SNB

Love Insurance by Earl Derr Biggers

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Time for another link to a Shiny New Books review. And this one is an absolute joy – any fans of P.G. Wodehouse or early Hollywood will love this one. It’s the 1914 novel Love Insurance by Earl Derr Biggers.

As is my practice, I’ll give you the first paragraph of the review, and then send you over to Shiny New Books if you’d like to read more…

It’s fun occasionally to read a book that doesn’t take itself remotely seriously. And it would be impossible for Love Insurance (1914) by Earl Derr Biggers to take itself seriously for a moment – before a few dozen pages are finished, the reader has had to buy a number of extremely unlikely situations – but that all adds to the pleasure. It is unmistakably of its time (if A.A. Milne had written a novel in the 1910s, when he was still being guiltlessly insouciant, it might have been a lot like this) but that doesn’t mean it can’t still charm a century later.

The rest of the review is here…

This Is The End by Stella Benson

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A Shiny New Review from Shiny New Books – of an old book, now reprinted by Mike Walmer. I loved I Pose by Stella Benson (review here) and leapt at the chance of reading her next book, This Is The End. Even though I kept singing ‘Skyfall’ every time I picked it up…

Here’s the beginning of my review:

One of the more unusual novelists being reprinted at the moment is Stella Benson. Her work is issued by Michael Walmer, a one-man publishing house that is reprinting various neglected novelists in the order their novels were originally published. This Is The End is Benson’s second (from 1917), and comes immediately before the one that is probably most remembered now,Living Alone, about very curious witches.
I want to say that This Is The End is not supernatural, but any definite statement about a Benson novel feels like a trap waiting to happen; the reader never quite knows which genre they’re reading, or what sort of response is required. Except that laughter will always be involved somewhere.

Margaret Kennedy Reading Week

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Are you joining in Margaret Kennedy Reading Week? All the info you need is here on Fleur Fisher Reads, and it’s all very exciting. I’d thought I would read Red Sky at Morning, because I started it months ago, but instead I read Kennedy’s final novel – The Forgotten Smile, published in 1961.

It has just been reissued by Vintage Books, along with a whole bunch of other Kennedy titles (some of them POD) and I read it for Shiny New Books – so I’m going to point you over there. (And I actually did finish it this week – on Sunday afternoon.) I’ll just say that she does such interesting things with chronology, and it works – and her characters are brilliantly realised. Read on…

So… are you joining in Margaret Kennedy Reading Week?

Pleasures and Landscapes by Sybille Bedford

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Another book review to point you to in Shiny New Books! This one is by an author I’d love to know more about – Sybille Bedford. She seems so fascinating. I loved her novel A Favourite of the Gods, and so I took Daunt Books up on their offer of her collected travel writing, Pleasures and Landscapes (2003, although collected from mostly 1950s and 1960s articles).

I usually don’t like travel writing, so I was nervous, but I really liked the way Bedford writes – and the unusual (often food-orientated) take she has on the world. If that’s tickled your fancy, you can read the whole review on Shiny New Books…

The Man Booker longlist

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Thanks so much for all your suggestions on 1990s books – I will reply soon, and there are lots I haven’t read. If you thought that was unusually modern for Stuck-in-a-Book, then brace yourself for this: the Man Booker longlist. Granted it was announced some time ago, but I’m not one for keeping my finger on the pulse…

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris (Viking)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus)
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail)
The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre)
J, Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape)
The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound)
The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell (Sceptre)
The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee (Chatto & Windus)
Us, David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Dog, Joseph O’Neill (Fourth Estate)
Orfeo, Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)
How to be Both, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
History of the Rain, Niall Williams (Bloomsbury)

I usually steer clear of Booker winners. I’ve only read three from the past decade, and all of them were underwhelming (The Sense of an Ending, The Finkler Question, and The Line of Beauty) and in fact I gave up halfway through two of them – but sometimes the shortlists and longlists bring up more intriguing titles.

