2022

A bunch of books I’ve read recently

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It’s that time again when I look at a big pile of books I’ve been intending to review, and don’t really have a full-post’s worth of things to say… so here they all are, in a round up. Hope you’re all reading something fun at the moment.

Because of Jane (1913) by J.E. Buckrose

I have a few books by the near-forgotten Buckrose and really like her writing. My hope is that one of them will elevate itself above the others and be good enough for the British Library Women Writers series – but it won’t be Because of Jane. As I’ve written previously, Buckrose is very good on puncturing egos and awkwardness and social manners. She is much more formulaic and less interesting when it comes to romance – and there is a lot of romance in Because of Jane. The central one is ‘spinster’ Beatrice who reluctantly lives with her brother and his wife and daughter, and who begins to fall for a local widower, Stephen Croft.

“They were married at a registrar’s office. That always seems to me a little like buying machine-made underclothing. Doesn’t it to you?”

“Yes – no – I don’t know,” said Beatrice.

“And so,” said Miss Thornleigh, pursuing her train of thought, “it didn’t last. It was never likely to last.”

“I cannot think that Mrs Stephen Croft died because she was married at the registrar’s,” objected Beatrice in common justice.

“Well, perhaps not,” conceded Miss Thornleigh. “But it was a bad start.”

That was one excerpt I enjoyed, but sadly Because of Jane doesn’t have that much in this tone – and a lot more in Jane’s voice. Jane is Beatrice’s seven-year-old niece and the sort of irritating novelistic child who says things with wide-eyed innocence that sum up what other are truly feeling. The book was fine, but rather worse than the other two Buckroses I’ve read.

The ABC of Cats (1960) by Beverley Nichols

Reading the Meow week was the reason I started The ABC of Cats, but I didn’t finish it. He goes through the alphabet, writing about a different aspect of cats for each letter (e.g. Y is Yawn). It’s all delightful, and Nichols does cats extremely well – he is expert on their behaviours, habits, wishes without every getting saccharine or fey. It’s one for cat lovers certainly, and enjoyable if only for his apparent belief that he has invented the cat flap.

Things I Didn’t Throw Out (2017) by Marcin Wicha

Translated from Polish by Marta Dziurosz, this is a non-fiction reflection on Marcin’s mother’s life through the books that she left behind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are mostly Polish books – Emma by Jane Austen is the only one I’ve read. The book is also a lens to look at post-war Poland and how the Communist regime affected those who lived there.

I think Wicha writes really well, in sparse, curious way. But I struggle to know what to write about this book except that it’s unusual and beguiling – and probably better if you have a good knowledge of this period in Polish history and literature already, which I do not.

The First To Die at the End (2022) by Adam Silvera

I thought Silvera’s young adult novel They Both Die at the End was a brilliant premise worked out really well – it’s a world where people get a phone call from DeathCast on the day they will die, but aren’t told precisely when or how. And now he’s written The First To Die at the End, a prequel set on the first night that DeathCast is launched.

As before, there are two teenage boys who meet for the first time that day and spend it together – waiting for death (though I won’t spoil whose). It does feel a little like a repeat of the same sort of thing, done a little less compelling and with some extraneous side characters taking up some of the 550 pages. But it’s still a brilliant idea, and Silvera writes very engagingly. I didn’t remember the original book well enough to get all the references or Easter eggs, though did appreciate the two boys from that book appearing here briefly as their younger selves.

Seven Cats I Have Loved by Anat Levit #ReadingTheMeow2023

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When I saw that Mallika was inaugurating a week devoted to books about cats, you know I had to join in. Books! Cats! Basically my two favourite things, as anyone who follows my Instagram will attest. Then I had to read Barbara Trapido for book club, but now I’m getting onto the cat books.

I had a few on my shelves, and the first one I finished is this little memoir, Seven Cats I Have Loved (2022) translated from Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan. It turns out all three of the books I was eyeing up for this week are in translation – do people write more about cats in other languages, or is there sufficient faith in a market for them that cat books are disproportionately translated?

Levit is an Israeli poet and author who has won various prizes, though I note she doesn’t have a Wikipedia page (in English, at least). So this isn’t a book by an unknown person who happens to love cats – rather it’s a look into a fascination of an author people already love. And it does what it says. The book is about seven cats that Levit has lived with and loved devotedly.

