Life must be filled up

This year I’ve done a lot of re-reading, especially of children’s series fiction. I haven’t always bothered to write about these. I was watching Between the Covers one day when Stephen Mangan said that it really annoyed him when people said they’d been ‘re-reading’ such-and-such a book. To him it sounded like boasting. What utter rot.

I keep a monthly record of everything I’ve read and categorise the books. In spite of this, when I come to add up the totals at the end of the year, my sums are never right, so you’ll have to take any figures as approximations.

This year, I read 194 books. There was a much better balance than usual between books by men and those by women; hardly anything in it. Here’s some I particularly enjoyed; reviewed books linked.
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In August, Dean Street Press will bring out another batch of Furrowed Middlebrow titles, books written by women and published around the middle of the last century. The new selection is: E.H. Young's Miss Mole, A House in the Country by Ruth Adam, Much Dithering by Dorothy Lambert, Miss Plum and Miss Penny by Dorothy Evelyn Smith, and two by Celia Buckmaster: Village Story and Family Ties. The only one of these I’d read before is Miss Mole, which I have in an old Virago edition. The one I most wanted to read, because I already liked the author, was luckily the other book I was sent: A House in the Country by Ruth Adam.

I love books about housekeeping, especially when the story is about turning a wreck into a home. Ruth Adam begins this book, published in 1957, by saying that it is both a true story and a cautionary tale and warns the reader against ever falling in love with a house. During the Second World War a group of friends, sometimes described as ‘BBC types’, share a house in London. As they weary of overcrowding, noise and the lack of decent food, they fantasise about living in a lovely old house in the country. When the war is over, they find that by pooling their resources, they can just about afford to rent such a house and find their dream in Kent. Oh, be careful what you wish for. At first it all seems too good to be true: a manor house with acres of garden, any amount of space and Howard, the factotum who has kept the house and garden from ruin and knows how everything works (or doesn’t). The author, writing in the first person, finds herself regarded locally as the lady of the manor and expected to behave accordingly.

At first all is well. The garden blossoms and provides food for the house, rooms are cleared for use, everyone gets on, people are found to help out. Gradually, reality creeps in. Someone decides to leave, making a hole in the finances. The water supply runs dry and they find that half the village is using their water. The author/Adam is exhausted trying to keep such a monstrous house clean. Only when they’re on the verge of bankruptcy do they give in, realising that this is a house ‘made to be served’ and that they don’t have enough servers. It’s not at all a depressing book because it’s full of the joys of the countryside, happy children and various interesting characters who come and go. I enjoyed it but it’s not as good as Miss Mole.

Promoting Indistractable, a new book by Nir Eyal, Bloomsbury Books send me an email containing the following unlikely-sounding ‘facts’.

67% of men and 25% of women would rather electrocute themselves than be alone with their thoughts
(Who did they ask, for goodness sake?)
Every time you get distracted, it takes over 23 minutes on average to regain your focus
(How was this counted?)
Digital detoxes don’t work! Learn how to use technology to keep you focused on your goals
(What exactly is a digital detox? Does it mean keeping off your phone and social media? Easy for me, ha ha.)

I’ve really had enough of self-help books. Sometimes I want to ask these self-appointed gurus: why not give God a try?

Simon’s little game is proving popular.

The last book I gave up on
Last September: Battlestar Suburbia by Chris McCrudden. I wrote, ‘Battlestar Suburbia is a great title and a good idea, yet I couldn’t get through it. The premise is that humans live in floating colonies and seem to spend all their time cleaning. The universe is controlled by machines. It’s touted as ‘for fans of Douglas Adams’ but I think it’s insulting the late, great man to compare this book with Hitchhikers.’
The last book I re-read
Just finishing it now: Twelve Days of Christmas by Trisha Ashley
The last book I bought
This very morning I ordered a bargain copy of Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris, thanks to a tip-off by Cornflower. I praised it here.
The last book I said I read but actually didn’t
This happened by accident. I assumed I’d read at least one Father Brown book but when I read one, found I hadn’t.
The last book I wrote in the margins of
That would be way back in the mists of time when I was a student and annotated textbooks. Nowadays, if I want to mark a passage I use a Post-It note.
The last book I had signed
Rather, the last book someone had signed for me. huskyteer went to hear Julian Barnes speak and got him to sign a copy of The Only Song which she then gave me. He’s lovely, apparently.
The last book I lost
Quite a while ago I lent someone a copy of Racundra’s First Cruise by Arthur Ransome and never got it back. It still rankles (how petty!) and I now only lend to people I know for sure will return the book.
The last book I had to replace
A long time ago now: my copy of Mastering the Art of French Cookery fell to pieces and I had to get another.
The last book I argued over
Let’s say ‘discuss’ rather than argue. I can’t remember.
The last book you couldn’t find
Goodness knows. Now that most of my books live in a chalet in the garden, it happens all the time.

