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The Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson – #1952Club

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I bought The Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson in Canada back in 2017, based on her being a Persephone author. Since then, I’ve read another couple of novels by her – but I think this overlooked gem might be her masterpiece. Or perhaps I was just in exactly the right mood to read the sort of brilliance that Wilson is? Either way, it’s my new favourite by her. (NB: when I call it ‘overlooked’, that is true in the UK – for all I know, every Canadian schoolboy and schoolgirl is reading The Equations of Love.)

The Equations of Love is actually two novellas which, as far as I can tell, have no point of connection: Tuesday and Wednesday and Lilly’s Story. They don’t seem to have appeared separately, but rather have always been together under this title. I thought they were both excellent but preferred the first, shorter, of the two – let’s all concentrate on that one.

The novella is about Mortimer and Myrtle Johnson, living in a small, shabby apartment in Vancouver. Mort makes a fragile living at whatever handyman work he can get – though he quickly considers himself too good to be looked down on, and either quits or is fired within a few days or even hours. Myrtle is a cleaner and she holds the power in the marriage – she holds, indeed, the power in almost any relationship with any other human. Wilson lovingly describe her tyranny:

When she slowly raises her heavy eyelids as she soon will, but not until she feels inclined to, you will see their power. Myrtle’s eyelids, and her small amused smile, which is not a turning-up but a turning-down of her lips, induce a sudden loss of self-confidence in the individual towards whom the look or non-look, the smile or non-smile, is directed. She can make you, or Mort, feel insecure and negligible, just by the extra quarter-inch of her dropped eyelids and by that amused small turned-down smile. It is not fair. If you should in your beauty, your new hat, and your recent tennis championship appear before Myrtle, she can by her special look and without saying a word, intimate to you and your friends that, for some reason obscure to them and to you but well known to her and to the rest of the world, that she thinks very poorly of you.

Tuesday and Wednesday is only 129 pages long in my edition, but there are worlds of richness in it. You might expect so short a novella to keep to the canvas of this marriage and this apartment (and – hurrah – the feisty cat, who fools them she is a tomcat). But Wilson widens the scope. Mort goes to work as a gardener, and we see the power jostles with his distracted, kind, unsure employer – with enough feminity to raise Mort’s oafness flirtation, and enough money to make him feel angrily inferior. There is a memorable scene where Mort meets an old friend who takes him to visit his workplace, which is an undertakers. We follow Myrtle to her work, where there is no power imbalance because Myrtle holds all the cards. Other friends and relatives appear – we even see the world from an anxious niece of the couple, who feels she must visit the only people she knows in Vancouver, but desperately doesn’t want to be there.

In each scene, what makes Tuesday and Wednesday so good is Wilson’s control of tone. She is so insightful in the way people behave, particularly around the numerous power dynamics that are constantly in play. She’s brilliant at what people no longer notice because it is part of the furniture of their life – from an unclean home to an unhappy marriage. And she balances all of this with a witty, ironic tone that she judges perfectly. We remain invested in the characters’ lives, but always aware that they are being observed. The detachment means we don’t get too overwhelmed by pathos – these are people under a microscope, intensely real but not necessarily to be loved.

I suppose the only way for you to discover how brilliant Tuesday and Wednesday is would be to read it – but I’ll finish this section with a quote about the cat, because I can’t resist anybody who writes well about cats:

The kitten, who was not a tom, felt her way about in the dark which was, to her, transparent, and learned the room. Feral, wise, with her inscrutable little hunter’s nose and whiskers she felt and explored and recorded each chair leg, each table leg, each corner. She prowled and prowled on silent paws, and sometimes she stopped to wash. When she was satisfied, she accepted and adopted the room. Then she slept fitfully. She slept anywhere, lightly yet deeply, waking and moving often. Chiefly she slept on Mort and Myrtle who lay deep in sleep, warm and approved by her. But sometimes she awoke, remembering something pleasant. Then she jumped lightly down and ran to her box. She scrambled up the side of her box and sat down, quivering, still, looking into the transparent dark with bliss.

