Tea or Books? #39: spoilers or no spoilers, and Anne of Green Gables vs Daddy Long-Legs

Special guest Jenny joins us for episode 39 – discussing children’s classics and spoilers!
 

Tea or Books logoI was SO excited that Jenny agreed to join me and Rachel on ‘Tea or Books?’ while she was visiting England – her podcast, Reading the End, was one of the two book podcasts that inspired me to start my own, so it seems like a perfect circle that she joins us as we’re nearing our second anniversary.

In this episode, inspired by her blog and podcast name, Jenny asked if we discuss whether or not we like hearing spoilers – and, in the second half, we debate Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery and Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster. Guys, this podcast was SO FUN to record.

We were crowded around one mic – the first time Rachel and I have ever recorded a podcast in person – so forgive any issues with the sound quality or variability.

Here’s our iTunes page, and here are the books and authors we mention in this episode:

The Pelicans by E.M. Delafield
Country Notes by Vita Sackville-West
Friends and Relations by Elizabeth Bowen
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
Miss Mole by E.H. Young
Chatterton Square by E.H. Young
Once a Week by A.A. Milne
The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne
23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang
Long Live Great Bardfield by Tirzah Garwood
Not So Quiet by Helen Zenna Smith
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Emma by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Sunlight on the Lawn by Beverley Nichols
Threads: the Delicate Life of John Craske by Julia Blackburn
Sylvia Townsend Warner
A Footman for the Peacock by Rachel Ferguson
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Muriel Spark
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Enid Blyton
Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery
What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge
Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter
Anne of Avonlea by L.M. Montgomery
Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery
Dear Enemy by Jean Webster
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham

A few little reviews…

It has come to my notice that it is December, and there are only 27 days left this year.  I have almost 20 reviews to write for A Century of Books… oops, didn’t work this out very well, did I?  (Well, I still have 10 books to read – but I have 4 of them on the go already.)  So I’m going to rush through five of them today – books that, for one reason or another, I didn’t want to write whole posts about.  But do still free to comment on them!

Daddy Long-Legs (1912) by Jean Webster
An orphaned girl is given a scholarship by a mysterious, anonymous man – she has only seen his back – and one of the conditions is that she must write updates to him, without getting any replies.  She nicknames him Daddy Long-Legs.  Can you guess what happens?  Well, I shan’t give away the ending.  I was mostly surprised at how modern this children’s book felt, despite being a hundred years old – a lot of it would have been at home in a Jacqueline Wilson story.  I enjoyed it, but did find it a little creepy, and rather repetitive, but these are probably signs of not having read it when I was the target age.

Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he is an enormous bug.  Which is going to make his job as a salesman somewhat difficult.  The reason I’m not giving this novella/short story its own review is that I don’t feel I have anything new to say about it.  Kafka is famed for his matter-of-fact approach to the surreality in this story, and rightly so.  What surprised me here was how middlebrow it all felt.  It is definitely comparable to David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox – which actually seems to have greater pretensions to literariness.

Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
Another one which surprised me – I’d always heard that Marie Stopes started a sexual revolution in the UK, offering knowledge about sex to the everywoman for the first time.  Turns out she is much more conservative, and less revelatory, than a lot of the other guides written around the same time, and earlier.  I read these guides for my current DPhil chapter, by the way – my favourite so far being the person who argued that sexual intercourse and reproduction were acceptable as separate impulses, because protozoa separated them.  Sure, why not?  (I wonder if I’ve just made all sorts of inappropriate search terms for this blog now…)

Miss Hargreaves: the play (1952) by Frank Hargreaves
This is something of a cheat, since it was never published – but it was performed, with Margaret Rutherford in the lead role.  Tanya tipped me off that copies of all performed plays were in the Lord Chamberlain’s archives in the British Library – so I had the great privilege and pleasure of reading the play, with Baker’s own penned changes.  It’s pretty similar to the novel, only with the action restricted to a few settings.  Such fun!

V. Sackville West (1973) by Michael Stevens
I’m a sucker for a short biography, and I hadn’t read one of VSW before, so I gave this one a whirl.  It’s a critical biography, so Stevens discusses and analyses the work while giving an outline of VSW’s life.  About halfway through I thought, “this feels way too much like a doctoral dissertation.”  Turns out it was a doctoral dissertation.  I think I’ll be turning to a more charismatic writer for my next biography of Vita, as this one was rather prosaic and charmless, although very thoroughly researched.

Right, well that’s five down!  How are the other Century of Bookers getting on?