly in this sardine tin of an island, it is difificult to be illegal without inconveniencing somebody else. Contemporary youth, of course, asserts its freedom from conventionality by hitting people over the head with milk bottles, and this causes no little inconvenience too; but even the nonconformists who do not go as far as breaking the law often break the code of good manners by which we painstakingly live with each other.

The Thirteenth Tale (2006) by Diane Setterfield

Everybody was reading this when I started blogging and look, only the best part of 20 years later, I’ve listened to the audiobook!

The premise is fun. Vida Winter is the most famous writer in the UK and famously secretive about her life. Whenever she’s been asked about her history, she’s made up one after another fanciful tales. It’s become part of her lore. But, out of the blue, she writes to Margaret Lea requesting – well, more or less demanding – that Margaret write her biography. So off Margaret goes to Vida Winter’s mansion, kept in residence and regularly taken into Vida’s past with long accounts of her childhood, told by Setterfield as a separate narrative. Margaret is your classic heroine of any book like this: bookishly obsessed with the Brontes, feisty when needed, introspective and clever.

The title of the book, incidentally, comes from a collection of Vida Winter’s stories called Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, which only has 12 stories in it. What happened to the thirteenth tale?

I enjoyed the book, and Setterfield is definitely an excellent and involving storyteller. I’m always a bit dubious of narratives-within-narratives but it captivated me more than I thought it would. It wasn’t always immediately obvious (in the audiobook) whether we were in present-day with Margaret as ‘I’ or in the distant past with Vida as ‘I’. Perhaps it is marked out more obviously in the print edition?

I think the narrative-within-narrative device was stretched a bit far when it turns into somebody’s rediscovered diary late in the book, but perhaps Setterfield was harkening to her gothic antecedents. Anyway, it was a fun and diverting novel. I wouldn’t necessarily race to read another by her, but I’m glad I finally read The Thirteenth Tale.

The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi

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I got sent Helen Oyeyemi’s second novel, The Opposite House, by the publisher in… 2008, the year after it was published. Oops, sorry Bloomsbury. I’ve read four of her other books, and have finally read this one too. Better late than never? And what prompted me to finally read it? It was one of the 20 books I listed for the inaugural BookTube Spin, and its number came up.

My relationship with Oyeyemi’s writing is definitely a bit up and down. I really love Boy, Snow, Bird and often recommend it to people – others of her books I have liked a lot, but some have tipped over the edge of experimentalism into confusion, for me. How will The Opposite House fare?

Maya lives in London, having moved there with her family when she was five. She only dimly remembers her life in Cuba – there is really only one memory: sitting under the table at their farewell party, hearing a woman singing. It is her defining recollection of life in the land of her parents and their Yoruba gods. And speaking of those gods, among them is Yemaya Saramagua, an Orisha, who lives in the somewherehouse. Short sections between chapters show her existing in this mysterious, liminal place which opens out onto two very different worlds:

On the second floor, rooms and rooms and rooms, some so tiny, pale and clean that they are no more than fancies, sugar-cubed afterthoughts stacked behind doorways. Below is a basement pillared with stone. […] The basement’s back wall holds two doors. One door takes Yemaya straight out into London and ragged hum of a city after dark. The other door opens out onto the striped flag and cooking-smell cheer of that tattered jester, Lagos – always, this door leads to a place that is floridly day.

In London, Maya has discovered she is pregnant – though she hasn’t told her boyfriend Aaron, or her family. She is conflicted by the pregnancy but, in typical Oyeyemi style, it is a conflict that seems to swirl between reality and magical realism. There is no searing look at whether or not to have an abortion, but thought processes that look much more at the metaphysical and abstract implications of pregnancy. All of Oyeyemi’s novels seem to exist in a somewherehouse – a world between worlds, where reality, fairy tale, religion, and magical realism co-exist and inform one another. But reality is one of the ingredients. This cocktail doesn’t diminish the impact of real anxieties and burdens:

Slaves had to be Catholic and obedient or they’d be killed, or worse. The Word ‘slave’ is a big deal to Chabella and Papi; neither of them can get out from under it. It is a blackness in Cuba. It is sometimes bittersweet, for such is the song of the morena; it is two fingers place on a wrist when a white Cuban is trying to describe you. Papi tries to systematise it and talk about the destruction of identity and the fragility of personality, but he is scared of the Word. Mami hides inside the Word, finds reverie in it, tries to locate a power that she is owed.