The second of the novellas is Lilly’s Story, and yet it starts with a pair of sisters – ‘old Mrs Hastings who was a widow, a saint and a mystic’ and ‘her younger, elderly sister Miss Edgeworth’ – who live together with sundry other relatives. We learn a lot about the Chinese cook, Yow, which regrettably includes some attempts to transcribe his accent – even down to ‘oily [early]’. If you need to include square brackets in your dialogue to make clear what you’re writing, maybe don’t bother.

It all feels like we’re setting up a family dynamic with these sisters, hangers-on, and the rather unlikeable Yow – focused around a bicycle which Miss Edgeworth whimsically owns without riding, to be seen walking it around, and which Yow less whimsically borrows. But it turns out this is all a detailed prelude to kicking off Lilly’s story – as perhaps we might have guessed from the title.

Lilly had a sort of flirtation with Yow, more on his side than hers, and lives in a world filled with potential dangers. She is haunted by the possibility of the police – who once came to her home, when she was 11 years old, and have remained a threat in her mind ever since. Years later, and as the timeline of the novella truly begins, it’s partly this fear that sends her out into the world alone, to earn her living.

The rest of the novella follows her employment in various places, marked more by kindness than you might expect, and the raising of a daughter, Eleanor, for whom she fantasises a legitimate background – styling herself as a widow. The mother/daughter relationship continues for many years in the short novella, though with Eleanor herself less vivid – seen really in relations to Lilly. Except when she is very young, and more present on the page, where she seemed more individual:

By the time Eleanor was six years old she had three gods and her mother. Her mother was not a god, she simply an extension of herself. She had a slave, and she had a companion who refused to be owned and could not be coerced – the cat. Eleanor’s gods were Major and Mrs Butler and Leo, the big dog. As Leo sat upon his haunched looking majestically around him, Eleanor, standing, could look into his face, caressing his ears. Her slace was a nondescript faithful little black and tan dog who could be dressed in doll’s capes and hats, and would sit, miserably, in the doll’s pram that Mrs Butler had given to Eleanor.

Wilson has the same tone as before, and I also really liked and admired Lilly’s Story, but I think there’s a reason I preferred Tuesday and Wednesday. In Lilly’s Story, there are many characters but Lilly is undoubtedly the central point. And I found that Wilson’s detached, observational style worked better for a couple and their world than it did for an individual and her world. When a writer puts one person front and centre, maybe we need to be more deeply buried into their mind and heart. I knew a lot about Lilly by the end of the book, and I was fascinated by her, but I don’t think I ever really cared for her. Wilson’s characters, in The Equations of Love, are infinitely detailed, thoroughly real, and very memorable – but I think the style works best when we see them constantly in relation to each other, and not to be loved as individuals.

If I had only read Lilly’s Story, I’m sure I’d have raved about it – and it is excellent. But there was something so exceptionally well-realised in Tuesday and Wednesday that it had to suffer by comparison. As I said at the beginning, it may just be that I was in exactly the right reading mood for Wilson’s particular acuteness – but, to me, Tuesday and Wednesday is a miraculous little gem.

Love and Salt Water by Ethel Wilson #SpinsterSeptember

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I haven’t actually read very much of the book I had decided to read for Spinster September – a brilliant brainchild of Nora aka pear.jelly – but one of the other books I was reading also qualifies. Ethel Wilson was one of the Canadian authors I was keen to find on my recent holiday, and while I was there I bought and read her final novel, Love and Salt Water (1956).

The novel follows Ellen Guppy through large sections of her life, starting in childhood. Of course, nobody would call a young girl a ‘spinster’, so not all of this novel qualifies – but it’s clear from the opening paragraph that Ellen doesn’t have the stereotypical views of marriage that other girls of her generation are expected to:

When Ellen Cuppy was eleven years old and sat on the foot of the bed, getting in the way of her big sister Nora who was packing her suitcases with great care, she thought how sad it was for Nora, who was so fair and pretty, to marry that old Mr. Morgan Peake who was all of forty; yet Nora did not seem to mind, but shook out the crêpe de Chine nightdresses and laid them on the bed and slowly folded them again with tissue paper in between, and Ellen thought that Nora was like a lamb getting ready for the sacrifice; and thinking of lambs and sacrifices she thought of garlands and timbrels and damsels and maidens and vestal virgins, such things as she read about and liked the sound of but did not understand.

