2010s

All The Lives We Ever Lived by Katharine Smyth

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Do you ever read a book that is so perfect for you that you wonder if anybody else will want to read it? While away in Cornwall, I read my review copy of Katharine Smyth’s memoir All The Lives We Ever Lived (2019) – the subtitle of which is ‘Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf’. I’ve used the word ‘memoir’, but it covers more categories than that – biography, philosophy, literary criticism – and it is extraordinarily good. But it does, perhaps, require a love of a Virginia Woolf and a familiarity with To The Lighthouse.

Luckily I have both those things. I’ve read To The Lighthouse three times (far fewer times than Smyth has read it, I should add) and believe it to be one of the greatest books ever written – and quite a few of the books to which I would give that accolade are by Woolf. To me, she is easily the best writer of the 20th century. To Smyth, she is that and more. The solace she is seeking (in that subtitle) relates to the death of her father – a man she idolised – and she uses To The Lighthouse to better understand the role of a parent, and the impact of filial love, and any manner of other things that she draws out of Woolf’s writing.

Much of this book is a portrait of her father. One of the impressive things Smyth achieves is conveying how deeply she loved this man who was evidently, openly flawed. For much of her life, he was an alcoholic – and her descriptions of his glassy-eyed appearances at dinners, his mood swings, his melancholy are vivid and uncomfortable. Despite a few stays in rehab facilities, he refused to go to AA meetings; Smyth’s parents had multiple times where they announced their separation, but stayed together. Smyth not only draws unlikely parallels between this troubled man and the almost saint-like Mrs Ramsay of To The Lighthouse, but makes the reader believe them. She is also keen to point out that her mother is not akin to the frustrating, unthinking cruel Mr Ramsay – but we see the dual portraits: this suffering, patient mother, and the mother that Smyth could not love in the way she loved her father.

People sometimes ask me if I’m angry with my father. When I say I’m not, they think I’m lying to myself. I don’t think I am. When I look back on his worst acts, I can remember my wrath and hatred, certainly – so violent, so complete, so inexorable, I thought at times that I could barely stand to be in my own skin. But I can also remember the way in which, within a week or two, such vehemence had faded to nothing; how that brutish stranger was again and again vanquished by that other, most gentle and lovable being: my father. And the truth us that neither memory – neither the loathing nor the absolution – feels especially familiar now. They feel like stories attached to someone else.

Smyth weaves together the various strands of All The Lives We Ever Lived beautifully, with extremely good judgement. Any time that I wondered why we hadn’t heard from To The Lighthouse for a while, it appeared in the next paragraph. The links she draws between the novel and her experiences are always thoughtful and illuminating, and never feel forced. It’s impact on her life and how she frames her understanding of life is so great that it is natural to take it as a guidebook to the intense experiences of loving and grieving. (Incidentally, having never grieved for anybody close to me, I am always reading books about grief as something of a tourist – fascinated but without truly understanding. I imagine this book would feel very different to somebody who has lost someone.)

I remember when I first started reading Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway, mostly on the school bus. It was a revelation. Language had previously been something that sat around in piles, being clumped together to form books that were buildings of meaning – some architecturally elegant, some more workmanlike, but always simple enough constructions. And now this; now Woolf. She seems to disregard everything that language has previously had to do, and find new, beautiful, extraordinary ways of using it. Unlike other authors I had read, she was not finding words to match her meaning, but giving language new meaning, new vitality, through her ways of using it.

Her writing has not affected how I relate to the world in quite the way it did for Smyth, but I certainly share her admiration for Woolf’s astonishing ability. If I didn’t, or if I had not read To The Lighthouse, I do wonder what I’d have made of All The Lives We Ever Lived. I can’t answer that question. I know that reading this has made me want to pick up To The Lighthouse for the fourth time, and perhaps it would inspire Woolf newbies to do the same.

I’m still not sure why this book was published. Smyth hasn’t written any others, and its audience must be relatively niche. But I’m so, so glad it was. It is beautifully written, movingly thoughtful, and something I feel sure I will return to. Woolf fans – rush to it. For those who aren’t – I hope you find as much to value as I did.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

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I think it’s fair to say that my reading isn’t the most zeitgeisty. I usually only read a small handful of books published in the year I’m reading them, increasingly new non-fiction. But when I had audiobook credit towards the end of last year, I decided to spend it on one of the year’s bestsellers – Michelle Obama’s autobiography, Becoming (2018). All 19 hours of it.