I think quotes like that give a better sense of what reading an Oyeyemi novel is like than any description I can try to give. The Opposite House incorporates interesting and vital questions about, say, race – Maya and her family are black Cubans; Aaron is a white Ghanaian – and about mental health, portrayed through the ‘hysterics’ that live alongside and pursue Maya and her best friend. The prose never settles on conclusions, or even on the sort of imagery that allows the reader to make their own. Instead, everything is filtered through a beautifully written and imagined prose style that is uniquely Oyeyemi’s – so distinct that it is not just a style but a world.

I found the Yemaya elements beautiful and striking and confusing, but was most drawn to the scenes between Maya and Aaron. There is distance and uncertainty in their relationship, but somehow Aaron was, to me, a really lovely and warm character. Oyeyemi is very good at building up nuanced relationships – familial, romantic, or friendly – but I found something particularly special in that between Maya and Aaron, perhaps because he was kind without that kindness being able to solve problems. It was a twist on the sorts of boyfriends you often see in books.

Boy, Snow, Bird remains my favourite of Oyeyemi’s novels, though I have one yet to read – but The Opposite House is up there, a really vivid and intriguing novel that refuses to let you settle as a reader, and makes up its own rules to help penetrate to deeper, if less graspable, truths about relationships and human nature.

Isolarion by James Attlee

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I joined my village book club at exactly the wrong time. I did make it for their annual meal (which was a slightly odd way to meet those I’d not previously met) but the next meeting came after the pandemic hit and we decided not to go ahead. A few days later, we were in lockdown. I still haven’t written about The Citadel by AJ Cronin that we read for that, but I loved it.

This was before libraries shut, so we were able to get our next book: Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey by James Attlee, published in 2007. As you find out in an epigraph – isolarion is ‘the term for 15th-century maps that describe specific areas in detail, but that do not provide a clarifying overview of how these places are related to each other’. It’s a pretty self-indulgent title, since nobody will know what it means without opening it, but authors often seem to lose their heads when it comes to a title. The ‘specific area in detail’ in question is Cowley Road, Oxford. It’s a long road that goes straight through East Oxford – the less affluent area of Oxford. (It’s an intriguing phenomenon that you will hear people talk about North Oxford and East Oxford, but never about South or West.)

From the events mentioned, Attlee was researching this around 2002-2004. I moved to Oxford in 2004 – to a big, ugly student accommodation block next to the Plain Roundabout, which divides East Oxford from Central Oxford. I could see Cowley Road from the kitchen window. I lived in Oxford for 15 years, and before I finally managed to move out to a little village, I lived in East Oxford again for a few years. I never lived on Cowley Road itself – this country boy could not have coped with living on a busy road – but I lived around it off and on for quite a while. So I definitely had a personal interest in seeing what Attlee would make of it – I don’t know if it would have the same appeal for people who’ve never been there. Who knows.

The beginning of this book starts a trend that was also my favourite element of Isolarion – going into the different shops, pubs, restaurants etc of the street, and learning about them from their owners. Learning what it was like to have a business there, and how the proprietors ended up there. Because East Oxford is easily the most multicultural part of the city, and that’s reflected in the range of shops there: Brazilian art gallery, Chinese medicine, Polish food, Lebanese food, Indian food… there are a lot of food shops there. My favourite to walk past, though I never went in, was a robemakers – because the mannequins in the window wore clerical robes that reminded me of life in a vicarage. Some of the places Attlee mentioned had disappeared before I moved a little while later – some are still in situ, though you’ll also find Sainsbury’s, Costa, and other signs of gentrification there now.