Not long into the novel, Ellen’s mother dies – in fact, Ellen discovers her. Wilson is such a good writer that the scene of this discovery is haunting, and she shows us a reaction that is unusual and yet entirely right. In many ways, the Bildungsroman plot of Love and Sea Water treads some expected paths – but Wilson’s observant eye means that, within this, nothing is ever quite as you’d expect. I thought young Ellen’s response to her mother’s dead body was brilliant:

She stretched out her hand toward her mother’s telephone and drew it back, to defend her mother and herself – and her father too – just for a few more moments, against her mother having died. Yet she was sure her mother had died. This must be what that is.

When she had cried awhile, standing there in her nightdress in the stillness of the room, very frightened with this quiet stranger her dear mother, she managed to pick up the telephone because she must at some time pick it up, and all the while she never took her eyes off her mother whom she was now giving over to other people’s talk and arrangements (it was strange how strongly Ellen felt this as the minutes advanced).

The first hints of the ‘salt water’ of the title come to prominence when Ellen is whisked away by her grieving father on a cruise. She is disorientated and confused, and trying to behave well and keep her father happy. Wilson shows us this in the background, but swirling around is the life of the ship – including the tragedy of a bo’sun swept overboard. She balances Ellen’s internal narrative with reality: her grief is not as significant to the other passengers as the day-to-day gossip and drama that they are experiencing themselves.

As the years pass, Ellen’s sister Nora follows conventions – marrying an older man, having a child, relishing the trajectory that is held up as the ideal. Ellen, meanwhile, is not self-consciously maverick. Her character is fairly quiet and unassuming, and she doesn’t make ripples for the sake of it. But this conventional path doesn’t work for her. She meets some suitable men, but is not interested in them – or at least not sufficiently – despite the urging of her relatives. I think this passage, coming after a proposal from a man she is merely fond of, could be a mantra for a certain group of the fictional women being remembered during Spinster September:

[…] at once her freedom became essential to her again. This free life-without-an-object, which had become so boring, was suddenly necessary to her security. She knew this life well, and would not exchange it for some other life which might be only a new conformity, and then perhaps a prison far away with a stranger.

Will Ellen end the novel a spinster? Well, I shan’t spoil it for you – but I will say that it was a very satisfying ending, true to her character. My edition has an afterword by Anne Marriott and she mentions an alternative ending that Wilson wrote – and I’m very glad she didn’t use it. The one that was published is excellent.

I really enjoyed Love and Salt Water – a short novel, and where some scenes and stages of Ellen’s life are truncated and could perhaps have been explored in more depth. But also one which comes with the wisdom and clarity of a full life and a long writing career. And I particularly enjoyed recognising the settings, as parts of the novel take place in both of the cities I visited – Vancouver and Toronto.

An accidental addition to Spinster September, but glad I could contribute!

Three more #1929Club books

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It’s the final day of the 1929 Club and I have three books I haven’t reviewed – I really went to town on 1929 titles! Indeed, one of them I only started yesterday. Here are some quick thoughts about the three final books I read…

I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson

I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson is one of those names that I’ve heard a lot – one of the literary hangers-on who is better known for his criticism than his own fiction. Or perhaps better known in America than in the UK. Apparently he helped the public get to know and appreciate a range of writers, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to William Faulkner to Ernest Hemingway. It wasn’t until I looked at his Wikipedia page just now that I realised that I Thought of Daisy was his only novel. (Having said that, other reviews say he wrote three, so who knows.)

One of the things that makes us know that we are in 1929 America is that Prohibition is front and centre – and one of the things that makes us know we are in a certain echelon of society is that everyone seems to known ways to evade it. The narrator is at one such party, flowing with booze despite the rules, when he meets two women. Rita and Daisy. Rita is a poet; Daisy is a chorus girl. The novel is occupied with seeing which of the women he will choose (with something of an assumption that either of them would be delighted to be chosen).

Reading I Thought of Daisy was an interesting experience. Wilson doesn’t write in a High Modernist style – that is to say, he always uses full sentences, and the prose is quite traditional. But he has the Modernist technique of considering every small detail of essentially equal worth. Everything he notices and thinks is documented. Characters are given long, anecdote-driven backstories that could last ten pages, and then they’re never seen before.