Those 19 hours were read by Obama herself – which was one of the reasons I was keen to get it, as I love her voice. And, yes, she reads very well; I’d certainly recommend this way of experiencing the book.

The book takes us from Obama’s earliest memories through to leaving the White House and the inauguration of Donald Trump – and the most amazing thing about it is her astonishing powers of recall. Steadily, step by step, she takes us through every stage of her life – seeming to remember vividly what she experienced and thought at each part. She gives the same rigorous attention to (say) watching her father suffer with MS, or her path to getting into law school, as she does the minutiae of her husband’s rise to the White House. It is all-engrossing, and throughout she reflects with wisdom, thoughtfulness, and clear-sightedness about her own journey – and how this has been influenced by being a black woman.

Clear-sightedness is, indeed, the hallmark of Obama’s writing. My favourite parts of the book were probably her view of the first election campaign – as Obama fought first for the Democratic nomination and then for the presidency. While obviously wanting her husband to win, and believing he would be the best choice for the job, she has no illusions about the downsides of campaigning and the way opponents and the press manipulate everything. She says at the beginning and end of the book that she is not a political person and has seen nothing over the past ten years to change her mind – no, she isn’t going to run for president – and my heart ached with sympathy for somebody thrust into this position she would not have chosen. With her blessing, of course, but not with joy.

Anybody interested in how politics works in America will find the campaign trail section extremely interesting, and I can’t imagine anybody else has written about it from quite her perspective (or, frankly, with her humanity and wisdom). The same is true for life as First Lady – from how she wanted to use the role for the nation’s good to how she tried to ensure that her daughters’ lives were as normal as humanly possible.

It closes with her hopes for the future. She is refreshingly open about her disdain for Donald Trump (which dated back to his endangering her family’s lives through his ‘birther’ attacks, which led to a gunman attacking the White House) – like many of us in and out of America, she couldn’t believe that America had seen him for what he was and chosen him.

The book is certainly long and every anecdote is thorough and detailed, even when it adds only background detail. But it works – all the details come together to show you who Michelle Obama is. And the only mystery I leave with is that somebody so modest, selfless, and unbombastic came to be persuaded to write an autobiography at all. She suggests it is to show other young black women what they can achieve. Well, I’m very pleased she did – and I think the book will continue her good work.

Bleaker House by Nell Stevens

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As soon as I finished Mrs Gaskell & Me by Nell Stevens (my review here), I bought a copy of Bleaker House (2017) – going on rather a wild goose chase through London bookshops in order to do so. It had been on my probably-read-one-day list for a long time, and I thought I should hasten on that time – and it’s really good; excellent pre-Christmas reading.

I wrote in my review of Mrs Gaskell & Me that I much preferred the sections where Stevens was writing about her own life to those about Mrs Gaskell’s – and so I was pleased to see that Bleaker House is all about Stevens’ own writing exploits. Specifically, the fellowship generously given to all students on her writing masters in Boston, whereby they can spend up to three months anywhere in the world. Many of her fellow students are going to Europe or Asia. She decides to go to… Bleaker.

Bleaker is a tiny island (population: 2), part of the Falklands. Off the coast of Argentina, the islands are an overseas British territory (cf the Falklands War) and about as isolated as you can get. The name is a corruption of ‘breaker’, because of the waves that break there, but it does seem an accurate description of the conditions there. Especially in winter, which is when Stevens decides to go. After a sojourn at the slightly-larger Stanley, she stays in one of two otherwise empty guests houses on Bleaker. The farming couple who divide their time between this and another island are there for the beginning and end of her three months, but otherwise she is alone – with her novel.

The idea was to get away from the world so that she’ll have to write her novel – about a man named Ollie who ends up travelling to Bleaker to track down the father he thought had died years earlier. We know, from the outset, that Bleaker House is a work of non-fiction, not a novel – so what went wrong? (Or, perhaps, right?)

This is a challenging read for any of us who are not doing very well at finishing novel, but an extremely engaging and well-written account of failing to write a book. And, of course, about the unusual experience she has foisted upon herself – not least the lack of food she brought, and dealing without the internet. This section is from her stay on Stanley, not noticeably more modernised than Bleaker:

I will spend the next month in this guest house on the outskirts of the town, presided over by Mauru, the housekeeper. Since it is the middle of winter, Maura explains, there will probably be no other guests. The owner of the hotel, Jane, is away in England. For the next few weeks, then, it will just be Mauru and me.