All of this was wonderful – building up the sense of recent history and community, talking to people who’ve been there all of their lives. It certainly isn’t romanticised – he also talks about the churchyard where people get drunk, the levels of homelessness, the mentally unwell people who pace the street (I recognised the people he spoke about). He talks about the porn shop – that, no, I have never been in. It’s called ‘Private Shop’ – when Attlee wrote about it, and when I moved to the area, it was a blue shop with a discreet sign. Now it’s still called ‘Private Shop’ but the ‘A’ is silhouette of a naked woman… some discretion has been lost.

Alongside this, Attlee documents his attempts to guide the local planning committee about how best to celebrate the area – he is very anti having a gateway arch at the beginning of the street. It was a little off-putting how certain he was that he was right and other locals were wrong, but it was an enjoyably immersive sense of living in the community.

So, there were the makings of a book I really loved. I could even forgive his casual dismissing of students as being part of East Oxford life, though I’d point out that they (we) spent a lot more time there each week than people like Attlee, who commute to London. But he rather lost me when he got abstract.

Increasingly, Isolarion turns to philosophical tangents. He gives overviews of various religions, and has some platitudes to share about them. The concrete gives way to his musings about them, and I didn’t find his musings particularly exciting. He quotes Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy a bizarre amount that an editor should have cut down on – it reminded me of another book about Oxford that kept going on about Isaiah Berlin. Stick to the topic on the table, folks, and don’t let your personal obsessions take over!

So, if this was edited down to the concrete – and if Attlee had interviewed more people – it would have been a truly wonderful book. As it was, I still loved reading it – paradoxically, I enjoyed it more than the sum of its parts. But I do wish he’d been stricter with himself about what made Isolarion great and what was interesting just to him.

Looking for Enid by Duncan McLaren

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I love books where the writer discusses how authors have shaped them, or where they find parallels between their lives and the books they’ve read. Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm was fab; Katharine Smyth’s All The Lives We Ever Lived is likely to be on my best books of 2019. So I’ve been quietly keen to read Duncan McLaren’s Looking for Enid (2007) ever since I bought it in 2011 – and Project Names finally elevated it to the top of the pile. Well, colour me disappointed. If you don’t like reading negative reviews, then stop reading now.

Enid Blyton (which other Enid could it be?) was one of the founding authors of my childhood. She was practically the founding author – I was obsessed with her, and read almost nothing else for a handful of years. So a book following her life, and relating the author’s own memories of reading Blyton, was really promising.

We do get some of that. As McLaren takes his friend/maybe more than friend Kate on travels around the country, we learn about Blyton’s marriages and how she behaved as a mother. We marvel at her prodigious output. Much of this is openly taken from Barbara Stoney’s biography, but that’s fine. It’s quite entertaining to see McLaren pop up at Blyton meet-ups, join internet forums, and hunt for Blyton books in charity shops. Much of the format of the book could have worked (with some notable exceptions that I’ll get to).

My main and overriding problem with Looking for Enid is that McLaren is not a very good writer. That doesn’t usually matter as much in non-fiction as it does in fiction, because the interest of the topic can support workmanlike prose, but McLaren’s sentences are flat and awkward. The tone aims at informal and just ends up sounding like notes for a draft. Here’s a representative paragraph:

Well, no, I shouldn’t read it aloud! The librarian would be sure to think I was taking the mickey. The tiny little knock comes from a fairy, of course, and the second and third verses tell how the fairy stays for a glass of milk but is the scared off by the crying of the baby. Charming. I wish I did have the guts to read it aloud. Or perhaps I should read aloud the first verse of the facing poem: ‘Lonely’. In this, the poet goes out into the garden, as lonely as can be, and finds a fairy sitting beneath a chestnut tree. Would that have been the chestnut tree at Elfin Cottage? Anyway, tears were rolling down the fairy’s cheeks because he was lonely too. So the poet played bat and ball with him and they had a lovely time together. Eventually the poet’s healthy appetite meant that she had to go in for tea. She walked indoors, conscious that the fairy at the bottom of the garden was much happier now that he had got a friend like her. Charming, once again!