Five of these cats come quite quickly. After not really intending to ever get a cat, she is persuaded to do so by her two young daughters when her life faces a bit of a crisis. She falls so fast and so hard for Shelly that she almost immediately goes and adopts four more kittens. Each is a purebreed who is kept indoors and treated like royalty. All cats should be treated like royalty, of course, but I will have to prevent Hargreaves from reading Seven Cats I Have Loved because he will consider himself terribly hard-done-by in comparison. They get an elaborate ‘buffet’ of different types of expensive cat food, with much of it being thrown away uneaten. As a result, one of them is unhealthily overweight.

I always knew it was impossible to deny my cats food. The buffet served all the cats, and there was no way of preventing access to one of them without making his or her life miserable, which I was incapable of doing. Closing the buffet, and diminishing the lifestyle the cats had grown accustomed to, was also not an option.

I’m certainly not going to judge another cat owner for how they look after their cats – let’s just say that many things in Seven Cats I Have Loved show that Levit does things differently to the way I would/do. But she also loves them very, very much. In philosophical interludes, she talks about the love between cat and human (sometimes wandering into over-optimism, to my mind, in relation to the love she gets back from them); she even compares the love she has for cats and for her daughters, and the ways in which the former is greater – or at least simpler.

The final two cats to come are Cleo, a male Siamese whom she impetuously buys from a neighbour – and perhaps my favourite, Mishely, because she is a stray. She seems to live in a box at the bottom of the stairs, and only occasionally creep into the house for rare treats. But I’m not a purebreed-cat kinda guy, so the stray moggy has my heart. All of them have my heart.

I had read (and commented on) Rebecca’s review of this book not long before my friend Lorna gave me my copy, but I had forgotten her warning that ‘Unfortunately, I felt the most attention is paid to the cats’ various illnesses and vet visits, and especially the periods of decline leading to each one’s death.’ And this is certainly true. Each decline is detailed laboriously, and movingly. Levit seems to choose never to euthanise her cats, so they live out every last minute before finally dying. She has very strong opinions on some health issues (she won’t take them to the vet hospital when they are dying) and curiously lax on others (they all get matted fur, and she believes clipping this away is torture to them).

So, this was hard to read. Like Levit, I find I can’t help being very alert to any sign of cat illness – particularly since I don’t know how old Hargreaves is. She tends to rush them to a vet; I tend to fret to myself while Hargreaves continues cheerily along. (And never mention anything online, because people love to try and make cat owners anxious with their own horror stories and warnings.) So I found I Levit a very empathetic memoirist, and even if we don’t treat our cats the same, we certainly both love them deeply. I would have liked more little reflections on the nature of cats, like this one of discovering missing Jesse:

Finally, I found the cat stuck behind the fridge. He’d made it in but couldn’t make it out. I quickly pushed the fridge away from the wall, picked up Jesse in my arms, and kissed him, trying to reassure both of us. I had no idea if he’d only slipped behind the fridge that morning or if, God forbid, he’d spent the entire night back there. I knew I would never be able to answer that questions, and took solace in the notion that perhaps cats knew how to skip from one event to the next without carrying the burden of human memory, which accumulated unhappy experiences.

Indeed, a few minutes later, Jesse returned to prowling the apartment with his usual ease, as if no serious trauma had befallen him.

On the whole, I loved this little memoir when it was talking about the foibles, behaviours, and eccentric demands of the cats. I wish there had been a lot more about their lives than their deaths, and that it would have felt a more joyful book. It’s not as good or as sharply observant as a similar book I’ve read, Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats, but I enjoyed it nonetheless and will happily keep it on my cat shelf.

London, With Love by Sarra Manning #ABookADayInMay No.29

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Jacket for 'London, With Love'

I’ve been e-friends with Sarra Manning for years, and have read some wonderful books on her recommendation – but somehow I have never got around to reading one of her own books. There are lots to choose from, and I chose London, With Love (2022) more or less at random from the ones available on Audible. I went in a little nervously, for reasons I will explain shortly, but I finished it a complete Manning convert. What a delightful book.

London, With Love tells the story of Jennifer (/Jen/Jenny, depending on her stage in life) and Nick over the course of two decades. They meet as teenagers in the early 1980s, where Jennifer is an intelligent, bookish, uncool girl desperately seeking somewhere to belong – and Nick is (in her eyes) a cool, handsome, unknowable boy far out of her league.

Somehow, despite the abyss she perceives between them, they do end up becoming friends – and then best friends. But while she never recovers from that crush that snowballs into love, she never wants to chance telling him about it. He seems simply a dream that can’t come true.