I ask her about the Internet. “Is there Wi-Fi here?” I know, as I ask, that I sound needy, a little obsessed. I am a little obsessed.

She squints.

“Wi-Fi?” I repeat. “The Internet?”

Mauru looks troubled. “The Internet?” Jane would know, she says. She leads me into the hall, and points at a bulky machine squatting on a table by the door. She looks doubtful as she says, “Is that it?”

“No,” I say, “no, that’s a printer.”

“The Internet?” Mauru repeats, again. She shrugs. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. I’m just not sure where.”

In both her books, Stevens goes for an interesting patchwork technique – putting together different stages of her life in a way that works really well (and presumably takes a great deal of thought to avoid feeling odd). So we see the relationship she has recently left, and experiences from writing classes, all intersected with the feelings of isolation and uncertainty on the island. In amongst these, perhaps less successfully, are excerpts from the work in progress – and a couple of short stories that aren’t related. Her writing in these is good, though with a little less vitality than her autobiographical writing, but it’s hard to see quite how they cohere with the rest of the book. I suppose it would be a lot shorter without them – and I’d have complained if we didn’t get any evidence of the work she was there to do. All things considered, the balance isn’t too off.

Stevens is an honest, interesting writer – managing the difficult feat of extended introspection without isolating the reader. Who knows how many more books she can write before she runs out of writerly life experiences to document, but I’m hoping there’s a least a few more to come.

This Little Art by Kate Briggs

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I’m back from a week in Northern Ireland, and I have a pile of books I’ve been meaning to talk about. Some of those are books that I read whilst I was away, but the first one I want to talk about is one that I read shortly before. It’s This Little Art (2017) by Kate Briggs, which I bought in Libreria – an independent bookshop off Brick Lane. I’d seen a few book bloggers writing about it, and I couldn’t resist.

The book is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, a beautiful and very simple edition – very sleek and chic and all things like that. It’s all about translation. Briggs is herself a translator, having translated some of Roland Barthes’ seminar notes from French to English. Don’t stop reading this review quite yet. While that may seem like the most niche thing known to man, this book is extremely accessible, even to people like me whose French is extremely rusty. Well, ‘rusty’ makes it sound like I once knew French, which is not true – or ‘vrai’. Ithankyou.

The book takes the reader on a discursive, surprisingly pacy adventure through the different facets of translation and how understanding translation can help you understand your relationship with authors, writing, books, and even one’s own self respect. the title is a quotation from Helen Lowe Porter, who apparently translated Thomas Mann works for much of his career, which became her career. She was using those three words to deprecatingly refer to translation, and Briggs looks quite a lot at how Lowe-Porter’s life and reputation were shaped by the debates relating to translation. Some of the most interesting sections, for those interested in literary feuding and scandal, were when Briggs talks about a famous demolition of Lowe-Porter’s work that appeared in some literary journal or other. But Briggs puts this into a fine tapestry of other debates about translators, including discussions about her own suitability to take on the work that she has done.

‘Tapestry’ is perhaps a good word to describe this book. It has the unconventional format of many areas of white on the page. While some pages are full of paragraphs, others have only a few lines at the top; each thought is given only the space it needs, and there’s a generosity with margins and white space that is very unusual in modern publishing. This feels perhaps odd at first, but soon becomes the only way that one could write or read a book like this. It is almost dream-like, how one thought leads to another, whether about Briggs’ own life or about the philosophy of translation or about particular nuances of individual words in different languages. I can only imagine that Briggs did have to do the usual editing that any writer has to do, but it is hard to believe that this book ever existed in any other form than that which it currently does. Each word leads so perfectly to the next, each moment follows beautifully and logically from the one that came before, that it feels as though it has emerged whole and wonderful from her pen.