I made it to the end of the book, but it really is mediocre. And that’s even before we talk about the more unusual additions that profit neither man nor beast. The most obvious is that he ends each chapter with lengthy sections in the style of the Five Find-Outer series, which are mercifully marked out with small pictures in the margin, so I could skip them after a bit. A similar technique sneaks more insidiously into the rest of the book, as he often imagines conversations between Enid and others – usually in the style of her characters’ exchanges – and will flit in and out of these. Then there are images reproduced from the books which he has labelled ‘This is her…’ where the ‘…’ is replaced with different names – such as Bets, George, Father. I didn’t have a clue what that was meant to achieve. Some of his conclusions are bizarrely wrongheaded – like the seemingly genuine belief that Theophilus Goon is an intentional anagram of ‘O Hugh spoilt one’…

He mentions along the way that Looking for Enid is intended to be about her relationships with the different men in her life, but that doesn’t feel an especially dominant theme. And when he gets prurient about Enid’s sex life (and wildly oversharing about his own), I despaired. I was going to quote some of it, but, honestly, why would I put you through that? Besides being present for his sexual self-revelations, Kate – presumably a real person – is only there to say “Oh, do go on” as he puts all sorts of ramblings about Enid into extremely unlikely long-form dialogue. I hope, for her sake, that their conversations didn’t quite go like that.

I chiefly find it a shame that potential was so wasted. And it’s unlikely that anybody else will feel they can write anything similar anytime soon, because McLaren has taken this corner of the market. Frankly, don’t bother – seek out Barbara Stoney’s biography instead.

Two Lives by Janet Malcolm

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What an extraordinary little book. A while ago I read Blood on the Dining Room Floor by Gertrude Stein and found it more or less unreadable – the sort of High Modernism that renders every sequence of words gibberish – but I wanted to read more about her life. So when I saw a copy of Two Lives (2007) by Janet Malcolm, about Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas, I bought it – and thank goodness I did, because I have been introduced to a rather wonderful writer. And that writer is Malcolm, not Stein.

It’s quite an odd start. We are thrown immediately into comparing three different accounts of Stein and Toklas trying to rent a house that belonged to a lieutenant in France in World War Two. It’s a bit dizzying, this in media res, where we are exploring the details of competing versions of the story – two from different autobiographies Stein wrote; one from Toklas – before we’ve been told anything about them and their lives. And, indeed, Malcolm never writes about the women’s childhoods or lives apart from one another, nor do we see how and when they met, or anything that you might expect in a normal biography. This is not a normal biography.

For a long time I put off reading The Making of Americans. Every time I picked up the book, I put it down again. It was too heavy and too thick and the type was too small and dense. I finally solved the problem of the book’s weight and bulk by taking a kitchen knife and cutting it into six sections. The book thus became portable and (so to speak) readable. As I read, I realised that in carving up the book I had unwittingly made a physical fact of its stylistic and thematic inchoateness. It is a book that is actually a number of books. It is called a novel, but in reality it is a series of long meditations on, among other things, the author’s refusal (and inability) to write a novel.

Indeed, it’s not really a biography at all. It has elements of that, alongside literary criticism, literary history, investigative reporting, and all shades in between. I found it beguiling and exciting. We would dart from Stein publishing a 900+ page novel that nobody could understand (and which Malcolm writes about brilliantly) to Malcolm’s own reluctance to read it, and then to notes on the discovery of manuscripts to the chequered history of interviews with Toklas. In between is much on the way Stein has been posthumously treated by critics, academics, and publishers – shown alongside conversations Malcolm has with other Stein enthusiasts.

If I loved Stein and wanted to know all about her life, it might have been frustrating. As it was, it was a wonderful experience – Malcolm is such an intriguing companion to walk alongside. Her thoughts are original and vivid, and her voice is so distinct. I immediately went to see what else she wrote, and ordered four more of her books – on Freudianism, journalism, and writers and artists.

It made me think of Julia Blackburn’s quirky and wonderful book about John Craske, and is in that category of non-fiction where all the usual tenets of biography are thrown out the window – or, rather, stirred and rearranged and made clear and new. It was a wonderful reading experience – and, while I still don’t know many details about the lives of Stein and Toklas, I feel as though I know their characters and personalities well and brightly. I’m really looking forward to reading more by Malcolm.

