How do we choose our reading, and E.M. Delafield – welcome to episode 97!
In the first half of the episode, we debate whether to read spontaneously or plan our reading. In the second half, two E.M. Delafield novels vie against each other: Tension, recently reprinted in the British Library Women Writers series, and Thank Heaven Fasting.
Do get in touch if you have any suggestions for future episodes, or questions for the middle section – teaorbooks@gmail.com. You can find us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, your podcast app of choice etc, and can support the podcast at Patreon.
The books and authors we mention in this episode are:
Consequences by E.M. Delafield
The Way Things Are by E.M. Delafield
The Solange stories by F Tennyson Jesse
Mrs Alfred Sidgwick
The Hills Sleep On by Joanna Cannan
A Lion, A Mouse, and a Motor-Car by Dorothea Townshend
The Glass Wall by E.M. Delafield
Love Has No Resurrection by E.M. Delafield
The Gap of Time of Jeanette Winterson
The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare
The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson
Crow Lake by Mary Lawson
Barbara Kingsolver
Miss Bunting by Angela Thirkell
Love at All Ages by Angela Thirkell
The Duke’s Daughter by Angela Thirkell
Festival at Farbridge by J.B. Priestley
The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart
P.D. James
The Shelf by Phyllis Rose
Sun City by Tove Jansson
Agatha Christie
Opening Night by Ngaio Marsh
Georges Simenon
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
Where There’s Love, There’s Hate by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Mary Webb
Faster! Faster! by E.M. Delafield
The War Workers by E.M. Delafield
The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby
Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell
Thanks for a great episode! I’ve just acquired the two new BL titles, so perfect timing.
I was interested in your takes on book groups and quite agree, I have two on the go, one work and a group of friends of 15 years standing and I can’t take on any more. Over lockdown though I started a ‘not a book group’ with online friends in different places and countries. We pinched your idea of a general booky topic to think about and then just talk about what we’ve been reading – with no homework! Doesn’t have to be online of course, but the lack of prescribed reading really takes the pressure off!
Thanks so much Gill! That does sound fun – and how lovely to get people around the world in it too. One nice thing about lockdown is that we’ve had an ex-member rejoin the group, who’d moved to Yorkshire.
I really must listen to these!
It seems to me that whenever I plan my reading, I don’t do it. When I finish a book, I so much enjoy walking around the house and choosing a new one.
You have predicted some of our reading life too :D
Hi Simon – as I said this morning, I thought this was one of the best Tea or Books episodes I’ve heard.
I was very interested in the spontaneous/planned reading discussion. I loathe book groups for all the reasons Rachel mentioned and more. I know they’re supposed to broaden your experience, but the ‘set’ book (because that’s what it feels like) is almost inevitably something I don’t want to read (usually a new release), and of course I want to read it even less if I know I’ve got to.
When we lived in East Lothian I suggested to the very friendly and helpful librarians there that we might start a book group that just had a theme each time – eg ‘Italy’ or ‘cake’ or ‘autumn’ – anything really – and that people could come and talk about books they had read that fitted the theme in any way. I thought that way we’d avoid having to read anything we didn’t like the sound of, but might well also find out about authors/books we hadn’t come across but might want to seek out.
The librarians seemed very enthusiastic about this. We got to the first meeting and in they came with a stack of copies of the Set Book (The Testament of Gideon Mack, I think). Then at the end we were told what the next meeting’s book would be. It was as if our discussions hadn’t happened, and eventually I stopped going, though I did feel bad as their intentions were good.
I have enjoyed some themed reads over the past few years – I especially loved #projectnames – and I suppose it’s because they run along the same lines as my ill-fated book group idea, in that each participant can choose what they want to read within very broad parameters. The ‘year’ read that you orchestrate with Karen is the same, and I have discovered some great books through that, including ones that had sometimes been languishing on my own shelves (Nan Shepherd’s The Weatherhouse was one I’d probably never have opened if I hadn’t needed it for 1930, and I am so very glad that I read it.)
I also usually join in with Six Degrees of Separation, run by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest; everyone starts from the same title (but you don’t have to read it, and most people haven’t) then creates a chain in which each book is connected to the one before – so you can go in any direction you like. The connections can be anything you like too, from authors to themes or even pictures on the front. It’s really surprising – and interesting – to see how other people’s minds work, and each month I learn about books I’ve never previously heard of.
I agree with Rachel in that I sometimes enjoy just standing in front of my shelves, or the bookcases at the library, choosing randomly; as she said, you can discover some great writers that way – but sometimes I dither so much that a themed read or a challenge helps me to focus and narrow it down a bit (and, as you said, helps me to get through my TBR, which is enormous, and to which I, of course, never cease to add. I want to go to Hay now – it’s only 469 miles from here…)
Even online group reads are a fail for me. I used to take part in a largely American book group that had been running for years. We got along very well, and just chatted about whatever we’d read, heard, watched, etc. Once or twice group reads were started – I tried one on Cranford and another on A Gentleman in Moscow. They were both well led by a member who kept people on topic, suggested questions for discussion, that sort of thing, but I still found them frustrating; I think they reminded me all too much of undergraduate English – the picking over the bones of a book, the analysing of every sentence, is just not my thing. Then – THEN – they decided to do A Room of One’s Own.