As such, it is also difficult to compartmentalise. To pull any individual thought out from this book feels like pulling a thread from that tapestry – it only works at its finest when seen in the whole. And please don’t think that this is an unduly academic or self-indulgent book. The back cover talks about it having the momentum of a novel, and I was very sceptical – but that is exactly what it has. There is wisdom without sacrificing humanity; philosophy without losing humour or groundedness. I have a feeling that Briggs could write something brilliant on any topic, but choosing one about which she is so evidently passionate means that we have a true gem unfurled before us. I’ll leave you with a quote – the entirety of p.146, in fact – but I do encourage anybody to get a copy. (And, in passing, I will apologise for any odd typos in this review – I have been largely dictating it, as my RSI is playing up, this time in both hands. Off to a physio to see if she can sort me out!)

We need translations. We do, of course we do. The world needs them. And translation is work undertaken in response – direct or indirect response – to that demand. But the nature of the work involved, the time that writing a translation takes, together with its lack of material support, its little pay and uneven appreciation, will inevitably narrow the pool of people actually capable of answering it. Translation is necessary, vital work. It is also deeply pleasurable and instructive and intensely time-consuming work. Approaching a kind of leisure activity, then, but one with its own precarious economy;its per-word fees (as if translating one word, one sequence of words, one book made of words, were ever equivalent to translating another); its occasional prizes. It is not my aim to celebrate these conditions, exactly; it’s rather to recognise them in order for there to be a chance of varying them. As well to point out – no doubt too fast – that even these conditions (these apparently ideal conditions? The lady translator translating what she loves, working from home, grateful for but not entirely reliant on what Helen Lowe-Porter calls the ‘dribble of money’, or otherwise secure enough to risk trying to make the various dribbles of money work) are complicated.

Mrs Gaskell & Me by Nell Stevens

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I love a book about reading, and I love a biography where the biographer’s experience is part of the story. And so I was really pleased when Picador sent me a review copy of Nell Stevens’ new book Mrs Gaskell & Me. I’d heard of her book Bleaker House but not read it yet – still, this sounded so up my street that I couldn’t resist starting it almost immediately, Century of Books be hanged.

The book is in two parallel timelines. In one timeline, Elizabeth Gaskell has written a controversial biography of her friend Charlotte Bronte, and is heading off to Rome at the time of publication. In the other timeline, Nell Stevens is writing her PhD thesis about Gaskell. Both of them have romantic entanglements of some variety – Gaskell is charmed by the, indeed, charming Charles Eliot Norton; Stevens gets up the courage to tell her friend Max that she’s in love with him, and they start a slightly complex, often long-distance relationship. The parallels are clearly brought to the fore, but they are there nonetheless.

I deliberately didn’t look up anything about Gaskell’s life, because I didn’t want to know how much was documented and how much Stevens imagined. Much like ‘Nell Stevens’ herself in this book, it is a fictionalised version – or, rather, a selective and edited version. Every biography or autobiography is that, naturally, but I suspect Stevens had to edit a little more than most to make parts cohere.

While she writes well about Gaskell’s adventures, and imaginatively makes us feel like we are watching these tense moments of her life, I have to admit that I was drawn a lot more to the sections about Stevens’ own life. Perhaps any dual narrative will inevitably lead us enjoying one more than the other – I do find, in a novel, that the balance is more easily struck with three. In the strand that follows Stevens’ life, she writes with striking vividness about her romance – sometimes awkward, sometimes secure, sometimes fraught – and juggling it alongside writing her PhD thesis. Normally I find fiction or non-fiction about romance a bit tedious (unless it’s a romcom movie, then I’m right in) – but Stevens manages to write about her emotional experiences without being too vague or claiming too much worldwide significance for them – the two pitfalls people often fall into. By contrast, when she writes about Gaskell’s emotional life, the guesswork shows through. It’s all quite plausible, but inevitably loses some of the vitality that makes her sections so engaging. (I did like what she wrote about the reception to Gaskell’s life of Charlotte Bronte, though – I hadn’t known it was such a scandal.)

And then there is all that she writes about the academic student life. Perhaps I enjoyed this mostly because it reminds me my own doctorate, and the highs and lows of academic research – dealing with expectations, wondering about the future, revelling in the highs when research unearths gems, and panicking because nothing seems to cohere. Though Stevens’ course had a lot of expectations – she seemed to have substantial work and a strong idea of where she was going almost immediately. I didn’t really know where my thesis was going for at least 18 months.