Tove Jansson

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You probably know that one of my very favourite authors is Tove Jansson – but I didn’t know very much about her beyond what she’d put of herself in her fiction. So I was thrilled to learn that a biography of her was going to be published by Sort Of Books – indeed, translated (by Silvester Mazzarella) as, unbeknown to me, it was actually published in 2007.

And you guessed it – I’m pointing you towards my Shiny New Books review of Boel Westin’s biography of Tove Jansson!  Not only that, though – Silvester Mazzarella very kindly agreed to write a brilliant piece about translating the book.  It’s a long and interesting book that I don’t feel I entirely did justice to in my review, written when cold-ridden, but I always think it’s difficult to write properly about a biography – because, almost by definition, they have so much, and so much variety, in them.

Can Any Mother Help Me?

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I don’t remember where I first heard of Jenna Bailey’s book Can Any Mother Help Me? but it has been across the blogosphere like wildfire over the past year or so. Ironically, a few people bought it because of a mention or two here at Stuck-in-a-Book in the past – because I got my copy in mid 2008. It was one of those titles I just *needed* to own immediately, had to read immediately… and then, of course, it somehow languished on my bookshelves for the best part of two years. But no longer!

Can Any Mother Help Me? tells the story of the Cooperative Correspondence Club – known to its members as CCC – which began in 1935 when a young woman wrote to Nursery World:

Can any mother help me? I live a very lonely life as I have no near neighbours. I cannot afford to buy a wireless. I adore reading, but with no library am very limited with books. I dislike needlework, though I have a lot to do! I get so down and depressed after the children are in bed and I’m alone in the house. I sew, read and write stories galore, but in spite of good resolutions, and the engaging company of cat and dog, I do brood, and “dig the dead.” I have had a rotten time, and been cruelly hurt, both physically and mentally, but I know it is bad to brood and breed hard thoughts and resentment. Can any reader suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude “thinking” and cost nothing!

The solution was to set up a collective magazine (of which there were apparently over two hundred that are known about) to which women would contribute, under pseudonyms ranging from ‘Sirod’ (Doris backwards) to ‘Cotton Goods’ (for the proudly working-class) to ‘Elektra’ and ‘A Priori’. The members came and went, but over half a century these women sent around their contributions on all manner of topics, but mostly simply about their own lives. Ad Astra organised it all, and sent them out in the beautiful homemade covers shown in a picture below.

The book is essentially a selection of articles from different magazines, with editorial material provided by Bailey. She has grouped the articles thematically: issues of raising children (members had to be mothers – the issue was raised of allowing non-mothers to join, but it was decided against); the war; everyday life; marriage; working; hard times; growing old. There are quite a few ‘voices’ in the book, and only a few become really familiar, but it’s certainly an interesting sample and cross-section of a fascinating project.

I loved the idea of the CCC, and did enjoy reading the book, but somehow it didn’t *quite* match up to what I was expecting. Or rather, what I was hoping – because I didn’t know how I expected Bailey to arrange the material. She could only really pick and choose certain pieces, it would be impossible to give the feeling of belonging to the group – instead, I felt a little like an eavesdropper. Also, once all the articles were typed up, with marginalia noted in neat little font, the feel of the magazine was lost. I’d have loved a facsimile edition of one or two copies of the magazine – so that all the original handwriting and margin notes and crossings-out would have been reproduced. But perhaps that wouldn’t be possible, or too expensive, or even illegible.
When Claire reviewed the book, she pondered over blogging as a modern equivalent of the CCC. In a way it is, but much closer (in my experience) is the Yahoo Group I’m in. Are other people in these sorts of email groups, where people send out emails to a whole group, and correspond that way? They’re not as popular as they once were, but the one I’ve been in since January 2004 (a quarter of my life!) is incredibly dear to me. The experiences of the CCC sounded very familiar – the cautious and slightly nervous initial face-to-face meetings, which become regular and joyous occasions; the feeling that you can share close, personal events with people you’ve never had the opportunity to meet; the joy of kindred spirits. Who knows whether we’ll still be going in fifty years’ time (with some record-breaking-aged people, if we do) but I know that it has been, and will continue to be, a very special part of my life.