What I found, in Wilson’s hand at least, was that this approach made each sentence, paragraph, page interesting to read, and his writing is very pleasing – but that the whole was less than the sum of its parts. I found that, by documenting everything, he left us with nothing. I read acres of details, but never felt that I knew or cared about anyone. Though I could also see that, to another reader, it might be mesmerising.

Mr Mulliner Speaking

Mr Mulliner Speaking by P.G. Wodehouse

Well, you can’t go wrong with a Wodehouse, can you? Mr Mulliner Speaking is a collection of short stories, and Mr Mulliner is the least significant character in them. He is merely a man in a pub who has lots of stories to tell, and tells them insistently – so there is always something in the first paragraph that reminds him of a nephew, cousin, or friend. From then, he tells the story about them, and fades into the background.

It’s all delightfully Wodehouse. In perhaps my favourite story, a gentleman goes to extreme lengths to avoid being seen in public with yellow shoes. But most of the plots are about engagements – either ones that people want to get into, or get out of. His characters stumble in and out of proposals at the drop of a hat, and it’s such fun. In one story, the winner of a golf match must propose to a woman they both loathe; in another, a man will be horse-whipped on the steps of his club by one man if he doesn’t propose and trampled with spiked boots by another if he does.  Here’s Archibald, masquerading as a teetotaller who believes Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare to impress his chosen woman’s aunt:

Life, said Archibald, toying with his teacup, was surely given to us for some better purpose than the destruction of our brains and digestions with alcohol. Bacon, for instance, never took a cocktail in his life, and look at him.

At this, the aunt, who up till now had plainly been regarding him as just another of those unfortunate incidents, sprang to life.

It’s bits like ‘regarding him as just another of those unfortunate incidents’ that make me love Wodehouse so much. His turn of phrase is unparalleled, isn’t it? A delight to read a book I’ve had since 2006, thanks to the 1929 Club.

Hill (New York Review Books Classics): Amazon.co.uk: Giono, Jean, Abram, David, Eprile, Paul: 9781590179185: Books

Hill by Jean Giono

I’ve managed to get one book in translation into the 1929 Club – Hill by Jean Giono, translated from French by Paul Eprile. This was his debut novella and tells of a small community who live in an isolated community. There are twelve people living in four houses – each household holding some slightly fractured version of a family. In one, the wife has died, found hanging a few years ago. In another, the patriarch (Janet) is in the final throes of illness. It is a self-sufficient community, but very discontented.

In the space of about 120 pages, Giono shows us the slightly grotesque world here. He described it as the first of his ‘Pan’ books, and nature is certainly front and centre in the book, but so too is the ugliness of human nature that lies just below the surface. The people here care only for themselves, deep down – but do so in a casual way. There is little malevolence here, just an absence of kindness.

Someone on Twitter, with whom I was discussing 1929 books that had been translated into English, seemed quite cross that Jean Giono had been translated at all. She called him a bystander, a regional writer, who wrote about things that weren’t significant in 1929. And I disagreed – while the everyday lives of a community relying on the land will not be in history books, survival is always the most significant thing in any country, at any time. And farming will always be central to that. Rural life is often dismissed as less important than cities and politicians and wars, but without the production of crops, civilisation ends.

Giono knew that. And he knew how to write piercingly about nature – knowing its dangerous beauty.

Until now Gondran used to study the clouds for the threat of storms, for the white light that warns of leaden hail. Hail is no longer on his mind.

Hail means flattened wheat, hacked-up fruit, ruined hay, and so forth . . . but what he’s on the lookout for now, it’s something that threatens him head-on, and not just the grass. Grass, wheat, fruits—too bad for them. His own hide comes first.

He can still hear Janet saying: “So you think you know, do you, you sly devil, what’s on the other side of the air?”

And so, Gondran stays absorbed, right until the moment they call out to him from the Bastides.

And it is the elements that threaten them – starting with their water supply, which dries up overnight. Before this, they have seen a black cat walking through their community. They knew this cat to be the portent of something evil. Not evil in itself, but a warning. They have to work out where the evil within the four houses – who might have cursed the water, and how they can prevent it. The plot gets going at this point, as the superstitious and the intensely practical interweave, as they try both paths to solve this crisis.

Throughout, Giono (and Eprile’s translation) had lines that showed great perception, written in eerily lovely prose. I noted down this, of a girl suffering a terrible illness – ‘Through her skin you can the fire that’s consuming her, licking at her bones.’