Quite a bookfest on the BBC at the moment and I’ve been joining in with some of it. All the programmes are mentioned on the linked page. I started with Faulks on Fiction, in which the curly-haired one began with ‘The Hero’. This plodded along on the lines of : "Faulks is a hero on account of his barnet, his ability to walk and talk at the same time and his excellent ‘noddies’." There was not an original or interesting thought in the whole programme and it was incredibly shallow (BBC2) compared with Birth of the British Novel (BBC4). I’d never heard of Henry Hitchings and he’s less easy on the eye than Faulks but his look at eighteenth century novels was very interesting, particularly on Richardson and Sterne.

Scheduled well after my bedtime was In Their Own Words, a compilation of interviews with British novelists; I recorded it to watch the next day. If you click on the link to the programme it tells you exactly when each piece was recorded and how long it lasted. I disliked the narration but was fascinated by the subject matter. Several of the clips I had seen before, such as Evelyn Waugh being interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face. Many were quite new to me; I’d never seen or, more to the point heard, Elizabeth Bowen or Aldous Huxley. It was a wonderful glimpse not only of dead authors but of a different culture, one of clipped accents, no holds barred questions (ever seen Mark Lawson Talks To…?) and people smoking while being interviewed. There was no George Orwell, of course, because the BBC wiped all the tapes.

Where today is there a programme like Monitor? You’d think things had dumbed down, perish the thought! (OK, Arena puts out some good programmes.)

A curious feature of these three programmes was that Martin Amis popped up on each one with something to say. I don’t mind that at all; like his father he’s a good critic. Speaking of Dad, here he is. To save you even that trouble, see below for that same 1958 interview with Simon Raven. The presenter is Huw Weldon.

A much shorter list this month; a good thing, due to not being flaked out on the sofa, ill.

Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, Fannie Flagg
The Lost Art of Gratitude , Alexander McCall Smith *L
Corduroy Mansions , Alexander McCall Smith *L
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Thanks to Susie Vereker, I’ve just read this list of the 50 Most Annoying Things About the Internet. I’m sure people could add to it. Now for a good thing about the internet: reading people’s book recommendations. Not necessarily the latest books, but older, perhaps out of print books which the writer loves.

Radio 4’s A Good Read has been doing this for years; guests introduce a book they’ve enjoyed to be chatted about. Now Open Book
is catching up, with two weeks on Neglected Classics, all recommended by established writers.

The List

William Boyd
The Polyglots by William Gerhardie
Susan Hill
The Rector's Daughter by F M Mayor
Hari Kunzru
A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
Ruth Rendell
Many Dimensions by Charles Williams
Colm Toibin
Esther Waters by George Moore
Programme Two: Sunday 25 October
Beryl Bainbridge
The Quest for Corvo by A J A Symons
Howard Jacobson
Rasselas by Samuel Johnson
Val McDermid
Carol by Patricia Highsmith
Michael Morpurgo
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico
Joanna Trollope
Miss Mackenzie by Anthony Trollope

I’ve read Rasselas, The Snow Goose and A Hero of Our Time. Oh ho, I’ve just spotted a copy of Esther Waters on the landing. I should follow Susan Hill’s excellent example and read it.

Stella Duffy seems everywhere at the moment, whether appearing on The Book Quiz (what a wonderful laugh she has) or being interviewed by dovegreyreader. I’d never read any of her books before and I simply loved The Room of Lost Things. How could I not? It’s set close to my old stamping ground south of the river which, like Stella Duffy, I am happy to defend against regions north. I loved the geography of the book; loved travelling with Akeel from Blackfriars to Loughborough Junction or with the mad poet on the 345 bus. The setting is so real that you could go right now to Google Street View and take a virtual walk down Coldharbour Lane, where at some time each of the book’s disparate characters has business.