If Bailey’s book couldn’t quite convey this sense of intimacy and special-ness, that’s only to be expected, because the reader must remain an intrigued outsider to the group. At the same time, it is the only way that we can now remember such wonderful groups and I applaud Bailey (and the Mass Observation project which held the material, and also gave rise to significant books like Nella Last’s War) for immortalising the CCC and making their venture accessible to many.

Oh, and for anybody reading this in Oxford… the £2 bookshop has a number of copies…

Billybob

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You’ll be delighted to know that my failsafe computer tactic – ignore the problem and it will go away – has once more worked its magic. My ‘b’ key, though needing a tiny bit more persuasion than the others, is almost as good as new. All through the magic of ignoring the issue. Trust me, if restarting the computer doesn’t fix the issue, then try ignoring it. Like all other dangerous animals, it secretly craves attention, and will right itself if is starved of it.
So why is this particularly pertinent today? Well, I realised I hadn’t blogged properly about Shakespeare by Bill Bryson. That’s a lot of ‘b’s, especially when you remember that William is known fondly as Billybob by myself and others who took the Shakespeare paper alongside me in finals.

The Carbon Copy bought me Shakespeare for my birthday, along with the wonderful and moving film Amazing Grace and, possibly my favourite, a little picture of Eeyore receiving his birthday balloon. My previous experience with Bill Bryson is positive – loved Mother Tongue, which I read about five years ago. Fascinating stuff on the evolution of the English language, and incredibly readable.

‘Readable’ always sounds a bit like damning with faint praise – cereal packets deserve the same honour – but it really isn’t. Take it from one who had to read a lot of literary criticism, readability (is that a word?) is a must. Shakespeare follows suit – Bryson has obviously done a great deal of arduous and scholarly research, and the resulting book manages to be both deeply informative and incredibly amusing. Tricky combination.

So why do we need another book about Shakespeare? Bryson is honest enough to tell us how many thousands are on offer. Can’t remember the exact amount, but enough to make sure I could comfortably be reading a book about Shakespare every week for the rest of my life – not mentioning the rate at which they’re still being published. What sets this book apart is that Bryson’s character and authorship is expressed through style and wit, not groundless speculation or wide context. Shakespeare is only about 200 pages long, but it is an essential and reliable tome. Everything we know about Shakespeare is in here. A few theories and possibilities are mentioned, but they are shown to be just that, and not argued as certain. The funniest chapter is the final one, on Anti-Stratford theorists i.e. those who, for some reason or other, refuse to believe Billybob wrote his plays. Littered with such scathing lines as “an excellent theory, if it weren’t for the complete lack of evidence to support it,” and “X demonstrated amazing foresight in, seeing as he died before many of Shakespeare’s plays were written, secreting enough manuscripts that they could be gradually released, and correctly estimating the time period between his own and Shakespeare’s death”. I paraphrase, but you get the gist – very funny.

For the rest of the book – the first chapters sketch out Shakespeare’s life; where he was, different instances at which he is mention in some document or other. A nice touch is that Bryson often details the person who discovered a new fact about Billybob, often through laborious and painstaking reading of many manuscripts and documents. Credit where due, is Bryson’s motto. Subsequent chapters talk about the plays and the sonnets – not lit crit, but where they were performed or when they were first published. All very interesting, and if it sounds dry (and to me it doesn’t!) then Bryson’s wit and charm will fascinate you.

There have been thousands of books written about Billybob, and I daresay there will be thousands more, but for the facts in an engaging and funny way, this can’t be bettered.

