Life must be filled up

Total books read in 2023: 127. 89 dead tree, 40 on Kindle. By men 47, by women 81. Fiction 98, non-fiction 29. As usual, I resolve to read more books by men and more non-fiction.

December Books
The Fortunes of Jacky, Katharine L Oldmeadow (for Children’s Press project)
Portrait of a Murderer: a Christmas Crime Story, Anne Meredith BLCC
Christmas at Nettleford, Malcolm Saville
The Girls of Chequertrees, Marion St John Webb (for CP project)
Bunty of the Blackbirds, Christine Chaundler (for CP project)
A Redbird Christmas, Fannie Flagg
The Box of Delights, John Masefield
A Surprise for Christmas and other Seasonal Mysteries, BLCC ed. Martin Edwards.
A Country Christmas, Miss Read
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Headland Mystery, Arthur Groom (for CP project)
Christmas at Fairacre, Miss Read
Currently reading Moonshine Murders by Anthony Horowitz
( the books )

Last week, (or was it the week before? Something has happened to time), I went shopping. Not just a quick trip to the village shop but actually going into town and in and out of shops, looking for books. As it turned out, I absolutely hated it and won’t be doing it again in a hurry. I did, however, come home with two bags full of books, mostly from charity shops. One (so heavy!) was this Norman Rockwell book, which I later found was a great bargain.

(Pic on LJ, where you can also see my completed jigsaw, an achievement for me.)

American artists are particularly good at Christmas (Susan Branch, Tasha Tudor), so the Rockwell looked promising. The pictures are lavishly produced but the rest of the contents are strange. There are Christmas stories (quite dull, the ones I’ve read), carols printed out with the music and so on; quite a hotchpotch. I was surprised by how many pictures included black people, which seemed a good thing until I saw that a story mentioned ‘the coloured maid, Alice’. Eew! It reminded me of The Help and put me right off. This book should have been revised before it was reprinted.

I also got: a book by Monty Don, Christmas novels by Jenny Colgan and Trisha Ashley (both now read), Sissinghurst by Adam Nicolson and Great Britain’s Great War by Jeremy Paxman, all in very good condition. I’m hoping these will last until at least after Christmas. I shall, of course, be reading A Christmas Carol as usual, even though everything feels so un-Christmassy.

This morning, I finished reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. ‘So wot?’ I hear you ask. So it’s the only complete book I’ve read this month. It was worth it because, Wow, what a book! But also, what a long book.

What are these good intentions? To read, in December, only what I really want to, with probably quite a lot of re-reading. I still have books which should be reviewed, or at least given a mention and it makes me feel guilty. Guilt and reading should never go together, IMO. So I’ve been resisting all most of the tempting offers from NetGalley.

I have very much enjoyed Issue 4 of The Scribbler. Books about women’s war work, books about nursing, Christmas books. A frightening short story by Ethel Lina White* which I read elsewhere recently. Best of all is a brilliant Twelve Days of Christmas quiz. I’ve looked through it and am really looking forward to having a go some wet afternoon. Recommended, as I said here, for lovers of middlebrow fiction and children’s books.



*Recently? It was nearly a year ago! Took me a while to find but it’s reprinted in Serpents in Eden, one of the British Library Crime Classics. The fact that I remembered it so vividly shows how good it is.

I was absolutely furious yesterday evening to find that the borefest which is Autumnwatch had taken over the schedules for the entire week and there would be no University Challenge or Only Connect. My favourite programmes! All was not lost because I had the second episode of Andrew Marr’s Paperback Heroes to look forward to. This is a brilliant little series. In the first episode Marr looked at detective fiction. Last night’s episode, about fantasy writing, was even better, I thought. Phew, it was so fast and so dense I could hardly keep up.

I’m a bore about fantasy, thinking that once you’ve read Tolkien you don’t need to read any more. It’s often been pointed out to me that there are many different forms of fantasy and Andrew Marr convinced me that this is true. I now have to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, for example. This series (BBC 4 of course), is television for intelligent viewers and shows what TV can be at its best. Next week: spies!

This year I have to add a new category: iPad. One of the publishers sends out books in file formats I can’t cope with but now that there’s an e-books option, nothing could be simpler than to download them as iBooks. It’s surprisingly pleasant to read them on the iPad. Here’s the list:
Dead tree: 55
Kindle: 55
Library: 24
iPad: 2

Total 136
This doesn’t seem many but I’ve probably had some re-reads unlisted. I notice that I used the library more at the beginning of the year and resolve, yet again, to use it more next year. With so many libraries closing down, it really is a case of use it or lose it.

I can’t pick a book of the year or even a top ten so here’s a few books I’ve admired in 2015 with links to where I wrote about them. They weren’t all published in 2015.