The only reason I didn’t love Hill as much as this review might be suggesting is that I found it a little confusing. There are a lot of characters for such a slim novella, and beauty is sometimes prioritised above clarity in the writing. It wasn’t the easiest book to sit down and spend time with, though rewarding when I did. I’ve read three books by Giono now – this, Melville and The Man Who Planted Trees – and they’re all so different. But I’m glad to have experienced something so powerfully elemental – and, even though Giono was writing about some unspecified time in the past, the passions and needs of communities like the one in Hill existed in 1929, and still exist.

Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson #1954Club

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When I was in Toronto in 2017, I was keen to buy books that wouldn’t be so easily available back home – and it made sense to pick up Canadian authors, where possible. It was also during another Project 24, so I couldn’t go wild with the number of books I bought – I restricted myself largely to Stephen Leacock, Margaret Laurence, and Ethel Wilson.

The only Ethel Wilson I’d read was Hetty Dorval, in the Persephone edition, and I remember liking it but none of the details. Now I’ve read this beautiful edition of the unprepossessingly-titled Swamp Angel, and I can see why she is so beloved by many Canadians.

We open in Vancouver. Maggie Vardoe is living with her second husband, having been widowed in her first marriage. And, on page one, we get this sentence:

Mrs Vardoe had become attached to, even absorbed into the sight from the front-room window of inlet and forest and mountains. She had come to love it, to dislike it, to hate it, and at seven-fifteen this evening she proposed to leave and not to return. Everything was, she thought, in order.

As well as a vital plot point, it’s a great indication of Wilson’s writing in this novel. She blends the beautiful with the plain. Throughout the book, we are always aware of the surroundings – views and environments and nature are as crucial as anything happening in the foreground. But Wilson is not sentimental about the natural world; she is in awe of it, and she values the vantages people have of it.

Maggie leaves the house, having cooked enough meat for her husband to eat cold for a few days. We don’t learn a lot about Mr Vardoe, except that he is irascible, unkind, demanding and unsatisfactory. It’s no mystery why Maggie wants to leave. What is less clear is where she might go, and why.

Swamp Angel follows Maggie as she becomes independent. At various places in those forests and mountains she could see from her window, Maggie learns how to live in a way that gives her autonomy, and respects the people and places around her. She is pretty good at it from the outset, so this isn’t a case of seeing a suburban housewife gradually learn to adapt to a new way of life. It is as though this way of life has always been waiting for her, and she only has to dive into it.

Maggie isn’t alone in this experience, nor is it idyllic. A large part of the novel sees her working at some remote cabins, and the difficulties this causes with the married couple who own it. She also invites a young Chinese boy to work with her, based on a brief meeting. There is little maternal in the relationship she has with him, or his brother. What I found interesting about Wilson’s writing is how often it resists comfortable emotional conclusions. People remain self-contained, or have outbursts that they regret. There is a beauty in the restraint that the characters are permitted.

In between the character interactions, Wilson allows herself leisurely envelopments in the natural world that are the novel’s most beautiful moments. I particularly loved this description of the northern lights, and how Maggie is swept into it:

One night she saw, north of the lake, a pale glow invade the sky. Maggie got up and pulled a blanket round her. The pale glow was greenish, no, a hot colour rose up and quickly took possession. The colour changed. The vast sky moved as with banners. The sky was an intimation of something still vaster, and spiritual. For two hours Maggie watched enraptured the great folding, playing, flapping of these draperies of light in heaven, transient, unrepeated, sliding up and down the sky. After declaiming lavishly, the great Northern Lights faded with indifference as one who is bored and – deploring display – says I may come back but only if I choose; I do as I wish; I am powerful; I am gone but I am here. The orthodox stars, which had been washed away, returned palely. Night was resumed, and Maggie slept.

I’ve missed quite substantial parts of Swamp Angel that take place back in Vancouver, with Maggie’s friends and husband, and haven’t even mentioned that the Swamp Angel is in fact a gun. But hopefully I’ve said enough to tempt you to the quiet tumult of this novel.