Christmas BOOKings now being taken

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It’s the 25th, and you know what that means – only two months until Christmas. Yep, usually I’m there with the Grumpy Old Men and complaining that Christmas comes earlier every year, with tinsel going up as soon as the Easter eggs have been melted down for fondue. But I’ll make an exception for books, as it’s not their fault that marketing has to happen in October. Today I’m going to chat about two different Christmas books – very different, actually, but both worth mentioning.
This week, like a couple of other bloggers, I was sent Lynn Brittney’s Christine Kringle, described as a book for children of all ages. All the Gift Bringers from around the world are meeting for the annual Yule Conference, which debates such issues as whether Gift Days should be internationally universalised, or whether women can be become the hereditary Gift Bringer if a Yule family have no male offspring. This is especially important to Christine, daughter of Kriss Kringle, as she has no brothers and wishes to inherit her Yule duty. In the midst of this, the council of Plinkbury, a town in Worcestershire (hurray!) decide to ban Christmas. Off flies Christine and her Japanese and English friends to get Christmas reinstated… An enjoyable book, though not my usual fare, and was delighted to see Worcestershire get in print, as it was my homeland for thirteen years. Can’t work out if Plinkbury is based on a genuine town, though… there certainly isn’t one of that name. Unsurprising, really.
When I started the book, I was a little dubious at all the national stereotypes. You know – Italians in the Mafia; British sullen; Japanese polite and industrious; Americans saving the day. But Brittney melds these characters into a fun plot which keeps you turning the pages. I do have quibbles with the polemics Christine delivers – as a Christian, I didn’t like to see the Christ part of CHRISTmas swept under the carpet so much, quite openly, and I’m too British not to blush at some of the bits about loving ourselves and finding a hero inside every one of us and so forth. But if you’re feeling Christmassy and uncynical, give this one a go.

The second Christmas book I wanted to mention is Jostein Gaarder’s The Christmas Mystery, initially published in 1992. The book is divided into 24, being the first twenty-four days of Decemver – like a big advent calendar, in fact. The central character, a little boy called Joachim, is given a mysterious old advent calendar – each day opened provides a slip of paper and a picture. Through the story on the bits of paper, we follow Elisabet as she wends her way through the shepherds and wisemen as they journey towards Christ’s Nativity – and Joachim’s family try to connect it to the Elisabet who disappeared at Christmas 1948. This is a beautiful book, with mystery and atmosphere and the magic of Christmas without making the festival commercial or saccharine. I read it last year, a chapter a day through advent, and would definitely recommend reading it that way.

Oh, and don’t forget you still have a chance to get Miss Hargreaves!

Common/Uncommon

StuckinaBook All , , 6 Comments

Had a lovely time at home, soaking in the countryside, and am now back in my usual blogging spot of Oxford – specifically the desk of the back bedroom in Regent Street. While down in Somerset (or Zumm as I affectionately label it) I was able to offer my lovely Aunt Jacq. a cup of tea, for she also lives in Zumm, and she reciprocated with much more exciting gifts…

No, not my birthday of anything – she just saw them and thought of me. It pays to make your opinions known, doesn’t it?! Well, you all know I love Virginia Woolf – and I’d ummmed and ahhhed over the Alan Bennett for a while, glad the choice was made for me.

Haven’t used the mug yet, but a car journey too and from Bristol to see The Carbon Copy (the whole Clan together for a few hours at least!) allowed me to read The Uncommon Reader, and greatly did I enjoy it. Haven’t read any Alan B before, though did see The History Boys film, and have vague recollections of Talking Heads being on in the car in my younger days. It was great fun – I’m sure everyone knows the plot by now. The Queen bumps into the local library van, and, out of politeness, borrows an Ivy Compton-Burnett. Love her or loathe her (ICB, that is), you have to acknowledge she’s not a great one with which to start the long path of literacy:

‘She’s not a popular author, ma’am’.

‘Why, I wonder? I made her a dame’.
Mr Hutchings refrained from saying that this wasn’t necessarily the road to the public’s heart.

As she pursues more and more books, with the help of kitchen boy Norman who becomes her constant aide, her royal duties start to suffer… This book, as well as being witty and just the right combination of absurd and plausible, also offers some genuine insights into the realm of reading, without being too truism-y. ‘I think of literature,’ she wrote, ‘as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach’. Ever felt like that?!!

And just a final word about the sketch. Not a great one today, I’m afraid, so if you need a clue just think ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.