The main divider in whether or not you’ll enjoy this is: do you like the fourth wall broken? This is all meta – all about the author, and doing the research, and breaking that wall. I love it and, if anything, would have welcomed more. The Gaskell bits held my attention, but it was the “and me” that made me really love this book. And, indeed, I’d bought a copy of Bleaker House before I got to the end.

Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales

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As the year draws to a close, I seem to be drawn to more new books than usual – to the detriment of A Century of Books. One area in which I’m particularly allowing myself to go rogue is audiobooks. While I am ticking off some ACOB years with it, I’m also going earlier (thanks to the copyright-free restrictions of Librivox) and later (thanks to… my wish to read the books in question).

I’ve been listening to the Chat 10: Looks 3 podcast for a while, hosted by Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales. Those names meant nothing to me and, indeed, it was a while before I realised they were famous outside of the podcast – which was recommended to me by an Australian colleague. And, indeed, Australians will probably recognise those names as journalists/presenters/newscasters/etc. Leigh Sales presents a flagship news programme, but in a recent episode of Chat 10: Looks 3 (which is always hilarious) she talked about finding time to write her new book – Any Ordinary Day (2018).

The book stems from the idea that life-changing moments happen out of nowhere – that people get up, get dressed, leave the house as they do on any other day. And then the extraordinary happens, potentially ending their lives. Sales first thought about this when she experienced a life-changing event herself: a uterine rupture, while pregnant with her second child. Thankfully she had gone to the hospital earlier, with unfamiliar pains – and thus was able to be rushed straight to surgery, and survived something that is usually fatal. In the midst of other dramatic or traumatic family events, it put her in mind of speaking to people who experience or witness the extraordinarily tragic.

That ‘witness’ is fascinating, but let’s start with the ‘experience’. She speaks to the man whose wife and two children were murdered in the Port Arthur Massacre; she speaks with a woman who was in the Lindt cafe siege and has MS – with someone who lost his first wife in an avalanche and his second to cancer; with a man who survived over a month stranded in a snowdrift; with someone whose husband was murdered by his schizophrenic son. There is a panoply of grief and tragedy here.

Many of the names are famous, particularly in Australia – and that is part of what makes her conversations with them so interesting. People are changed by these things happening to them, or to people they love. But they are also expected to remain in a stasis of grief. The Port Arthur widow related people asking “Oh, you’re over it, then?” if they saw him laughing in public – as though being over that sort of event were possible. The man lost in the snow has had to live with a curious urban myth about a Mars bar in his bag – perhaps this will mean something to Australian readers! – and tells Sales that people joke about that Mars bar to him at least once a week. Discovering the after effects of these extraordinary moments is saddening in a wide range of ways but so interesting.

And then there are the people who walk alongside the mourners, or work with them. Some of the most fascinating parts of Any Ordinary Day were when Sales interviewed people whose jobs are connected with people’s most tragic days – particularly the empathetic, wise woman who worked in a morgue and accompanied those who had to identify dead bodies. In a similar vein, she speaks with the police officers who have to inform people that their loved ones have died, and a priest who particularly helped one widow. The meeting of ordinary and extraordinary is so unusual, and Sales writes about it brilliantly. This is their livelihoods; the other people engaged in each day will never forget the encounter.

Along the way, Sales tries to find out answers – how people cope with these events; if they try to find any reason in them; what responses are most likely to lead to emotional recovery. I had never heard of post-traumatic growth, but apparently it’s much more likely than the much-more-talked-about PTSD.

Several of the people Sales meets are Christians, and (as a Christian myself) I found it really interesting to see how she responded to that, as somebody predisposed to scepticism. She is a little patronising to them at times, and conflates the idea of a sovereign God with “this was meant to be” – the problem of evil and suffering is, of course, endlessly complex – but I thought it was intriguing how often she came upon people of faith.

Having said that, her writing and interviewing is extremely sensitive and thoughtful. Being a big name in the Australian media has granted her access to many people who might not speak out otherwise, and she draws together the stories and threads extremely well. It is not trying to be sensational, nor answer all the big questions – but by introducing the questions (and, indeed, some less eternal questions – like the idea of media intrusion and journalistic integrity) she creates a very good book. My biggest take away was the extraordinary bravery of survivors, kindness and wisdom of those who have helped them, and troubling way that the media and public at large treat tragedies. No answers, perhaps, but definitely worth a read to explore the issues – and I can definitely recommend the audiobook, narrated by Sales herself.