Not that Jennifer is entirely boy-focused. One of the most impressive things about London, With Love is that Manning creates a heroine who is completely fixated on a boy but is still independent, determined and ambitious. Her love may revolve around him, but her life does not.

As the years go by, we see Jennifer trying desperately to get into publishing, and find a role that fits the love of books that never leaves her. I relished every time Manning got in a literary reference, and you could tell that she the list of books Jennifer recommends for a teenage girl to read is a list close to Manning’s heart. And this isn’t one of those novels where the heroine achieves everything she puts her mind to – as someone who also tried to get work in editorial publishing, I recognised and winced at how many obstacles are in the way, and how publishing seems set up for people who can afford to do unpaid internships. I was following Jennifer’s path a few years later, but not a great deal had changed.

Nick and Jennifer lose touch after an early misunderstanding, but (unsurprisingly) he is not then absent from the novel. Over those 20 years, their paths cross time and again – the friendship is picked up, and sometimes it wanes and sometimes it is violently discarded. Sometimes we don’t see Jennifer for a handful of years at a time, and pick up with her at the next significant Nick encounter. Other partners come and go, sometimes people that Jennifer believes she could be happy with forever – but Nick is always there at the back of her mind. Sometimes they are friends. Sometimes they are too hurt to talk to each other. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is awkward. While there is admittedly a little bit of coincidence about how often they run into each other, more often it is believable – through mutual secondary school friends, or because their parents have been talking to each other.

Another success in London, With Love is how both characters develop and mature, while still having recognisably the core of the person they always were. Some of the things that drive them change; some stay the same. And I loved Jennifer – annoying and foolish as she can often be, particularly when she ditches her friends to spend all her time with a new boyfriend (and hurrah, Sarra Manning, for pointing out this all-too-common unkindness!) – and I loved her because she is so vividly real.

And now onto the thing that made me a bit nervous. ‘London’ is right there in the title, and I knew that different tube stops and underground lines would be significant features of the novel. Since I don’t really like London, or any city, I wondered if that would put me off. And, yes, I’m sure Londoners or Londonophiles would recognise a lot of sites and situations in this novel that passed me by, but it is not so dominant that the country mouse feels alienated.

Similarly, I was born in 1985 and so quite a few years behind Jennifer – the fashions, songs, politics, experiences that she has in her teens and 20s would doubtless be nostalgia-inducing for some readers. I enjoyed them without that same sense of recognition.

Perhaps the perfect reader is a Londoner approximately the same age as Jennifer (i.e. in their 50s now), but it is certainly not a requisite to lap it all up. I want to write something about the patriarchy and how David Nicholls’ One Day is a huge deal when this book has a similar sort of theme and is every bit as good, but that’s a whole other essay that you can imagine for yourselves.

What a lovely, memorable time I’ve spent getting to know these characters, and I’m very open for recommendations for which Sarra Manning book to read next.

The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight #ABookADayInMay No.17

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The Premonitions Bureau: A Sunday Times bestseller: Amazon.co.uk: Knight, Sam: 9780571357567: Books

I didn’t know anything about The Premonitions Bureau (2022) by Sam Knight when it turned up in the Audible sale – but the title, the cover, and the unexpected subtitle telling me that it was a true story were enough for me to take a gamble on it.

The story starts with the Aberfan disaster in 1966 – I’m sure you all know about it, but
it’s when a colliery waste tip atop a Welsh hillside suddenly fell down into the valley with devastating effect. 144 people died, including large numbers of pupils in the village school. And several people claimed to have predicted that the tragedy would happen.

‘Claimed’ is perhaps the wrong word, since apparently two of the people who predicted it also died in the disaster – neither of them apparently having any sense that they were having a premonition. One of the children in the school told her mother “I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.” Another had drawn a picture of people digging at the hillside, with the words ‘The End’.

John Barker, a psychiatrist who ran a mental hospital in an old Victorian asylum in Shropshire, was fascinated by the possibilities in this phenomenon. He had already been deeply interested in unusual psychiatric issues – such as Munchausen syndrome, or the idea that people could literally be scared to death.

Being a scientist, he decided to go about this systematically. He set up the Premonitions Bureau, inviting people to send in any premonitions they had – whether in dreams, visions, or convictions. They got hundreds of replies from all over the place – some trolling them, but others very serious. Few seemed to be particularly specific – more along the lines of ‘something terrible will happen to a plane’ – but each was catalogued carefully. The hope was to be able to present their findings to the Medical Research Council and perhaps, in turn, set up a system to warn people of impending disasters. (Though there was also a debate about whether you could have a premonition of an event that then doesn’t happen – a Catch 22 for any way of using this tool to save lives.)