Funny Girl, Nick Hornby
Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper , Alexandra Harris
Expo 58, Jonathan Coe
The Museum of Things Left Behind , Seni Glaister
Crooked Heart , Lissa Evans
Sweet Tooth , Ian McEwan
The Quality of Silence , Rosamund Lupton

I’ve enjoyed several books by reliable Trisha Ashley, Simon Brett and Elizabeth Edmondson; also the British Library Crime Classics and the Dean Street Press reprints of crime writing from the golden age.

Murder on the Flying Scotsman, Carola Dunn
Damsel in Distress, Carola Dunn
Lois in Charge, Bessie Marchant
Chris in Command, Irene Mossop
Hazel, Head Girl, Nancy Breary
Dead in the Water, Carola Dunn
Margery Merton’s Girlhood, Alice Corkran
The Exciting Journey, Norman Dale
Rattle his Bones, Carola Dunn
To Davy Jones Below, Carola Dunn
The Case of the Murdered Muckraker, Carola Dunn
Boys of the Valley School, R A H Goodyear
Mistletoe and Murder, Carola Dunn
A Question of Inheritance, Elizabeth Edmondson
Die Laughing, Carola Dunn
A Mourning Wedding, Carola Dunn

Not very exciting, as I’ve written about several of these books already. No literary fiction at all this month; I’m right off it and preferring familiarity and reliable entertainment. Today I received this month’s offer of a free book for the Kindle. Six choices and every one seemed utterly depressing.


Plate from Hazel, Head Girl

Here are some reasons suggested in an email I've just received from AbeBooks.

Fact: Reading can make you a better conversationalist.
Fact: Neighbors will never complain that your book is too loud.
Fact: Knowledge by osmosis has not yet been perfected. You'd better read.
Fact: Books have stopped bullets - reading might save your life.
Fact: Dinosaurs didn't read. Look what happened to them.

The first one sounds like something from The Reader's Digest. Any more?

I’m having a terrible time settling to reading at the moment. I have any number of books around, started but not finished. Being so stressed out by builders means that the highlight of my day is getting into bed with a hot water bottle and a cosy Mrs Malory Mystery; saddo me. The exception is Hopes and Fears by Charlotte M Yonge which is new to me and totally gripping. I revere that lady so much that she deserves another post of her own.

All the books in the picture above came into the house yesterday. Thin Blue Smoke by Doug Worgul I was lucky enough to win in a draw over on the dovegreyreader blog. ‘A novel about music, food and love’; well, two out of three ain’t bad and dovegrey certainly made me want to read it. From the library comes La’s Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith. I heard this on Book at Bedtime, or would have done if I hadn’t regularly dropped off to sleep before the end of each episode. Let’s hope reading it will prove less soporific. I’ve just ordered Tea Time for the Traditionally Built. I was tempted because The Book People have it for £4.99 but adding on their postage charge made it cheaper from Amazon (with Prime). Goody, another parcel will be on its way.
Also from the library is Anna Shepard’s How Green are my Wellies?. I picked this up thinking it would be about gardening but see it actually deals with green matters generally. Hmm. The author writes for The Times and has a green blog. It will have to be very good to please me.

The top three books on the pile also came from the library but I bought them for ten pence each. This is shocking, really; only one of them is in poor enough condition IMO to warrant throwing out. Damsel in Distress is part of The Everyman Wodehouse series and is in just about perfect condition. Donna Leon: some say one thing, some say another. The books are never in the library or in any charity shops so I was happy to risk twenty pence to find out if I will be a Brunetti fan. Although I’m pleased to have the books, I still think it quite wrong that for every new book coming into the library, an old one has to go.

To add to my weekend’s reading pleasure, Folly Magazine arrived today. lizarfau, First Term at Cotterford is highly recommended!

I see I read more books than I thought I had last month. Here’s the list, with links if I’ve written about the books already.


One Good Turn, Kate Atkinson
Lily A Ghost Story, Adèle Geras. An odd little book, branded a ‘Quick Read’, which I assumed was aimed at older children, but perhaps not. A strange mixture of Jacqueline Wilson and The Girl on a Swing.
The House on the Kopje , Mollie Chappell
The Fortunes of Frick, Mollie Chappell
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen , Paul Torday
Digging to America , Anne Tyler
Stormy Petrel , Mary Stewart
Pilgrimage 1, Dorothy Richardson
Life Skills, Katie Fforde. Always a pleasure.
All the Adrian Mole books one after the other, when I felt poorly. I wished there were more.
Collector’s Progress, Stanley W Fisher

I don’t seem to have finished many books this month. Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf is an ongoing read and very good it is, too. As part of that read I’ve dipped again into Mrs Dalloway (goodness, those first pages are a wonderful piece of writing) and A Room of One’s Own.
( more books )