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

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I’d seen a few friends (and strangers) on Twitter and Facebook talk about Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (2017) by Reni Eddo-Lodge, and was very keen to read it myself. When it came out in paperback, I snapped up a copy and read it quickly – and it’s extremely good. I heartily recommend it – particularly to any white people who don’t think that white privilege is a thing. The main problem with this book, of course, is that the people who most need to read it almost certainly won’t. (Not that I didn’t need to read it – but I didn’t need convincing on most of what she wrote.)

The title comes from a blog post Eddo-Lodge wrote a few years ago – about why she was so sick of defensive white people refusing to listen to conversations about race, and how she was giving up on trying to help them understand. It’s an ironic title, of course, because this book is exactly her talking to white people about race – thank goodness. I had thought it might be more memoir-based, and there are certainly elements of her story, but what kicks us off is a chapter (‘Histories’) which is entirely objective. It’s about the history of racial oppression and the civil rights movement – in the UK. Even here, we hear a lot, lot more about the civil rights movement in the US, or South Africa, than we do about our own country. There is a common belief that class is the British inequality issue, and that race is broadly fine. Well, as Eddo-Lodge demonstrates thoroughly and yet concisely, this is not, and has never been, the case. She condenses enormous amounts of research very well, making this history section very accessible.

The rest of the book looks more at the lived experience of being a black person in the UK – and specifically a black woman – and explains how racism works in action. It is not, she writes, simply abuse shouted in the street or people consciously refusing to hire a black person (though it does include this); it is embedded in the systems that make up many facets of our society. White privilege (as she explains so patiently and well) is not saying that all white people are rich or have all opportunities dropped at their feet – it is an absence of the barriers and assumptions that people of other ethnicities face. As  a white man, for instance, I have never had to worry if my race or gender will be held against me when I apply for a job, drive my car, go into a shop, or simply walk down the street. I have never had to feel that I am the de facto spokesperson for my race, or that I will be judged by what some other white man has said or done. I even have the privilege that I can decide when I want to engage in conversations and thoughts about racial equality. All of this is to say – it’s extremely easy to ignore or be ignorant of my white privilege, and it is only by engaging properly with books like Eddo-Lodge’s that I can fully recognise what it means. As a white person, my role here is to listen to other experiences and to listen to an explanation of the invisible frameworks of my life and my society – only visible if you are excluded from them.

Eddo-Lodge is an excellent writer and (praise be for popular non-fiction!) includes proper referencing – why is this so often absent? It leads one off in all sorts of other directions to explore. She also allows people with opposing views to have their say, even the bizarre and offensive Nick Griffin. I do wonder whether people like him need more air time, but she notes that the UK’s defamation laws could land her in hot water if she doesn’t give him a chance to air his thoughts.

Later chapters look specifically at feminism and class. The former I found particularly interesting – around the ways in which feminist movements have often been predominantly about white women, and how some white women have been reluctant to acknowledge that, though marginalised in one part of their identity (gender), they have privilege in another (race). She did lose points in my eyes by using the term “anti-choice” – nobody is ever anti-choice, or anti-life for that matter – and I would have liked a bit more interrogation around some more rational objections, like the abundance of theory-based rhetoric in what should be an accessible movement. But these are relatively small objections.

The afterword – a bonus of the paperback edition – looks at how people have responded to the book. Spoilers: people at book events tended to have a lot of opinions without having read the book.

I do realise the irony of saying how important it is that white people listen and try to understand while not quoting directly from the book at all. Sorry, Reni, I’m writing the review without a copy in front of me. But I heartily recommend this – it’s very readable, very informative, and has the potential to effect real change. If you’re scoffing at this review, I particularly encourage you to get hold of a copy. And if you’ve been nodding your head throughout, then you probably won’t have your life and perspective changed – but it’s definitely worth a read nonetheless.

25 Books in 25 Days: #23 Virginia Woolf

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I’ve read a fair few biographies of (and books about) Virginia Woolf, but somehow I always keep going back for more. I’ve also met Alexandra Harris once or twice over the years, so it was sort of inevitable that one day I’d read Virginia Woolf (2011) by Alexandra Harris, published in a rather lovely hardback, and which I found in Brighton a year or two ago.