Hetty Dorval – Ethel Wilson

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Somehow I’d forgotten, when noting down books to read for my Reading Presently project, that quite a few of my unread Persephones had originally been gifts.  So there might be a little flurry of them as I come to the end of the year… and first up is the shortest, which accompanied me on my trip to the Lake District (and which I read in its entirety on the train): Hetty Dorval (1947) by Ethel Wilson. (Thanks, Becca!)

Hetty Dorval isn’t really the heroine of the book, and she certainly isn’t its narrator – that title goes to Frankie (Frances) Burnaby – but she is perhaps its leading figure.  Frankie first sees her on her arrival in their small British Columbian community, and is enchanted (and a little intimidated) by Hetty’s beauty and lack of convention:

We walked our horses side by side, I feeling at the same time diffident and important.  Mrs. Dorval did not ‘make conversation’.  I discovered that she never did.  It began to seem so easy and natural riding beside her there and no one making an effort at conversation that I was able to steal a few looks at her side face.  This was especially easy because she hardly seemed to know that I was beside her; she just took me for granted in a natural fashion.  Through the years in the various times and places in which I came to know Mrs. Dorval, I never failed to have the same faint shock of delight as I saw her profile in repose, as it nearly always was.  I can only describe it by saying that it was very pure.  Pure is perhaps the best word, or spiritual, shall I say, and I came to think that what gave her profile this touching purity was just the soft curve of her high cheek-bone, and the faint hollow below it.
Frankie is only a child, and does not understand the mystery of the woman – but agrees to keep coming to visit her secretly, flattered because Hetty Dorval refuses to have any other people call.  And, of course, it all ends rather calamitously.

The novel follows the various different times that the paths of Frankie and Hetty overlap, as the narrator realises and mentions, when she is a young adult:

But this is not a story of me […] but of the places and ways known to me in which Hetty Dorval has appeared.  It is not even Hetty Dorval’s whole story because to this day I do not know Hetty’s whole story and she does not tell.  I only knew the story of Hetty by inference and by strange chance.  Circumstances sometimes make it possible to know people with sureness and therefore with joy or some other emotion, because continuous association with them makes them as known and predictable as the familiar beloved contours of home, or else the place where one merely waits for the street car, or else the dentist’s drill.  Take your choice.  But one cannot invade and discover the closed or hidden places of a person like Hetty Dorval with whom one’s associations, though significant, are fragmentary, and for the added reason that Hetty does not speak – of herself.  And therefore her gently impervious and deliberately concealing exterior does not permit her to be known.
It is a curious and interesting way to structure a novel, because it leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness and an obviously skewed sequence of events.  Both factors enhance the mystery and complexity of Hetty, seen through the narrator’s evolving eyes.  The early enchantment becomes, inevitably, disenchantment – as Hetty’s past is revealed to show her not only disliked, but dislikeable.  Hetty Dorval is a intriguing counterpart to another Persephone book, Susan Glaspell’s Fidelity, and all others of its reactionary ilk which sought, George Bernard Shaw style, to show that the fallen woman need not be immoral.  That was so much the dominant narrative of interwar fiction that a ‘conservative’ viewpoint would be more revolutionary than a liberal one – or so it seems to me.

Not that Wilson is making any grandiose point about sexual morality – rather, she is depicting one woman’s sexual morality, and the impact this has on another young girl growing up.  Hetty Dorval is psychologically so subtle that the narrative can read deceptively simply – but it is an impressively measured and restrained portrait of two women.  Well, restrained, that is, until the final section where things get suddenly melodramatic – but somehow it doesn’t feel out of place; it is as though emotion had been repressed or held back for so much of the novel, that it has to burst out at some point.

The Persephone edition has an afterword by Northrop Frye, of all people, and an amusing and interesting letter from Ethel Wilson to her publisher, obviously in response to various corrections and suggestions – largely asking for them all to revert to her initial wording.  It’s always great to see ‘behind the scenes’, and this is the sort of thing to which the reader all too seldom has access.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“This is a “small” story of ordinary dramas, but it illustrates a big truth that is easy to forget in a world that prizes the independent spirit.” – Teresa, Shelf Love


“This is a book definitely worthy of its dove-grey cover and beautiful endpapers!” – Jane, Fleur in Her World


“This small book so captures the wild joy I feel in the wind, in nature, in prairies, hills and mountains.” – Carolyn, A Few of My Favourite Books