I had never heard of the Premonitions Bureau, and I did find Barker a likeable, fascinating and curiously impenetrable person. And I found much the same with Knight’s book. It goes on so many tangents, exploring interesting side-roads to the main discussion – often spending large chunks of chapters talking about these other matters in great detail. And some of them are certainly interesting, but by contrast, the bits about the actual bureau seem a bit flimsy. We don’t learn much about the hundreds of contributions or contributors, or what happened when they were right or wrong (though, as an exception, we do get a lot of detail about a train crash that was apparently predicted and which one of the BeeGees survived). It does feel as though there isn’t enough material to give a thoroughly researched book about this bureau – that it is an enthralling and enticing topic which isn’t quite followed up by what we learn about it. The bureau is there throughout, but sometimes as a shadowy thread at the centre of a lot of other topics.

And Knight is careful in not committing either way to whether or not he believes premonitions can happen. There are moments which seem to defeat any scepticism, but not much on probabilities of success or alternative explanations of the ‘accurate’ premonitions.

I did finish The Premonitions Bureau having found it interesting and well-written, but thinking that I might prefer to read a fictional story that could equally well be invented for this eye-catching title. Perhaps truth is stranger than fiction, but I think fiction could have been more satisfying.

Fifty Forgotten Books by R.B. Russell

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Fifty Forgotten Books | And Other Stories

One of the books I took on holiday to read was also one of the books I’ve bought under Project 24 – Fifty Forgotten Books (2022) by R.B. Russell. It’s exactly the sort of book I can’t resist, and it was every bit as enjoyable as I’d hoped. I absolutely loved reading it.

Of course, bibliophiles who tend to read slightly more obscure books will ask, ‘Are these really forgotten?’ And of course they are not all completely obscure books, but I have only read five of the 50. Four of those were actually books I discussed in my DPhil thesis (The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, The Haunted Woman by David Lindsay, Flower Phantoms by Ronald Fraser and – hurrah! – Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker). The fifth is The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson, perhaps one of the best-remembered names in the book. But, yes, there were an awful lot of titles and authors I’d never heard of, and I very much enjoyed reading why Russell had chosen them for inclusion.

There certainly isn’t any attempt to make this an objective collection of titles. They are certainly books that reveal one man’s personal taste, and in some ways Fifty Forgotten Books is a memoir, a little like The Books of My Life by Sheila Kaye-Smith. Compared to something like Christopher Fowler’s The Book of Forgotten Authors (which I enjoyed, and which also includes Miss Hargreaves), Russell’s book is much more personal and he doesn’t devote each short chapter exclusively to the book being mentioned. Rather, he will use the book in question as a prompt for writing about something going on in his life. Or, I should say, his bookish life. That means we get truly delightful looks behind the scenes at the development of his literary taste, his bookshopping habits, or the origin and history of Tartarus Press – a small-edition publishing house that Russell co-runs, and which came to my attention when they reprinted Miss Hargreaves in the mid-2000s.

Tartarus Press specialises in the literary supernatural/strange/horror, and that is certainly reflected in his selection here. It overlaps with my love of the fantastic (hence the four books that were in my thesis on the Middlebrow Fantastic) and, while I’m unlikely to leap towards some of the horror or fantasy books he recommends, I still loved reading about them. I was already feeling confident that Russell was something of a kindred spirit when I got to the Miss Hargreaves section. This opening line makes me wonder if I am secretly the same person as Russell:

With limited house room, there is little excuse for owning multiple copies of the same book. I do, though, feel I can justify my five different copies of Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker.

Why, yes, I do also have five copies of Miss Hargreaves, and would readily buy any future ones I find, so long as they’re not editions I already have. One of the differences between Russell’s bibliophilia and mine is that he cares about first editions. He often talks about replacing copies of much-loved books with first editions, perhaps then moving on to a first edition with a dustjacket, and so forth. It’s an angle of literary life that I’ve never understood. I’d definitely opt for a book with a lovely dustjacket, for aesthetic reasons, but I can never see why anybody cares if a book is a first edition or a 50th edition, so long as the text is the same. Well, it saves me money!

Threaded through a lot of sections is the memoir-esque bit that I found the most intriguing – Russell’s experiences with the Arthur Machen Society. We learn about the machinations (ho-ho) of this society along the way, including misunderstandings, draconian leaders, unsettling periods in leadership, and the start of a rival organisation.