Considering how many long books have been written about Woolf, I wasn’t sure how Harris would get her complex and significant life into 170 pages. But what a staggering achievement Virginia Woolf is – this isn’t just the essentials (though it includes that); somehow, miraculously, Harris has still accompanied those with insights into the literature and a wonderful freshness to the whole thing. It steers between the Hermione Lee school of biography (every footstep requires three footnotes) and the ‘She must have felt…’ school of biography – into something approachable, concise, and extremely thoughtful.

Having read it today, I’m still not sure how Harris managed to get so much into so few pages. There are certainly books that get more treatment than others – Orlando gets a lot; A Room of One’s Own is rushed past – but nothing felt completely overlooked. There’s even a chapter on the afterlifes of Woolf, and how the publishing of her letters and diaries, and various biographies about her, have helped shape her reputation. Virginia Woolf is a brilliant starting point for anybody interested in her life and work – but, what is more, it’s also a vital and beautiful book for even the dyed-in-the-Woolf reader, however much they’ve already read about her.

25 Books in 25 Days: #20 Dear Farenheit 451

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I mentioned Dear Farenheit 451 (2017) by Annie Spence in one of my Weekend Miscellanies a while ago, and a bit later a review copy came through the post – whether or not the two things are related, I’m unsure, but thank you to the publishers! Books about books are always, always welcome, and this made a nice book to read on a little solo day out to Stow on the Wold and Charleston House (a National Trust property). Sadly, two secondhand bookshops have closed in Stow since I was last there – but another has opened.

Dear Farenheit 451 takes the form of Spence writing little letters to many books. Some of them are books she’s loved at different times of her life – from Judy Blume to The Time Traveler’s Wife – while others are books that she’s shelved or discarded in her job as a librarian. The last section of the book is all about book recommendations – either ‘if you like this then try this’, or books that pair well together, or other things of that ilk.

I really enjoyed reading it. Her bookish enthusiasm is evident, and I loved that she wrote about an unusual and personal selection of books. True, I had heard of relatively few of them and read a tiny amount, but I’d much rather this than another list of Best Books Ever with all the expected candidates.

It seems churlish to wish it were a slightly different book than it is – but I have to admit that I would have preferred it if it were less sweary and (I can think of no other word for it) vulgar. ‘As sh*t’ – without the asterisk – is used as an amplifier all the time, for instance, and I suppose the whole tone shook me out of my 1920s mindset.

But that’s a small price to pay for this level of bookish fun. It’s not a set of thorough literary analyses, or even unthorough ones, but it is a fun, lively look at the different books that surround Spence for one reason or another.

25 Books in 25 Days: #11 The Other Mitford

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I’m so glad people are enjoying these posts – I was a bit worried the flurry would get a little much. And I think today’s is among the longest I’ve read this week – I hadn’t realised quite how many words were on each of the 180 pages. The book in question is The Other Mitford: Pamela’s Story (2012) by Diana Alexander, given to me for my birthday last year by my friend Malie.

My Mitford mania started back in 2008, when I read the collection of letters between the sisters – still one of my favourite books. Since then, I’ve read bits and pieces by many of them, though never actually any of those long books devoted to all the family. Still, the details are ingrained in my mind – Nancy the novelist, Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Nazi, and Debo the Duchess. In the background, quieter the rest, is ‘the other Mitford’ – Pamela, who was a countrywoman at heart.

The Other Mitford is very engagingly written, and it certainly helps that the author knew Pamela personally (initially as her cleaner, and then as her friend). I really enjoyed it – but the structure is odd. Huge amounts are about the other sisters, often having a chapter about them followed by a chapter looking at Pamela during the same period. It’s useful for those who haven’t read anything about the Mitford sisters before, but a little redundant for those who have. And then there are a handful of chapters at the end which look at different aspects of Pamela’s personality – which means there are some aspects of her life that end up being repeated three times.

Throughout it all, or almost all, Pamela remains elusive. I still don’t feel like I know very much about her, and crisis moments like the break up of her marriage to Derek Jackson pass by in a line or two. Only when she is an old woman, and Diana Alexander knew her personally, does she really become truly vivid – as a thrify, kindly, stubborn grande dame of the village. The book is worth reading for those sections alone – but, as I say, enjoyable throughout. I just wish it had been a bit more about Pamela who, even here in her own book, remains rather overshadowed by her more dramatic sisters.