This is pure London, ever in flux, with old street patterns, old buildings, hidden rivers overlain by the modern lives of the current, temporary occupants. Old and new is rather a theme of the book; I was reminded quite strongly of Graham Swift’s Last Orders, set on The Old Kent Road. Robert Sutton is in his sixties, has lived his life in the same place and for most of that time has been running the dry cleaning business inherited from his mother. Now, he wants to retire and the business is to be sold to Akeel, an ambitious young Moslem man born in Bow. The relationship between the two men, the conversations they have over the cleaning and pressing and the back story of each which emerges are touching. There’s not exactly a feel-good ending but you can’t help hoping that in forty years time Akeel will be there, handing on the torch. This is a book about the city, a book to gladden the hearts of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. One of its most vivid characters, Robert’s mother Alice, is dead before the story starts but I rate this a life-enhancing book.

In spite of today's brilliant sunshine, it looks as though I'll be frozen in this weekend, due to the state of the roads round here. I don't mind too much as I'm tired out by the stress of having builders in all week. They're very nice but they can't help making noise and mess and demanding spot decisions from me. So it's time out with books and knitting.

Judging by Ravelry, making dishcloths is getting to be as hot as sock knitting. I'm between projects so before casting on yet another pair of socks I thought I'd make inroads into my stash and use up some cotton making a dishcloth. Whether I'll ever use it remains to be seen, but it will look pretty hanging up.

As usual I have three books on the go and one I am in love with. Amitav Ghosh's book Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the Booker prize. I saw a copy in the library recently and, like an idiot, didn't take it out. A couple of days ago I was in a charity shop when The Hungry Tide caught my eye. I dipped into it, looked further into the book, then again and found myself utterly seduced by the beauty of the prose. Ridiculously, I then had a little argument with myself on the lines of, 'you're not supposed to buy any books this week/you have plenty of TBR books/but it's only £1.75 for a hardback and you've just spent £1.50 on Private Eye/you'll be miserable if you get home and haven't got it.' Now I've started reading it and was drawn in straight away by the opening scene at a railway station where middle class Indian Kanai meets Piya, an American born in Bangladesh. I immediately wanted to know more about both characters and was fascinated by the exotic landscape which is about to be explored. I'm looking forward to reading the rest.

Not surprisingly, moving house in December didn’t leave me much time for reading. I wanted to write about Tamsin, by Peter S Beagle, which was a Christmas present from huskyteer. She picked it because she’d enjoyed another book by the same author. I’d wanted to try it because Geranium Cat recommended it. Another incentive was that most of the book is set in Dorset, where I live. It’s not what I’d usually read because I’d take one look at it, think ‘fantasy!’ and reject it out of hand. This, though, is a genuine ghost story.

The book opens in New York, where bratty, essentially urban Jenny lives with her divorced mother and Mister Cat. It’s written in the first person, by an older Jenny who is unsparing of her younger, selfish self. Mother falls in love with an Englishman and Jenny is transported, almost literally kicking and screaming, to an old house in rural Dorset. From the start the whole family (two new stepbrothers as well as a stepfather) sense a strangeness about the house. Jenny, probably because of her age and her own unhappiness, meets Tamsin, a girl from the 17th century who has become ‘stuck’, unable to leave her old home. The reader immediately senses the dangerousness of the relationship and rushes through the rest of the book to find out what happens.

I have a few quibbles about the book. You don’t drive through Southampton when travelling from London to Dorset; Yeovil is not in Dorset; there is no university at Dorchester. The strange beings Jenny meets, in the tiresome manner of such creatures, always address Jenny by her full name, Jenny Gluckstein, which I find madly irritating. The ending is not quite as frightening as it should be. Nevertheless, I could hardly put the book down until I’d finished it.

I re-read A Village Affair, by Joanna Trollope because I’d watched the TV dramatisation. I liked it less than the first time I read it. I’ve pretty much given up on Joanna Trollope since Marrying the Mistress and I still think Other People’s Children is her best book.
Star Gazing, by Linda Gillard I liked a lot for its insights into the life of a blind woman. I couldn’t feel, though, that either of the loves of her life was quite worthy of her.
No Cure for Death, a Sheila Malory mystery by Hazel Holt, was reliably enjoyable.
Laurie Graham has been a discovery this year for the strangeness (to me) of her stories and I liked The Importance of Being Kennedy. It’s written in the first person by the Kennedy children’s Irish nurse and the story is mainly about Kathleen. The supporting cast of the entire Kennedy clan is believably described.
Cookie, the latest from Jacqueline Wilson, was a very speedy read, as all her books are. This heroine is plain and plump, has a bullying father, a bimbo but loving mother and an obsession with rabbits which innocently causes family breakdown. As usual with Wilson, the frightening aspects of a child’s life are tempered by at least one sane adult on the scene and the book ends on a hopeful note.