There are times when you can find yourself embroiled in unexpected battles, even in literary societies where so little might appear to be at stake. […] Matters came to a head in September 1966 when a member from Tunbridge Wells phoned to ask why he’d had a subscription reminder when he had received no journals or newsletters in the previous year. When I passed this complaint on to Mrs X, her reaction was such that I could only share Mr Talbot’s concerns. She could not explain how the subscriptions had been spent, and when I suggested that this was an unsatisfactory situation, she launched an unpleasant personal attack upon me. I was confused and hurt, and I could see no option but to resign.

Any of us with experience of big fish in small ponds may well recognise the type of Mrs X. What I found impressive is that, even when Russell is writing about disputes and fallings-out, he comes across very well. He always seems kind, thoughtful, and eager to share passions about literature with like-minded people. He is refreshingly free from any book snobbery, taking in all genres and all types of literature equally. In short, it was a pleasure to spent these 254 pages with him – and, for that reason, I think Fifty Forgotten Books would be very enjoyable and engaging even if you’ve never heard of any of the 50 authors.

I’ve come away with a little list of books to look out for, happy reminders of some titles I’ve enjoyed and, above all, the happy experience of spending time in the company of somebody who unabashedly loves books and knows the power they can have to grow as a person, form communities, and connect with authors who are long gone.

Novella a Day in May: Days 13 and 14

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I’m watching Eurovision; I’m typing up thoughts about novellas. What a day.

Day 13: Elizabeth Finch (2022) by Julian Barnes

Ooof. I’ve read a couple of Barnes novels before this one, and never really seen what the fuss was about. But I wasn’t prepared for quite how bad Elizabeth Finch would be.

The narrator is remembering a teacher – Elizabeth Finch, referred to often as EF – who has had a lasting effect on his life. Think someone with the unusual pith and dignity of Jean Brodie, dispensing philosophical insights that have her pupils thinking for decades. Except that everything she says is only a couple of notches above a ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ sign in terms of profundity.

One of the things she introduces the class to is Julian the Apostate, who hated Christians sometime many centuries ago. Don’t know much about him? Don’t worry, Barnes then includes an ‘essay’ by the narrator where he dumps all the knowledge he has about Julian. It reads like a Wikipedia article, only it’s 50 pages long. We get the facts and theories about Julian the Apostate, It’s astonishingly inelegant, in terms of novel writing.

Elsewhere, in the first and final sections, his writing is serviceable and only occasionally embarrassing (some of the dialogue he gives Elizabeth Finch is really awkward, and clearly she is a mouthpiece for a middle-aged man). But the best this novella gets to is mediocre, and at worst it is bafflingly poorly done.

 

Day 14: Sing Me Who You Are (1967) by Elizabeth Berridge

I bought this back in 2009 because I knew her name from the Persephone collection of her short stories, but I might equally have bought it for this glorious cover. The illustrator – Reg Cartwright – did three or four Berridge reprints in the 1980s and they are so characterful and wonderful.

What’s more, it is accurate to the premise of the novel. Harriet Cooper and her two Siamese cats arrive at the farm which belonged to her recently dead aunt, and where her cousin Magda and her husband Gregg live. Her aunt hasn’t left her the farm, or the land, or anything – except, pictured there on the cover, the bus.

Wading through the still-dewy grass – for the bus lived in shadow half the year, and this was autumn – Harriet went through the wooden gate set in a gap in the hedge and up on to the step. She unlocked the padlock and pushed open the door, which folded inwards down the middle. Stepping inside she became aware of the musty smell of disuse. How long, a month, six weeks? Enough for damp to invade this thin shell. She would open windows, light a fire, banish it.

She has stayed there on and off over the years, and now she has brought her few possessions to live there indefinitely.

The story then looks at how her life alongside Magda and Gregg brings up past and present tensions, as well as affinities. Central to them is the memory of a man known as Scrubbs – who deeply affected each of the three. He has been dead for a long time, but he is still impacting all of their lives, and the way they interact with each other. Along the way, secrets come out…

I’ve read three other Berridge books, and have yet to find one that I really love. This is a good novel, and Harriet is an interesting, layered character – but I think I’m really hoping for a book that will live up to those wonderful covers. If Berridge were a little weirder, or a little more stylised in her prose – a dash of Beryl Bainbridge, say – then I think I’d love her. As it is, her realism lacks a little something. And yet I’ll keep reading them, because I feel like there might be something even better in her oeuvre – and something that lives up to those covers.