I am not Virginia Woolf’s greatest fan, but this book is of course a feminist classic, and one that i first read as a teenager. None of the other people in the group could get their heads round it at all – they tore it to shreds, accused VW of moaning, could not understand that her little stories were fictions made up to illustrate her points. They saw VW/the narrator – as a whinging, silly woman. One of them even said the book showed she had ‘mental problems’. They were raging. And after not very long, so was I.
So there’s another reason why I cannot abide group reads. I haven’t been back.
I also agree with Rachel about the importance of reading a book at the right time for you – I think she called it ‘the right season of your life.’ I have abandoned Wuthering Heights on more than one occasion, but last December I decided to give it one more go in audiobook version (via BBC Sounds) and after a while something clicked, and I was enthralled. I still think about it a lot, and am truly stunned by Emily Bronte’s brilliance. If I’d been forced through this at school – or indeed by a book group! – I’d have hated it, and I’d have missed so much.
Re the question you had about crime writers, I must (of course!) mention that English = British, so if it’s non-English crime writing that is required, I could suggest Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Stuart McBride, Graeme McRae Burnett, and even Alexander McCall Smith. But I do know the question was really not looking for Scottish writers, so I thought of Alan Bradley, author of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and its sequels, (the Flavia de Luce series) who is Canadian, and Louise Penny’s tremendously successful Three Pines series – she’s also Canadian and the books are set in Quebec. I also quite enjoy the French writer Philippe Georget, author of Summertime: All the Cats are Bored and Autumn: All the Cats Return, both set (I think) in Perpignan, and I loved the film of I’m Not Scared, a novel by Niccolo Ammaniti about a the kidnapping of a young boy in a fictitious village in Southern Italy. I haven’t yet read the book, but I imagine it’s good.
And re the Thank Heaven Fasting, which I have not read, I was very interested in the discussion about young girls whose only ‘point’ in life was to marry. I don’t think this did die out after the First World War. In Marghanita Laski’s The Village, which opens on the last day of World War Two, Margaret’s mother Wendy despairs of finding her a husband. (She has to marry her off because the family has lost all of its money during the war – while the tradesmen in the village have prospered.)
Margaret’s younger sister is clever and Wendy wants to send her to a good school, but Margaret isn’t much good at anything – except cooking, which she loves. Margaret suggests she looks for a job as a cook-housekeeper, but Wendy is appalled, and simply cannot countenace the idea of a daughter of hers working for people ‘like’ her. A good marriage is the only option for such girls. And Wendy herself is painfully aware that she was not brought up to know how to do any of the things she now has to do, when servants are thin on the ground, and she can’t afford them anyway = but the most important thing in her life is not letting anyone else see her struggles.
Even in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, when Mildred and her friend Dora go back to their old school for a reunion (an all girls’ establishement, hence the chapel is not a glorious architectural masterpiece but ‘in a rather cold. modern style …with uncomfortable light oak chairs and rather a lot of saxe blue in carpets and hangngs’) Mildred, as a spinster (‘on the shelf’ at the age of 30 – this may not be 21, but we are now in the late 1940s at least), remarks;
‘We had not made particularly brilliant careers for ourselves, and most of all, we had neither of us married. That was really it. It was the ring on the left hand that people at the Old Girls’ Reunion looked for. Often, in fact nearly always, it was an uninteresting ring, sometimes no more than the plain gold band or the very smallest and dimmest of diamonds.Perhaps the husband was also of this variety, but as he was not seen at this female gathering he could only be imagined, and somehow I do not think we ever imagined the husbands to be quite so uninteresting as they probably were.’
Women’s lack of support for one another was also mentioned in your discussion – Rachel commented that if women’s only goal is to marry, those that have managed to are wary of sharing anything – especially any of the power that marriage confers – with their less fortunate peers. I am sorry to say that I think this is still happening. (As in Bridget Jones having to have dinner with all the Smug Marrieds. And really, what is Bridget’s aim in life? To marry Mark Darcy. I know it’s meant to be Pride & Prejudice updated – and it’s done very well – but it does reflect the status that still seems to be afforded to women who’ve got a partner.)
I’ll stop now. Apologies for the length of this comment – which I hope just shows how very interesting I found all parts of this episode!
I loved this comment, Rosemary, thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts! I do know some book groups where people go and discuss a theme rather than a book, though have always thought I’d get confused at them. And I do hope you enjoy Thank Heaven Fasting if you get to it – interesting comparison with the Laski, showing that things haven’t changed as much as they could have done in the first half of the 20th century.
What a very good podcast! I so agreed with so many of your comments over reading. Now to search out the two Delafield books. Thank you both.
Must just say how happy & bouncy I thought Rachel sounded. Looks like the change of career is totally correct. Congratulations, Rachel!
Thanks so much! I do hope you enjoy the Delafield. And yes, lovely hearing Rachel sound so carefree :)
Of course I meant English does not equal British – sorry!
Interesting post, peeps! Despite my attempts to organise myself I rarely stick to plans (apart from our club weeks!) I totally get Simon’s comments about structure helping with the TBR – it’s so often a struggle to decide what to actually pick up next. As Rachel says, being able to choose books within the parameters of the challenge makes it doable. But mostly I have to go with what my mood dictates! 🙂
Yes, this is why I am so choosey in my challenges – and our year clubs are perfect!
Those “Let’s all read Middlemarch” ones are too much like high school literature homework for me. I do enjoy the Year Club, Classics Club spins, and some of the Month challenges, but I’m not a slave to them. If I don’t like the only book by a Spanish-speaking author I can lay my hands on, then, oh well! Good discussion.
Yes! Maybe it is flashbacks to seminars at university…