When the longlist was announced, the editors of Shiny New Books had a fun conversation about it – I think you’ll enjoy reading it, especially if you like my cynical moments – and I hadn’t read any of them (unsurprisingly). I had heard of nearly all of the authors, though, which is a sign of what Shiny New Books has done to me.

After that, though, I did read Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and reviewed it for SNB. It was good. But it wasn’t any better than good. I don’t understand by what criteria it made this list. Intriguing.

Have any of you read any of these, or want to? I’d like to read the Nicholls, and that might be it…

Shiny New Books: Issue 2a

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Those of you who receive the Shiny New Books newsletter will know that the ‘inbetweeny’ issue is now live – that is, the update between issues, which includes anything published just after or just before Issue 2 went live that we were keen to incorporate. Go and explore!

In my case, it also involves a novel that I hadn’t heard of – Virginia Woolf in Manhattan by Maggie Gee – that I was so intrigued by and had to read. Luckily it turned out to be very good. You can read my review of it here, and (even better) a piece that Maggie Gee wrote for us, answering my questions, here.

I’m determined to set aside some time this week to writing SIAB reviews, as the pile is looming, and there are plenty of treats to come. At least this way they will get posted after the summer lull, when blog views and comments crash down!

Hope you’re all very well, and reading lovely books. I’m currently indulging in Marilynne Robinson’s Home (finally, Susan!) in preparation for reading Lila for Shiny New Books Issue 3.

The City of Endless Night by Milo Hastings

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If your reading tastes are anything like mine, then you’ve doubtless read a lot of books about the Second World War. But how often has that Second World War been in the 1980s?

That is the premise to the 1920 novel The City of Endless Night, which takes place in 2151. Despite my aversion to sci-fi, I found this book really interesting and good – and so unexpected for 1920. My full review is over at Shiny New Books…

Many things Milne

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Issue 3 of Shiny New Books had not one, not two, but three posts about A.A. Milne & family – and I’d really encourage you to go and read them all.

Curiously enough, none of them are actually reviews of books by A.A. Milne himself (as in the books weren’t by him… neither were the reviews, but that is perhaps less surprising.)

I reviewed a long-term favourite, which I re-read as Bello have just reprinted it – Ann Thwaite’s brilliant, award-winning biography A.A. Milne: His Life. Review here.

Another long-term favourite is Christopher (Robin) Milne’s The Path Through the Trees, the middle of his autobiographical trilogy – so it’s not so much about being Christopher Robin as it is about fighting in WW2 and opening a bookshop, but I love it. Claire (The Captive Reader) reviewed Bello’s reprint here.

And then I put together Five Fascinating Facts about A.A. Milne.

Let me know which Milne books you’ve read, or would like to read!

Glow by Ned Beauman

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I don’t often read new novels… but, when I do, they’re by authors on Granta’s Best Young Authors list. In Issue 1 of Shiny New Books I reviewed and interviewed Helen Oyeyemi; in Issue 2, I have done the same with Ned Beauman.

Following on from loving his first two novels (Boxer, Beetle and The Teleportation Accident), I also really liked his third, Glow; review over at Shiny New Books. As before, you wouldn’t have thought I’d enjoy the book by looking at its ingredients – sex, drugs, and clubbing, basically, but with virtual reality twists – but Beauman is such an imaginative and inventive writer that it works.

He kindly agreed to do a quick Q&A too. Do go and have a look!

The Listener by Tove Jansson

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It’s no secret that I love Tove Jansson, and I was pleased to get the chance to read the latest collection of her work from Sort Of Books; a new translation (by Thomas Teal) of her first collection for adults, The Listener (1971).

I read it for Shiny New Books; my review is here. You can also win a copy – along with the other editors’ favourites from their sections – by entering the competition on the homepage. And then have a browse!

It feels a bit lazy to be pointing to my reviews elsewhere, but then I remember that I still spent time writing them… probably more time, as I do more double-checking etc. for SNB reviews! And I hope that regular SIAB readers still have fun looking at those reviews.